Clark David: New Zealand Superannuation and Retirement Income Amendment Bill Taxation (New Zealand Superannuation and Retirement Income) Bill — Third ReadingsText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClark David: New Zealand Superannuation and Retirement Income Amendment Bill Taxation (New Zealand Superannuation and Retirement Income) Bill — Third Readings[Sitting date: 20 October 2015. Volume:709;Page:7368. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North): It is a pleasure to rise to speak to support this bill and to speak a little about the reason for it because I sat on the select committee the Finance and Expenditure Committee that heard the petitions of the Guardians of New Zealand Superannuation and heard them explain the reasons why they think these amendments are necessary.Before I speak too much about that I just want to correct a point raised by the previous speaker David Bennett relating to my colleague Clayton Cosgrove’s KiwiSaver bill.Hon Clayton Cosgrove: Kiwibank.Dr DAVID CLARK: Sorry the Keep Kiwibank Bill. The previous speaker was implying that this was about Ministers getting their hands on assets and selling them off and so on and meddling in the day-to-day affairs of Kiwibank. That simply is not accurate. My colleague’s bill is about ownership of the bank and it is merely a measure to stop the National Party flogging off Kiwibank in the way that it has flogged off so many other assets. I think New Zealanders are sick of a Government that is focused on asset stripping—sick of a Government that is focused on asset stripping. Members on that side of the House know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.Again in this fund—precisely in this fund—we see a similar thing going on. The Government has chosen not to invest in this fund which is one of the funds that has the best returns in the world for a fund of its type and has foregone revenues of about $18 billion as a consequence of its mismanagement of this fund.I just want to draw the attention of the House to some of the awards that the Guardians of New Zealand Superannuation have won in recent years. I have a brief list here in front of me. In 2015 they won the gold award in the 2015 Australasian Reporting Awards. In 2014 they were the winner of the governance award in the AsianInvestor Institutional Excellence Awards and the gold award in the 2014 Australasian Reporting Awards they were a finalist in the RI Reporting Awards 2014 and the guardians’ Cristina Billett was named the joint CLANZ-Chapman Tripp Public Sector In-House Lawyer of the Year. In 2013 they were the winner of the best first-time entrant category of the 2013 Australasian Reporting Awards and a finalist again in the RI Reporting Awards 2013 and so on. The list goes on. In 2012 they won a further four awards and in 2011 they were runner up in another significant set of sovereign wealth fund awards. That is because they have outperformed—they have consistently outperformed.The Superannuation Fund which was set up by Michael Cullen is a very good one and although Bill English may have called it a dog at the time he now seems very keen to cosy up to that dog and show some affection for it which shows some dexterity in terms of his understanding of the issues involved. But the facts speak for themselves. This is a very successful fund and that $30 billion that it is now worth as a result of returns of 15 percent over the past year and an average of 17 percent annually over the past 5 years and around 10 percent per annum since inception is an extraordinary return. Even if returns were not so extraordinary it would still be worth the Government’s while to be investing in that fund—there is little doubt amongst the commentators—rather than stockpiling debt as it seems so keen to do.It is a Government of course we know that has borrowed more than Sir Robert Muldoon’s Government. This Government is the Government in New Zealand history that has accumulated the most debt. With that in mind it is good to see it making one or two sensible decisions here. It has just achieved actually its first wafer-thin surplus—the first it has ever achieved even though the last Labour Government achieved nine out of nine. But none the less the Government is making a sensible decision here in listening to the guardians’ advice to put these additional vehicles in place.We had a debate in the Finance and Expenditure Committee about whether these funds should be subject to the Official Information Act and we sought information from officials. In the end those of us on the committee were satisfied that the protections in place were appropriate and that the governance arrangements could be subject to the Official Information Act in so far as the guardians were directly involved with them because the guardians would appoint their own directors they would often be supplying people to work on those particular funds and in so far as being their end of things we could hold the guardians to account for the decisions that were made—albeit the actual operation itself was at arm’s length. So we did debate those issues fairly robustly within the committee and that is good parliamentary practice but in the end we decided that that was appropriate.We did as a committee though suggest that there should be some involvement from the Minister of Finance in ticking off these operations to give the taxpayer a voice—because the fund of course naturally is at arm’s length for most of its operational decisions and because we felt that there should be a role albeit largely a symbolic one for the Minister of Finance to have some oversight of those decisions and to only intervene when there was a really obviously strange thing going on. This Minister of Finance has somewhat arrogantly overruled the will of the select committee which contained his own members. The very thing that his own parliamentarians recommended was rejected by the Minister of Finance and in the most recent stage of the Parliament sitting on this bill the Government ran through some changes that will see the Minister of Finance wash his hands of any responsibility for the decisions the fund makes.That is of course this Government’s general approach. It is not keen to be accountable in any way. It is very keen to sell off the assets that this country owns and very keen to minimise the signs of Government and to not be accountable for the actions of the Government in so far as it can get away with it. We think that is unfortunate. We think the taxpayers should have had a voice in this albeit not one where politicians were actually meddling in the day to day decision-making but one where there was a veto at the level of the Minister of Finance.That aside we will still support the bill because the vehicles themselves seem sensible and they were requested by the fund which has been a very good fund. It would have been an even bigger fund had this Government not stopped the contributions that were being made but again we see that that is the pattern of this Government. It has got an ideological agenda that is around minimal involvement and around not putting taxpayer contributions into savings funds. It has said it will not deal with the superannuation issue. This Prime Minister has said that he will not deal with the issue during his prime ministership. He is leaving those difficult decisions to future Governments. And of course we have seen the wasteful spending that accompanies this reckless economic management—the television screens in the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment the $140000—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! The member has been quite a long way away from the bill for quite some time. He will return to it.Dr DAVID CLARK: Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. I am merely making the point that this decision the Government is making in this bill is one that we think is not economically as smart as it might be and so although we will be supporting the bill it is not without some small reservations. Thank you very much.