Woodhouse Michael; Robertson GrantHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you Madam Chair and I appreciate the Minister's response to all of the questions that have been put so far. There are plenty more. But I do want to pick up on a point that the Minister made in respect of what he described as the extensive public consultation" on the bill and to the degree that there was a small number but very intelligent and thoughtful submissions on the bill I would agree with him. The issue that I have and that I think is worth canvassing in Part 1 is the fact that after that consultation ended there were changes that were made to this bill not the least of which was fundamental to the Reserve Bank's operation and that's to the governance structure. Now it is mentioned in Part 1 and we're going to elaborate on it more in Part 2 with the amendment in Part 1 to the preliminary provisions that changes the Governor of the Reserve Bank to be its chief executive to that which then says "and a member of the board;". This is to my mind a quite fundamental change to the governance structure and one which at the time the bill was introduced and was referred to the select committee was not being considered. I note the officials' departmental report to the committee dated 1 April was talking about this. There were two submissions that addressed this particular point one from Michael Reddell and the other from Helen Dervan and Simon Jensen. They raised concerns but not about that question. I would also point out that while there were extensive submissions by the public as it were on the removal of the reference to efficiency—which is I believe in Part 1 of the existing bill and is now removed—that was not taken up. That has been of concern to National Party members at least to the degree that while there was extensive public submission it didn't really feel particularly listened to and there were changes. So my question effectively to the Minister is: did he consider that the changes that were made after the closure of the consideration of the submissions and the amendments that officials recommended to the committee—did he consider that there was merit in actually reopening submissions on at least the question of the governor on the board and some of the other changes including to remits and so on that had been recommended to the committee after the closure of submissions? Hon GRANT ROBERTSON (Minister of Finance): Just to go back to the beginning of the member's contribution I respect the fact that it's an important part of the process that submissions came through the select committee process but in the second consultation round I think we had probably around 60 submissions and in the third consultation round around another 30. So I do just want to say that there's been an awful lot done before we got to the committee. Issues around the question of the role of the governor and him being on the board have been live discussions throughout the process. The decision was made—and this was an example in response to my comments that I made to Mr Bayly earlier—of where there were differing views amongst the stakeholders involved in this about exactly how this should work in terms of the governor and the judgment that we made was that given the very particular role of the governor it is best that they were represented on the board. That is also the position in a number of other central banks as well and it's largely to do with the coordination of monetary and financial policy and the fact that the governor still occupies a very unique role. Even though we've now moved to the position of a committee-based structure for monetary policy the governor can provide that level of coordination between financial policy and monetary policy that makes him an appropriate member of the board. There are—and we will come to this Madam Chair in the relevant operative part—in Part 2 a number of mitigations around that for matters to which the governor is not to be a party to including his own role within the bank and he would not be part of those decisions within the board's normal decision-making framework. So our view is that that was important. The second matter the member raised in his call was the question around efficiency and the place of efficiency. I covered this in one of my earlier responses to Mr Bayly which was that when we are setting as a cascade we set the high-level objectives. It's important that we're clear about what the primary objectives are. Efficiency then plays its part throughout each of the activities the bank undertakes and in each of the regulatory measures that we might choose or indeed other Acts of Parliament including the prudential supervisor's work and so on. That's where you'll see it. So it's a debatable matter and I'm not ignoring the fact that some submitters wanted to keep it. Other submitters were comfortable with where it ended up."