Genter Julie Anne: Trustee (Public Trust) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGenter Julie Anne: Trustee (Public Trust) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 08 May 2013. Volume:689;Page:9816. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): I rise to speak on behalf of the Green Party on the Trustee (Public Trust) Amendment Bill. The Green Party saw a copy of this bill only very late in the day on Tuesday. Today is the first day that I have had a chance to look at the regulatory impact statement and I would not say that I have had enough time to look at it thoroughly. As Andrew Little mentioned earlier even in the regulatory impact statement it says that officials have not had the opportunity to fully evaluate all the options they would have liked to deal with the problem that has arisen.The Green Party will be supporting the bill because we agree that there is a problem. We do think it is very important to protect the Public Trust from unforeseen financial liabilities that would arise from being appointed as a trustee of last resort for failed finance companies. However I have to agree with Andrew Little in saying that the process being adopted by the Government to put this bill through under urgency does not allow us to fully scrutinise and evaluate all the options. It is unclear to me at this point that the option that has been chosen and put forward in this bill is actually the best option for dealing with the problem.There is a very serious and significant question as to why the Government was not aware that this could become a problem until Capital + Merchant Finance applied to the High Court for the Public Trust to be appointed as a replacement trustee for Perpetual Trust. Why did it not realise that this was going to be a problem when the failure of finance companies has been going on for a number of years now? There is a huge number—60 failed finance companies as the Minister of Justice referred to and Perpetual Trust is a corporate trustee for 22 of these companies. I would have thought that it would be obvious that there would be a danger of something like this arising and the Public Trust suddenly having to become the trustee of last resort for companies that simply have not taken responsibility for their own risks and no longer have the money or resources available to handle all of the costs that are incurred as a result of their poor decisions.It is really important when dealing with the types of failures that we have seen coming out of the financial crisis that the public sector and Crown-owned entities are protected from having to bail out or otherwise incur financial liability for decisions that were made by the private sector—decisions that made some people a whole lot of money in the short term but now have resulted actually in a destruction of wealth. It is really important that the public sector is not stuck with that risk and forced to pick up the tab.We constantly hear from this Government that it is important to support the private sector and to support private business. That sort of model can work only if the risk is fully borne by the private sector and not the public sector when bad decisions are made.On the one hand we hear arguments that the public sector should not be putting money and investment into those who are the worst off and into public infrastructure that everyone can benefit from and the Government is looking for every opportunity to get private sector capital involved in what really should be public infrastructure projects like prisons schools and transport projects. It wants to get private sector capital involved not because there will be a cost saving to the taxpayer and not because there will be a benefit to the economy but because it simply guarantees a return for private investors over the long term.As we have seen the private sector has provided fewer and fewer opportunities for low-risk long-term sustained growth and returns. Now the private sector is looking for every opportunity to secure assurances that it will get returns on what are actually opportunities where the public is going to end up taking the risk and the private sector gets to benefit from it taking that risk.The Green Party is very happy to see that the Government is willing to take some steps to protect the Public Trust from financial liabilities incurred from these developments with the failed finance companies but we remain unconvinced that this is the best process that could have been taken in order to ensure that we do have a robust protection for the Public Trust. It remains to be seen whether this will indeed solve the problem. We will just have to wait and see. Until then the Green Party will be supporting the bill. Thank you.