Bidois DanDAN BIDOIS (National—Northcote): It's a pleasure to rise and take a call in the second part of the New Zealand Productivity Commission Act Repeal Bill. I was listening from my office last night to this debate. It's been great to hear some of the concerns that members have had and to hear that the Minister for Regulation reflects on past ACT positions and says that members should be willing to learn and grow from those past positions and that is why we're here today to disestablish the Productivity Commission. One of the questions that we heard last night and that we hear out there in the public domain—whether it's on the blog sites or in the papers—is who will carry out the work of the Productivity Commission once it is disestablished and so that is my question to the Minister today which is to reassure the public that actually there is a huge body of independent organisations out there that will take up the mantle of the Productivity Commission because we know it's an important challenge this country faces. We know that since the 1960s this country has had a lagging productivity growth rate compared to our international peers which has led to the fact that any worker in New Zealand can go to Australia and earn on average 30 percent more income over there and that any worker can go to America and earn 35 percent more income in America. So that is I think a really important thing.Here's my reflection on that question but I would like to hear the Minister's reflections. It is that there are some fantastic organisations in New Zealand that do work on productivity: organisations like Motu and I'd like to call out Phil McCann an amazing professor who does work on the economic geography of this country and who has done a huge amount of work to understand New Zealand's geographical position and how it's led to our low-productivity growth rates. There are places like the New Zealand Initiative: Oliver Hartwich and his team do a great job of understanding particularly the economic drivers around education and financial markets as well. There are universities—and I'd like to call out my own professor Tim Maloney from Auckland University of Technology and formerly from Auckland University around labour economics because as we know what drives productivity is finance labour and the meshing of those together. That's called multi-factor productivity.So that's my question to the Minister. It is: who will take up the mantle of productivity in this country? There are other great organisations out there organisations like the Treasury. The Treasury has done—Hon Dr Duncan Webb: Talk about the bill.DAN BIDOIS: —in the past some incredible work and I'd encourage the member opposite to read the Treasury's papers on productivity because they are possibly even better than the Productivity Commission's papers themselves. There are international organisations—places like the World Bank the OECD and the IMF. These organisations do an incredible amount of research on New Zealand's productivity challenge and what we need to do to resolve that. So that is the question that I think some of the left-wing blog sites and some of the left-wing papers and some of the questions that are lingering in the minds of the public that I think the Minister ought to potentially address. My reflection is that there is actually a huge amount of people out there and bodies of organisations that will take up the mantle and this organisation although they've done some important work their kaupapa—which is around improving productivity and understanding the key policies that will help to improve productivity in this country—will actually be taken up and adopted and delivered by other important people and organisations in the country. So that's my question to the Minister. He may wish to not answer but we'd like to hear his answer on that question.Stuart Smith: A substantive answer.DAN BIDOIS: A substantive answer to Part 2. But I support this bill and I would like the Minister to address that question.