Williams ArenaARENA WILLIAMS (Labour—Manurewa): Tēnā koe Madam Chair. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak in this debate. This is my first contribution to the debate; I have not had an opportunity to speak in the first or second reading so I'm very enthusiastic to speak with the Minister today. Now I have one specific question that is really important for me to have some answers on before I speak to the House about my proposed amendments. There are a number of amendments proposed in my name which I think will help the House to improve the intentions of the bill. However I need some answers on these specifically. Just to flag for the Minister the specific question is about the November 2021 Monetary Policy Statement of the Reserve Bank but before I ask my question I'll give a bit of context.So recently New Zealand's economy has been through a period of quite extreme fluctuation that you know fluctuated to a degree that we haven't seen in a very long time. Late 2020 through to early 2021 saw widespread concerns about rising unemployment. This was a period where the country's focus was on the immediate effects of COVID-19. We were in a period where both our fiscal and monetary policy had to respond to the concern that there would be widespread job losses in New Zealand and that was focused you know in this global context of this happening all over the world. So we needed to act together as Government and as the Reserve Bank to guard against that. Then continued weak economic activity in the wake of the initial shock from COVID-19 furthered that need to keep people connected with their jobs and their employers.But some months later the nature of what was worrying commentators actually changed. Policy makers had undergone this sort of whiplash shift between these extreme concerns looking overseas at job losses to then being worried about an economy with too much slack and that might have been in danger of overheating. It's quite unusual in the economic history of New Zealand and very unusual around the world where not only are we shifting policy priorities over you know say a year or two but actually that same concern is playing out within six months. So you have this challenge of inflation over the past few years in all advanced economies dealing with those ranges of shocks but then we get to this problem of whether repealing the dual mandate might have had some stabilising effect on that and my contention would be that it did not. Returning the Reserve Bank to a single objective here I would say wouldn't have had any effect on you know the way that the Reserve Bank was acting during that time period and certainly not within the sort of 10 years preceding that. Had the Reserve Bank been operating under a straight inflation-targeting objective in recent years it would not have had a different outcome.But my question to the Minister is about whether she herself agrees with that contention or whether in her speeches to the House when she said that the change that she is proposing would have improved the situation with inflation that's the case because if the Minister is correct in her assertion that the Reserve Bank would have been able to do something different about inflation then there might be something else going on which would be really useful for the House to know.So I come then to my question about the 2021 Monetary Policy Statement from the Reserve Bank that employment was above its maximum sustainable level. In more general terms that means that unemployment was lower than it could be sustained. So my question to the Minister is: does she agree with that statement and if so did she believe that the Reserve Bank was also acting in that way because if the Reserve Bank was saying one thing and doing another if they were in fact not acting to—you know if they were continuing on a project of trying to bring unemployment down then perhaps she's right. She's told the House that this change will have an impact on inflation. Is that because she believes that the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) was telling us in 2021 that maximum unemployment had been reached but does she think that the RBNZ was not actually following what it was saying? This is important to my Amendment Paper that I've proposed to clause 4 which provides a more flexible approach to monetary policy. If the idea is that the RBNZ says one thing and does another then that won't work and I want to hear from the Minister if that's what she's contending.