McKelvie IanIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you Mr Chair. It gives me pleasure to take a short call on the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (Monetary Policy) Amendment Bill and I want to comment on one or two things before getting into a bit of detail on one or two pieces of the bill. You know if you think about life in my electorate for some time now or some years ago—for three or four years in fact—every farmer in New Zealand was calling for changes to the Reserve Bank of New Zealand Act and the way it operated. I can assure you none of them have been calling for that in the last three years because the world's changed. But the point I'm making is that we go through cycles in life and we always seem to come back to the same spot. The Minister of Finance just said a minute ago that this Act's been in place since 1989 and the world's not the same but fortunately for us the people running the Reserve Bank are not the same either. So I think that's an interesting point. They of course bring themselves up to date pretty quickly.We're opposing this bill not because we don't think change is appropriate but because I think we're probably a little uncertain as to whether the changes proposed will in fact have a positive impact or not. As I said earlier tonight on a previous bill the problem with changes like this is you don't really know the impact they're going to have and I guess that's the excitement of life but when you've got something that appears to be working pretty well I think that perhaps changing those things isn't always a sensible thing to do. So whether it makes sense for us to alter the conditions under which the Reserve Bank acts or not will remain to be seen.I guess that the point the Minister just made as well was that in fact the people who are making the decisions in the form of a committee are very much the same people who will have been feeding into the information that arrived at those decisions anyway. So there wouldn't be a great deal of change there; it's just formalising a committee and of course making it accountable to the Minister. I guess one of the fortunate things about that is that if we're introducing Treasury to this equation the Government doesn't have a great track record of believing what Treasury tells them anyway so we're probably half safe there. So perhaps the information that's fed into that committee won't necessarily make a great deal of difference.Now there's one other thing that I think is interesting—and I'm not saying it would happen but if you think about the last year or so the security of the Reserve Bank decision-making process is very important. I just hope that by extending the number of people involved in this—and it's certainly no aspersion on the people involved but none the less it's a very important issue. I wouldn't mind the Minister answering a question or perhaps having a comment on that because the security of the Reserve Bank decision-making process is absolutely vital for New Zealand and for the future of that decision-making process to have integrity. I just hope that by extending the mandate and extending the number of people involved in this that has an impact and that it in fact will retain its integrity as it moves forward.Now I don't know whether including employment in the Reserve Bank decision-making will in fact have an impact or not. We don't know the impact it will have on the eventual decision. We don't know whether the impact of introducing any other measure around foreign exchange rates or whatever may have an impact on where the Reserve Bank gets to in the future. What we do know is that aside from the fact I mentioned earlier in my contribution tonight about the fact that there are sectors of our economy over the years that have wanted change to the Reserve Bank Act it's come back to where it was originally and they no longer require those changes. Whether those changes are positive or not for the future we don't really know that.So that's my brief contribution and I think the thing that I've introduced probably that no one else to date has is whether in fact having a large group of people involved in the decision-making process as opposed to where we're at at the moment will impinge on the security of that decision-making process and whether that integrity's going to be retained. Thank you Mr Chair.