Webb DuncanDr DUNCAN WEBB (Labour—Christchurch Central): Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker. The last speaker Lawrence Yule said What is the problem?" The fact of the matter is there is a significant problem here and it's with considerable gratitude that we can thank Mr Tabuteau for bringing it to the attention of this House. Hon Members: What is it?Dr DUNCAN WEBB: I'll tell you what—the key problem here is that the fees in KiwiSavers erode savings and they erode them really significantly. The Treasury report that our friends from the Greens commissioned actually identified exactly what that did. In fact if you have a half a percent difference in fees that'll make a 6.7 percent difference in the final return. So if you were lucky enough to have hidden away $300000 in your KiwiSaver that would mean you were $20000 worse off. Now when we look at a half percent per annum on our KiwiSaver fees we might not think it's very much but when you look at it like that—Barbara Kuriger: We can do the maths but Mr Yule just told you a much simpler way to achieve the outcome.Dr DUNCAN WEBB: —on what must be said to be a moderate amount of savings—that's cutting it. And look the member there is shouting out but she might be interested that in fact it's women who actually suffer worst here. We know for a fact that women need to save more because they live longer they take breaks from the workforce more often than men do and they earn less—we're addressing that as well. So these KiwiSaver questions actually cut more deeply for women than men because they need to provide more carefully and they're less equipped to do so over time. So when we come to look at these questions—and so much for transparency. The fact of the matter is that I challenge any member on the other side of the House to go and find out how much their KiwiSaver fees are. Whilst you might get some headline figure of 0.95 of a percent the fact of the matter is that hidden in another layer are brokerages administration fees and all kinds of other provisioning—layer upon layer upon layer.The fact is that because of the default framework we have there's not a huge amount of competition in this market. People very rarely change KiwiSaver providers so the provision of a State-backed or a State-run KiwiSaver provider would put some real competition into the market. It would be manifestly better because what we need is market discipline and we know for a fact that the market fails over time. So we've got the fees question which I think is the most important one because that's how we make sure that ordinary genuinely hard-working New Zealanders can finish their working life with as much in the bank as possible without paying to offshore bank owners.But the other things that are proposed in this bill are also very very good. The idea that profits stay in New Zealand and that we invest in New Zealand—we know that New Zealand suffers from a lack of capital and so there's absolutely nothing wrong with saying let's both have a fund that has lower fees and have a fund that generates business and prosperity within New Zealand. The idea that we need to give our money away to banks who immediately invest it offshore—we can get away from that.As was noted before the guardians of the New Zealand Superannuation Fund themselves are increasing their New Zealand investment. It was pointed out there by the guardians that in fact that is entirely consistent with a good return. So you can have both a risk-balanced return and a good return on that investment and low fees and invest in New Zealand. When we do that that has a double benefit: not only do we maximise the return for the person who's looking at retirement but also we are supporting New Zealand businesses and that's what this Government is about—not about multinationals not about propping up multinationals but about supporting New Zealand businesses. Of course the other thing we want to do—and this is something that I know we want to look at closely—is ensure that Kiwi funds are investing ethically and we need much much more transparency around that. The fact of the matter is that it's very hard to determine exactly what funds are invested in so we need to have a very close examination of that. We want to have investments that look forward for New Zealand—and indeed for the world—including questions on things like climate change. So Mr Tabuteau I commend you on bringing this to the House and I commend this bill to the House."