Dalziel Lianne: Financial Advisers Amendment Bill (No 2) Financial Service Providers (Registration and Dispute Resolution) Amendment Bill — Third Readings 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Dalziel Lianne: Financial Advisers Amendment Bill (No 2) Financial Service Providers (Registration and Dispute Resolution) Amendment Bill — Third Readings 
[Sitting date: 22 June 2010. Volume:664;Page:11981. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East) 
: 
 I am very pleased to follow the Minister and offer our continuing support for the passage of the Financial Advisers Amendment Bill (No 2) and the Financial Service Providers (Registration and Dispute Resolution) Amendment Bill. I am very pleased to have been able to play a role as the chair of the Commerce Committee. I am pleased to have worked very closely with members of the Government and with the Minister and the staff of his office and also with the officials parliamentary counsel and of course those all-important stakeholders who make up our crucial financial sector which is so important to our economic recovery and also to our future. 
I have already said in my second reading speech so I probably do not need to repeat—but I will—that I think people worked together in a very positive and constructive way and it would be wrong not to mention it again. I pay tribute to the House for being prepared to set aside essentially a Standing Order to allow for the officials’ documentation to go to stakeholders so that they could remain engaged in the process of deliberating with the select committee in many respects ensuring that we had the best-quality advice on how this legislation would work on the ground. The House gave our committee a fantastic signal of trust but I would like us to consider whether we need to rethink some of our Standing Orders and whether we have too much of a closed environment once legislation goes to a select committee. 
I reflect often on the United States of America where one sees the head of BP before a Senate committee and the person gets grilled. I would like to do that with some of these finance company directors. It would be so neat to be able to hold them to account in our Parliament. Maybe we need a slightly more open process in our select committees and perhaps the media need to take a little bit more interest in the work that we are doing. I have always described our select committees as the engine room of Parliament. They are not the engine room of Government; Cabinet is. Select committees are the engine room of Parliament and I think the work that they do is important. These bills stand tribute to the efforts of our team that supported us and our select committee clerks and I would like the Office of the Clerk to take that comment back to them. We really were incredibly well supported. We worked to impossible deadlines and they really delivered for us so we are very grateful to them for that. We are also grateful to the officials as I have mentioned before and to the wider stakeholders. 
I have already had my little confessional moment my mea culpa where I have confessed that as the previous Minister of Commerce I did not have my head around the technical detail of how the legislation that I was responsible for would work on the ground as well as I do now as the select committee chair. Select committee members are in a privileged position in that they have a higher level of input into the development of that technical detail and of course they have that wider support from stakeholders. I do not know that this is a failing in the system because certainly the feedback from people whom I spoke to was that we really could not tell how it would work in practice until we started implementing the legislation. It was during that phase that people started to say that the legislation introduced by the Government does not actually go far enough and does not address many of the concerns that they had and the difficulties they were coming up against in terms of its implementation. 
Of course the other group is lawyers. I know that I should not be saying this as I am standing next to my very good colleague Charles Chauvel but lawyers—and I confess to being one of those as well—have a habit of looking for problems. That is how they get paid: they get paid to solve problems but they have to find them first. Unfortunately I think that some of the advice given to those in the sector raised concerns that were not really valid in my view. But the fact that lawyers were raising those concerns with those particular companies and individuals meant that they had to take action; they had to prepare themselves for that to be the interpretation just in case. So it was right and proper that they brought those concerns to the select committee in the submissions process. We listened to those concerns and as a result we have better legislation. 
There are not many opportunities in this House for a previous Minister to also have the privilege in a different role as the chair of the select committee of seeing through changes to the original legislation that one has brought in. I make no secret of the fact that I would rather be the Minister but I am not. But in playing that particular role I was very very grateful to be able to make a contribution and I think we did. 
I said in my second reading speech that an exposure draft bill accompanying discussion documents at an early stage of the process in the way that experts in the field are consulted on tax bills would improve the process. I know that some people would be concerned that some of the interests in the financial sector would be self-serving but in the entire time that I was Minister not once did any stakeholders say to me that they did not want regulation. They all wanted regulation in this field. Why? It is because the sector requires confidence. It does not operate without confidence. People do not invest unless they know they can do so with confidence. The sector knows that it needs that confidence restored if it wants our financial markets to flourish. 
The last thing I want to comment on is the people who have lost money. I will never ever in my life forget the meetings that I had with people from one end of this country to the other who had lost money. I do not know how many meetings I had with people who had lost money in finance companies—for instance who lost money in Blue Chip which fell outside the system. We now have a law that will capture the Blue Chips of the future and if the law is not tight enough—there are people out there who are looking to avoid the application of the law; that is their job and they do it every second of every hour of every day—we now have provisions in place that will enable the Securities Commission to haul them into the frame. That will ensure there are better protections in place for the future. 
But I give a warning to people who want to invest and that is to take good-quality advice. People can ask questions of their advisers and ask who is paying the way for them. Issues relating to commissions still need to be addressed but I will never forget meeting those people who lost money. At a time when we want to encourage people to save we are not necessarily providing all the best options for people to consider doing that. The people who lost money were variously described by various media as being greedy as being out for a higher interest rate and as knowing very well the risks that they were taking. I cannot say honestly to this House that I met anyone whom I would describe as greedy. I met people who had been conned. I met people who had been duped. I met people who had no idea of the level of risk that they were taking with their hard-earned money. I met people who were so embarrassed at what they had done that they did not tell their adult sons and daughters what they had done with their inheritance. Essentially the money was all gone and they were embarrassed that they had fallen for it. 
These people require some protection but at the end of the day where there is risk and the rate of return is proportionate it is balanced against that risk the Government cannot make the risk go away because then there would be no financial sector. At the end of the day people need to understand what those risks are and they need to take good-quality advice. This legislation means that they can rely on this sector again and I am very pleased to have played a role in achieving that.