English Bill: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
English Bill: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 20 June 2012. Volume:681;Page:3139. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (Deputy Prime Minister) 
: 
 I move  
That the House take note of miscellaneous business 
. We are still waiting this week for the Labour Party to commit to buying back the shares of the 49 percent of the energy companies that the Government is planning to sell mainly to New Zealanders. New Zealand First has made that undertaking. New Zealand First has shown that the Labour Party has persuaded New Zealand First that its arguments are so strong New Zealand First should go and buy them back if it has a role in a future Government. But the Labour Party has not been able to persuade itself. Labour members have been in the Chamber arguing hour after hour day after day week after week that these proposed share offers are fiscally irresponsible economic nonsense and a sell-out to foreigners but they are not so fiscally irresponsible that they are going to buy them back. They are not such a sell-out to foreigners that they are going to buy them back. They are not such an economic nonsense that they are going to buy them back. 
The Labour Party has one more parliamentary day tomorrow for its leader to set some direction and show that the Labour Party really believes the arguments that it is making in the House. So far it has not happened. I thought it would happen; its members persuaded me that they really cared about this. It was the centre of their election campaign. Surely it is not the case that the Labour Party all through the 2011 election campaigned against asset sales and never intended to buy them back. Surely that is not the case! Surely it did not mislead the New Zealand public about how desperate it is to save New Zealand and New Zealanders from the evils of the sale of these shares. Well a seed of doubt is growing in my heart. A seed of doubt is growing in my heart that Labour will not promise to buy them back. 
Let us just take Labour members through the accounting that they would be signing up to. Let us say that they are the Government and they say that the sale of those shares is terrible. This is what they have to do. The first thing is they have to go to the international money markets and borrow $5 billion to $7 billion. They will borrow not just from their grandmother but off big corporate foreign multinationals. That is the first thing. Then they have to take those billions and pay them out in lump sums to shareholders who they told this House are a small elite. That will be the first action of a Labour Government—borrow off foreign multinationals and pay it out in lump sums to a small elite to buy their shares off them. 
 Then the next thing that happens these companies stop paying dividends into the Superannuation Fund. They stop paying dividends to KiwiSavers—2 million of them—and they stop paying dividends to iwi and to tens of thousands of New Zealand families who had the shares and were getting dividends and those dividends were flowing to them. Guess where that money goes? Labour then has to start paying interest to big corporate foreign multinationals for the money that it borrowed. I can see a seed of doubt in David Cunliffe’s heart as well. How is he going to explain to the aspirational electrician in his electorate who bought those shares that he has to sell them back to the Government so that the Government can borrow $7 billion and pay interest on it to a foreign multinational instead of into the electrician’s savings account? It is no wonder Labour has not made the undertaking yet or will we be surprised by Thursday night? Let us see; there is only 27 hours to go.