Williams Andrew: Cheque Duty Repeal Bill Climate Change Response (Unit Restriction) Amendment Bill Dumping and Countervailing Duties Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third ReadingsText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliams Andrew: Cheque Duty Repeal Bill Climate Change Response (Unit Restriction) Amendment Bill Dumping and Countervailing Duties Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third Readings[Sitting date: 15 May 2014. Volume:698;Page:18068. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]ANDREW WILLIAMS (NZ First): I take a call on behalf of New Zealand First on the legislation arising from the omnibus bill the Budget Measures (Miscellaneous Fiscal Matters) Bill: the Cheque Duty Repeal Bill the Climate Change Response (Unit Restriction) Amendment Bill and the Dumping and Countervailing Duties Amendment Bill (No 2).Just to cover them briefly in terms of removing cheque duty in the Cheque Duty Repeal Bill New Zealand First supports that change. We feel it is very late it is overdue it should have been done a long time ago and we cannot understand why it has taken this Government 6 years to get around to it. I pulled out a cheque book a few weeks ago to write out a cheque. I do not think I have used it for more than about 2 years. I noticed that that particular cheque book was first issued in about 2007 or 2008 so I paid that $2.50 some 6 years ago. Cheque duty is a bit of a nonsense and really it should have been done away with a long time ago. Again it was a little fiddle around the edges in the Budget—another little lollipop—to try to make things look good but at the end of the day it was immaterial.The second thing in terms of climate change in the Climate Change Response (Unit Restriction) Amendment Bill again we think it is just fiddling around the edges. New Zealand First has no time for the emissions trading scheme. We think it is just another money-laundering scheme for bankers financiers and people from the likes of Merrill Lynch to take and extort money from the New Zealand economy and put it into places like New York London Frankfurt and other financial markets trading on the emissions trading scheme and basically New Zealanders the New Zealand Government and the New Zealand economy will pay dearly. We again will be the guinea pigs the suckers. We will pay out around the world to these people and probably in years to come we will all look back in hindsight and say: “How on earth did we get dragged into that? Why did we bother?”. Well New Zealand First says we should not have a bar of it. We should get on with our own problems here in New Zealand in terms of our emissions and we should sort out our own emissions here in New Zealand. We should workconstructively in New Zealand in terms of what is polluting our own environment and what is happening around our own country in terms of emissions levy the polluters here in New Zealand and make sure the money goes back constructively into sorting out the issues with pollution here in New Zealand and not send it off to some money-making scheme administered by the likes of Merrill Lynch in New York.The third part of the bill which is the main part in our view in terms of issue to New Zealand is the building supplies bill the Dumping and Countervailing Duties Amendment Bill (No 2). We have huge opposition to this bill. New Zealand First believes that this is another attempt by the National Government to undermine New Zealand manufacturers. Again New Zealand manufacturers bear the brunt of this. We sat on the manufacturing inquiry in the last year and we were prepared—the Government was not prepared—alongside other Opposition parties to listen to our manufacturers. Those who are in the manufacturing sector—not in the agricultural manufacturing sector not in sectors that are exporting our primary produce and other things but those that are in basic everyday manufacturing—are finding it pretty tough. With our dollar up around US86c and heading towards US90c they are finding it very tough. Therefore they do need some assistance to stay viable here in New Zealand when they are up against very very cheap sources of materials such as those in the building industry coming out of the likes of China Indonesia Thailand and other places which have already been identified in the last 2 or 3 years as being dumped in this market and seriously undercutting our own manufacturers of wallboards steel coil steel reinforcing nails and other such construction materials. It has already been proven that that has gone on and it is having a very serious detrimental effect on our manufacturers in New Zealand.We in New Zealand First say we will stand up and support our manufacturers. We will go into battle for them. We will make sure that they do have that level of protection because they are up against other economies that have got huge scale much lower wage rates much lower standards of production in terms of quality and warranty that come with it and therefore it is not a level playing field. So the whole idea of these anti-dumping tariffs is to try to create a level playing field to ensure that those New Zealand manufacturers are not disadvantaged. The Minister of Commerce refused to answer some of the questions I put to him in the Committee stage. In the regulatory impact statement from the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment—the “Ministry of Everything”—it said that it was going to be something that would give us a $900 saving per house in this. We have heard from the Minister that it is going to be a saving of $3500. It is very interesting that there are contradictory pieces of information being provided and yet the Minister has not stood up throughout this whole debate today and given an explanation as to why those figures are different. There might be a reasonable explanation. It might be justifiable. But when I read a regulatory impact statement that says that the saving is only $900 per residential household that is the figure I take—when I see it in writing from the officials.We have also heard from the Minister that this will help reduce house prices in Auckland. I held this document up earlier in the day and said that the problem in Auckland is that houses are being bought by people from all over the world—not just by people from Asia but by all sorts of people from all over the world. These people are buying them because the Auckland housing market is hot and it is going up and it is going up at a rapid rate. They are bidding via telephones to auction floors in Takapuna—rooms full of people in Takapuna. And those people are on phones overseas—John Hayes: Where?ANDREW WILLIAMS: They are Mr Hayes I can assure you. I have a daughter who has been in the real estate market and she gives me information as to what is happening. I have got other friends in the real estate market who have told me as well. They are bidding and half the time these people are sitting back overseas and bidding blindly on properties and buying them in Auckland. There are properties on the North Shore that are bought closed up left empty and nothing is done with them. They are sitting there on the basis of a speculative purchase knowing how fast property prices are going up in the Auckland market. Those houses are sitting empty—million-dollar homes sitting empty. Three houses in a row in a street are being bought they are taken off that land and six dwellings are being built in their place for speculative purposes. And it is all being done in a large cash market. Then there is a paper in Auckland like this one—a huge paper huge paper—and it is not in English selling properties all over Auckland but a New Zealander would struggle to read it. They would struggle to read it. So this is of concern. I stand as a fifth-generation New Zealander whose family on both my mother’s and my father’s side came here in the 1840s and I stand up for the young people of New Zealand who ask us as politicians and they ask us all the time: “How on earth are we ever going to afford to buy a house in the likes of Auckland when the properties are being bought from many offshore sources?”. It is incredible.At the same time through this whole thing the Government has said through the Budget that it is going to try to massage things—it is doing so well we heard from Mr Goldsmith. He gave his checklist of how wonderful the Government was and he was checking off all these things and saying how it is saving all these various things. Then you hold up this piece of paper from the Budget documents which shows contributions to superannuation from the Government in the next 5 years. For 2015 it is zero; for 2016 it is zero; for 2017 it is zero; and for 2018 it is zero. Mr Goldsmith you cannot claim a $372 million surplus and say how wonderfully you have done while New Zealanders and future New Zealanders—and with the baby-boom bubble coming before us—will be retiring in years to come with a superannuation scheme that your Government will not have contributed 1c to in the decade between 2008-09 and 2018-19. That is a whole decade of no contributions to the future of this country while at the same time the young people of this country are up against this sort of thing when trying to buy a house in Auckland.This Government is really disappointing. Then it comes to this House under urgency puts forward these pathetic little things like the removal of cheque duty on cheque books and a little bit about climate change and it thinks that that is the urgent business of the Government under urgency. Well it is not. New Zealand First says otherwise. We think that there is a much bigger picture here—a much bigger picture in terms of what is happening in our economy—and New Zealand First will address that on 20 September.