Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you very much Madam Speaker and thank you very much to Barbara Edmonds for letting me take this call. I've got quite a lot on this afternoon and you've saved me 20 minutes. So thank you very much.I rise on behalf of ACT in support of the Financial Market Infrastructures Bill. I will just make a couple of preliminary comments about some of the debate that's gone before. It's certainly true that this is a very technical bill. It deals in matters that most people will never encounter. I certainly have not encountered these sorts of matters outside of my role on the Finance and Expenditure Committee in the previous Parliament when we dealt with this bill. But I also say I think it's a little bit unfortunate that in various comments including from the Minister and Dr Webb there's been an expression that maybe the financial markets are a little bit murky or that the people that work in them are a little bit sinister. I think that's really unfortunate because actually they're a valuable part a vital part in fact of the New Zealand economy. While I don't claim any great expertise I think we can actually do a bit better in talking about what this legislation does and why it is necessary and broadly a good idea. There are a few trends in the financial sector that are important. One that's been going on for several decades is that computerisation and then the internet have meant that we have a much higher velocity of transactions a lot more participants with a lot more financial products. What we've just seen with GameStop what we're seeing with retail investors are just some high-profile examples of those trends. And that means that there are a lot more possibilities for different people coming together and when they come together in financial markets they often require a clearing house or some sort of meeting place where they can transact. We have quite a number of those. They've traditionally been regulated by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand Act 1989 but clearly the possibilities of market failures have grown and the need for certainty and clarity and potentially crisis management has grown. So giving the Reserve Bank and the Financial Markets Authority (FMA) jointly and separately depending on whether they agree to regulate a particular financial market infrastructure together or apart is actually a very good idea.Just to give one example of something that has cropped up in recent times we now have a lot of potential for New Zealand to grow its weightless economy through fintech companies. I've had a few of them in the Epsom electorate raised in this House over the years—some of the travails that Harmoney for instance have had attempting to do business under our current financial regulations. I could also raise NZFintech and part of the challenge that they've had is that they haven't been able to access clearing houses or payment systems so that they could be part of the wider New Zealand financial sector. I would hope that this bill will allow the FMA and the Reserve Bank to step in and regulate infrastructure for some of these emerging markets made possible by new technology so that we can have new entrants. Gerry Brownlee's looking because NZFintech are based in Christchurch and they're very good people. He's nodding and he's right. So I think it's really quite valuable in terms of the opportunity that it creates for more entrepreneurship in New Zealand but you do need to have clear rules of the game because as the Reserve Bank identified in their initial briefing to us at the Finance and Expenditure Committee one of the dangers is that if you've got a group of financial firms who own a particular clearing house there's the possibility that they will actually use that market power to the exclusion of new entrants and that is bad for everybody in the long term. It's particularly wrong when actually it's only the Reserve Bank's licensing that put them in a position to own that payment system in the first place.So I think this is something that we can say is welcome. We obviously I think have a responsibility in this House to watch how the legislation that we make is used in the future. I hope that this will lead to more stability better crisis management—heaven forbid it be needed—and an environment that is more welcoming to new entrants and more innovation in our financial sector because we need to create those high-paying globally connected jobs right here in New Zealand and Fintech's a great opportunity for that. I don't have a huge amount further to say except that I thank again the member for letting me have this early call in the debate and letting me get to my 3.30 meeting—it's very collegial of you. On behalf of ACT I commend this bill to the House.