Genter Julie AnneHon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. The Green Party is supporting this bill. Indeed some of the reforms that it's proposing are things that the Green Party has long advocated for in particular the shift to a broader range of people in the board being responsible for some of the decisions as opposed to just the one single Governor of the Reserve Bank—although I know in practice they have been operating that way for a while.I guess I wanted to just step back for a moment and just talk about monetary policy and fiscal policy which sound really quite boring and technocratic probably to many people but ultimately the decisions that we make around these—it's really important that we understand that it's not a purely technocratic thing monetary policy and neither is fiscal policy. Ultimately they reflect the values and priorities of a society and they are tools with which we can work together for the benefit of all of us or we could you know—I think in the 1980s and early 1990s the view was that somehow this was a value-free technocratic approach that was superior and going to lead to the perfect functioning of the economic machine. But the economy isn't a thing separate to us; we are the economy. The economy is what we do. It's the goods and services we pay each other for and in fact we do a lot more than just the economy. A lot of the things in our society that enable us to have an economy or a market where services and goods are traded commercially are things that are unpaid and the things we do for the value of it. So we can't pretend that there's some ideal technocratic solution that is fully independent of politics because politics is how we work together to make decisions that affect us all collectively.So I think it is appropriate that there is a broader mandate and that we look beyond really just purely narrow goals because one of the things that I think was overlooked in the economic revolution of the 1980s and 1990s was how some of these decisions that were done supposedly for the good of the economy weren't actually that good for everyone and they entrenched a certain amount of inequality including here in Aotearoa New Zealand in the name of a GDP growth rate that was seen as success. I think most of us would agree that extreme inequality of wealth and income is not a good thing and it's not something that we support and that ultimately whether Government's making decisions about how we budget how we spend money laws and regulations that influence how people live their lives or whether it's the Reserve Bank making decisions around interest rates all of these things will have some impact on people in our society and it's important that they are democratically accountable and that we recognise and are explicit about the values that are underlying those decisions.The Green Party has for a very long time advocated for a different approach to economics that isn't just solely focused on GDP because GDP doesn't measure a lot of the things that we value in life and it doesn't measure all of the costs necessarily as costs. Things can increase GDP that are increasing inequality or increasing pollution things that we actually don't want more of. So looking beyond that really narrow technocratic vision I think is going to be valuable. Of course there is a case for having strong institutions and making sure that they are transparent and accountable and a certain amount of independence but yeah just recognising that ultimately nothing is free from politics because politics is the way that we make decisions about the things that we value.