Dean JacquiHon JACQUI DEAN (National—Waitaki): Thank you Madam Chair. I want to congratulate Stuart Smith again on this bill that he has brought to the House—the Friendly Societies and Credit Unions (Regulatory Improvements) Amendment Bill—and reflect back for a moment and then project forward after that.If I reflect back to credit unions in the past the fact that they are membership organisations there for the benefit of their members has provided a great deal of usefulness to New Zealanders on an individual basis. Obviously there are benefits to their members but there are also other benefits to having a structure such as a credit union. If I think of Credit Union South a number of years ago because of the nature of their organisation which admittedly is now outdated and thanks to this bill is being addressed—even at the time a decade ago there was a small rural town in Otago similar to many small rural towns throughout New Zealand which found itself in a position of losing banking services and this is a process which has only sped up over the past few years and will continue as moving to the online platform progresses. But for this small rural town—in this instance in Otago—they were facing the prospect of losing all banking services and so what that meant to the individuals was that there was nowhere to go and cash a cheque. For older folk who 10 years ago still used a cheque book—some people still do but fewer now—there was limited ability then to get change if you were a retailer in the town. There were issues around the security of carrying cash of course for extended periods of time. There were issues about how retailers got their cash to banking services. In this instance it would have been a good hour's drive—so time out of the day inefficiency. So small towns facing the loss of banking services was quite significant to that town. In this instance Credit Union South were approached by the local authority and a negotiation was held whereby Credit Union South put in an ATM machine and trained up local staff. This facility was put in the local community centre and library—and problem solved. Credit Union South deserve a lot of—I shouldn't say credit" because it's corny—congratulations and admiration for stepping in where the trading banks had literally walked away and stepped out. And it goes back to my point that as a credit union the objective of the union is to look after people and return profits back into society by way of good interest rates good pricing good fees and all that sort of thing—plus a good dollop of community service.Then I just want to project forward a bit to Stuart Smith's bill which modernises those credit unions in New Zealand modernises the structure and the function of those credit unions. Now the current Act is something like—is it 38 years old? It has been around for a while. Of course it didn't anticipate online banking or online trading—even ATMs were very new at that time.I think one of the aspects of this bill—which will pass—is that it will allow credit unions to lend to small and medium sized enterprises (SME) instead of what is at the moment a rather cumbersome process where Credit Union South for example can lend to an individual who then has to on-lend to an SME. Well this side of the House are all in favour of making doing business easier. This bill will achieve those objects and it will achieve them very well.As I was reviewing the notes for this contribution—one of I hope several because there are a number of aspects to it—I couldn't help noting the commentary around the bill from the financial services sector and in particular I just want to note Otago Daily Times' Dene MacKenzie who in fact welcomed the credit union reforms. Well good call Dene MacKenzie but also we live in a part of New Zealand which has a very good credit union: Credit Union South."