Trustee (Public Trust) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Trustee (Public Trust) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. This bill clarifies the process for appointing a replacement securities trustee. Section 46 of the Trustee Act allows the High Court to appoint Public Trust as replacement trustee for any trustee who wishes to retire or resign. This rule was first enacted in 1899 to ensure that family trusts or estates did not fail for lack of a trustee. Trusts have significantly changed since then. Trusts have become increasingly popular for commercial uses, including raising money for the public. Some of the rules applying to traditional trusts are out of place when applied to corporate trusts. A trustee of a failing or failed finance company trust can ask the court to appoint Public Trust as replacement trustee. This was not envisaged when the rule in section 46 was enacted. To date this rule has never been used to appoint Public Trust as a securities trustee. If it is used in this way, securities trustees will be able to walk away from their responsibilities by asking the court to have Public Trust appointed in their place.

There may be very good reasons for appointing Public Trust to stop a family trust from failing, but we need a different approach for appointing a replacement trustee for a finance company. That approach is coming in the Financial Markets Conduct Bill, which is currently before Parliament, but it will not begin to come into force until 2014, and we need change now. The law puts Public Trust on an unequal and unfair playing field. It is unequal because the existing trustee is not required to contact other trustees in the market and try to negotiate terms with them to act as a replacement trustee. It is unfair because the current legislation does not ensure that Public Trust’s reasonable fees and expenses will be met. Although the court has discretion to award costs to Public Trust, it is unclear whether and how this discretion will be exercised. This is not a hypothetical risk; it is real and it is happening now.

Perpetual Trust is trustee for the failed finance company Capital + Merchant Finance. Perpetual Trust has applied to the High Court to have Public Trust appointed as replacement trustee. Public Trust is unlikely to recover its expenses from the company. This bill does not seek to affect those court proceedings. Public Trust will have to wear the cost if it is appointed. The bill will remove the risk of the case setting a precedent. Public Trust could be appointed as replacement trustee for many more failed finance companies. There are 60 finance companies currently in receivership, liquidation, or moratorium. It would take only a few appointments of the same scale as Capital + Merchant Finance for Public Trust to incur more than $1 million of unanticipated and unfunded costs. Furthermore, Public Trust may incur more than a significant financial burden. Being a trustee for failed finance companies may impact on Public Trust’s reputation and brand. It will put Public Trust at a competitive disadvantage. Its current business activities will need to be reprioritised. Public Trust is required by law to operate as a competitive business. To place on it the burden of acting as a replacement trustee for securities trustees puts it at an unfair disadvantage in the competitive market.

This bill makes an urgent amendment to the Trustee Act. The amendment will clarify the process for appointing replacement securities trustees. Securities trustees are those who supervise offers of securities to the public under the Securities Act 1978 and are licensed by the Financial Markets Authority under the Securities Trustees and Statutory Supervisors Act 2011. Instead of allowing a securities trustee to merely resign or retire and ask the court to appoint Public Trust as a replacement, this bill requires more effort on behalf of the retiring trustee. A retiring securities trustee must make reasonable endeavours to appoint a replacement trustee. Reasonable endeavours include offering to pay the replacement trustee’s reasonable fees and expenses. If it is impractical or difficult to appoint a replacement trustee, the court may assist. Public Trust may then be appointed as a replacement trustee.

The requirement on the retiring trustee does not end there. If the trust cannot cover Public Trust’s reasonable fees and expenses, the retiring trustee must do so itself. These changes place an appropriate responsibility on the retiring securities trustee. The trustee of last resort should really be the last resort. The retiring trustee should demonstrate that it has made reasonable endeavours to find an alternative trustee, and Public Trust should not have to incur the costs without being compensated for them. The retiring trustee should ensure that Public Trust’s reasonable costs are met in taking on this role. If the trust cannot do so, it is not fair that one licensed trustee that just happens to be owned by the State should have to underwrite the risk that private sector securities trustees take on when they become trustees of finance companies, and for which they have been compensated. This amendment is needed and it is needed now to protect Public Trust from the significant burdens of being required to act as a replacement trustee for retiring securities trustees. I commend this bill to the House.

The Labour Opposition will support the first reading of this bill, the Trustee (Public Trust) Amendment Bill, and will be interested in explanations from other Ministers and those who are supporting the bill. I do not think there is any doubt around the principle of the bill. The fact is that currently the Public Trust looks like it is the designated receiver of hospital passes, in a rugby sense. If there is something going badly wrong and there is going to be a loss involved, toss it to the Public Trust, because it will carry it. I think it probably comes from the days of thinking that when there is a problem, give it to the Government. The private sector, especially people involved in this sort of industry—and we saw it in South Canterbury Finance and a number of other places—thinks that if something makes a profit, it is capital, and if it makes a loss, let us socialise it and get the Government to pay for it. I think the Public Trust was treated as that sort of organisation.

I have had a lot to do with the Public Trust over many years. I used to get involved in delivering scripts to it when I still had short pants on. I think it is seen as an organisation that is upright and has integrity and should not be placed at risk of having to demand some sort of Government support as a result of the activities of organisations that have made a lot of money out of being trustees and have basically sucked organisations dry. When they work out that the cash flow is likely to stop, they then seek to offload to what is seen to be a public organisation. I think that is wrong.

My question for the Minister of Justice and for others goes to process and the necessity of using urgency to pass this bill. I mean, I think the Minister does make a good point. She does not want to open the floodgates to similar organisations passing off their responsibilities as they see the gate closing. But my question to the Minister—and it goes to our support of this bill at its later stages—is for her to give a good explanation as to why an alternative approach could not have been taken. I know that she is deeply involved in important conversations, but as the length of the sitting time of the House—

💬 Hon Judith Collins: I’m listening.

Well, the question I have got for the Minster is why she did not include in this bill an effective date of today for the shutting off of the gate, and then send it to a select committee to make sure that there were not any unforeseen circumstances, so that we knew exactly what we were doing, so that the other organisations that she is seeking to shut out would have the opportunity to have their say, and so that we could also make sure, by getting the Law Society and others involved, that we had the legislation absolutely right. Doing that—shutting the gate as at an effective date and maybe sending it off for a shortened period to a select committee and giving people the chance to have their say—in my opinion, would have made Parliament look better.

It would have meant that we had not rammed things through under urgency. It would have meant that the public could look at the process, but we could have had the gate shut, because the effective date could have been, well, probably today. It would have been appropriate for it to be 9 May, rather than 8 May. That is the date on the wall, but 9 May is the day of the introduction of the bill. In fact, if the bill was tabled yesterday, we could still have had the date of 8 May in the legislation as being the effective date. People know that the principle of retrospectivity does not apply when notice is properly given on the introduction of a bill. It would have been retrospective in effect in its coming into force, but not retrospective in that people would have been aware of it coming into force from the date of its introduction.

I know that it is, you know, relatively finely tuned. I know that it is certainly easier for the Government to ram it through like this. It gets it out of the way some time—you know, 10 o’clock tonight, or something like that, the law will be changed, it will go off to the Governor-General and will get signed tomorrow, and that is the effect of all of that. But the question that I would like to get answered is whether the Government considered the alternative approach, especially given the lack of consultation, which is apparent from the regulatory impact statement—the fact that people who are affected by it have not been consulted. We know why they were not consulted, because they could have shot in and lodged their papers—I understand that. But given the opportunity of having the select committee process to give the Government some consultation at that point but not to open the door to others, why did the Government not take that approach?

It is a pleasure to rise in support of the Trustee (Public Trust) Amendment Bill. The Public Trust, of course, plays a very important role, and it has done so since its inception back in 1873. I am delighted to hear that the Hon Trevor Mallard is endorsing—

💬 Dr Cam Calder: Was he there then?

No, he was not there then, but he was not far from it. I am delighted that he is endorsing the bill through its first reading. That is welcome because I think, as further speakers and I go through this debate, that we will be able to answer his questions.

The Public Trust is the only Crown-owned trustee serving the corporate and business market in New Zealand, and it is the largest trustee organisation in New Zealand. It is, of course, best known for services that it provides around wills and estates and administration, as well as the work it does for New Zealanders around legal, financial, investment, home loans, conveyancing, and estate protection.

So what does this bill do? Well, it will close a loophole to the principal Act, the Trustee Act 1956. In particular, this bill will clarify the process for appointing a replacement securities trustee for financial products regulated by the Securities Act 1978. The bill will shield the Public Trust from wearing the costs of having to step in and replace trustees of failed finance companies. Currently, trustees can apply to the High Court and have the Public Trust replace them without any agreement by the Public Trust itself. Doing so exposes the Public Trust to the costs and risks of sorting out these trustees’ tangled, failed financial affairs, all on the tab of the long-suffering taxpayer, via the Public Trust. So with 60 failed finance companies currently in receivership, liquidation, or moratorium, the potential exposure for the taxpayer is simply unacceptable.

The Hon Trevor Mallard asked why we should adopt this process. The reason is quite simple. It is that this bill provides an interim solution until the Financial Markets Conduct Bill, which is currently before the House, is enacted and comes into force. The Trustee (Public Trust) Amendment Bill makes it clear that if the court appoints the Public Trust as the trustee of last resort for securities offered to the public, then retiring trustees must indemnify the Public Trust for its reasonable fees and expenses. This ensures that the Public Trust’s fees and expenses will be met by the retiring trustee if the trust cannot cover them itself. That seems to me to be eminently sensible and worthy of this House’s support, and I commend the bill to the House.

I am happy to take a call on the Trustee (Public Trust) Amendment Bill. I can say this of the bill: we are supportive of the policy behind the bill, and we will support the bill. I think the policy is a very sound one, that if the Public Trust is to be called upon as the trustee of last resort, in the case of collapsed finance companies or collapsing finance companies, it is only correct that when the retiring trustees who wish to wash their hands of their responsibilities are looking for an alternative, they should be required to have used their reasonable endeavours to look for an alternative other than the Public Trust. Then, if in an application to the High Court the Public Trust is the only one left standing, the Public Trust should be reimbursed or at least indemnified for the cost of taking on that responsibility.

The truth, certainly in relation to finance companies, is that we are talking about corporate trustees. They are there in the good times, and they charge fees and generate an income while the finance company is doing its best to take money and lend it. They may have whatever care or regard for the investors and depositors with them; they are quite happy to be there at that time and fleece the finance company and its depositors and creditors. But when it all gets too hard, they want to flick responsibility and wash their hands of it. So I commend the Minister of Justice for adopting that policy and taking that approach.

The question remains, however, as to why this bill has to be considered under urgency. There are two principal reasons. One is that the issue that underpins this bill is not new. The finance companies have been collapsing since 2008. The risk of an application to the High Court to nominate the Public Trust or appoint the Public Trust as a securities trustee for a failing finance company has been there at least since 2008. A question obviously arises as to why the Ministry of Justice, the other appropriate authorities, or, indeed, the Minister herself or her predecessor have not seen the risk and sought to move on it earlier. In that regard we have the Financial Markets Conduct Bill, which is under way. In any event, if it is passed, it is not intended to take effect until next year.

But this is not a new issue; it has been around. What we have is one application to the High Court by Perpetual Trust, to appoint the Public Trust as a trustee for Capital + Merchant Finance. The other policy aspect is, of course, that if this bill should be passed, if the Public Trust is appointed, then the risk of loss to the Public Trust is mitigated by the indemnity. That, however, will not apply in the case of Capital + Merchant Finance and Perpetual Trust, because the bill does not seek to be retrospective. That application has been with the court. It is due to be heard in a few weeks’ time. So any appointment of the Public Trust by the court cannot or will not take effect under this bill.

The interesting thing about that is—and I have said this before about some of the personalities behind Capital + Merchant Finance—that one of them is Trevor Janes, who was a director of Capital + Merchant Finance. Many directors, in fact all the directors, of Capital + Merchant Finance have been the subject if not of prosecutions by the Serious Fraud Office—and by that I mean successful prosecutions by the Serious Fraud Office—then of civil action by the Financial Markets Authority. The one director who has escaped attention, for reasons that no one can understand and for reasons that have never been given, is Trevor Janes.

The interesting thing about Trevor Janes is that he is a favoured appointee of this Government. He was most recently appointed to the board of none other than ACC by the present Minister of Justice when she was Minister for ACC—she still is the Minister for ACC—as a consequence of the clean-out of that board following its crisis last year. Of course, not only was he appointed to the board of ACC but he was made its deputy chair and the chair of the investment committee. He was a director of a failed finance company, a finance company whose other directors have been the subject of prosecutions by the Serious Fraud Office and civil action by the Financial Markets Authority, who found himself excluded from those actions and appointed by this Government to the board of ACC and as the chair of its investment committee. In the words of that great English comedienne Catherine Tate, I say: “What a liberty. What a liberty.” that that should happen.

💬 Mike Sabin: Give us the full version.

There is another word in that phrase, but I understand that it is considered to be unparliamentary, so I will not use it. But I simply say: “What a liberty.”

💬 Scott Simpson: It has something to do with ducks—something to do with ducks.

It might do. It might rhyme with it. I am not quite sure. It is a derivative of a word used, I think, by Aaron Gilmore not two weekends ago. But the point is that Capital + Merchant Finance and Perpetual Trust, which was trying to absolve itself of any further responsibility for Capital + Merchant Finance, will not have this bill applied to them. They have escaped the net. And it is only after they had escaped the net that the Minister, the same Minister who appointed Trevor Janes, a former director of Capital + Merchant Finance, should seek to act under urgency to pass this legislation. I just go back to what the Hon Trevor Mallard said. That is not necessary. There is already legislation being considered by this House that would cover this situation, and that is good. As I say, the underlying policy is good, but this could have been dealt with in a way that could have allowed proper and full consideration.

It is interesting seeing the regulatory impact statement on this bill. It became available to us mere mortals in the Opposition only today. It is interesting seeing the regulatory impact statement, because it refers to the limited amount of time the Ministry of Justice has had to consider the matter. It says that it has not been able to fully develop even one of the options that it was considering. It talks about the inability to consult with other trustees who will be affected by the proposed options, and it talks about the inability to consult, because of the litigation presently in the High Court. It talks about the lack of information about the financial implications of each of the options it was asked to consider before giving its report on this bill, and notes that the Public Trust has had no experience up to now of acting as a trustee for a failed finance company.

These are matters upon which there should have been proper evidence given to a select committee. These are matters upon which there should have been proper and considered deliberation by members of this House. Because of urgency we will not have that, so we are flying blind. Not a blind trust, of course, but we are flying blind on this particular issue. That is a matter of concern when the issue could have been dealt with by simply saying in a bill that it will take effect from a particular given date, so that should legal proceedings by other failed finance companies and their trustees follow there was then a clear signal and a clear warning that their legal action would be affected by the legislation before the House.

💬 Hon Lianne Dalziel: It has been done before.

It has been done before, my colleague Lianne Dalziel tells me. So there is no need for urgency. All stages of this Trustee (Public Trust) Amendment Bill are expected to be passed now under this urgency motion. We will not have the benefit of considered evidence from experts and those experienced in the field. We are in that position because of dilatoriness on the part of either the ministry or the Minister of Justice, and/or her predecessor, and we are simply no better off. This is not good lawmaking. We are in the unnecessary position of having to consider this legislation under urgency.

So although we will support the bill, and we support the policy and the direction it is taking it in, we do not support the process. The Minister is deserving of the harshest of criticism for adopting this process in this particular way.

💬 Hon Judith Collins: Ha, ha!

She can laugh and giggle. She is looking after her mate Trevor Janes, as she has done all the way along, by appointing him to statutory roles. Of course, her track record in statutory appointments this year alone is not a very good one, but she has made it worse. She has exacerbated it by the passage of this legislation, which was totally unnecessary.

I rise to speak on behalf of the Green Party on the Trustee (Public Trust) Amendment Bill. The Green Party saw a copy of this bill only very late in the day on Tuesday. Today is the first day that I have had a chance to look at the regulatory impact statement, and I would not say that I have had enough time to look at it thoroughly. As Andrew Little mentioned earlier, even in the regulatory impact statement it says that officials have not had the opportunity to fully evaluate all the options they would have liked to deal with the problem that has arisen.

The Green Party will be supporting the bill because we agree that there is a problem. We do think it is very important to protect the Public Trust from unforeseen financial liabilities that would arise from being appointed as a trustee of last resort for failed finance companies. However, I have to agree with Andrew Little in saying that the process being adopted by the Government to put this bill through under urgency does not allow us to fully scrutinise and evaluate all the options. It is unclear to me at this point that the option that has been chosen and put forward in this bill is actually the best option for dealing with the problem.

There is a very serious and significant question as to why the Government was not aware that this could become a problem until Capital + Merchant Finance applied to the High Court for the Public Trust to be appointed as a replacement trustee for Perpetual Trust. Why did it not realise that this was going to be a problem, when the failure of finance companies has been going on for a number of years now? There is a huge number—60 failed finance companies, as the Minister of Justice referred to, and Perpetual Trust is a corporate trustee for 22 of these companies. I would have thought that it would be obvious that there would be a danger of something like this arising and the Public Trust suddenly having to become the trustee of last resort for companies that simply have not taken responsibility for their own risks and no longer have the money or resources available to handle all of the costs that are incurred as a result of their poor decisions.

It is really important when dealing with the types of failures that we have seen coming out of the financial crisis that the public sector and Crown-owned entities are protected from having to bail out, or otherwise incur financial liability for decisions that were made by, the private sector—decisions that made some people a whole lot of money in the short term but now have resulted actually in a destruction of wealth. It is really important that the public sector is not stuck with that risk and forced to pick up the tab.

We constantly hear from this Government that it is important to support the private sector and to support private business. That sort of model can work only if the risk is fully borne by the private sector and not the public sector when bad decisions are made.

On the one hand we hear arguments that the public sector should not be putting money and investment into those who are the worst off and into public infrastructure that everyone can benefit from, and the Government is looking for every opportunity to get private sector capital involved in what really should be public infrastructure projects like prisons, schools, and transport projects. It wants to get private sector capital involved not because there will be a cost saving to the taxpayer and not because there will be a benefit to the economy but because it simply guarantees a return for private investors over the long term.

As we have seen, the private sector has provided fewer and fewer opportunities for low-risk long-term sustained growth and returns. Now the private sector is looking for every opportunity to secure assurances that it will get returns on what are actually opportunities where the public is going to end up taking the risk and the private sector gets to benefit from it taking that risk.

The Green Party is very happy to see that the Government is willing to take some steps to protect the Public Trust from financial liabilities incurred from these developments with the failed finance companies, but we remain unconvinced that this is the best process that could have been taken in order to ensure that we do have a robust protection for the Public Trust. It remains to be seen whether this will indeed solve the problem. We will just have to wait and see. Until then the Green Party will be supporting the bill. Thank you.

The Public Trust has been looking after the interests of New Zealanders since 1873. It is a Crown entity that is New Zealand’s largest trustee organisation, and it provides for wills, estates, and administration services, as well as services around legal matters, financial matters, investment, trusts, and home loans. The intent of this bill, the Trustee (Public Trust) Amendment Bill, is really to close a loophole to ensure that the Public Trust does not bear the financial burden of acting as a trustee for products regulated by the Securities Act if an existing trustee seeks to retire and apply to the court to have the Public Trust appointed in its place. In particular, the main provision of the bill makes it clear that if the court appoints the Public Trust as a trustee of last resort for securities offered to the public, the retiring trustee must indemnify the Public Trust for its reasonable fees and expenses. This, in turn, will ensure that the Public Trust’s fees and expenses will be met by retiring trustees if the trustee cannot cover them.

This is a bill that has wide support across the parties. It is a good bill. It is small and technical in its intent, but it definitely does serve a purpose for the wider part of New Zealand as well. I commend this bill to the House. Thank you.

I will take a brief call on behalf of New Zealand First on the Trustee (Public Trust) Amendment Bill. We also will be supporting this bill. So it is being supported completely across the whole of the House, which is a good thing. We have said in the past that New Zealand First will support good Government policy but oppose poor policy. In this case we believe this is good policy.

The bill ties up and sorts out some loopholes to ensure that this taxpayer-supported entity, the Public Trust, is not exposed in any way. That is a good thing. It ensures that there are more safeguards to ensure that the public interest is put at the top of the list in terms of making sure that nothing untoward would happen to the Public Trust if something rebounded on it. This bill achieves that. It is only a very small, technical bill. It is very much an administrative matter in that respect. It clarifies a situation and improves a situation that otherwise would have left the Public Trust, perhaps, exposed. In that respect New Zealand First will be supporting the bill.

I just want to take a very short call to support the first reading of the Trustee (Public Trust) Amendment Bill. It has been very elegantly and efficiently described by the Minister of Justice earlier. There is not really much we need to do to elaborate on that. I would just like to say, though, in terms of process, that I am not sure that there is any alternative if we are to avoid a queue of section 46 applications at the courtroom door. The Public Trust does not have a choice. It is only fair and reasonable that this loophole is closed. I support the bill.

I have read the regulatory impact statement for this bill, the Trustee (Public Trust) Amendment Bill, and I think that it is important to refer to it. It does traverse the history of the legislation. The legislation is doing something in this particular instance for which it was not originally intended. Originally, it was intended to ensure that private trusts would not fail through the lack of a replacement trustee, and I guess as we have moved into a modern environment, with securities now having trustee appointments, the potential for what has actually occurred in this one instance has, in fact, arisen. I think it is appropriate for the Government to act to cut it off at that point. So we are in agreement on this side of the House in respect of the intent of the legislation and the fact that it would apply from today’s date.

But there are two different ways that you can make legislation apply from today’s date. One is to do what the Government is doing, and that is to pass it under urgency through all of its stages, without the benefit of a select committee hearing, without advice from the Law Society, and without advice from any trustee company. In fact, the trustee companies could not be consulted on this bill when it was being developed, because, of course, of the conflict of interest and the fact that it would alert those companies to the fact that the Government was going to do precisely this. So I actually think that the second option would have been the preferred way to go, given those limitations, and that was to announce that today would be the operative date for the legislation—that it would come into effect from today, even though it would be passed in a fortnight’s time.

I, like everyone else, would rather see the certainty of having the time-scale truncated, but I, for one, would always prefer to hear what the Law Society has to say in a considered submission to a select committee, and then have the officials respond to that and provide the committee with advice. Maybe it would have been more than a couple of weeks, but with the date in concrete, that would have prevented any other application being filed, because at the simple transition point—and I can see Kate Wilkinson is shaking her head, but the transition clause could simply say that any case filed after today’s date would not have the benefit of the application of that particular provision. So with a good deal of working through these issues, I honestly think we could have come to the best of all worlds.

The only thing that just concerns me is that we are now going to substitute that select committee process with a Committee stage where we will ask questions about amending the wording of section 46 of the principal Act. I guess that one of the questions that I will be wanting to know the answer to is whether this is the same provision that is due to come into effect with the provisions of the Financial Markets Conduct Bill, which I understand the Government hopes to have passed by June and have come into effect later on. If that is the case, I mean, that would be incredibly useful information, but, on the face of it, it does not seem to me to explain whether this is, in fact, the wording that has been taken out of there. I do not know. So there is detailed stuff that I would like to know, because the last thing that we would want to do when we are addressing the unintended consequence of perfectly good legislation, which has just become outdated because of the circumstances that we now find ourselves in, is to create the potential for another unintended consequence down the track if we have not got the wording quite right. It is very difficult to amend these things. Obviously, it is much easier to amend these things with a select committee process. So I agree with my colleague Andrew Little that this is very much a case where we are on all fours with the Government in terms of policy—the outcome that we want to achieve—but we are not entirely happy with this process because it just brings such risks with it.

The last thing that I just wanted to comment on was the finance company failures, which actually led us to this position today. I just want to make this point. I have given the odd speech in the past, because I was the Minister of Commerce at the time that the original finance companies started their cascading effect into failure. The point was often made that the finance companies were not regulated. That actually is not correct. The finance companies were under-regulated. The supervisory role of the trustee was what was supposed to protect the investors from what actually happened. I want to remind this House that when Neville Harris reported to the select committee that I chaired, after the fact, he said at the time that at least 25 of the failed companies at that point had used just two trustee companies: Perpetual Trust and Covenant Trustee.

I think that we actually have to think long and hard about how we let that area, which was supposed to exist as a regulatory protection for investors, so utterly fail in this particular instance. I do want to place on record again my absolute concern for those who lost a substantial amount of money in all of those company failures. There were people out there who had roles that were supposed to act towards protecting those investors’ interests, and they simply failed to do so.

I am very pleased to speak to the first reading of the Trustee (Public Trust) Amendment Bill. It is an interim bill and it amends the Trustee Act 1956. It closes a loophole, as we have heard, to ensure that the Public Trust does not bear the financial burden of wearing the costs of having to step in to replace trustees of failed finance companies. This is an urgent bill. We have heard that there are potentially 60 failed finance companies that are seeking to have the Public Trust appointed as the trustee of last resort. It is unacceptable that the taxpayer has to, in effect, pay the bill for that. It is a good bill. I commend it to the House. Thank you.

💬 Clare Curran: Mr Speaker—

Is this a split call?

💬 Clare Curran: Yes, a split call—

No, it is not. Clare Curran.

💬 Chris Hipkins: It’s going to be short, anyway.

Short. Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. Thank you, “Mr Whip”.

💬 Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: You have the call—proceed.

Yes, I have the call, Mr Deputy Speaker, thank you. I would just like to make a few comments about this bill, the Trustee (Public Trust) Amendment Bill, which Labour is supporting. As you know, this amendment in front of us is not absurd. It is not preposterous. It is a sensible move, and it is something that we think is basic, common sense. Labour supports this bill. As you know, it is necessary and logical in its provision to ensure a comprehensive trustee policy agenda. I do not really want to go too much into the substance of it other than to say those things, but I also want to talk about the importance of the regulatory impact statement when tabling a bill in the House and introducing it in the House and ensuring that it accompanies a bill into the House.

Although this bill cements the endowment that turning to the Public Trust must be seen as a last resort when seeking to retire, there is the financial burden of finding a replacement, which has grown exponentially as trusteeship becomes increasingly focused and complex. Those things are absolutely important, but we have had—is it five new bills introduced into the House in the last 2 days? How many of those bills have been accompanied by a regulatory impact statement? What—[Interruption] How many? What is the importance of the regulatory impact statement? Why is it so important? In relation to this particular bill, there was a regulatory impact statement introduced within just hours, maybe 24 hours, around the—

💬 Andrew Little: Today.

Today?

💬 Andrew Little: Today.

Today, which—

💬 Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! The time has come for the dinner adjournment.

Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): The House is resumed. Kia ora tātou, nō reira e te Whare, e ngā iwi, e ngā reo, e ngā hau e whā. Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa. Prior to the House suspending at 6 o’clock for the dinner break, the honourable member Clare Curran was addressing us with her dulcet tones. She has 7 minutes and 40 seconds remaining to speak. Does she seek the call?

Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. It is lovely to be in the House listening to your dulcet tones. As I was saying before the dinner break, Labour supports this bill. Labour supports the underlying policy behind this bill, but the Government, on the other side, has failed in a number of ways. First of all, it has failed to provide an adequate assessment to justify why this bill should be put through under urgency, and, second, it has failed, as it has failed on a number of other bills that have been before this House this week, to provide adequate regulatory impact assessment and to provide time for the Opposition and the public to have discussions and consideration around these bills before they are actually brought before the House for debate. This bill’s regulatory impact statement, which was prepared by the Ministry of Justice, reflects concerns from the ministry that National’s reactionary approach means an adequate risk assessment has not been conducted, which suggests that the Minister of Justice’s public justifications are mere scaremongering.

On this bill, which we support, there are things to be said, but the fact is that on two other critical pieces of legislation before this House yesterday, particularly—one around the Government Communications Security Bureau and one around our telecommunications networks—no regulatory impact statements were supplied at all. None. That meant that there was no ability to get any sort of independent assessment that had been prepared by officials before those bills were brought to the House. One of them is being rushed through with a truncated select committee process, which we have said is a travesty of process and is a very strong indication of an authoritarian approach to running the Government.

In this particular case the Minister’s public justification, as I have said, could be mere scaremongering in an attempt to gain support. The regulatory impact statement states that the nature and rigour of the analysis has been affected by the limited amount of time. This is fact. This is written down in the regulatory impact statement. Further, it expresses concern that because the ministry has not consulted with trustees who will be affected by the bill, the risk of further applications to the High Court has not been quantified. As we heard earlier, I think the regulatory impact statement was produced yesterday or today—anyway, in a very short amount of time. That has minimised the length of time for Opposition parties to scrutinise the Government’s policy rationale for this bill. This is a trend. It is a trend that this Government has, I suppose we could say, set in stone now. It is a trend that is being extended through other ways of withholding information, blocking information, and obfuscating the Opposition’s and the public’s ability to access information through the Official Information Act and through other mechanisms. It is a trend, as I have said, that is towards a much more authoritarian way of running the Government.

Bill read a first time.

Second Reading