Clark David: Financial Reporting Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClark David: Financial Reporting Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 19 November 2013. Volume:695;Page:14997. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North): It is with delight that I rise to speak to the title and commencement clauses of the Financial Reporting Bill. This bill as I noted in my earlier contributions is something that we on this side of the Chamber can agree with. Although we think it may have slipped through unnoticed by the Government that here is a bill that actually does reduce compliance on small entities that do not need it certainly the Government’s record suggests that it is interested in doing otherwise and I raise the matter of the child support payments that come on to small businesses now the compliance requirements around the paper boy tax and so on and so forth. I note the red tape that this Government has built—it has tried to do an iPad tax and it has tried to do a car-park tax. There is a constant flow of additional requirements on small businesses. But this one—Hon Clayton Cosgrove: They came a gutser.Dr DAVID CLARK: They came a gutser—they certainly did come a gutser. The word “gutser” is a technical tax term which my colleague is using. There is an opportunity in this bill for the compliance to be reduced where it is not required. So that is why we heartily support this bill. It was well debated in the Commerce Committee and we have covered the charities matters there. The “Financial Reporting Bill” is probably a good title for this bill I would suggest. That is what it is about. We might even want to add in there “(Transparency and Appropriateness)” as descriptors because the transparency arrangements here are ones that we can agree with. If there is no wider public interest and if shareholders are comfortable with the arrangements unnecessary reporting requirements should be abandoned and that is one idea that we on this side of the Chamber are quite comfortable with.However we need to be really clear that where there are public funds at play there should be transparency. That is why of course when it came to the Supplementary Order Paper 376 changes and the energy companies were being sold off—being flogged off—for less than the $5 billion to $7 billion that Bill English said that he might get when he sold New Zealand taxpayers’ best revenue-generating assets we protested at the loss of public scrutiny of those entities. So we have a principled stance. We are glad to see that that is reflected in this bill. It does not seem to be normally the Government’s practice where it does these shady deals with the casino deal being the most obvious one—John Key meeting with the Skycity chief executive saying one thing to him whilst there was supposed to be a transparent process running. We know that this Government has a bad track record of doing deals behind closed doors and the business community is sick of it. Those in the wider business community whom I meet with are saying that they just want transparent arrangements so that they know that when they are bidding for something it is really being taken seriously.That means that in this case where there is a sensible offering being put forward—and I thank the officials for their hard work. They will have put many many hours into this Financial Reporting Bill and put many more hours in over the years in background and supporting papers and consultation. I thank the officials for their work. It is a good bill and that is why we on this side of the Chamber are very pleased to support it.We wish that the Government would apply these transparency principles to its wider practice and that it would not put those ideas I guess of transparency and responsibility to one side when the Auditor-General makes a criticism in say the Earthquake Commission report or of the Crown Retail Deposit Guarantee Scheme. We wish that the Government would adopt these principles for its own practice not just for the wider business community. We know that there are examples. We think of the power sector and the $4.3 billion worth of price gouging that was estimated to have occurred between 2001 and 2007 by the world’s leading modeller of energy markets at the time Professor Wolak because of effectively cartel-like behaviour where market power could be used to extract excess profits from the market at the expense of mums and dads at home.Of course that risk is going to be increased with the asset sell-offs where the interests are not aligned with the taxpayer. The silver lining back then was that much of that excess profit went back into the taxpayer purse. We now know that so much of that is going offshore. Treasury said that those State-owned enterprise sell-downs will take the Government books backwards by about $100 million a year—$100 million a year.So I urge people at home to vote “No” in the referendum when they have their chance to say no to the asset sales that this Government has put in place. Say no to the lack of transparency that goes with the deals that it is doing around those energy assets and around deals more generally and say no to this Government at the next election.