Genter Julie AnneHon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): Tēnā koe Madam Speaker. The Green Party is supporting this bill. In fact there are several changes that it makes that the Green Party was calling for for quite a long time one of them being ensuring that a broader representation of people such as the board was overseeing key monetary policy decisions rather than just the Governor of the Reserve Bank alone. I do think it's totally fine to have the Governor of the Reserve Bank be a member of that board but it is crucial that there is a broader perspective and that all of that responsibility doesn't just sit in the hands of one person who's deemed to be some sort of technical expert.I think probably the area where the Green Party departs from some of the views that were expressed by the Hon Michael Woodhouse and even Andrew Bayly is that back in the late 1980s and early 1990s there was a certain change in the way that people approached monetary and fiscal policy. There was a kind of belief that there were some technical experts I mean they all happened to be English-speaking white men more or less. But yeah what a coincidence—technical experts who were somehow able to manage the economy as a kind of machine as if it were something separate to communities of people and that they somehow knew better than communities of people.Ultimately money just is one tool for representing value that we have in our communities and in this world. It's really important that it is democratically accountable and that the functions of the Reserve Bank are actually serving the needs of the community because the economy is just one subset of our society and our communities. All the economy is is a representation of the commercial transactions that we undertake with each other. Really the economy is just some of the stuff we do as human beings; it's when we buy and sell things from each other or give each other services that we pay for but there's a whole lot of things that humans do that is not caught by the measure of GDP; it's not caught by paid work. There's a lot of things that enable our society to function that aren't currently represented in commercial transactions. All of society human society is ultimately reliant on ecosystems to survive and thrive. If we aren't looking after our ecosystems we are going to be in deep trouble. So while back in the early 1980s and 1990s there was this view that somehow the economy was something that functioned on its own separate to humans and we couldn't possibly make trade-offs to protect the environment or to look out for the needs of people because of the economy. Well in fact the economy is just one part of what we do as humans.It's really important that the Reserve Bank is a democratically accountable institution. Of course we understand that there could be a desire to ensure that there is independence from the Government of the day but that should not be independence from the community as a whole in New Zealand. There needs to be broader interests represented. This bill takes it in that direction.I wouldn't say that all of the concerns of the Green Party have necessarily been met by this particular legislation and it will be interesting to look after the third bill that the Minister spoke of which is coming to the House. But I would say that with the recently released Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that states what a critical emergency it is for us to respond to climate change that this is an existential threat to all humanity not to the planet just to the planet that supports life for humans on it. So it is going to be vitally important that all of our institutions are retooled to be able to deliver the solutions to that; that becomes our primary driver.It can't just be about people getting rich for the sake of getting rich and living their lives and using their billions of dollars that they've accumulated thanks to the work blood sweat and tears of many many other people such as Jeff Bezos going into space. It's just a perfect representation of how financialisation and a growing of the financial sector as part of the economy over the last 20 to 30 years has not actually produced the supposed economic benefits for humans for all humans and that actually we're going to need to look at money how fiscal and monetary policy are used by Governments and whether or not they're achieving those objectives of supporting widespread flourishing of well-being protection of our natural ecosystems and climate action or whether they're meeting the needs of a small number of people mainly white men who are amassing all of the wealth and using it on their ego trips to go into space which is completely useless to most humans.So yeah as I said we need a paradigm shift. Unfortunately I don't think that—the Opposition's kind of still stuck in the 1980s and 1990s on this. This is making some interesting changes that we can support. Ultimately as a society we need to have a conversation about what kind of economy we want and what is going to support our aspirations as human beings who have relationships with each other and who rely on the natural environment in order to live our lives.