White HelenHELEN WHITE (Labour): I rise in support of the New Zealand Superannuation and Retirement Income (Fair Residency) Amendment Bill. I wasn't here when this was drawn out of the biscuit tin under the name of Mark Patterson. I absolutely agree that it looks like it was more of a vibe than an Act and people have worked hard to make it into something that will work well for our country. I am very grateful for the work that was done before I joined the Finance and Expenditure Committee and I was very honoured to be part of that process. This is a bill that originally didn't protect current entitlements and there was no lead-in or transition and that is something that the select committee has taken very seriously. Veterans would have been caught up in it and it was inconsistent with the portability that we've arranged in the Realm countries. We have a very special relationship with the Realm. We're part of it and we have the Cook Islands Niue and Tokelau. They are part of our own citizenship and so we have to really look and turn our minds to how we best work with that group of nations. We also hadn't considered how this would impact on refugees. The changes that have taken place are very sensible changes. The first change that's taken place is that a mechanism has been devised to phase in on the basis of age. It depends on when you were born and there are two-year little jumps so if you were born in 1955 then you will need to have 11 years of entitlement. This happens in two-year jumps so if you turn 65 in 2022 to 30 June 2024 it'll be an 11-year entitlement. If you turn 65 on 1 July 2024 then it will be a 12-year entitlement and so it will go on. So it actually is a very reasonable lead-in to this change. Why the need for the change at all? Well I think we've actually had a few speakers today talk about the history of New Zealand and it's probably a good idea just to contextualise this. New Zealand was one of the first countries to bring in an old-age pension and it did that in 1898. It wasn't the kind of pension that we have here. It was a pension that was means-tested. People were very grateful for it and it kept a lot of people going in their old age but in 1932 we introduced a universal superannuation system. That's a very special thing indeed and it has been very much something that's been precarious because it's an expensive system. But it means that New Zealanders can count on quite a generous entitlement when they retire and we've heard today a slight baying for raising of the age of entitlement and that's because of the expense of it. We've also seen a time when we stopped contributing—under the National Government—to the Superannuation Fund. Again that puts that fund very much in jeopardy so it's our job and our duty to make sure that we're actually making this a feasible scheme for people. My understanding is that this was a scheme that was introduced when the life expectancy of people was about 65 to 67 and so it wasn't a great deal of entitlement they were getting. What we've seen happen—very thankfully—is life expectancy raised by about 20 years on average which is a really great thing and we hope that it will go higher. With good management of our health system and with the advancements we're making we're going to be looking at long healthy lives. It's during that time that people will need to retire and they will rely on this money so it's an important thing that we make sure that we are actually recognising that most of the people who are in the system will need to contribute to it and will contribute to it for quite some time. That is being secured in this bill because what we're doing is coming in line with other countries. We're coming into a 20-year time frame and we're excluding the groups that are truly vulnerable or that are necessary for us to protect. Hence the exclusion of the Realm countries and hence the exclusion of refugees because refugees—as Mr Bayly pointed out and I think Mr Woodhouse just pointed out—are a very special category of New Zealander. They come in without very much choice and with a lot of devastation and they come in with nothing quite often. So it's very very important that we extend to them a different kind of security from that of somebody who comes into the country and who can plan how they do that and actually know what they're in for when they come in. So that's the difference in scheme. It's very much a matter of choice and fairness and it is a very important balancing act that we have here because this is a system that is fragile and it is expensive and it is a really good scheme and we should actually respect that. There are people who at the current time are actually already affected by our scheme in a disparate way and I'd just like to recognise them for a moment. One is that we've always had a problem with the fact that working-class people haven't actually lived into the period of entitlement so we actually haven't had a system that's been particularly beneficial to those groups. It's also very important that the entitlement's there for that very class of people because manual labourers get worn out and they need to be able to come into those entitlements in a reasonable time. It's also an area which has affected Māori. Many many Māori don't live to the age of entitlement. So these are the areas where we really need to make sure that we're looking after people in a fair and reasonable way and I'm very satisfied that we have struck a good balance here. I just wanted to thank several people. One group is the officials because during the submissions process it was the officials who suggested the mechanism we have here for gently raising the age of entitlement. It's a good mechanism and I can see it applying in many other situations where it would be a very useful and sound mechanism. They really contributed something to this which was absolutely taken up with open arms by the people in the select committee. The other group I wanted to recognise are the submitters. The things that came out of the submissions weren't what I expected. We had people who were not necessarily talking about their own self-interest. I remember one Indian migrant a young man who came in and talked about how he saw this bill as important and he was actually in a category where I would have thought he would have been perhaps more self-interested in being able to allow people to come in on a lesser term. But something that I'm constantly surprised at with the submitters in the select committee is how many people come along with a very genuine lack of self-interest and who put forward a submission that's based much more on inviting the idea of participation in a democracy and putting their best efforts into contributing in an intelligent and logical way. I am extremely proud of the commitment here that we've got to refugees. I think it's a very important carve-out. It shows the motivation of people in putting up this bill and making the changes that they've made that we've managed to come to a very sensible fair reasonable kind of approach which guards entitlements which are not our safety net. Our safety net is actually there anyway—you know it's not the safety net. This is the layer on top—the wonderful thing that we have in universal superannuation. So I commend this bill to the House.