Webb DuncanDr DUNCAN WEBB (Labour—Christchurch Central): Thank you for those words of endorsement Mr Brownlee. I'm now going to leave for my office to look at situations vacant. Look once again an entirely negative view which doesn't reflect what actually went on in the Finance and Expenditure Committee. As we've heard this is a modernisation of our financial framework and a really important one and the references to the Lange years were essentially pointing out that what occurred there might have had its place then in terms of the Reserve Bank reforms and the inflation targets but it has no place now. Inflation was absolutely the scourge of the economy. We know that something had to be done and the great economic innovation of the time of course was inflation-target signalling to let the market know that the Government with the Reserve Bank was committed to lowering inflation and it would take the steps necessary and that alone had a very significant effect. New Zealand in fact was the first country in the world to do that. In those other countries where inflation was rampant that was adopted as well and we can be very proud in fact of that. But in the current economy if anything inflation is sticky—right? Inflation has been at the lower bounds of the inflation target for some time and at the same time we're trying to balance a whole lot of other variables including housing and employment and to suggest that the Reserve Bank should simply have a single target in a complex and multifaceted economy such as the one we have today is to throw half the tools out of the tool box. But my real point is this: it was a really useful select committee process. We did actually have a really good look at the bill and I must say the report—and you should give it a read Mr Brownlee—is well worth a read and we did actually identify some of the things. Given that the Reserve Bank Governor is to become a member of the board we looked at some of those issues. We looked at the decision-making processes. We identified the risk of conflict of interest. It was already in there in a sense but we thought it needed some strengthening so we did exactly that and we made sure that obviously the Reserve Bank Governor didn't have any role to play in things like the appointment of a successor and things like that. We also had a look at a whole lot of other things. We did touch on cryptocurrency. I suspect that cryptocurrency doesn't meet the definition of money" at the current time. It's not legal tender. It can't be used in transactions with Government to discharge a debt owed to the Government—a critical feature of any genuine legal tender money—but we know it's there. We know that there's a potential that it could have a distorting effect on the economy in years to come so the bill is equipped to at least monitor that if not to actually address the issues that may arise because at the present time we don't know exactly what they'll be. Now Mr Bayly in particular on the committee took a very active role and had discussions both in committee and outside of committee on a number of fronts. It's true that it was signalled that if he was given his way on all of these things we might have had the National Party's support. But I must say obviously on a bill that's important—essentially constitutionally important—it would be nice to have that support but essentially those things would fundamentally change what the bill would do. So in the minority view you'll see that essentially it was objected to that the Reserve Bank Governor could be on the board. Now that collective decision-making and collective responsibility is a key aspect of this bill. The reintroduction of the efficiency mandate was also asked for by the National Party but the problem with the efficiency requirement of an efficient financial system is that despite the apparent clarity of the word it's not clear at all. To ask what is efficient—even economists don't agree. They'll be able to spit out four or five different definitions at a kind of first-year level. Whether it be Pareto efficiency or Kaldor-Hicks efficiency—all of these different kinds of efficiency—we can't actually apply a standard if we don't understand what it is and "efficiency" is an unclear word. So whilst obviously we want a well-functioning and a stable financial system which is the critical part of this bill to simply throw in the word "efficiency" is just a sop to essentially Chicago school economic theory and we're not interested in doing that. So look it's a pity that we haven't got the National Party onside. The ACT Party also expressed its reservations along a similar vein but it is prepared to engage in an ongoing discussion in supporting this bill as I understand it. So I look forward to hearing from them. This is a really good bill and another great piece in the reform of our monetary system which will put us on a great foundation for years to come. I commend it to the House."