Norman Russel: International Finance Agreements Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeNorman Russel: International Finance Agreements Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 15 September 2015. Volume:708;Page:6608. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr RUSSEL NORMAN (Green): I rise on behalf of the Green Party to support this bill. I think what we are recognising with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank is that the global economic institutions are having to accommodate the growth of China. Of course China’s initial gambit was actually to increase voting rights and reform voting rights in the International Monetary Fund but that attempt to reform the International Monetary Fund and voting rights within the fund has been blocked by the US Congress. People may or may not know that in order to change the voting rights within the International Monetary Fund you have to get an 85 percent vote from the fund and of course the United States controls 16 percent of the votes on the International Monetary Fund board so it can block any attempt to reform voting rights on the board. China of course has only about 3.8 percent of the vote in the IMF and yet it currently represents more like 15 percent of global GDP.So the old economic institutions—the Bretton Woods institutions that were set up after World War II—were an attempt to represent the global economy at the time and to provide global economic governance of a sort. They have done that at times well and at times extremely poorly. But those economic institutions simply have to change to reflect the rise of China and they have not. And really the US Government—in particular Congress—has only itself to blame for the invention of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.What China said eventually—when it got completely frustrated by the lack of reform in the global economic infrastructure—is that OK it would set up its own. Of course the United States said that that was totally unacceptable and no one would join it. A number of countries have of course joined China including Britain and New Zealand and eventually a whole raft of countries signed up to the infrastructure bank and that is what we are effectively doing here today. And I think that is a good thing. The reality is that the world has changed. China is now a huge part of the global economy and the global economic institutions simply need to reflect that. So that is the first point I would like to make.The second point is that I just hope that the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank does a really good job. At various times the IMF and the World Bank have done a good job; at other times they have done a terrible job. During the 1997 Asian crisis the intervention of the IMF and the World Bank at that point was disastrous as Joseph Stiglitz went on to write about. He was the chief economist at the World Bank. So there have been times when the global economic institutions have played a positive role and at times a very negative role.The third point I would like to make about the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank is that sustainability needs to be at the heart of the thing. The president-elect of the bank has said “lean clean and green”—his rhyming description of what he wants to do. The green stuff is really important now in Asia. I think people from outside do not realise how rapidly this has come to the centre of things. Obviously a lot of it is about air quality. In those giant Chinese cities air quality has now become a big focus. But also the Chinese Government is getting its head around climate change in a big way and of course it is the world’s leading producer of solar panels and is the leading installer of a lot of different kinds of renewable energy.So the green part of it is tremendously important and we need it in the infrastructure that is built over the next 20 years in East and South Asia in particular where there is a massive growth. If that infrastructure uses clean energy rather than coal and dirty energy that will make a fundamental difference to the future of climate change on this planet. That really is going to be one of the deciding factors. Does India for example put in coal-fired power or does India use sustainable energy? That will be one of the deciding factors in the future of planet Earth for us and our children. That is one of the key questions—and likewise all through South-east Asia and East Asia.So if the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank can play a positive role in pushing in a sustainable direction for those giant infrastructure projects that are going to determine the future of life on planet Earth then that will be a very positive thing. We do not yet know the outcome of that but the Green Party is very hopeful given some of the early comments that it will be sustainable and it will push infrastructure in a sustainable direction and we very very much hope that New Zealand uses its influence to push infrastructure in that direction. Of course unfortunately the current New Zealand Government obviously goes in the opposite direction but at some point hopefully there will be some representatives on the board from New Zealand who push that bank to embrace sustainability more than it already does. Thank you.