Trustees Executors Limited Amendment Bill

Second Reading; Wednesday 28 June 2006

Te Ururoa Flavell; Member of Parliament for Waiariki

I rise to take a very brief call on the Trustees Executors Limited Amendment Bill.

The Maori Party supports the Bill for the purpose of tidying up technical aspects of legislation and hopefully avoiding the need for yet another retrospective Omnibus Bill to be introduced at a later point.

It is a thoroughly sensible idea to correct the preamble of the Bill to recognise that the current owner of the company has changed its name from Sheffield Investments Incorporated (NZ) Holdings Limited to Sterling Grace (NZ) Limited.

The recommendations from the Select Committee make sense. Sterling Grace (NZ) Limited is the current owner of the company which the Bill recognises.

The mechanism also removes the need for parliamentary approval of a new parent company, should Trustee Executors be sold.

We are happy to support this change, recognising that the procedure will still allow appropriate scrutiny of future parent companies before transactions with them are authorised.

We have some familiarity with the concept of parent companies and trustees - through our experiences with what are called whanau trusts.

In the whanau trust, the rights of individual owners are submerged beneath the trustees’ power to manage the property, and to select suitable beneficiaries of the profits gained from the land.

There is a very interesting bit in the bill about future-proofing, with an Order in Council mechanism so that we will not have to relitigate it in the House; and we are very supportive of that type of notion, and will be supporting the Bill.

ENDS

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