Genter Julie AnneHon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. I'd like to start my contribution firstly by just saying that the financial system really exists to serve people and not the other way around. And our economic system is there to serve people and not the other way around. I think in the last few decades we've seen financial services significantly grow as a sector of the economy without actually contributing to growth of productivity or the things that people need to live good lives. That's something we don't get much opportunity to talk about in the House but I think that here in the Greens we acknowledge that it's really important that the way in which the Government regulates and looks after the financial system has to be done in a way that is there to benefit all people—you know people are not existing simply to serve the gods of the financial or economic system and it has kind of gone the other way.The second thing I want to say is that the Green Party will be supporting this bill and we have a very small but significant win in this bill which is the depositor compensation fund as well as a previous shift which was the move to the board making the decisions and not just the Governor of the Reserve Bank. These are issues that the Green Party I believe was the first to raise in Parliament and I went back to look at when the Green Party was calling for this and the oldest press release I could find was from March 2013. So I want to acknowledge previous Green Party finance spokespeople: Russel Norman who was calling for deposit insurance back in March 2013 some months before the OECD came out and urged that New Zealand take up deposit insurance as well as capital gains tax—also something the Green Party had been calling for for about a decade or more before then.Just going back through it of course in June 2016 November 2016 May 2017 and on and on we have press releases from the Green Party calling for the National Government of the day to implement deposit insurance and of course in the last term of Government when we did have an Associate Minister of Finance who was a Green. I believe most of the critical Cabinet decisions were made about this legislation so it's nice to see it finally come to fruition.What I think is notable—I heard Nicola Willis the finance spokesperson for the National Party talk about moral hazard and some concerns the National Party might have that having deposit insurance would encourage greater risk-taking behaviour on the part of financial institutions. And I have to say this: in some ways having a deposit insurance scheme or as they call it the depositor compensation fund is actually an improvement on the status quo where what we've seen is large financial institutions becoming too big to fail and even though there has been no kind of formal fund or scheme in place when they have gone under they inevitably get bailed out by the Government and that's just you know by all the people who are contributing. And what misses out at that point is other crucial public services like income support like our hospitals and pay for our teachers and our nurses and our doctors. So you know when South Canterbury Finance was bailed out by the Government it was over a billion dollars and of course in today's dollars that would be much more. So that came at the expense of other important crucial Government services that benefit all New Zealanders and that was quite risky decision-making.This scheme that has been set up and what's proposed in this legislation—of course it will have to go through the select committee process and we will want to make sure we get it right. But I think quite a lot of time has passed and there has been quite a lot of work done on it up until this point and it is an improvement on the status quo. I guess I should say that globally the finance sector has become bigger and more complex and too big to fail. Some people working in that sector have become extraordinarily rich and in some respects it's been at the expense of everyone else and as it becomes bigger and more complex Governments get held to ransom because the Government is so concerned about what happens if we have fiscal instability and the impacts on the economy for ordinary people—potentially them losing their jobs—that they can't afford to let those institutions fail and suffer the consequences of their risky decision-making.So I think this is at least a really sensible way to do that because it means all people who are putting money into a financial institution saving into investing into it—whatever it is—are making some proportionate contribution to the fund and then people who have deposits up to $100000 will have that covered by that fund in the case where an institution goes under. So that is a fair and proportionate response and it means that those who don't have the financial resources who don't have the wealth to be investing in institutions like that aren't paying to bail those people out. Also there's the cap of $100000—so I mean there's fairness in this in that people who have super-large investments which is a tiny percentage of the population are not going to be bailed out to that amount in that circumstance by this particular compensation fund.So the Green Party is happy to see this bill come to the House. I think it's quite overdue at this point but it's great that it's come and I hope that we'll be hearing from a lot of informed submitters and be able to make some improvements at select committee. But I do think that we do need to think about the bigger picture and what role finance plays in our economy and in our society and how important it is for us as the representatives of the people in this House to make sure that we have a system that is looking after our people. In order to look after our people we have to look after our natural resources and our natural environments and so it's really important that money doesn't become the thing that is more important than everything else. Money is the means by which we—you know it facilitates the trade of goods and services but that's just one small part of what it means to be a human and to have a good life and we need lots of other things to live a good life. This is the place where we come together to make sure that the rules are fair and that the system is fair and we have a lot of work to do in that respect.