Curran ClareCLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): Well in the spirit of the debate in the House tonight can I congratulate Dr Shane Reti for having his member's bill drawn from the ballot. Having a member's bill drawn is an uncommon thing for some of us in the House or a rare thing. Some of us have more bills drawn than others but it is the luck of the draw and so it deserves to be taken seriously. Every piece of legislation—Sue Moroney: Well most.CLARE CURRAN: —pretty much most—deserves to have debate about its importance. The more that I am listening to the debate tonight the more as a member of the Commerce Committee—if this bill passes tonight then I think there will be an interesting ideological philosophical discussion actually about principles. In my view this bill is not a small change; this is actually because it is a change to the interpretation in an Act quite a fundamental change. So there are actually important points of principle here. We note that this was actually drawn from a paper written by The New Zealand Initiative which comes from a particular ideological point of view—and I am making no comment about that. But when you change an interpretation—a fundamental interpretation—in a piece of legislation it actually really matters. My first point is that the description of the Consumer Guarantees Act in your amendment bill is actually not about a further protection for consumers; it is basically a protection for lenders. As a result of that it diminishes the protection for consumers so that is basically what we will be debating and discussing when it comes to the select committee and what the impact of that is. Another important point to make is—this is I guess around priorities—about what the priority is when it comes to consumers and guarantees around consumers. I commend the New Zealand First speaker Fletcher Tabuteau for raising the Responsible Lending Code because there is much work yet to be done in that space. If you are going to be talking about consumer guarantees it would be much better if we were adopting the course proposed by my colleague Kris Faafoi in his member's bill the Credit Reforms (Responsible Lending) Bill which strengthens the protections for consumers against loan sharks and the enormous interest rates that loan sharks can impose and the vulnerabilities that consumers end up facing. That is a fundamental change that would actually do a lot of good in terms of protecting consumers. There has been a lot of public outcry around that particular issue. It is really apposite to note around this issue—where has been the outcry? Where is the problem? David Shearer my colleague raised that and it has been reinforced by others in the House. Who is actually saying that this is a problem? Where is the call for there to be a change—a fundamental change—in the interpretation of the Consumer Guarantees Act which has been in place for some time? What is the point of changing the interpretation of that unless there is actually a problem that you are trying to solve? Not you Mr Assistant Speaker but the member Dr Shane Reti. I think that is what we will be trying to tease out if this bill comes to the select committee: what is the problem here? Why do we have a Consumer Guarantees Act? It is a mechanism. There are other pieces of legislation that recourse can be got from but there are important reasons as to why the Consumer Guarantees Act exists and why those protections are there for consumers as recourse. Fundamentally I think this is an Orwellian piece of legislation actually because what you are proposing to do is the opposite of what the intent of this legislation actually is.