Russell Deborah; Kuriger BarbaraHon Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour): Thank you Madam Speaker. Mālō e lelei. I want to begin with just a little bit of history given something that one of the speakers on the other side has talked about and that is the 1997 referendum on the compulsory superannuation scheme proposed by then the Hon Winston Peters who at that stage he was Treasurer. So there was a referendum on whether or not we should have a compulsory superannuation scheme.It was an interesting model. The idea was that each worker—wage and salaried worker—would pay 8 percent of their income to Inland Revenue every year. In return at age 65 a person would be guaranteed a lifetime annuity equivalent to 33 percent of the average wage. I'm just going to venture to suggest that that doesn't seem like a particularly good model now. The speaker from New Zealand First was sort of interested as to why people had voted against it. I'm going to suggest that the particular scheme had some rather large complications but also because we do politics I'm going to suggest there might have been political reasons for voting against it based on who it was being sponsored by. That's just one of those things; the way that politics works.But the history of this particular bill is quite interesting too. I just want to recall why KiwiSaver came into being. It's a problem that we have acknowledged already in this debate; a problem that in fact the superannuation scheme that Mr Peters was sponsoring back in the late 1990s was trying to address and that is the low retirement savings of New Zealanders.We knew that New Zealanders needed to be encouraged to save more for their retirement. Of course we also looked across the Tasman and saw the success of the superannuation scheme there. So thanks to the far-sighted and excellent work of Sir Michael Cullen we had two major steps taken in terms of New Zealanders' retirement savings. Now one was the establishment of the New Zealand Superannuation Fund—known as the Cullen fund—and the other one was KiwiSaver encouraging New Zealanders to save themselves for their retirement and ensuring that employers contributed as well. Both of these were targeted at ensuring that we could afford to support our senior citizens in their old age and that we could continue to ensure that older New Zealanders had some dignity in their old age.We were the first country in the world to introduce old retirement incomes retirement superannuation schemes a pension for our senior citizens—and we should be very proud of that. One way and another we've kind of more or less solved some of the problems of old-age poverty in New Zealand. It's not pretty for people who get to retirement age and have only their New Zealand Super and it works better for people if they have substantial savings in KiwiSaver as they get to retirement age.Of course being the generation that we are KiwiSaver didn't come along until we were perhaps some way through our working careers. But even if people didn't join KiwiSaver when they first got a job the next best time to join it is right now and start saving with KiwiSaver. The best thing that we can do as legislators as people who are responsible one way or another for the stewardship of KiwiSaver is to keep on improving it; to keep on making sure that it becomes a better and better scheme. I think one of the steps we need to be taking is making KiwiSaver compulsory for everyone. We should be eliminating some of the things we do at the moment with KiwiSaver like the contributions breaks and so on. We should just be making it compulsory and we should be supporting people to have decent wages so that they can afford to save for their retirement.This particular bill which was brought into the House by Dr Tracey McLellan had one of those enhancements for KiwiSaver. Now when KiwiSaver was first introduced way back in—when it first became operational in 2007 this very protection for workers was in that bill; was in the KiwiSaver Act. It was sitting there right from the start. In fact there was a series of protections for workers in the original KiwiSaver legislation. Then it was taken out by the Employment Relations Amendment Act in 2008. This particular protection was taken away and it's an important one.Now this particular bill is phrased in terms of discrimination but what it really prevents is an employer exerting pressure over an employee to ensure that instead of the employer's KiwiSaver contributions coming out of the employer's funds it actually comes out of the employee's remuneration. Perhaps when there is a shortage of labour in the economy; when workers are able to command better salaries and so on then it's not such an issue.But in a time of rising unemployment; in a time when people are kind of getting a bit desperate to get a job; in a time when unemployment is predicted to rise; in a time where employers—businesses—are not creating extra jobs then the employer has the advantage and the employer can discriminate against workers. This is what this piece of legislation seeks to change: to ensure that at least in the matter of KiwiSaver that an employer cannot discriminate against a worker.Now the reasons given by the members of the Government parties as to why they are not going to support this legislation are listed almost in the select committee's report. They say more or less that they don't think that we should have additional hurdles for businesses or additional costs for businesses which would not benefit either employees or employers. But what of the long-term cost of ensuring that all of us support each other; of the long-term cost of supporting New Zealanders when they retire? It is a very short-sighted view that the Government parties are taking here.It's a real shame that they are not supporting this bill—this bill that simply puts back in a protection that was there right from the start when the Hon Dr Michael Cullen first devised KiwiSaver. What a shame—what a shame.So congratulations to Tracey McLellan for all her work on this bill. It's the sort of thing that when we are back in Government in 2026 we will be promoting—Camilla Belich: Two years.Hon Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL: Exactly. This kind of protection for workers as part of our proud history of being the workers' party in New Zealand. Madam Speaker a sad day.DEPUTY SPEAKER: Members the time has come for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break. The House will resume at 7.30.Sitting suspended from 5.57 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.