English Bill: International Finance Agreements Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeEnglish Bill: International Finance Agreements Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 10 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:7805. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon BILL ENGLISH (Minister of Finance): Can I thank the member for a pretty succinct and sensible summary of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and its purpose as laid out in this bill. Also can I thank the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee and chairman Mark Mitchell.The legislation is here because the New Zealand Parliament has dealt with it pretty expeditiously. I have just a couple of points to make in addition to those made by the member and I look forward to contributions on the way through this debate. It is a slightly unusual piece of legislation—it is not the only one that has been done like this but essentially we are legislating the Articles of Agreement of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank which were not written by us. They are the result of the collective discussions of a significant number of countries.I might say that the way they are laid out in this legislation should be a lesson to our own bureaucracy. There is admiral economy clarity and brevity in these articles for what is a complex multinational institution. It all fits into about 20 pages or slightly more and you can actually read it and understand it. So I would like to give the select committee credit for that but actually it did not have the opportunity toget into the detail of it—although I know Mr Parker could have improved on it.However it does demonstrate something that I think is certainly a feature of a bipartisan approach in New Zealand and that is that under successive Governments New Zealand has been able to carve out a bit of a role as an honest broker in international events and international forums. This piece of legislation here is a product of that actually because when the original proposal was put forward there was a great deal of concern and reticence among a number of countries that this bank may be set up in a way that enabled it to expedite the policies of the Chinese Government and that was it. Of course it was any number of countries that were interested in participating because they were interested in the investment capital and the member Grant Robertson mentioned some of them.But with the early focus on Singapore but particularly New Zealand—because we count in the international world as a developed economy while the much wealthier economy of Singapore counts as a developing economy—as the first developed economy to participate was able to have considerable influence over the articles as we find them here.And finally can I just acknowledge the role of the parties across the Parliament. The speed at which this multilateral institution was proposed and has come into existence is remarkable by any standard. In fact there probably has not been another one like this. That demonstrates I think a wide set of interests in the broader multilateral community particularly to have institutions of a higher quality and a broader base than the current World Bank and the IMF where unfortunately reforms to their make-up that reflect the fact that the balance of world GDP has shifted away from the European and North American economies to a whole range of emerging economies—those reforms simply have not proceeded for various reasons but it has been disappointing. So there has been an interest from the international community in this institution because it can start afresh in the 2010s rather than the 1940s and the world of course is a bit different now.So I want to acknowledge the fact that the Parliament has seen the virtue of that and has expedited this legislation so that we will meet the deadline—by 1 January this will be in place and New Zealand will along with other countries be able to take up its role in the governorship of this bank.