Smith Nick: Local Government (Council-Controlled Organisations) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Smith Nick: Local Government (Council-Controlled Organisations) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 19 September 2012. Volume:684;Page:5429. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon Dr NICK SMITH (National—Nelson) 
: 
 Ports are vitally important for a small ocean-bound trading nation like New Zealand. The essential question that is raised by the Local Government (Council-Controlled Organisations) Amendment Bill is do we want our ports run as efficient businesses or as bureaucratic council committees? Do we want our port companies’ decisions over governance being made on sound commercial grounds or do we want the decisions made on political grounds? I am dumbfounded that we are even having this debate in 2012. Never has there been such a time for our nation when we need to grow our exports when we need to improve our competitiveness when we need to grow our productivity and yet this bill would undermine every one of those objectives. In fact this bill aptly illustrates the differences between the Government and the Opposition. 
Firstly the Government is focused on the future; the Opposition wants to take New Zealand backwards. It actually pines—and we heard it in Darien Fenton’s speech—for the days of industrial chaos and feather-bedding in our ports that have actually been such a sad part of New Zealand’s port history. You see it is not so long ago in the 1980s that whether you were a truck driver or a crane driver or a loader driver—and as a student in the 1980s did some of those jobs in the port—if you did those jobs in the port you got paid two or three times what you would if you did those jobs anywhere else. That was how inefficient our ports had become because they were able to hold the nation to ransom because they hold that crucial fulcrum position in the export and import of goods in New Zealand. Actually Labour members opposite like Annette King should be proud of the work they did in the 1980s to reform our ports. That was complemented by reforms that were put in place by National such that we saw in the 1990s the fastest improvements in productivity in the New Zealand ports of anywhere in the world of which we should be proud. That helped us grow exports and grow the strength of the economy during that decade. I am truly gobsmacked that Labour today wants to take us backwards but not completely—not completely. 
This is as much about not the national interest but Labour’s narrow interest of serving their wharfie union mates. That is what this bill is really all about. You see it wants to use this bill as the tool to drag our ports back to the inefficiencies that typified the history of the port industry in New Zealand. Why that should worry New Zealanders is that every single export every import that we pay for as consumers risks going up in price if we allow the ports to return to their inefficiencies of the past. 
Hon Annette King 
: Nothing to do with it. 
Hon Dr NICK SMITH 
: Well absolutely it has to do with it Ms King. This bill was tabled immediately in the months after the port dispute and Darien Fenton made absolutely plain that this bill was all about the Auckland port dispute. 
But I have this question to ask members opposite: who wrote the Local Government Act 2002? Labour. Why did it in 2002 exempt port companies from those very provisions? It was because it knew then that it wanted to have ports run on a proper businesslike basis. But it is even more important if we look at that provision. Why was it that it exempted port companies from these provisions in the bill? What about the electricity companies? What about all the other entities that were listed in Labour’s bill in 2002? The simple answer is because this is simply about Labour doing the bidding of its wharfie union mates. This bill is blatantly about special interests and lacks logic. Why is it for instance that members opposite think that Local Government New Zealand—a 100 percent public entity—is not included? Why not the insurance company? This bill is not about principles it is about politics. Labour simply wants to repoliticise the management of New Zealand’s ports and that is the very last thing this export-growth Government wants to occur. This bill is a nonsense. It shows how left Labour has become in its time in Opposition how out of touch it is with what we need to do to improve New Zealand productivity. Any member who wants to strengthen the New Zealand economy must vote against this bill.