Wood MichaelMICHAEL WOOD (Labour—Mt Roskill): I am very pleased to stand up and speak in favour of the further and final progression of the bill in the House. In a former life I was a trade union organiser and negotiator for the finance sector union FinSec and a part of my role was negotiating collective agreements across that sector including with credit unions. While I was in that role I grew in my appreciation for the role and the value that credit unions play in many of our communities. They have an incredibly interesting history and they form quite a unique part of the financial services sector in New Zealand.There are around about 194000 New Zealanders who are members of credit unions and I think in a day and age in which increasingly in sectors like the financial services sector the big players are seen to dominate and have significant market share it's incredibly important that we do actually provide our citizens and consumers out there with some different providers who might meet different needs. In the case of credit unions the significant value that I saw in them is that they often provided unique and tailored services to communities who otherwise wouldn't have access to financial services. Some of this goes back to the history of credit unions which were formed on the basis of what is called a common bond and that's something I'll talk about a little bit more later where they were initially formed either through the common bond of people who lived in a particular geographic area or people who had a particular common bond perhaps through working in a particular workplace. So for example we have credit unions such as the New Zealand Police Credit Union the New Zealand Firefighters Credit Union or Steelsands Credit Union which services workers in the steel sands and broader steel industry. So that's a common bond and so workers are able to pool their resources and access financial services through these credit unions.Over the last 20 to 25 years or so as we've seen some of the larger financial institutions retrench from some of our communities sometimes the only financial services provider who's actually stuck around and provided those services to people—to workers and to their communities—has been the credit union. I've been particularly critical in select committees and in this House of some of our larger financial institutions for walking away from providing direct branch services in some of our lower socio-economic communities. I think that is an abrogation of the social compact that those large organisations should hold. Very often it's the credit unions who have continued to provide those services and I take my hat off to them for that. What the bill advances is a future for credit unions in which they can be more efficient and more effective and continue to not just exist but hopefully grow in terms of the range of services that they offer. I do want to commend the member who's brought this bill to the House Stuart Smith and all the other people who have shepherded it along the way. The Finance and Expenditure Committee of which I'm a part was unanimous in its support for this bill and a range of members worked with Mr Smith to make sure that we got a bill that was in really good shape and that can continue to enjoy broad support. I want to acknowledge my colleague Dr Duncan Webb who at select committee in respect of a particular issue that was raised in submissions around the question of mutuality did some work with Mr Smith to ensure that we're meeting some of those concerns in respect of the bill.The bill makes a number of quite important changes. One is to reform the current internal trustee structure which is quite a sort of cumbersome old-fashioned structure that credit unions are currently required to have if they want to hold property or to conduct business. Instead what we're replacing that with is a relatively simple straightforward and modern incorporation structure. This is going to make things much much simpler for the operation of credit unions.The other significant change I just want to touch on is the ability of credit unions under this new piece of legislation to be able to make loans to small to medium sized enterprises. This was really put through to us in a range of the submissions that came before the select committee. We have the situation at the moment where quite often people are loyal customers of credit unions they see the value of a credit union they or their family have perhaps had a relationship with it for many years but they want I don't know a $10000 loan for a small business a small lawnmowing business or a hairdressing business or something like that. At the moment the regime that we have prevents that credit union from directly making that loan to that person's business even though that person may in fact be an existing customer of the credit union and they might meet every other criteria that they would otherwise need to meet if they went to another financial institution to get that loan. You have to have sort of funny work-around options where the loan is made to the individual who will then loan it on to the small business. What some of the credit unions told us is that this actually resulted in people simply taking all of their business including their personal business away from the credit union because it just didn't work for them. There doesn't seem to be any particularly good reason as long as of course credit unions behave in a prudential way—that they do their due diligence—to prevent them from making loans to small to medium sized enterprises.We were able to sharpen up some of the provisions around this at select committee stage to make sure that the loans were going to businesses that were small businesses and these are businesses in which the individual who is a credit union member I think from memory has at least a 25 percent stake and they need to employ fewer than 20 employees. So it's not setting up credit unions to kind of grow overly big and mighty and get into risky situations. Again it's dealing with the small end of town people who are credit union customers—owners in fact—who want to expand their relationship with that credit union and I think that's important.It wouldn't be appropriate in this debate for us to not comment on the fact that there are a range of different views in the credit union community. We did have submissions from credit unions who were in favour of this direction very strongly and some credit unions who would have preferred that we stayed with the existing regime and we have had to balance that carefully in this Parliament and at the select committee. Certainly the view of the select committee when we were considering it was that credit unions do need these changes to remain efficient and to remain viable into the future. There were some comments about the costs that may be imposed on credit unions as a result of these changes. There probably will be some costs but at no point were substantial costs substantiated in the evidence that was put before us.I do need to comment that at the committee stage of this debate there was Supplementary Order Paper 40 put up by David Seymour in the committee of the whole House which would have proposed that we effectively have two different regimes—that we allow some credit unions who wish to to remain with the current regulatory regime and others to shift on to the new regulatory regime. This was something that was actually raised at select committee that was thought about and that was soundly rejected. And really if you think about it it's completely absurd. This is a relatively small sector in New Zealand—they are not big organisations—and it simply makes no sense to add the complexity of overlapping and different regulatory regimes. Would we for example even when dealing with large organisations like the major trading banks think that it was wise to have two separate regulatory regimes to govern them depending on the preferences of the particular banks? It simply doesn't make any sense in terms of good lawmaking and quite rightly this House at committee stage rejected that approach.This is a good bill. It makes some very real changes some valuable changes to quite an important little—but valued—sector of our economy and of our financial services landscape. I want to commend everyone who has participated and worked on this bill including the members that I have mentioned in this speech; the officials who gave very good advice to Mr Smith and the select committee along the way; and all of those people in the broader credit union community including the leaders of credit unions the staff of credit unions who I had the privilege of representing in those union days and all of those customers who have kept faith with the credit union movement over many many years.This is a really positive bill and I think that most of us in this House are very happy to see it proceed to this stage in debate today and to be very close to being made law. I commend it to the House. Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker.