Cunliffe David: KiwiSaver Budget Measures Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCunliffe David: KiwiSaver Budget Measures Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 21 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3840. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn):It is my pleasure to take the first of what I hope will be a series of calls on this important bill which is going to be bad for New Zealanders bad for the New Zealand economy and actually bad for our financial and saving institutions as well.As you know we are in the technical part of the debate here where we are going clause by clause. I want to begin by offering some fairly narrow comments on the commencement date itself. This is an example of misplaced use of a retrospective commencement date. It is actually quite a confused clause in itself because clause 2(1) says that the Act will come into force on the day on which it receives the Royal assent—but no date is provided breaching what is a longstanding good-practice convention upheld by Parliament in its Regulations Review Committee. In clause 2(2) however it says that “Section 4”—the operative section—“is treated as coming into force on 1 May 2015.” Given that that is prior to today that ensures a retrospective effect. That means that a young Kiwi who today hears that this door is closing cannot now join KiwiSaver. It is too late because Parliament if it passes this bill will deem that the door shut nearly 3 weeks ago. This is a retrospective instrument.Why would you do that? Or why would the Government do that when the argument that it has ostensibly for trying to take away the $1000 kick-start contribution is that not enough people have joined the scheme and not enough people have saved? That is its argument. Of course it is a fallacy but that is what the Government is trying to convince New Zealanders of. If the Government set as my colleague Chris Hipkins has suggested a future close-off date there would be a very strong incentive for anyone who is not currently a member of the scheme to join it. That would be a very good thing and it would support the very objectives that the Government has said it espouses. It would encourage people to join the scheme and to save more particularly those vulnerable or low-income people who to date have been the slowest to join. So setting a retrospective close-off prevents people joining and prevents the very objective that the Government says it holds.Even better would of course be my colleague David Clark’s amendment which is that the commencement date be deferred until after the coming election. Then it would never happen because the chances of the Government getting returned have got to be very very low. But in principle that would be a better option because New Zealanders would have the opportunity to vote based on the information that the Government has given to them only after the election. The National Party did not campaign on stealing back the KiwiSaver kick-start contribution. Not one word was said about its eighth attempt to gut KiwiSaver. Not one mention was made of Robert David Muldoon wrecking the last Labour-led savings scheme which if we had kept we would be a country as rich as Australia now. This is classic National Party “short-termism”.Why has the Government got this commencement date? It is relying on a very late-to-the-piece evaluation by the Inland Revenue Department that was released concurrently with this bill—i.e. it has had no opportunity for peer review or public criticism. It has simply been fed into this retrospective measure. It is a very very interesting piece of analysis because it frames the question up front away from the broader objectives that the KiwiSaver scheme has had from its inception. Those objectives were really three-way: firstly to help all New Zealanders save and save more for their retirement and their general financial well-being; and secondly to strengthen our domestic financial institutions so we have sticky local capital that we can invest in Kiwi businesses and Kiwi jobs.Members opposite are not focused on the debate; they are focused on the gallery. That is a very interesting thing because this is a very—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order!Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE: —far-reaching measure that affects millions of New Zealanders. It affects millions of New Zealanders.The third objective for KiwiSaver has always been to improve New Zealand’s net savings position so that we reduce the current account deficit strengthen our total balance sheet and fit New Zealand for the future. And what is really interesting in the Inland Revenue Department’s analysis is that it has completely ignored 2½ of those three goals. It has ignored the broad fiscal savings gap issue and the current account deficit that flows from it. It has ignored the issues around the health of our financial institutions and our ability to invest in our own future.