Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Finance and Expenditure Committee to consider the bill.

I am delighted to introduce this bill, which will embed the pursuit of New Zealanders’ wellbeing as an enduring aspect of how our country’s Budget is developed. In the precincts of this building a month or two ago, I spoke at a conference for the 30th anniversary of the Public Finance Act. It would be fair to say that when I looked at the remainder of the list of speakers, I thought perhaps I may not have been entirely welcome at the event, and I did miss out on the dinner, where Ruth Richardson and Roger Douglas reminisced about the creation of the Public Finance Act. I didn’t take the opportunity—I had considered—of reminding Roger Douglas that one of my first significant political acts was to march up to him at a public meeting at Otago University and say, “How do you sleep at night?” Interestingly, he said, “Very well, actually.”

That conference did highlight for me the aspects of the Public Finance Act that are positive and that we do need to celebrate, and that is the fact that, internationally, we have a system of public accounting that is well regarded; it is transparent; it requires Governments to report on a regular basis to be able to give the public of New Zealand a very clear idea of the state of their finances, both at Budget time and, indeed, throughout the year; it also has put into law fiscal sustainability as a concept, and those are important things. It actually introduced accrual accounting, and it would be quite odd, I think, for most people who work in the Public Service of New Zealand to consider a time before accrual accounting. So there are some good things within the Public Finance Act.

But it has long been my view—and, I know, the view of other parties who make up this Government—that the exclusive focus of the Public Finance Act on fiscal matters means that we are not, in creating our Budget, looking at the full range of measures that define a country’s success from an economic point of view or, indeed, specifically here, that define what should be in a Budget. So as part of the Labour Party’s confidence and supply agreement with the Green Party, there was a commitment to look at alternative indicators of success and sustainability, and we’ve taken that on and actually gone significantly in advance of that in the legislation that is in front of the House today.

What we are doing here is embedding the concept of wellbeing at the core of the piece of legislation that defines how we put Budgets together. For those who are interested in the particular detail of that, there are two documents that, effectively, make up the Budget documents that are managed, in a sense, by politicians, and they are the Fiscal Strategy Report and the Budget Policy Statement. What most people are thinking about when they think of the Budget isn’t all of the accounts, necessarily; it’s the narrative, it’s the description that goes around that. What this legislation does is say that in that Fiscal Strategy Report and in the Budget Policy Statement, the Government must explain how wellbeing objectives have guided the Government’s Budget decisions and if the wellbeing objectives that guided the Budget decisions differ from those that were indicated in the Budget Policy Statement, and then, obviously, in turn, in the Budget Policy Statement itself, those wellbeing objectives have to be there. Those objectives relate to the social, economic, environmental, and cultural wellbeing of New Zealand and New Zealanders, and to any other matters that the Government considers support long-term wellbeing in New Zealand.

That is a fundamental shift in the way we put Budgets together, and we did this this year within the Wellbeing Budget. So we produced, for example, a wellbeing outlook to replace the economic and fiscal outlook that has traditionally been inside the Budget. That is because it’s important for New Zealanders not just to see how we’re going on those core fiscal measures around issues like debt and the surplus and Government spending—and they are important and they are still there—but in addition, what we are doing to address the wellbeing of New Zealanders, the living standards of New Zealanders, through the lens of those other objectives around economic, around social—natural capital and human capital.

So that is what this bill does, and I am extremely proud that we are putting this in front of the House now, at this time in New Zealand’s history, because 30 years on from that Public Finance Act, we as a country need to accept that if we are going to get on top of the big, long-term issues and problems and challenges that New Zealand has, we have to embed in our legislative framework a focus on those challenges. They can’t just be dealt with through the framework that we were left with at the end of the 1980s, because the companion bit of legislation to the Public Finance Act is the State Sector Act, and Minister Hipkins has reforms for the State Sector Act that will shortly be put before the House. What they are designed to do is to create the idea of a unified Public Service, to break down the silos that have bedevilled Governments in New Zealand for the last 30 years. It is these two bits of legislation together that, I believe, will have a fundamental effect on the way we do Government in New Zealand to the good, so that we will actually look at how we address those long-term issues, not at just the inputs, not at just the amount of money that goes in, not at even which Government department is responsible, but, rather, focus on those outcomes.

So, as we did in this Budget, if we are trying to address an issue like domestic and sexual violence, what we did under the leadership of Parliamentary Under-Secretary Jan Logie is actually bring those agencies together, set a goal, one outcome—not an outcome based on the individual agendas of the agencies but on what is needed for New Zealand. The same with the other objectives that we had in the Budget around child wellbeing and mental health: they are not the sole responsibility of any given agency, and it is vital at Budget time that we are talking about them. So the major manifestation of that in this year’s Budget was the child poverty report, which is covered by a different piece of legislation that also amended the Public Finance Act. That requires us to report on actions we are taking to reduce child poverty and improve child wellbeing. What this bit of legislation does is take that a step further and say we need those wellbeing objectives to be clear right across the Budget, not just in one area like child poverty but, in fact, across all of those areas of our economic, social, and environmental wellbeing.

So this is an important bit of legislation because the legislative framework is what guides the work of the Public Service. It’s all very well for an individual Minister to decide, as I did with this year’s Wellbeing Budget, that this is how I want to run it, but actually it’s important for getting the Public Service on board to pass this legislation so it’s understood by everybody that wellbeing actually is what matters, the outcomes are what matters, and, yes, part of that is being fiscally responsible. This does not change those aspects of the Act, but what it does do is put an imperative on Governments to talk about the effect of our Budgets, to understand how those social objectives are being advanced, to understand how we’re protecting the environment, to understand how we are lifting our own people in terms of their health and their education.

This piece of legislation will strengthen our public finance system. For me, it is the first stage of reform. The next stage of reform is actually looking at the way in which Government agencies themselves do their work, their planning, their accountability documents. What this piece of legislation does is set out that at least once every four years, the Government has to produce an overall stocktake of our wellbeing and the indicators of wellbeing, but in the intervening period, what we need to do is make sure that Government agencies are acting together, that they are actually working towards these wellbeing objectives. That will be the next stage of reform as we look towards how they go about their planning documents, how they go about their accountability regime, and how we ensure that they work together.

So this is a piece of legislation that I am immensely proud of. If I look back over the last 30 years, yes, there were some good things that came from the Public Finance Act around transparency and around accountability, but that piece of legislation was inadequate to reflect the values of New Zealanders, the value that we ascribe not just to being fiscally responsible but to being socially responsible, to actually delivering to New Zealanders wellbeing and increased living standards. We will not get there if we don’t have the legislative framework to back us up, and that is what this piece of legislation is designed to do. I hope that all parties in the House will send this bill to select committee so that we can hear from the public of New Zealand about what they want from the Budgets that come out of this House, so that it reflects their values, because it is my judgment that this bill that embeds wellbeing in our public finance framework does reflect the values of New Zealanders—that we value, yes, prosperity, but we value who shares in it as well.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Now, there is a bit of a theme developing in this Government, in that it’s very good at great gestures and big talk and bold, sweeping statements about their aspirations, but the delivery has been very poor. So there’s all talk but no delivery, and when I think of what the slogan might be for the Labour Party next year, I think it would be “Labour—it’s the thought that counts”. That seems to encompass everything that we see in this Government: lots of very smart talk but no delivery. So this Labour-Greens proposal that we’ve got here to change the Public Finance Act is very much in that category, because it’s based on the false assertion that everybody prior to the arrival of this magnificent, sort of, saintly Government didn’t think about wellbeing, didn’t care about anything other than the GDP, was only interested in the raw data, had no interest in social capital and all those sorts of things, which is nonsense.

Every Budget that’s been produced under the fiscal responsibility legislation and the many Budgets before that have been focused on the wellbeing of New Zealanders and improving the standard of living of New Zealanders and improving what we do. And the Budget, of course, is not all of what Government does. Government has wide-ranging interests in preserving what is special about this country and our environment and our social cohesion and the many other things about it, but apparently nobody’s thought about this before Grant Robertson and Jacinda Ardern descended from the clouds and said that now we will focus on wellbeing. Well, time will tell.

It’s also a sad reflection that this is an area where, usually, Governments have tried to bring about widespread support for changes to this legislation and this kind of legislation, but no such real attempt has been made. Unfortunately, we will not be supporting this, because our concern is that absolutely countries should be focused on wellbeing, but the purpose of the fiscal responsibility legislation is to deal with the way that the Budget is put together. It started in response to a long period of our history in New Zealand when Governments were, frankly, very murky about the money that they were taking, what they were spending it on, and the long-term sustainability of that. They would come every year with Budgets that didn’t actually disclose the full liabilities, and promises were made in election periods, in election-year Budgets, which said that we were going to be in surplus when it turned out we were in deep deficit. So we built up this robust framework which outlines clearly what Governments are taking in forms of taxation and borrowing, what they’re spending it on, and a robust analysis of what they’re actually spending and what particular programmes are going to cost over an extended period of time, what the liability is for current taxpayers, based on that, and whether that spending stacks up and whether it’s been done in a sustainable way.

That’s a very complicated area and quite a hard thing to get your head around, and the point is that this Government is not doing a good job in that core area. They don’t have any good track record on actually having a clear sense of what they’re trying to achieve from the money which they take and allocate. They’re marvellous at making big announcements. So if we looked at this current Wellbeing Budget, there was $1.9 billion allocated to help with mental health. Most New Zealanders would say, “Yes, we should invest more in dealing with mental health issues.” But this Government seems to think that just making an announcement that they intend to spend $1.9 billion on mental health is enough. Problem solved! They don’t actually have any clear plans for what to do with it. There is no analysis about it. No evaluation plan—well, there’s actually no plan about how to expend the money.

We’ve just had recent announcements that they’ve come up with $9 million that they’re going to spend, but the actual—

💬 Hon Andrew Little: The member’s been living under a rock—what has the member been doing?

—process. Oh, well, I’m very pleased to see the Attorney-General has woken up and has continued to contribute to the debate, but he hasn’t made much progress so far. So if we think of the $3 billion Provincial Growth Fund, for example, an amazing situation where $3 billion is going to be spent and the only current plan of this Government to assess whether we’re getting good value for the money that they’re going to spend is that once they’ve spent the $3 billion, they’ll do a quick analysis over at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment to find out whether they’ve got anything for the money. I mean, that’s the way that this Government operates.

If we think of the $2.8 billion spent on the fees-free programme, what have we got for that? Fewer students. Think of all the tens and tens of millions of dollars that have been invested in programmes to help young unemployed Māori through the projects for people who are not in education, employment, or training, yet at the same time they’re doing away with the 90-day work trial, which affects that very same group and makes it less likely that they’ll get an opportunity to get a job. Then we think of $1 billion put into subsidising rail. So all these things that, in the normal course of events, any good sound sensible Government in a Budget would have a clear sense of what exactly they are purchasing, what they’re buying, what we’re going to get for it, what sort of evaluation is in place and a clear sense of whether the overall spending of the Government is sustainable—we don’t get a very good response on that. We don’t get very good answers, but what we do get is an enormous amount of waffle about the intentions that they have.

So our concern with this legislation is that that is an opportunity for them to lose focus on the core task of the Budget process. That, as I say, is no way indicating that Government doesn’t have much broader interests in what we serve to govern, in Government. Of course we have a deep concern about preserving what is special about this country, about our environment, about our social cohesion, and about the happiness of New Zealanders, but all those things are legitimate concerns of Government and should not be thrown into the mix in the Budget process in order to dilute attention and focus on the simple clarity with which we go about the Budget process. They’re replacing clear accountability with porridge, and that will do us no good.

So, on that score, this is yet another example of a Government that has lost its way. New Zealanders are seeing that and recognising that every day—that they are very quick to come out with great announcements, are quick to make great claims about what they are going to do when they get a chance, but the delivery and the focus on actually making a difference with the investment that they’re making, and being held to account for the progress that they’ve made, have been woeful.

Never before, in my experience, have I seen a Government come along with their major plan, their major programme, which in this case was KiwiBuild, two years down the line—turning up and saying, “Well, yeah. We’re sorry. We failed with that. We got it wrong and we’re going to start again, but trust us. We’ll do it better next time.” That kind of lack of delivery is the thing that is of concern to everyday New Zealanders who are just struggling to get ahead. They’re conscious of the added costs that are being piled on through petrol prices and taxes and various other things. They want to see a clear sense of direction and a clear growth plan from this Government, and all they see is vague statements that they don’t understand and they can’t get their heads around. This process will only make that worse, and on that basis we will not be supporting this bill.

That member is trying, it seems, to live up to the negative National stereotype. There’s no other explanation for that speech, where he said he could agree with all of the principles in the bill but he couldn’t bring himself to support it. He thinks that GDP is, of course, not the only thing Governments ever do; they, of course, are concerned about wellbeing and other matters. But could he bring himself to support the bill? No, he could not—no, he could not. Negative National over and over and over again. They just seem to be opposing things for opposing things’ sake.

This bill represents a huge step forward, building on the successes of the Public Finance Act, the transparency, the accountability that came in 30 years ago, and acknowledges that in 30 years things have changed. The world has changed. We do have a more nuanced understanding of things. We do believe that we can walk and chew gum at the same time, that it is possible, on this side of the House at least—on this side of the House—to have other objectives, other than simply growing GDP. We believe that you can grow GDP and actually share it with the population, for goodness’ sake. We think we could actually make sure that everybody is better off, not just the precious few that might be represented by interests on the other side of the House. We all know why GDP is not the perfect measure. I mean, if we go and smash the window out the front, then of course that contributes to GDP, because some insurance money comes in and the economy gets a boost. But if somebody stays home and looks after a sick child, that does not contribute to GDP, because they’re not earning the money that would keep the economy going. Yet we know that looking after the sick child is the more important of the two.

We all know why it’s important to measure things more broadly, and we’ve got an example of the Budget just gone where the Minister of Finance provided the leadership and worked with the Chief Science Advisors to come up with some clear wellbeing objectives, to look out for child wellbeing, to make sure that we actually take mental health seriously. We are the first Government to take mental health seriously and to make the significant investment necessary to get us on that path, and I’ll come back to that because I can’t let some of the things that the member opposite said go unchallenged around the delivery that’s already happened in that area.

We also looked at Māori and Pacific aspirations and the wellbeing in that area. We looked at how we could make our economy more sustainable to ensure that our growth wasn’t just built on trading houses with each other or on immigration or growing the population, as seemed to be the strategy from the other side of the House. We’re more interested in going from volume to value, making sure that we have an economy that’s truly sustainable in the longer term and that benefits all of our citizens in a shared prosperity. So, on this side of the House, we do believe that you can walk and chew gum at the same time.

Now, I do want to concentrate just a minute on mental health delivery. I heard a colleague challenge member Goldsmith across the House about the fact that he might have been sleeping under a rock if he’d missed the progress on mental health, and the member didn’t directly confront that; he carried on, after pausing briefly, with another set of accusations that were just ill-founded. In mental health, already we’ve delivered a Mana Ake programme that has mental health workers on the ground across Canterbury and Kaikōura in all of the schools—in all of the schools—to make sure that people are supported in the wake of the quakes. We have the Piki programme across the Greater Wellington region having free counselling and, thanks to the Greens, as part of our agreement with them, free counselling available to young people from 18 to 25. We’ve got the nurses in schools programme, which we’ve continued to roll out, which has good evidence around it thanks to Simon Denny of the University of Auckland. We know that contributes to mental wellbeing. We’ve lowered the cost of visiting a doctor for 600,000 New Zealanders, making it easier, because we know many people go to the doctor to get their first mental health consultation.

💬 Angie Warren-Clark: How many?

600,000 New Zealanders have cheaper doctors visits as a result of action this Government has already taken, and we put $200 million in our first Budget into specialist mental health services; $213 million in our second Budget into specialist mental health services. We’ve put $200 million into buildings to make sure that the stock of buildings that were tired and run down after the previous Government are built up again, and that’s just the mental health and addiction buildings—that $200 million that we put aside for that. So we’re getting on and delivering, and already there are 170,000 New Zealanders able to access—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Is this related to the bill?

—primary mental health services, which was specifically mentioned in the Budget that mirrors exactly this bill that we’re putting through with the wellbeing objectives that are being implanted into this bill. I bring it back to the point that I was making, Madam Speaker, with your guidance.

So these are the very things that we know we can do, and we know, if we embed them in this bill and require the reporting of the wellbeing objectives, we can then measure the progress we are making as a nation toward ensuring a shared prosperity across our country. So the bill itself, of course, requires the Government to state the wellbeing objectives upfront—those wellbeing objectives that will guide the Government’s decisions as it goes through the Budget process, and each Government will have the freedom and the flexibility to describe its own wellbeing objectives. It will have the ability to articulate its own vision for wellbeing for this country. It’s not prescriptive, and it’s very disappointing that the member Goldsmith opposite thinks that it is too challenging to both think about wellbeing and grow the finances in the corner. I mean, history will tell us that Labour-led Governments have actually grown the economy faster than National-led ones, which is an interesting observation along the way that shows that maybe walking and chewing gum is more productive than just walking alone, if we want to continue the metaphor a bit further. But maybe that’s stretching it a bit far, if I can step into bad puns as well.

The bill also, then, in Part 2, requires Treasury to report back periodically on the state of wellbeing in New Zealand, and that first report would be due at the end of 2022 and then at least once every four years. We know Treasury are developing tools around this. So we’ve got the Living Standards Framework, which looks at physical and financial capital, which is, of course, the stuff we’re familiar with through the normal Budget process, but also looks at social capital: the connectedness and cohesion of our society. It looks at human capital—the skills, the education, the wellbeing of our citizens that goes with that—and also looks further at the environment and its sustainability over the longer term, recognising that that is also important to our wellbeing and prosperity in the longer term. So it’s a balanced package. We think Treasury is capable of giving us a broader picture of how our Budgets are shaping the future of our nation, of how they are contributing to us being a wealthier, more prosperous, and happier nation in the future.

We know that achieving genuine, enduring change requires establishing a public finance system geared towards this new way of working—this newer way of looking at the world. We know that the Public Finance Act has served us well in the past, but it is actually time to require Governments to set wellbeing objectives to make sure that we are reporting to the public transparently and having that conversation about where we are headed, and then reporting back on how we are achieving better wellbeing for our populations, and, of course, we know this is against the background of long-term challenges. Unfortunately, under the prior Government, whilst it did grow the economy, certainly sometimes faster than at others, we saw homelessness grow, we saw child poverty grow, and we saw the inequalities rising under that Government’s watch.

The OECD data backs this up. It’s not conjecture. The OECD has put out reports on how this has happened and how it’s grown over time. If we set in train a Public Finance Act that measures our progress towards prosperity and towards addressing homelessness and child poverty, addressing inequality, making sure that our Māori and Pacific people are sharing in our prosperity, making sure that we are addressing the mental health crisis that we’ve inherited, with so much growth in need but the services are not geared up to deliver and respond—we know all of this is possible. We are determined to have a Public Finance Act which brings us into the modern age, which sets objectives to be reported on periodically, and that is accessible to the population so that we can see how Governments are delivering for the people of New Zealand.

Certainly, this Government has many achievements, which I have already listed, in the mental health area. We want to be able to report transparently across all of the areas that we’re delivering, and I want to thank all of the partners to this Government for their constructive contributions to this. I hope the negative National view does not continue opposite. I hope they find it within themselves to not only support in spirit this bill but actually to put their vote towards it, recognising that New Zealanders will actually value having objectives around wellbeing spelt out and accountability around those objectives. It should not be something that a National Party opposes, in my view. I hope they see the bigger picture and support this bill.

Well, certainly after listening to that contribution from Dr David Clark, he hasn’t convinced me that National is not on the right side of the argument in opposing this legislation. I think it is actually a rather unfortunate night for Parliament that we’re fiddling with a piece of legislation which, in my mind, has been highly successful and, in fact, iconic—and that’s the Public Finance Act. If you couple that with the Fiscal Responsibility Act, for any of us members of Parliament who are lucky enough to go overseas and talk to other parliamentarians around the world, those two iconic pieces of legislation have stood this country in good stead for its ability to reveal quite accurately Government books as we approach elections. We’re fiddling with this particular legislation, and after listening to the Hon David Clark and the Minister of Finance, the Hon Grant Robertson, I am none the wiser as to why this legislation is before the House.

The Hon David Clark kept talking about his ability to walk and chew gum, and I think he mentioned that four or five times. I don’t know what walking and chewing gum and the ability to do both those actions at the same time has anything to do with the Public Finance Act. Then, as I listened to Grant Robertson’s contribution, he lamented the fact that he had been invited to a 30-year celebration of the Public Finance Act but that he didn’t get asked to the dinner that followed that particular function. Looking at Mr Grant Robertson, I don’t think his body noticed the fact that he didn’t get to the dinner.

As I consider what this legislation is about and the Wellbeing Budget, I think what’s happened here is that the Minister of Finance now knows that in the year of delivery, the thing that it didn’t deliver were any brownie points at all for the Wellbeing Budget. So they’ve had an emergency-type Cabinet meeting and have said “What can we do to have another crack at presenting the Wellbeing Budget in front of New Zealanders?”, and the lame attempt is now before this House tonight as we look at the Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Bill.

The Wellbeing Budget was a botched Budget—there’s no doubt about that—but when you look then at the issue of any Budget that’s named a Wellbeing Budget, it’s hard to see how this particular Budget was any different in its aspirations than any other Budget that I’ve seen delivered in 25 years in this House. I can tell the Government side of the House that every Minister of Finance, be it Labour, be it—on one occasion, sadly—a New Zealand First member delivering a Budget, and, whether it’s National, Labour, or New Zealand First, when that Minister delivers his or her Budget, that Minister is trying to improve the wellbeing of every New Zealander.

So while this particular label’s been attached by Labour in the year of delivery, it doesn’t change the fact that any Budget is about delivering outcomes for New Zealanders that will improve their standard of living. So what we see now is a Government that’s spent the last two years removing targets so that we can keep an idea on their achievements. They’ve removed every possible target that National had established under some better Government targets—the ability to actually measure the number of children entering early childhood, or the number of children getting immunisation, for example, and now we have this, I think, flummery or puffery that the Hon Paul Goldsmith spoke about earlier—

💬 Brett Hudson: “Flummery”—he said “flummery”.

—“flummery”; wonderful word—being presented now before the House tonight as an attempt for the Government to relaunch its very sad positioning of a Budget as a Wellbeing Budget.

I think it is actually a sad night when we see this particular Public Finance Act being fiddled with for nothing more than an attempt by the Government to repackage its Budget, and that’s what we’re seeing tonight. The Budget, we all know—and New Zealanders understand what it delivered for New Zealanders. It delivered wasted expenditure. It delivered higher taxes. It delivered in the area of mental health—that the Hon Dr David Clark spoke about—$1.9 billion, and then an attempt to run round to New Zealanders, saying, “Well, we’ve appropriated the money. We don’t know how to spend it. Give us some ideas.”

The Budget has been a disaster, and this attempt by the Government to relaunch it as a wellbeing Budget will not convince any New Zealander at all that the last Budget delivered by the Labour Government was significantly different to any other Budget presented, from an aspect that any Minister of Finance will be delivering a Budget that he or she thinks will deliver to improve the wellbeing and the standard of living of all New Zealanders. That’s why National will oppose this legislation.

I look forward to the submissions we receive at the select committee. I suspect they’ll be very similar to the many submissions we had through the briefing we had on the wellbeing initiative by the Government. It certainly didn’t convince me that it’s delivering to New Zealanders at all.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to rise to speak on behalf of the Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Bill. It’s worth noting that the person who created GDP said, when he created the tool of measuring economic activity “Do not use GDP as a measure of welfare of a nation”, and for the illumination, the elucidation, of those on the other side, it was Kuznets, the economist who said, “Don’t use GDP as a measure of wellbeing”. So after all this time of economies around the world going back to the simple number, because it was a simple sales technique—actually, full credit to the members opposite, the National Party there. They used that one number, GDP, quite effectively in their sales pitch to New Zealanders, whether it was 1.9 percent, or, I think they got as high as 3.6 percent—I’ll be corrected if I’m wrong—

💬 Hon Tracey Martin: For a short period.

For a very short period. They sold to New Zealand this figure of GDP. But what we have to ask ourselves, and what we have asked ourselves in this House, is what is it that we, as a Government, and that we, as the people of New Zealand, use to measure success? The man who created GDP said “Don’t use GDP”, so what is it that we use? We’ve asked ourselves, well, what is wellbeing? What is it that New Zealanders should be able to stand up, and proudly affirm, and say that we have achieved these things for New Zealand, and we are proud to be part of a country who has done this great work and contributed to an economy.

For the benefit of the previous speaker, David Carter, I just want to touch on some of the issues he raised about the Budget, which was slightly off topic, but kind of on topic when you speak about wellbeing. This Government is focused on wellbeing. How are we doing that? We refuse, unlike the previous Government, to use population growth and house prices to define success in this country. So what we’re saying through this Wellbeing Budget and, actually, through these mechanisms here, in the Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Bill, is to ask ourselves, well, what is success? I put it to this House that investment in infrastructure in a planned, coordinated way over the next few decades, so that businesses in this country know what they can commit to, know that they have business that they can do with this Government and invest in, and invest in their people and invest in this country themselves—that is a measure of wellbeing.

We can ask ourselves, well, what else can we do for our businesses in New Zealand so that they are more productive, and they can pay their employees more? We can ask the fundamental question about why has New Zealand for so long, because of the apathy on the other side of the House, not invested in research and development and said to businesses “Actually, we want to encourage you to do more in the R & D space, so that you can ensure that you are more productive and you are competing on an even platform around the world”, and so that is what we have done.

I suppose one of the great measures of wellbeing, and one of the indicators that we will use, is the distribution of wealth amongst New Zealand. So one of the fundamental questions to that—which I’m proud to say New Zealand First asked of both parties quite a while ago—was, “What are we doing for the regions?” So investment in the regions is a measure of success, not only for a Government but the people in the regions—the wellbeing of the people in the regions themselves.

So this Government proudly stands on its record already, and it has done more than the Opposition did in nine years. We focused on wellbeing, and we’ve done so much. I think—

💬 Hon Member: What does that mean? What does wellbeing mean? How do you measure it?

Here we go, for the member opposite who hasn’t read the legislation—I forget his name, it’s been five years—but, what the bill does—[Interruption] Simpson—Simpson? We know that achieving genuine, enduring change requires establishing a public finance system geared towards a new way of working. The Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Bill does so by requiring the Government to set wellbeing objectives, and explain how those objectives will guide the development of its Budget. So what we’re doing is asking “What does success look like?”, and then we’re going to the Ministers, and asking the fundamental question, “How does this measure up against the Public Finance Act, and the measures in wellbeing? Why, Ministers, are we going to give you money in internal affairs, in finance, in immigration, in children—why would we do that?” So the fundamental question comes back to the questions we ask through this Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Bill: “What are the objectives that will guide the development of your work?”

So Treasury will report back and, actually—

💬 Matt King: Here we go—here we go.

You can tell the members opposite are excited, but I don’t want to get them boiling too soon. You don’t want to peak too soon, members opposite. I put it to those members opposite that this Wellbeing Budget, unfortunately, and what we’re setting here through the Public Finance Act is about fixing, kind of, the mistakes and, actually, the non-action of the past.

I was in the electorates of several of those members opposite who are the most vocal right now—and I do appreciate the egging on. I was in their electorates having conversations about gangs and P, and so this is the context and what I’ll end on for this evening. They are now finding this Government is doing work on trying to get rid of that scourge, that blight, on our society that is gangs, and the insidious work—or they call it work—in terms of distribution of drugs in our society.

Good people from their electorates are coming to us and saying “What are you going to do about it?”, and the problem with that question is what was done in the past and what is it that we’re trying to deal with now, because, funny guys on the other side of the House—because this isn’t funny—they failed to invest in police, they failed to invest in our Customs Service, and they failed to invest in our children and schools and in mental health. So what does that mean? Well, right now, we here, on this side of the House, are dealing with the outfall of that—the negative externality of their inaction. For every $1 they presumed to save, we’re spending $10 now to fix it up, and that is what we’re dealing with in this Wellbeing Budget.

So thank you to those members opposite for egging me on, because they reminded me why I’m so proud of being on this side of the House and why the work we’re doing is so important for this nation and our regions. Thank you very much, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I was accused of waffling earlier on, so I’ll get straight to the point now: this bill is rubbish.

I will continue a bit further. The Finance and Expenditure Committee has had a number of briefings on what we should perceive as wellbeing, and I would bet that anyone who comes to this House should have a very good understanding of what wellbeing is all about. I would bet that anyone who comes here comes here for that very reason—to create wellbeing for everybody they provide legislation for—and I think anyone who read a Bill English or a Michael Cullen Budget would also have understood what wellbeing was about. So I don’t see that altering the Public Finance Act to include a whole lot of what I’d call waffle around wellbeing will make any difference at all to the way this Budget or future Budgets are presented. They’ll be presented as they always have been.

Now, this is a play on words, on people’s minds, and, in fact, on Treasury’s mind, and they’re challenged enough. I guess they’re challenged enough because Mr Twyford’s told us on numerous occasions that they’re challenged enough. Treasury’s role is really to provide sound fiscal advice, drive productivity in the public sector, identify risk and wasteful spending, and advise the Government on where it should go.

I’m not sure how we will ever measure wellbeing. I was trying to imagine measuring what I feel like in the morning when I get up. There would be no chance of measuring that publicly.

To do away with fiscal measurements and measurements using figures is, I think, a flawed system and I don’t see that in any way this is going to improve either the delivery of our Budgets or the delivery of services that those Budgets are designed to deliver. It, effectively, excuses Governments from real measurements, and I think that’s a shame, because I do think that we’ve made some progress in recent years in measuring all sorts of things from health statistics to the way the economy was growing, and, of course, we have to have a growing economy in order to fund the things that we need to provide for in the course of Budgets.

I just want to finish by commenting on a couple of things that were said from the other side. I was often thinking, as David Clark was talking about walking and chewing gum, that maybe the gum will get stuck at some stage and that’ll be the end of that, because it might have solved the problem and a lot of noise. In response to Mr Tabuteau, he was going on about what our people are saying about us to him, and I would hate to tell him what our people are saying about him to us. I won’t go on and say that, but I’m sure that the polls and the voters will in due course. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Thirty years, I think, is a good time to review an important piece of legislation, and so I’m delighted that we have turned our attention to the Public Finance Act.

I wanted to start my comments just by responding to some of what I’ve heard in the debate from members of the Opposition. Ian McKelvie, who has just concluded, referred to one of the roles of Treasury as advising the Government on where it should go—in other words, policy advice. In that sense, then, having a sense of the context in which that policy advice is given, I think, would be useful. Alastair Scott interjected a number of times, asking what wellbeing is—of course, he would have to ask—and I would like to say most of it came from Paul Goldsmith.

💬 Paul Goldsmith: the nature of his argument seemed to be that all Budgets are wellbeing Budgets and, therefore, this piece of legislation, and having this kind of context for the finances of a country, is irrelevant. But I just wanted to remind him of a Budget that was written by the author of the Public Finance Act, Ruth Richardson, and that Budget had the moniker the “mother of all Budgets”. In that Budget, one of the things that they did was they looked at what the minimum level of income would be for someone really on the breadline—what was the minimum required to get by—and then they set income support levels 20 percent below that, because they thought what that would do would be to incentivise lazy beneficiaries to get off their bums and get a real job. The consequences of that decision we are still living with today. We are still cleaning up the mess that was left by the “mother of all Budgets”, and by the mother of the “mother of all Budgets”.

So I have to say, if you had—as we are suggesting in this piece of legislation—a requirement for the Government to lay out what it thinks wellbeing is in social and in environmental and in economic terms for all New Zealanders, you would have to then justify the decisions that you’re making in that Budget, and I find it hard to imagine how the “mother of all Budgets” would have gotten through that filter if this amendment had been in place back then. So whilst Paul Goldsmith likes to write this off as just this kind of woke irrelevancy, actually, the consequences could be huge for the lives of New Zealanders. I mean, I think he referred to it as porridge at one point. But the people who were living on the breadline after the “mother of all Budgets” couldn’t afford porridge, Mr Goldsmith, and so I do not think that this is mere symbolism. I think that this can have real consequences for people.

I just wanted to move next to the heritage of this bill, and this is a source of some pride for myself and for members of the Green Party. I want to refer, if you’ll allow me to read a portion of a speech given in this House by a predecessor of mine, Jeanette Fitzsimons, in September 1998—21 years ago. In that speech, she said, “After 20 years of reasoned argument, one should not have to say again how inept GDP is as a measure of our economic well-being. All that GDP measures is the total amount going through the cash registers of New Zealand, regardless of what the money is … spent on. It assumes that the most important thing is for the economy to be big, rather than to be healthy, … If there is a car crash or an oil spill, the money spent on cleaning up the mess adds to our economic growth. If people drive to work, the petrol cost adds to growth; if they walk, it does not. … GDP totally fails to register the scarcity of resources. The first fish and the last fish in the oceans register the same. High growth in GDP is usually a sign that we are consuming our capital—both our social capital and our ecological capital.”

She then went on to say, in 2003, “GDP is both too narrow and too generalised to measure anything useful. It does not tell us whether the poor are getting poorer, and if most of society’s wealth is held by a few. It does not tell us if we’re paying more and more to control pollution and crime, rather than for real goods [or] services.” What is true is that our nation’s wellbeing is not a number on a GDP chart. The tragic thing is that GDP does not measure human happiness or wellbeing; it mainly measures the rate at which resources are turned into trash. Every tonne of metal mined, timber logged, fish caught raises GDP. Every tonne of trash dumped raises GDP. Every million dollars we spend trying to mitigate these effects from landfill management to land restoration, remediating toxic sites raises GDP. Finally, she said, “We will continue to be a voice for a different political philosophy, a new value system … where our success is counted not by the size of our GDP and our incomes, but by the warmth of our relationships with each other and with nature; by the health of our children and our elders and our rivers and our land.”

So this amendment, of course, isn’t going to change all of that, not at all. GDP will still be one of the core economic measures that we rely on to give us a sense of how things stand. But what we are talking about here is to create a broader view of the health and wellbeing of our country in economic and environmental and social terms. I also want to just reference Dr Kennedy Graham who, a number of years ago, introduced another public finance amendment bill: the Public Finance (Sustainable Development Indicators) Amendment Bill, which tried to find a way of introducing some ecological indicators into the Public Finance Act so that, at the very least, we would be able to measure the throughput and the stocks of our natural capital in a way that referenced things against the way that we measure the economy and the state of the public finances. So that attempt—although we were in Opposition and while it was drawn from the ballot and while it did get to a first reading—unfortunately didn’t progress through the House. But today’s bill, the Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Bill I see as the inheritor bill of Dr Kennedy Graham’s Public Finance (Sustainable Development Indicators) Amendment Bill in many ways.

So I do want to say that I am tremendously proud, alongside Grant Robertson, to be sponsoring this bill into the House, because in many ways it brings 30 years of Green economic advocacy to—well, not to a conclusion, but to an actual evolution in how things move through.

I know that other countries are feeling somewhat salty that they don’t have this level of thinking in their own set of public finances. We know that other countries are looking to us and saying, “It seems like New Zealand is making some real progress here in advancing economic and fiscal thinking in public finances in terms of which we’re thinking about things.” And I know that the reforms in the 1980s and the early 1990s—we actually exported that, warts and all, to some parts of the world. And whilst we’re attempting now, 30 years later, to clean up some of the damage caused by some of those reforms, I hope too that we can export the next evolution: this idea that, actually, we can take a more holistic, more all-encompassing view of social and environmental and economic wellbeing, and to say to the world, “Actually, there is a way that we can do this better.” So to all of those Greens, Jeanette and Kennedy and Russel and very many others who have gone before and who have advocated for this, I say booyah.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Look, I think this Government’s about as confused as anything I’ve ever seen before, and, interestingly enough, on a finance bill. So we’ve heard tonight that the Finance and Expenditure Committee have had briefings on wellbeing. Look, the last National Government had 10 Better Public Services targets: reducing welfare dependency, increasing infant immunisation rates, reducing assaults on children, just to actually begin. There’s a list of 10 and I won’t go through them all.

💬 Greg O’Connor: Cheaper public services.

But the message that I’m going to give you, Mr O’Connor, is that actually we had targets. And then we had a Government that came in and decided that they didn’t like targets because targets are too hard. I mean, look at KiwiBuild, for example. Let’s take the targets away and, “Oh, now we’ve figured out that it isn’t going to work.” Well, these Better Public Services targets were going to be too hard for this current Government so they moved them. So all of a sudden now they want to have Treasury then start measuring these things again.

Let me tell you, we’ve heard a lot of put-downs tonight about GDP and all the rest of it, but Deborah Russell over there’s an accountant. She will know that a ledger has two sides, and you have to have money coming in before you can have money coming out. So it’s not that hard; it’s one side to earn the money, and then to be able to put it in, measure it, and make targets. It’s not actually that hard.

Now, something that I’m really, really, really disappointed about right now is that the latest Situation and Outlook for Primary Industries has just come out, and we all know the importance of a strong economy to wellbeing. Well, I can tell you that the people who hold up this economy have never ever felt so down and out. The phone calls that I’m getting at the moment and the phone calls my colleagues are getting—and I tell you what: we talk about one suicide being one too many. Just watch this space, because if this attitude from this Government carries on with farmers, that’s what’s going to happen. So don’t talk to us about wellbeing, because, actually, actions speak louder than words, and right now I’m not seeing it. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

The next call is a split call. I call the Hon Poto Williams.

Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare. Madam Speaker. It might surprise you to know but I have been waiting for 30 years for this piece of legislation, for the changes that this brings out. In all my years in working in the community sector and all the conversations that we have had, one of the biggest, I guess, handbrakes on our ability as a sector to fully effect our ability to work with the people who come to us and to work with the causes that we hold most dear has been the Public Finance Act. Why I say that is for a couple of reasons.

When somebody comes through your door as an NGO, and they bring with them the myriad of issues that come with them, and you have access to a dollar of health and a dollar of justice and a dollar of education funding to support this person, but in front of you they have all the complexities of a modern person. There may be issues of income, there may be issues of housing, but the ability to actually cater to that person’s needs in relation to your Government contracts has seriously hampered your ability to deal with the person that’s in front of you. You have not been able to deal with the important needs that they have and actually effect good outcomes. So in many ways we have been totally missing the mark with our Government funding in terms of supporting the community sector.

So we are now better able to see that person and actually acknowledge the issues that they present, and actually work much more closely to their needs because we are thinking about their wellbeing and because we are thinking about outcomes as opposed to accounting for those dollars from the pūtea that they have come from. We’ve created an ability to work across Government organisations. We’ve created the ability to work across ministries and actually see the need in our community. And it is about wellbeing. It is about wanting to move people into a different space. It is about wanting our communities to thrive and to survive. And the important thing here is we’ve set this up using two frameworks.

So in Treasury they’ve got the Living Standards Framework, which looks at all of those wellbeings—social wellbeing, they look at human wellbeing, financial wellbeing, and natural wellbeing—and match those against all the other current wellbeings that we look at, which are things like civic engagement, cultural identity, environment, for example, and actually move us into a space of resilience. So Treasury has invested in these wellbeings. We overlaid that with the five priorities for the Wellbeing Budget, which are about taking mental health seriously, improving child wellbeing, supporting Māori and Pacific aspirations, building a productive nation, and transforming the economy. Together, Treasury and Government have created a framework with which we can look at our wellbeings and address the issues that are presented to us in the community sector. It is a really important day for us to be celebrating this.

My desire around the community sector and our engagement with civil society, as a Government, is that they could become much more an equal partner and be able to drive Government policy. The only way to do that, really, is to allow them some power in this relationship; allow them equality and, actually, be able to talk to us about what they see on the ground, because what people in the community sector see on the ground is an accurate reflection of what we, as a Government, should be putting our resources into if we’re wanting our nation to thrive and survive.

So I see this as a really important first step. There is much more to be done, and I know that the Minister of Finance signalled that in his speech earlier in this debate. I, for one, am looking forward to seeing those other pieces in the wellbeing puzzle come together to give us an absolute clear pathway forward so that our communities are engaged with their Government, are driving Government policy, and we can fully deliver on what we know is the best for our nation. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Madam Speaker, thank you. I’ve just been thinking about things tonight, and it’s interesting just thinking about this bill; I think that Grant Robertson must be Treasury’s best friend. He must be their bestie—or what’s the acronym if you’re a really good friend? You’re a BFF, isn’t it—best friend forever. Because if you think about Mr Robertson, since he’s become the finance Minister he’s done virtually everything Treasury has been pushing for for years. So what’s the first thing he did? Well, he had the Reserve Bank—OK, so now we’ve got a dual mandate. The bank had a very clear mandate to have inflation between 1 and 3 per cent, so on Treasury’s advice that got changed so now we have this one about full employment. Then we had the issue around how you set monetary policy. So what did Treasury want? They suggested we should do the monetary policy committee, and, of course, that’s now come into law. What’s the third thing that Treasury wanted? Oh, that’s right, Treasury wanted to have a role on monitoring the Reserve Bank, because they’ve been trying to take it over years. So, of course, we now have a Treasury official that sits, ex officio, on the monetary policy committee so when we do set the official cash rate, of course, Treasury is there.

Now we’ve got the next piece of legislation, this wonderful piece: the Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Bill. Gee, don’t I feel better after reading that! Of course, National recognises that we have much wider measures than GDP. Of course, we don’t talk about GDP per capita because under this Government it’s gone backwards dramatically—except prior to coming into power it was everything about GDP per capita, according to Mr Robertson. But somehow we’ve forgotten that in time. But the trouble is we’ve seen an economy go backwards under this Government in 20 short months, and we all recognise that having a strong economy powers all the type of stuff we’re talking about in this Wellbeing Budget, which is about how you fund new schools, how you deal with social inequities, how you deal with good health outcomes—that’s what gives you the money to do it. As my learned colleague beside me, Barbara Kuriger, mentioned, we had very clear objectives about measuring outcomes; not just GDP but a whole stack of them—in fact, the Hon Steven Joyce was fixated with measurement. But, hey, now we’ve got a Government who wants to talk about wellbeing but doesn’t want to measure it. That’s the trouble.

I’ll leave you with this best example, the one I’ve been talking about multiple times today: why has KiwiBuild got no targets? Why has it got no targets? Because this is a Government that doesn’t want to measure itself and see how bad it is in performing and executing good policy because it doesn’t deliver.

This is a split call. David Seymour.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a great pleasure to rise on behalf of the ACT Party in opposition to this bill, and to speak to you late in the evening about a matter of grave national importance. I have to say, the speech that I just heard from the member who has just resumed his seat would have to be one of the most confused and confusing contributions to this House that I’ve heard in a very long time. He didn’t know his outputs from his outcomes. Well, let me try to help the member Andrew Bayly with what this bill is about.

The Public Finance Act was a world-leading piece of legislation. It required the Government to keep proper accounts on an accrual basis so that New Zealanders could assess the performance of their Government and understand what was really going on, and not have the wool pulled over their eyes as it had been pulled by the likes of Sir Robert Muldoon and his predecessors in Government as Minister of Finance. But added to this world-leading piece of legislation tonight are a series of outcome measures—not output, outcome measures—that will be as confusing to the public and anybody trying to get an idea of what’s really going on as Andrew Bayly’s speech, because the problem is this Government is proposing to have Treasury try to measure the wellbeings of New Zealanders when what it should be doing is measuring the outputs of Government.

If we want to improve New Zealanders’ wellbeing, here’s a few things that Government departments could be doing. I’d be very happy, as an Aucklander, if Government departments introduced proper infrastructure and, possibly, priced roads correctly so that we didn’t spend so much of our lives in congestion—that would help our wellbeing. I’d be happy if this Government, or any Government for that matter, would try to run a corrections department that rehabilitated just some of the prisoners so we didn’t find that 50 per cent of people released from prison were back inside within four years. I’d be happy if we had a Government that ran an education system that did not leave one in five New Zealanders functionally innumerate and illiterate, according to the OECD, by the time they reached 15—that would help our wellbeing. I’d be happy if we had a Government that, when it came to the ownership of public assets, didn’t own 28 State-owned enterprises (SOE), many of which are losing money in competitive markets and for which there is no basis for the Government to own—for instance, a post office, a television station, or a weather forecasting business. I’d be happy if the Government focused on its ownership of State assets, which is hopeless—

💬 Greg O’Connor: It worked for Air New Zealand.

We hear from Greg—I forget Greg’s second name, but Greg from somewhere in Wellington. Greg says that he thinks it worked for Air New Zealand. Well, he’s absolutely right; the partial privatisation of Air New Zealand has been a success, and there’s a lesson in that. Privatisation increases the productivity and effectiveness of firms. We should do more of it.

But, in any case, the Government could do a lot better if it also focused on better performance for the regulation that it makes. If the regulatory systems didn’t constantly impose costs on New Zealanders without even having identified the problems the Government was trying to solve—and it happens regularly in this country—then I would be very, very happy. But, unfortunately, this perversion of the very good Public Finance Act is going to distract from the performance of the Government, giving the Government the excuse of focusing only on the wellbeing of New Zealanders rather than the performance of Government departments and its contribution to that wellbeing.

It is a distraction; it is an excuse; and it, ironically, will lead to worse wellbeing for New Zealanders to the extent Government can influence it. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Just a reminder to the member that it’s one of the rules of the House to refer to members by their full name.

💬 David Seymour: I just forgot his name.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): Well, then don’t use his first name.

It is a privilege to speak on this bill. It is a privilege to speak on this bill, because, on this side of the House, we look back to 30 years ago when the public sector went through a raft of transformational changes. If there’s anything that I can align and agree on with the previous speaker, David Seymour, the singular thing I will agree with is the fact that the Public Finance Act is a world-leading piece of legislation. It brought transparency and accountability into a public financial system that had none at the time; it was running awry. You had a public sector that was relatively agnostic in terms of following direction of its Ministers. You had books that were quite easily able to be—I think it’s not too much of a stretch to say that it was quite easy to duck and dive and hide the true measures of what was happening fiscally within that sector, and, coming off the back of the Muldoon era, that became very apparent, across the raft of areas, that greater transparency was required in the State sector. So we saw the introduction of the State Sector Act in 1988, and it was followed with the Public Finance Act in 1989.

Now, what that Act did then—as the previous speaker said—was it brought in a whole raft of measures that required transparency and accountability. It set targets which this House and the Minister of Finance were required to go through in terms of being able to audit those accounts of every dollar publicly spent.

Now, it’s interesting, though, to note, in this House, that there is near unanimous support for what the intention of—and, thus, actually, the output of—that bill was in 1989. I can say that, in 1989, the Opposition sat there and said it would have absolutely no effect, it would have little to do in terms of increasing transparency and accountability, and it was just a raft of measures that this fairy Government wanted to bring in—much like the arguments over the course of this afternoon and this evening have been from the Opposition. “What is wellbeing?”, says the member over there. Well, interestingly enough, it was Treasury under the previous Government’s watch that developed the Living Standards Framework. It sat up there on the bench, but it was under that previous Government’s watch where that Living Standards Framework was developed, which assesses multiple capitals in terms of understanding and seeing, beyond GDP, what wellbeing is; what the standard of living is. If we look back to what Robert Kennedy said—and there’s been a raft of measures in terms of people who have spoken about GDP, but it’s very hard to measure when you’re using purely fiscal outputs and measures to measure wellbeing, happiness, and a standard of life that this side of the House thinks should be made as a benchmark for all.

So when I look at the amending legislation that we’re considering this evening and what it requires us to do—well, it doesn’t supplant one for the other, as the previous member said. It doesn’t trump one and trump the other; it sets out a very clear public accountability regime. For example, section 26KA in the current Act sets out the contents of fiscal strategy reporting in terms of fiscal responsibilities and outputs. New section 26KB, inserted by the bill, is in addition to those fiscal responsibilities and accountabilities. This bill here sets out the wellbeing objectives that a Government must also be accountable to the public for. Now, why is that not a good thing at any state or in any measure that we look to? Of course it’s about financial wellbeing and accountability but so too the measures that were all set out in Treasury’s Living Standards Framework, which the previous Government actually developed.

So, look, I’m finding this debate a little bit reminiscent of those major transformational changes that were made back in the 1980s. We could almost take word for word the Opposition’s debate notes on that night 30 years ago to the debates that have been given in this House today. This side of the House and this Government has always been about transformational change. It might look a little bit tricky. It’s pretty easy to criticise change, but this side of the House believes it’s fundamental, and we’re doing it.

Well, I have to say that, in my view, this bill will achieve absolutely nothing and it’s all fluff and is, simply, a distraction—the Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Bill. If you ask any member of this House what “wellbeing” means, it will be very different. Chlöe Swarbrick will have a different view to Greg O’Connor, who may not have a view on wellbeing. Tracey Martin will have a different view than I have on wellbeing. And the last speaker, Kiritapu Allan, will have a different view than I have on wellbeing. The problem is that when you end up with fluff, you can’t measure anything. You end up with such a broad criteria that you end up not achieving anything.

I want members opposite to imagine that they’re running their electorate and their election campaign. They don’t focus on everything; they focus on the things that matter, and the important things—for us, on this side, that’s the economy, it’s jobs, and it’s exports. Once you’ve done all of that, as my colleague Barbara Kuriger has said, then you have some money to spend. Unless you’ve got the money, you can’t spend it. What I’m seeing in this bill is, really, a broadening of everything, no deliberate measures, and, really, a lack of focus.

It’s very easy for a Government to spend money—very easy; that’s the simplest part. The hardest part is to earn it. What I worry about in this bill is that all we’re talking about and what we’re charging Treasury with doing is broadening the framework for decision making. In my experience—and I have watched a number of Budgets over the years, with my political interests—all Governments manage the books in the best way they think they can at the time. Their view of wellbeing will vary from one chapter in time to another, and one party to another.

Most New Zealanders have three basic things they want: they want shelter, they want food, they want income, and they want to feel safe.

💬 Hon Chris Hipkins: That’s four things.

Four things—four things. My apology, one wrong; four. That’s important. I’m trying to be generous. But after that, then the discretion comes down as to what they can and want to spend their money on.

What I worry about in this bill is that we’re going to broaden the whole framework out, and we’re not going to concentrate on the things that matter, the economy, and those four things. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

We’ve had a long series of speeches on this bill tonight. I want to take it back to the very basics of what this bill is about, and to trace some of the, if you like, intellectual history behind wellbeing. It matters, and it matters because it is an ancient idea; it’s part of the ancient wisdom.

I believe one of the speakers on the other side of the House said that I was an accountant—that is, in fact, true. I am an accountant, but, as it turns out, I also studied philosophy to a reasonably high level. As part of that I spent a long amount of time examining the ancient accounts of the good life and what different people thought the good life was. It relates so directly to wellbeing.

The ancient Greeks, in terms of thinking about wellbeing, talked in terms of eudaimonia—e-u-d-a-i-m-o-n-i-a. It can be translated as “happiness” but it can also be translated as “flourishing”. And in terms of thinking about how to live their lives they thought, “How does the civilised man”—and that would have been the way they thought about it—“achieve the life of eudaimonia? What is the eudaimonic life?” and they had different theories about it.

The Cynics, that would be Diogenes in the market place, thought that the way to achieve the good life was to get by on as little as possible, to have the littlest and the simplest things. If what you had was bread and cheese, then you enjoyed that bread and cheese to the fullest and you didn’t ask for any more, and you simplified, simplified. The story of Diogenes casting his bowl aside in order that he would drink water just out of his hand speaks to the simplicity there.

The Epicureans were not the way we might think of as some who had a very sort of esoteric taste. Instead, Epicureans, again, very much focused on enjoying what you had to the fullest. That was their account of wellbeing. I found the Stoics more interesting—again thinking in terms of how they would live the good life. And they talked in terms of control—the control of emotions. It wasn’t that someone wouldn’t feel emotions, but that, in fact, a Stoic would attempt to control his emotions. There is a degree of asceticism in Stoicism but it’s not extreme; it’s in terms of enjoying the life you have, not looking for luxuries, not luxuriating in it, but enjoying what you had living a comfortable life, living a life in control.

One of the interesting things about these ancient accounts of the good life is that they are very individualistic and they look to the individual man’s account of the good life. Some of the later accounts have a more expanded idea of the good life looking at a whole of society. And this is where, I think, the one that appeals to me most is the philosophy from Aristotle, who is the favourite—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): I would invite the member to come back a little more specifically to the bill—

💬 Hon Members: Oh!

And I will. I’m moving there, Madam Speaker.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): —disappointing though that is to other members of the House.

In particular, he had an account of the good life, of wellbeing, of the way that the well-rounded person lived their life. It was a man living on his property with his wife, his slaves, his cattle, and, in particular, what that meant was that he had a life of autonomy—and the person who was that was a citizen; a person who had standing; a person who had his own account and was worth being considered as part of the polity of the city.

Indeed, that is, in some ways, how we think of citizens as well. Now, of course, in our society it is not just propertied people who are regarded as citizens; we regard everyone as citizens. We regard everyone as being important and in that regard we think it is important that everyone has access to a life of wellbeing, that we structure our society and we structure our Government in such a way that we try to ensure wellbeing for all the people who live in our country—all those who are citizens here; not in the formal legalistic sense but everyone who is part of our society.

And that is precisely what we are trying to achieve with this bill. We are asking our Minister of Finance, we are asking the Budget process, to consider not just the bare bones of—I think it was Mr Yule who put it—“GDP, jobs, and economy” but to think about wellbeing, to think about how we achieve a good life for all our citizens. And this goes back straight to those very ancient ideas of thinking about how we achieve that good life. Now, famously, we know that GDP doesn’t measure what we need it to measure. I think Marilyn Waring, famously, said that when a man marries his housekeeper GDP goes down. Part of what happens with GDP is we don’t count unpaid work. GDP doesn’t assess what we need it to assess and that is part of what we are trying to do with this amendment to the Public Finance Act: to achieve a way of measuring more than GDP, more than the bare bones of the economy, more than the basic structures. And we are trying to do it in a way that Governments will be held accountable for achieving wellbeing.

So if we look at the particular aspects of the bill that’s sitting there it says two very important things in the bill. It says, first of all, that a Government in the Budget Policy Statement each year must set up the wellbeing objectives that will guide the Budget, and then it invites the Government to decide what those wellbeing objectives are. It says they must relate to the social, economic, environmental, and cultural wellbeing of the country and to any other matters. And having set those wellbeing objectives, then the Government will be held accountable on them.

And it’s quite important that individual Governments have the capacity to set different wellbeing objectives. Just as there were a variety of different accounts of the good life, a variety of different ways of understanding what a good and flourishing life looked like for different citizens, so each Government in turn could well set different wellbeing objectives, could choose different ways of setting out what it intended to do, of what was important to it, and then how it would measure those objectives. So in terms of what is going on in this really rather short bill, that’s the substantial change that is sitting in there: define what wellbeing is for that particular Government, then measure it, because we are what we measure.

So it is a profound change in the way we do our Budgets. This much-lauded Act, the Public Finance Act—and a justly lauded Act—did revolutionise the way we do our Budgets in New Zealand and it was part of a whole suite of changes to the way we did our public finances at the time. But in terms of what it sets out for our framework of how we understand the role of the Government, it is at best an attenuated framework. It is thin, it is narrow, it is concentrated only on the measures of the economy.

What we are doing with this Act is we are expanding that notion. We are creating a much richer account of how Governments go about the process of governing, how they go about the process of setting Budgets, how they go about the processes of holding themselves accountable. That is why this is such a revolutionary and a transformational approach to doing our public finances. I am looking forward to discussing this in depth in the Finance and Expenditure Committee.

The Finance and Expenditure Committee is well prepared to discuss this. In the last few months under the leadership of the former chair of the committee Michael Wood we had an intensive look at Treasury’s Living Standards Framework. So we went through the Living Standards Framework. We consulted experts like Paul Dalziel, Caroline Saunders, Arthur Grimes, and Marilyn Waring—it was such an honour to hear from her—and talked about how the Living Standards Framework was constructed, what was done well about it, what needed to be improved, what sorts of things it tried to measure, and where it wasn’t measuring stuff. So as a committee the Finance and Expenditure Committee has already had a good look at some of those issues. It means it will be well briefed to consider this particular bill.

I’m looking forward to considering it in the committee. I hope that in the process of doing that, that as the members of the Opposition grapple with the concepts in this, they too might realise that this change is worth supporting, that it is worth doing something like this to make our country a better place. I commend this bill to the House.