English Bill: Urgent Debates — Tranz Rail Shares—Insider Trading 
English Bill: Urgent Debates — Tranz Rail Shares—Insider Trading 
[Volume:640;Page:9955] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (Deputy Leader—National) 
: 
 The events referred to in this debate and the payment of the fine by a number of people in addition to Mr Richwhite show the importance of having a strong regulator and the importance of having a strong regulator that maintains its independence from the Government at all times and in all cases. In this case it is easy to back the regulator for nailing some people to pay back a very large sum of money for something they should not have done and of course we should back the regulator. There are also any number of other circumstances where regulators have been set up and given a job to do. Unfortunately the Government is often less inclined to back other regulators when the result does not suit it politically and that has the effect of creating uncertainty and confusion. So when the Minister waxes lyrical as she has done I hope she will advise her colleagues in the fields of energy—in particular in the field of electricity—and telecommunications that this case underpins the importance of having a strong independent regulator. 
The Securities Commission has done a good job. It is too much part of the culture of business in New Zealand that people who are in business believe they can intimidate the regulator either by dragging out a case or by threatening to bypass the regulator by political means—by going to the Minister to get a different result. But it is very clear that there has been too much of a culture in that kind—as for instance in the Commerce Commission case against Carter Holt Harvey over that company’s misrepresentations on stress-tested timber. No one should be immune from scrutiny and business should take the ability of the regulator very seriously. I would offer a caution to my colleagues that when people from various industries wander into our offices criticising a regulator and saying how tough and unreasonable it is being that should be taken as a compliment. The response should not be to say yes to those people and to tell them that we will do something about it. That is not the answer. 
And where the Government has stood over a regulator such as the Electricity Commission that has led to confusion and uncertainty and to the need for considerable change. The Government kept saying to the Electricity Commission that it should do what it wanted and now the Government cannot replace anyone on the commission except with a Labour Party toady. Toadies are the only people who are willing to submit themselves to the political pressure on that industry that comes from the Labour Government. 
I conclude by saying that Winston Peters my colleague from New Zealand First made a number of allegations around the activities of these people and others through the 1990s. All of those activities were subject to the scrutiny of the law and at all times— 
Rt Hon Winston Peters 
: Rubbish! 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Well the member says “Rubbish!”. He may disagree with the law and that is fair enough—you know law changes; sometimes it does not work as it should. But all the activities that he referred to were subject to the scrutiny of the law. Our legal institutions have always been as independent as they need to be—our regulators have not always been but our legal institutions have been—and these people were subject to that degree of scrutiny. Some of the matters the member referred to were subject to the scrutiny of a pretty wide-ranging commission of inquiry. It actually went on for a long time at considerable expense and what was surprising about the result of the commission of inquiry was that the conclusions were not exactly decisive on the matter. It was found that if sometimes the law had been at fault it had actually been applied. That is all that anybody can ask for. Parliament can expect that its agents such as the Securities Commission will apply the law—and in this case the Securities Commission has done so. Every person in business in New Zealand who is subject to our commercial law should be able to expect a fair hearing. In this case the people affected have had to accept a stiff penalty. 
Really the concluding comment I want to make is that the business environment in New Zealand will work well and will not be over-regulated if business accepts that regulators are the final decision makers—that if they have provisions for penalising businesses then they will use them and that on each and every occasion regulators will be backed by this Parliament. Nothing is worse for the regulator and nothing creates more uncertainty in the business community than for politicians themselves to undermine the regulators they set up by the legislation of this House.