Hayes John: International Finance Agreements Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Hayes John: International Finance Agreements Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:642;Page:11897] 
JOHN HAYES (National—Wairarapa) 
: 
 I say to the people of New Zealand that the member who has just resumed his seat Hone Harawira is a man of absolutely muddled thinking. How can we possibly say that this International Finance Agreements Amendment Bill which is supportive of economic development in our small Pacific neighbours will impact on our sovereignty? For goodness’ sake! He is a man of totally muddled thinking. 
This Government has had the past 8 years to pass this legislation. It has fiddled and fiddled its time away and it is in the twilight of its stay on the Treasury benches. 
Dr Wayne Mapp 
: Shane’s happy about that! 
JOHN HAYES 
: I realise that Shane Jones is particularly happy about that because the departure of his party from the Treasury benches will create a very interesting opportunity for him. 
We should be looking at our Australian neighbours. They have had this legislation in place now for the better part of 8 years and it has been helping Australian companies to get into areas of political risk. Any Australian company doing business in Fiji whose business was upset recently by the restoration of martial law there would be covered under the policies that are available under this convention. How does that in any way impinge on one’s sovereignty? 
As for the Green Party’s opposition to this bill it is something I just fail to understand. The Green Party members came to the select committee and debated the issues and they were supportive of the issues. They did not in any way declare a contrary position or disagreement with the cross-party support that we were trying to put in place yet they come into the House now and oppose this legislation. The next thing they will be doing is making Ahmed Zaoui a list candidate—high up on their list—and they will be doing it to advertise their name to put their name in the public domain. At least that is nothing to do with sovereignty but it is all about trying to grab a headline which is really all that the Greens are about. 
 We need to think about the Convention Establishing the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency in the context of our economy and the economies that are important to us around the world. I do not buy into the Labour mantra that supporting this convention will assist poverty eradication. In my view that is total meaningless nonsense. This will do nothing to contribute to the United Nations Millennium Development Goals of halving the number of women who die in childbirth of decreasing by a third the number of people who do not have access to water or of increasing incomes. That is total drivel. Everything that the Labour Government and the Minister have said when the bill was introduced and this evening—presenting the mantra that the convention is in accordance with our aid agency’s goals and with the United Nations Millennium Development Goals—is just arrant nonsense and totally meaningless because those goals will never be measured and they will never ever come to anything whatever. 
The reason that members should support this bill and the reason why I rise with my colleagues Dr Mapp and Mr Groser to support it is that it will help New Zealand businesses. The same party that is promoting this bill had a principle back in the 1980s that we must move away from socialising businesses’ losses. So what did Labour do? It got rid of the Export Guarantee Office and it got rid of all the supports for businesses that had been covered as a taxpayer expense. As I have pointed out to this House before in the mid-1990s the Iranian Government through its own State-owned banks defaulted to 14 New Zealand companies on $100 million of letters of credit. If we had been a member of this scheme then the cover could have kept those New Zealand companies out of difficulty. We have moved to a situation where the Government is offering no principled approach to the issue. Members will remember that Labour removed the support that existed back in the 1980s. It was removed by Roger Douglas and Mike Moore. Now we are coming back—the worm seems to have turned full circle—to a point where this Government is saying it wants to socialise businesses’ losses again but to do it on an international scale and to do it through this convention. 
I happen to think that this measure is a good business opportunity. Going into the scheme will cost us a maximum of US$1 million. Sure there is some risk that down the track we would have to meet up to another US$4 million if there was a run on the company providing this support. But the upside of making this investment of US$1 million is that it will help small to medium sized businesses in New Zealand—those businesses with fewer than 300 members those businesses with less than US$15 million worth of assets and those businesses with less than US$15 million worth of annual income. It will help them for a period of 3 years to try to establish themselves. 
But if we think about the context of Fiji where democratic government has been removed and replaced with martial law we realise that had we been a member of this convention 12 months ago any New Zealand companies operating there could have insured themselves against that risk. They would not be suffering the financial losses that they are having at the moment. Because countries that operate under this convention and seek insurance cover also have to be members of it the same opportunity would apply to companies doing business in Papua New Guinea which is often perceived by our companies as a difficult and high-risk market. It would also operate in Samoa where there are lower risks. It would operate in the Federated States of Micronesia in Palau and in Indonesia. 
I do not support what we are doing in the sense of the mantra that the Government provides to us; we are supportive of the legislation just because we can see real benefits for individual New Zealand companies and for the Pacific economies on our boundary. With those words I give our full support to this bill.