Ms Derville Rowland:

I confess to never having taken a class action. To comment on the case, an individual can go to court if he or she chooses. The tracker mortgage examination offered extra choice, no more than that. It is not compulsory. If people go through the appeals mechanism for the serious cases, it might be interesting to see what kinds of awards are granted and whether they are better or worse than those of the court. That remains to be seen.

If it did work it would be less stressful and quicker for people to go that route. As a lawyer, I know, and I am sure committee members will believe this to be true, that people will go to court to test the boundary of anything when its new to see where the parameters are. That is a normal feature of every system. I am not saying that is good or bad but it is a truth. I listened in to the committee's discussion yesterday on class actions. It is a national level issue. I can see how it could afford benefits to people to club together. I say that not strictly speaking as part of my role but based on my having spent a decade building up supervision in the aftermath of the crisis, doing a lot of the work with my legal colleagues in terms of handing over disclosures to the Director of Public Prosecutions, DPP, for prosecutions etc., and having done a lot of unedifying but important work to try to support the infrastructure of our State in the public interest. Options are always good for people in general terms. One could not be against that. It is for others to consider the policy implications of that in greater detail than us, I would suggest.