Genter Julie AnneHon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. I rise to speak in support of this bill the Deposit Takers Bill on behalf of the Green Party. I think it is worth noting—since we have I believe the National Party supporting it and the Labour Party of course brought this bill to the House—that the main purpose of this bill bringing in the deposit compensation scheme which would protect $100000 of people's personal deposits in the case of a bank failure is something that the Green Party has been campaigning on. In fact the oldest reference I could find in the media from Russel Norman was March 2013—so over 10 years ago. Russel Norman was consistently saying that we should have a deposit compensation scheme that this was something obvious we could do that would help protect New Zealanders and 10 years later here it is with the support of the two main parties. So that's good; the Green Party makes a difference. It takes a while but we get there. Finally the other two larger parties pick up and support the things that we're saying. It's fantastic.The other thing I wanted to say about this bill coming out of the Finance and Expenditure Committee—and unfortunately I wasn't on the select committee to hear the submissions—is that I was really pleased to see that the select committee had considered a proportional scheme to take into account the concerns of the non-bank deposit takers like credit unions and building societies. Non-bank deposit takers like credit unions have an incredibly important role to play in our economy in supporting their members with access to finance and in a really personal way. I think that credit unions have huge potential but right now when they have to compete with banks which have much bigger budgets for advertising which have kind of cornered the market in terms of the services they're able to deliver it is quite difficult for them. So it is inappropriate for them to be regulated in quite the same way that the large banks are.Over the last few years we've seen that the four biggest overseas-owned banks in New Zealand have made record profits. They seem to be going up every year. Even in 2020 they were positive. At no point during the different challenges that we faced economically during COVID during the lockdowns have the banks taken a loss and while we do want banks to be stable and we want a stable financial sector there is a lot of room between stable and profitable and excess profit where they are basically sucking money out of our economy. I think it's arguable that the four biggest banks in New Zealand are in that position now and we would have liked to see the Government look at something like a bank levy. In fact while inflation is hitting households really hard and they're having to pay higher interest rates on their mortgages they're having to pay higher food prices a big part of the component of the higher food prices is higher interest rates that the farmers are having to pay. So throughout this whole process of raising interest rates in a way we might be contributing to inflation and at the same time the banks are just doing even better than ever out of this. So at a certain point we need to ask them to ensure that we've got a fair way to ensure that they are giving back to New Zealand and not just taking from our economy.So yes a win for the Green Party in this bill—happy to see the changes that take into account the particular needs of non-bank deposit takers like credit unions and building societies—and we need to see some stronger moves from the Government on the enormous bank profits which are basically sucking value out of the New Zealand economy and making inflation worse.