Roche Denise: Mixed Ownership Model Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Roche Denise: Mixed Ownership Model Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 20 June 2012. Volume:681;Page:3156. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DENISE ROCHE (Green) 
: 
 I rise to oppose this part— 
Hon Clayton Cosgrove 
: I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. Again I do apologise for interrupting the member. The Minister in the chair did indeed make a statement. Is he now misleading the Committee and backing off from that statement? 
The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson) 
: That is not a point of order. I have warned the member. He has got his first yellow card. I call the honourable member Denise Roche. 
DENISE ROCHE 
: Tena koe. Tena koutou ki te Whare. I join with many colleagues on this side of the Chamber to oppose this bill the Mixed Ownership Model Bill. Part 1 just to recap removed a whole bunch of requirements around social responsibility good-employer provisions and provisions of the Ombudsmen Act to be able to check what would happen with these companies once they are partially privatised and also removed them from the provisions of the Official Information Act. 
Then in Part 2 we see the whittling down and the watering down of the Treaty of Waitangi. It begs the question as to why you would remove the Treaty of Waitangi provisions from this part of the bill when in fact the Government says that these shares will be sold to New Zealanders. New Zealanders are a partner of the Treaty of Waitangi. It does not make sense that we need to put in special provisions to exclude 49 percent of our people. 
I am going to talk briefly about my colleague and co-leader Russel Norman’s Supplementary Order Paper 39 which calls for this bill to be deferred until the petition for the citizens initiated referendum on the sale of the State-owned assets has been completed because we are confident that we will be able to get 310000 signatures. In the last 3 days I have spent hours and hours alongside Green Party volunteers collecting signatures. I can tell you very clearly that even National Party supporters are opposed to the sale of our State-owned assets. They are signing this petition in droves. As of today the Green Party in 6 weeks has collected in excess of 45000 signatures. It is incredibly easy to collect them. I spent 2 hours on Queen Street yesterday and during that time I personally collected 90 signatures. That is about one signature every 1½ minutes. 
The conversations were the same over and over: this is theft. Selling the assets that were bought and built for us by previous generations steals from our generation and generations to come. This was coming very clearly from National Party supporters. In fact I got into an argument about other parts of our policy with one National Party supporter but he was very happy to sign the petition and to take it to his friends. A referendum would not be binding but it is a very clear signal and the rate of people signing the petition as it is at the moment clearly shows that this is an election issue and this Government does not have a mandate to sell these assets. I am sure my colleagues from the Labour Party from Mana and from New Zealand First and our allies in Grey Power Greenpeace and the New Zealand Union of Students’ Associations are hearing these stories over and over and over again. These assets belong to us all. They are not for the Government to sell. 
My colleague Russel Norman yesterday pointed out that the votes around the parts of this bill in Committee are very very close. And the vote will be extremely close when it comes to the third reading. Yesterday Part 1 was passed with a 61 to 60 result. That is not democracy. That is not a mandate. That is not fair to New Zealand citizens it is not fair or honourable to those who built up those assets for us and it is certainly not fair to the generations to come who will be paying higher and higher and higher electricity prices. 
Selling these assets is short-sighted. It does not in the long term resolve any of the deficit issues. In fact as we have heard time and time again across the Chamber it increases our lack of resilience. It increases our situation where we are basically reliant on debt because we lose our income-generating assets. A short-term fix a rush of sugar is how one person who signed the petition on Saturday explained it to me. Selling these assets—