White HelenHELEN WHITE (Labour): Madam Speaker.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Just in time. Helen White.HELEN WHITE: I was standing up madam. The bill before us is a really interesting piece of legislation because it's one of three and it is a structural piece in the legislation which has been modernised from its original inception in 1984. A lot of water has passed under the bridge and there's been a lot of development since then and this is a much more modern structure. I was concerned yesterday by some of the comments in the speeches of the Opposition which talked about really a concern about the idea of collectivity. This is a very sophisticated world we live in and we have many many talented people and actually the idea of a board having responsibilities is a good one. It does mean as my colleagues have just said that we are going to get many minds on to the same task and it's a cooperative way of working that I know that our current Reserve Bank Governor is quite capable of adopting because he has in the past in previous roles and I respect him more for it. Actually bringing those minds to the table will be a check and balance in itself. The people that run our Reserve Bank the governor and the people on the board are actually extremely talented people who bring a variety of wariness's from their work outside of this particular role to play in this role and I am extremely grateful and respectful of that.This piece of legislation will move the responsibilities from the governor to the board itself and the governor plays an integral role there. It is also an interesting piece of legislation because it connects the governor with other institutions. So the governor will sit on the board as a chair and he will also be playing a role in some of the other groups that are involved and again they are going to be involved. So for example the Council of Financial Regulators involves actually a number of groups so it will have the Financial Markets Authority the Commerce Commission Treasury the Reserve Bank and the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment all on it and they will all be able to work together collaboratively. And one of the things the bill does is it actually provides for cooperation between those entities and it has information-sharing going so long as it's subject to the conditions that are imposed by the Reserve Bank. The second part of this is that it is actually also about accountability of that institution and we all know that it's a very important balance. We've got a Reserve Bank that's independent and that's a very important and valuable thing but we also need checks and balances. So as my colleague said it brings it into line with other Crown entities. And a lot of the actual way it checks and balances this are actually adopted so they won't be unfamiliar pathways but they're here in the bill.We have a clarity in this bill about the objective and that's a very interesting thing to happen. I think it probably is a sign of maturity because words like efficiency" are actually words that have been loaded up with politics. And "efficiency" for Mr Bayly is probably not "efficiency" for me. And actually by getting the board to actually understand that its role is the stability of the New Zealand banking system it frees it up to work. So it works alongside the finance Minister and under the direction of the finance Minister to some extent because there is also the publication of a remit which will actually mean that the board has direction in the right place but it will make decisions about how to take the objective of any Government and actually make that work for the people in terms of getting that outcome given its clear objective. So it's a very interesting and nuanced piece of legislation and it really does respect the people involved and allow them to do their job well and I'm extremely proud of that.One of the instruments that I just talked about was the creation of what's called a financial policy remit. And that remit will be the thing that actually holds the direction of the finance Minister in it and so it will set the policy in some ways and then it will be adopted. So how does all this work? Well the Minister of Finance will appoint the new governance board and that will have the powers and responsibilities of the Reserve Bank. The chief executive will also be the chairperson. That's going to ensure that actually there is a lot of capture of information. And he—or she at some point I hope—will also be sitting on other bodies so that there will be a lot of information that comes back that will be shared.The process for the Reserve Bank funding will also be something that's captured by this bill and the Reserve Bank can recover its costs through levies both capital and operating expenditure to some extent. And that is all covered off in the bill in terms of process. It will increase oversight in a way that is consistent with a Crown entity. So the Public Audit Act and the Ombudsmen Act will now apply to the Reserve Bank and we will see oversight of it in that way. And the reporting will again be aligned to other Crown entities. The Minister of Finance might not have time to do that monitoring themselves but they can delegate to a department—so it may be Treasury. The functions of the Reserve Bank have also been articulated. So just to be clear those functions are to act as a central bank to act as a prudential regulator and as a prudential supervisor. Those things were probably true but now they're very articulate. And so we really are setting things up in a way that's really making everybody understand that role much more clearly. The Minister of Finance is going to issue this financial policy remit and that will set out the objectives. The board will consider those remits. In fact one of the changes we made was to make sure that there was enough capacity to change the remit so that the board could be not locked into what finance Minister one said if you in fact had finance Minister two. So they will consider the remit and they will look at these objectives and then they will decide how they will achieve them. They will doing that independently and they will be doing it with the strength of a group. So there will be an element no doubt of consensus. The Minister of Finance will still be very much doing their role but they will be doing it in a much stronger way because they will have a collaborative approach themselves because they will have more than one person. I just really consider that one of the greatest strengths of the modern age—that we are doing things in that way. In addition the Reserve Bank will now manage foreign exchange reserves. That wasn't regulated in the same way and that is now clear. So the key changes that were made by the select committee really were that the governor will now act as that kind of conduit between the board and the monetary policy committee. The chairperson—we very much did talk about the kind of conflict issues that were involved so we were much more nuanced in the way that the chair would be involved or not involved when there were conflicts. So we considered those matters. We have addressed them as best we could. We did actually work collaboratively as a select committee for a large part of the time. While there is an oppositional view now I would like to just finally acknowledge the work that was done in that select committee and was done largely because I think even the Opposition would agree that there is so much common ground in this legislation. So much of it made sense and common sense and while we may disagree on a few of the nuances I think we all agree that this is an important step for the country. I commend this bill to the House."