Shaw JamesHon JAMES SHAW (Associate Minister of Finance): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's a pleasure to rise in support of the Financial Markets (Derivatives Margin and Benchmarking) Reform Amendment Bill on this the second reading. I also just wanted to join some of my colleagues in commending the work of the Finance and Expenditure Committee in working their way through what has previously been described as an extremely dry and some would say boring piece of legislation. But it's very technical nature I think requires a higher standard of us as parliamentarians to be able to engage with it. When it gets to this level of kind of nitty-gritty detail to do with derivatives and similar financial instruments—which is not something that most people are familiar with—it actually does call for a pretty high level of engagement. I also just want to thank the officials who were engaged in this for supporting the committee through the House as well.I just wanted to pick up on some of the comments of some of the previous speakers in this—I won't go quite so far as to call it a debate because it does appear that the House is completely united on this issue and that is a good thing when we're dealing with financial services regulation. But the previous speaker Lawrence Yule referred to some of the issues around the global financial crisis (GFC) of the late 2000s. It was a pretty colossal event. It wiped about 2 percent off global gross domestic product. Hundreds of thousands of people were out of work. It affected New Zealand's economy for a decade and gave us a pretty tight operating environment to work within. We had here in New Zealand probably one of the better-insulated economies from the GFC. The reason as to its cause was because of poorly regulated financial services and financial products. This bill directly derives from that in some ways in terms of some of the regulation.The issue is that when it comes to financial services regulation always follows innovation. That is where you run into trouble because of course the incentives for banks and other large financial institutions is to constantly innovate in order to drive up their own profit margins. It's very difficult for regulators in an essentially globalised finance market to be able to respond appropriately with regulation that matches the innovation that's coming through. So the provisions in this particular bill are essentially following G20 and European Union regulations that are attempting to catch up with some of the innovations that are occurring in the derivatives market.I think it's really important for the House to engage with that because what we need to understand is that once we have gotten through this bill it's probably about time to start looking at the next tranche because things will have moved on such is the speed and the pace of innovation in financial services. That really speaks to the other purpose of this bill which is that this kind of regulation ends up being effectively global in nature because we are dealing with global capital markets. Therefore the regulatory environment that we have here in New Zealand has to match the regulatory environment of other countries as well.So I think—for all the people who've said that it is kind of dry and turgid and so on—that it is actually really important for us as parliamentarians to engage with this and to make sure that the quality of the regulation is high and that we really understand what it is that we're doing when we pass this bill. To that I just wanted to say that I think the changes that the select committee has come back with are very sound. They're not huge. There are about four of them but they all—to my reading; not having been involved with the select committee directly myself but having looked at the papers that have come out of it—seem to make a great deal of sense. So I would say that we have to support those through as well.As I said at the start I commend the work of the select committee of the officials and I commend this bill to the House.