King MattMATT KING (National—Northland): Thank you Madam Chair. It's a real honour to speak and I've been listening very carefully to both sides of the committee with their debates. I'm fortunate enough to not be on the Governance and Administration Committee. I'm on the Transport and Infrastructure Committee but I see that the membership there is—there are some highly talented people there: Brett Hudson Virginia Andersen Kanwaljit Bakshi the Hon Jacqui Dean Paul Eagle the Hon Peeni Henare Raymond Huo and Jian Yang. So we're in good company.Essentially this piece of legislation is to control the pays of—at last count there were three entities who didn't comply with the State Service Commission's guidelines. So we're talking about three people at the moment but we support this bill because we understand that it's a tidy-up process brings the powers for Crown entities—namely the terms and conditions of employment for CEOs. It effectively gives the State Services Commissioner a right to veto appointments because if he doesn't agree to the salaries or the conditions that's effectively a veto.However limiting the terms to five years—I think that's a good call. But I'm a little bit worried about the direction that the coalition Government are going in terms of public services under their governance. There's a little bit less of the accountability coming in here. For example in admissions in hospitals we had a time limit and that effectively saved lives in emergency departments and I see that they've been kicked to touch. I see that CEOs' salaries—the performance part of the salary is going to be paid out so there's no incentive there and automatic payouts for risk share. So for people that don't understand what that means in terms of a salary if they didn't meet the target they lose that payment. And I see it's all going to be swallowed into one.Now Treasury have warned that this bit of legislation might impact competing to get good CEs because we have to compete with the private sector. I see Minister Hipkins is keen on dropping measurement and setting of performance standards since they got into power. So they're more insistent on knocking the top rung of the ladder than pulling up the bottom.I see the 8600 members of the Institute of Directors state the bill may undermine good governance and take away too much power. Appointing and managing CEOs is one of the most important conditions that a board does. It's important that these functions are kept at arm's length. As I said before we're talking about three entities that didn't follow the rules. But I talk in relation to the New Zealand Superannuation Fund and Adrian Orr. I know that that got some coverage for a million dollar salary but he runs an organisation that has $38 billion worth of assets under management. So you need—Brett Hudson: Was.MATT KING: —was. He was. And you want the top people in charge of that. They paid $6 billion worth of tax. So I think that you need to pay the money to attract the top people. I don't want inferior people running big organisations where we're dealing with a lot of money.So we support the bill. I'll just quote here with this Government rich pricks" populist attacks are common from the other side of the House and it's unhelpful when the serious business of governance is involved. We support the bill."