Genter Julie Anne; Robertson GrantHon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): Tēnā koe Madam Chair. Thank you. I wanted to ask the Minister if he thinks it's fair and responsible to be asking New Zealanders and our public services to be making savings to be scratching around looking for all opportunities to cut costs when we're not asking a few sectors that have had sustained supernormal profits like the four big banks to contribute more to New Zealand's infrastructure. Those companies are only able to make excess profits because of the investments that New Zealanders make collectively in infrastructure and our people. It seems not right to me that a few big companies should be allowed to essentially make what even Treasury has dubbed supernormal" profits and not contribute more to our infrastructure and recovery and support for people during times like the COVID pandemic or in the wake of severe weather events which we're going to see more and more of. So I'd just like him to speak to the fact that he—you know that if we're looking for savings why aren't we also looking for revenue from private sector areas that are profiteering at the expense of New Zealanders?Hon GRANT ROBERTSON (Minister of Finance): I thank the member for the question. As the member will be aware having seen the Budget proactive release as it's come out one of the things we did look at was whether or not there was a case and the need for us to be able to to use the members language look at supernormal profits of banks. We did quite an amount of work on that and I would recommend to people to have a look at the work that was done because it does throw up some interesting issues. The decision was made in the end that we didn't actually need that money because we could manage the cost of the recovery and the rebuild through the resources of Government through some reprioritisation and indeed through using our balance sheet to be able to do some of the long-term rebuilds.However what did emerge out of that discussion was the need to take a closer look at our banks and to make sure that we believe that New Zealanders are being treated fairly. That's why the decision has been made to do the market study to have the Commerce Commission take a close look at the way banks are treating New Zealanders and their customers and to whether or not among other things their profits are fair. There is as I said in that material some quite interesting studies. The member didn't use the phrase windfall profits so I don't want to put words into her mouth but the question of whether there was a windfall per se from COVID is you know in that documentation not a proven case. Are the profits of New Zealand banks higher than some comparable jurisdictions? Yes they are. So therefore what is the reason for that? That is most definitely a debatable proposition. But equally as I've said on many occasions New Zealand banks need to justify to their customers that level of profit. What you see in the documentation that's been released is for example that the revenue that has been brought in by banks through things like bank fees and so forth and so on isn't that much proportionately higher than other countries. What you do see is that the cost profile of the New Zealand banks are lower than other countries seeing that much—that higher profit.Digging into that understanding why that is is exactly why we've set the inquiry in place. So I absolutely appreciate that the member thinks that the case is done and that we should simply do that. We believe that we actually do need to do the work properly. We've made a start on it in the work that we did during the Budget but that's why the case was made for us to do the Commerce Commission."