Russell DeborahDr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour—New Lynn): I've been looking at this Financial Services Legislation Amendment Bill and the way it's come back from the Economic Development Science and Innovation Committee. That isn't a committee I sit on. So I haven't had the opportunity to discuss this bill in detail. One of the things I'm particularly interested in is the code of conduct that financial advisers will have to adhere to. Looking through the bill what I've become aware of is that authorised financial advisers are going to have to comply with a code of conduct. As far as I can tell the particular code of conduct is in existence already or it may be being updated. I guess one of the things that I know from my background in having taught business ethics professional ethics applied ethics ethics ethics and meta-ethics—at the time when I was lecturing in philosophy that was a bit scary. But one of the known aspects of the codes of conduct is professional bodies organisations can write the most beautiful codes of conduct and write the most fabulous codes of ethics can have the most beautiful ideals but what really matters is how they are communicated how members of that profession take those codes of conduct on board how they are updated from time to time in order to take account of changing situations and most importantly how they are enforced. A code of conduct is just pretty words on a page if there is no mechanism for enforcement or if the enforcement is trivial or weak. If the penalties for misconduct really amount to a slap on the wrist with a wet bus ticket—probably a wet Snapper card would probably cause a little bit of pain but the old bus tickets did nothing. So I am quite interested in that particular code of conduct: first of all that aspect of how it's actually developed communicated and enforced. I think that's a very important issue. In terms of that code of conduct too one of the issues around the development is the extent to which the development of it draws on the expertise of people involved in the industry already. Now that's fine because people involved in an industry already obviously have an in-depth understanding of how the industry operates and what the particular crunch points are for people within that industry. But of course people within an industry can also participate in a mode of groupthink so that something that seems perfectly acceptable to them within an industry might seem quite egregiously wrong to someone from outside the industry. So what I'd like to understand is to what extent in the development and ongoing growth in the regulation and the enforcement of the code of conduct to which authorised financial advisers must adhere—as well as drawing on the knowledge and the expertise and the lived experience of people in the industry—it also draws on the knowledge and the experience and the lived experience of clients of the industry because they might have quite a different experience from the people who actually sell the services. And of course they are experts; the people who live the life are the experts. But the other set of experts that I would like to understand the extent to which they might be involved is the people I would call the professional experts: those who actually do have the academic expertise in ethics and in business ethics who've got the oversight over a number of codes of conduct and codes of behaviour and codes of ethics or whatever can see the similarities can see the differences and can see the pitfalls. So I'd like to understand the extent to which those people might also be involved and if at this stage they're not involved whether there would be a possibility for them to be involved at some stage partly as I say to draw on a broad range of expertise because I think that might be one of the best ways to get a very effective code of conduct in place. So I'd be interested to hear from the Minister in the chair on those issues if possible.