Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

I want to thank the Finance and Expenditure Committee for their studious work in going through this bill, and also for producing a very easy to read report from the committee, which I appreciate, and I’m sure all members do, and thank them for returning the bill to the House in good shape.

An awful lot has happened since I first introduced this bill in September last year, but the impacts of COVID-19 serve to reinforce the importance of the changes that this bill is making, as we’ve seen the devastating impacts of COVID-19 hit communities and economies worldwide. New Zealanders, more than ever, need a reassurance that their overall wellbeing is central to Government thinking and central to Government budgeting as well. And despite the strength of our economic and fiscal position going into COVID-19, we do need to bear in mind the health, environment, and social impacts of a pandemic such as COVID-19 and the long-lasting effects of those. So a wellbeing approach, as put into law by this piece of legislation, will continue to play a very important role.

Just before I move to talk a little more about the detail of the bill, I do want to highlight the fact that, as we put together Budget 2020, we endeavoured to do as we had done in Budget 2019 and do, effectively, what this bill now makes legislatively real, and that is include wellbeing reporting, include a wellbeing approach in the decision around priorities, and, overall, use it as part of our public financial tool kit. The reality, however, was that, when we came to put Budget 2020 to paper and finalise it, we were not able to complete the wellbeing outlook, which would be a core outcome of this legislation, simply because the people involved in doing so were 24/7 on the COVID response. That did not mean that wellbeing matters were not considered as we went through the COVID response and recovery programme, but it does mean that actually putting that into law in this way provides the belt and braces that I think we all, on this side of the House anyway, agree with.

It was 31 years ago that the Public Finance Act found its way through this House. I don’t think anyone here in the House today was present during that, but there are members of the House who were here. The Public Finance Act did make some profound changes to our system, and many of them are positive.

💬 Rt Hon David Carter: All of them are positive.

And in later years, when the Fiscal Responsibility Act—which Mr Carter was in the House for, I think—was included into the—

💬 Rt Hon David Carter: Straight afterwards—straight afterwards.

Actually, that’s true because you were replacing somebody who had something to do with it, but the Public Finance Act encompassed, eventually, the Fiscal Responsibility Act. I do believe the level of transparency that it brings is something that is important and is safeguarded by the changes made in this bill. Indeed, through the COVID-19 period, we’ve seen other jurisdictions struggling to generate data. The Public Finance Act actually has created and underpinned the system. It means that we have monthly accounts at a level and a depth that most other countries do not. So, actually, the system has served us well. But, as has been noted several times along the way, it is, however, narrow with regard to what it considers to be important when a budget, for example, comes to be put together. This Government, in particular, recognises that we need a much broader set of success measures. We have to go beyond the traditional gauges to get a full understanding of what is important in our society, what is needed to be funded, and use that to help assess what our priorities are and how we measure our success in going through that Budget process. So we have introduced this bill in large part to be able to ensure that that is now an automatic part of what we do within our public finance approach.

I want to reassure members across the House—and this was raised in the first reading—this in no way detracts from the core responsibilities under the Public Finance Act, and you’ll see in the Budgets that were produced in 2019 and 2020 that we continued to do all of the long-term fiscal work that is already within the Public Finance Act. This is about adding to our tool kit. This is about making sure that we recognise the full life experience of New Zealanders when we are putting Budgets together and we are assessing what we do.

So, to remind members very briefly, what the bill seeks to do is that the Government will be required, when creating future Budgets, to set wellbeing objectives and explain how those objectives will guide the development of its Budget, and for Treasury to report periodically on the state of wellbeing in New Zealand. As I say, we would look to do that at every Budget through the wellbeing outlook, but Treasury’s independent approach to do that on a regular basis will also assist us to do that.

It is important that each Government has some flexibility on how it articulates what it thinks about wellbeing and adapts their approach over time. We will be required to take into account a broad lens of the selection of wellbeing objectives, taking into consideration social, environmental, economic, and cultural factors. Treasury will be responsible for preparing their wellbeing report, including—and I thank the committee for their suggestions—a set of indicators that will be used using their best professional judgment. The first report on this will be due in 2022 and then every four years from that. It will complement a range of current reporting tools, including the investment statement and the statement on the long-term fiscal position, which are also required, at least every four years.

I believe we’re striking the right balance between requiring an enduring focus on wellbeing but at the same time retaining sufficient flexibility for improvements and changes over time. When we put this in the context of wider public finance reform, it is important to note that we have built on what has come before. The use of Treasury’s Living Standards Framework and its four capitals—human, financial, natural, and social—is a considerable advance on what had occurred under the previous Government. In addition to that, we now have Statistics New Zealand’s Indicators Aotearoa New Zealand project, which has given us indicators across all dimensions of wellbeing for New Zealanders, and when you sit this alongside the Public Service Legislation Bill, which has been introduced and is soon to come before the House, again from Minister Hipkins, you see a full suite of changes to our framework that I think enhance transparency and improve the amount of information that is in front of both the Government and New Zealanders when considering our Budgets.

So achieving genuine and enduring change in the way Budgets and policies are developed takes time. We know that we cannot meaningfully address long-term problems like child poverty, inequality, and climate change through a single Budget. We began our process with the first wellbeing Budget in 2019 that has now taken the first steps to measuring New Zealand’s success more broadly. We’ve delivered a Budget that embedded wellbeing at every step of its creation—from priority setting to analysis of proposals, to the final trade-offs that a Government must ultimately make.

This year, as I said at the outset, we were not able to fulfil all of those things in Budget 2020, but the wellbeing lens was important to the creation of the Budget, and the Budget itself still has the wellbeing of New Zealanders at heart. This Government is committed to taking a wellbeing approach to future Budgets, and this bill sets out the framework for that. At first glance, the changes introduced to the bill might appear to outsiders to be minor, but over time they will fundamentally improve the way Governments build Budgets and change the way we think about economic and fiscal policy in New Zealand. I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I recently got in trouble for using an expression that many people use, and I’m going to use another one now, which is “Fine words butter no parsnips.” I’ve never quite understood what exactly that means, but I think the intent of it is to say fine words are all very well but it’s actually the results and what you achieve that matters. That seems to be a theme that is becoming more and more prominent across the country as people see the difference between this Government’s intentions and the reality. I remember Bill English, the previous Minister of Finance bar one—Steven Joyce, of course—he characterised this Government, I think, quite effectively at the start as one that has great intentions but very little ability to deliver that. We’ve seen many instances of that recently, and this bill, with its fine words and its wellbeing, seems to me to be a perfect example of a Government that thinks that it’s the PR and the description and the intentions that matter, losing sight of the important reality and accountability that needs to lie behind it. That’s why we’re not supporting this bill and we see it as a distraction.

If we think about the gap between the intentions and reality, nothing is more stark than the border. When you think about wellbeing, which is what this piece of legislation is about, there are two biggest issues. We had Professor Easterlin, one of the leading intellectual figures on wellbeing economics around the world, come to New Zealand, actually, last week, hosted by Professor Robert MacCulloch up at the University of Auckland. He made the point that the two biggest indicators, or the most important things, for wellbeing, right across the world, every country, are always the same: health and jobs. On the health front, there’s nothing more important than keeping people safe, and we’ve been talking about the border at the moment, and what have we seen? Well, we’ve seen lots of fine words and lots of talk from the Prime Minister about how focused they are on getting things done. And what have we seen in reality? A complete shambles—a complete shambles. So no doubt, if we pass this law, we’d have a nice wellbeing intention in there that we’re going to keep the borders safe, and the reality would be just the same: a shambles. That’s what we’ve seen.

I remember, when I was on the Epidemic Response Committee during the lockdown—it was the greatest shock that I had through the whole process—we had the Commissioner of Police come in, Mike Bush, his last day; not a good last day for him. He came to the committee, and we’d heard all week the Prime Minister saying, “Ah, yes. People are coming in from offshore, but don’t worry, New Zealanders—don’t worry—because they’ll go off to self-isolation but the police will check on them within three days to make sure that they’re doing what they said they were going to do. Don’t worry, New Zealand; we’ve got everything covered.” We come along to this committee on our Zoom little computers, and we asked Mike Bush: “Well, have you been checking up on people within three days?” His answer was “No. No, we haven’t.” So that just laid bare the big gap between intentions and announcements and promises by the Prime Minister and the reality. It was the same then as it is now. And anybody that has been watching the news over recent times will have seen that.

It’s the lack of accountability that annoys people particularly. When things are going well, it’s all about decisive action from the Government, and the Government’s front and centre, the Prime Minister’s front and centre. And, when it’s going badly, well, it’s the system’s failure and those Ministers are nowhere to be seen. It is becoming a bit of a joke in this country: what does David Clark have to do to be sacked as Minister of Health?

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): If you can refer to that part of the bill, it would be really good.

Well, I will. The point I’m making is that this bill is, in its essence, about the statement of intentions about Government policy—such as keeping people safe; such as keeping the border tough—and they’d have a little measurement, but it’s the actual outcome that is the critical thing and the accountability.

I could run through so many things that would be included in the great list of wellbeing focuses of this Government that have been a complete flop. I can start with KiwiBuild, where they would have included in their wellbeing list in the Budget 100,000 houses to be built by KiwiBuild, and the abject failure and lack of delivery of that. I think we’re up to 323—something like that—fewer than the number of houses that the Prime Minister stopped from being built at Ihumātao by meddling and fiddling in that process. It’ll be interesting to see if we ever hear anything about that. So KiwiBuild was a flop.

💬 Infrastructure: we’re going to roll out all this infrastructure. We’re going to build the light rail down Dominion Road. That was going to help the wellbeing of people—nobody’s quite sure exactly how, because it seemed a very odd priority indeed and nobody was quite sure where it was going to. Was it going to Māngere or was it going to the airport? Was it going to be fast rapid transit or a slow tram? Nobody was quite sure, but, nevertheless, that was a focus, and it’s not being delivered.

Then, last year, at the first wellbeing Budget, with great trumpets, what did they announce? Mental health—$1.9 billion; we’re going to fix the problem. What have we seen, more than a year later? Well, nothing much, really. They’ve managed to spend about $20 million on extra actual funding for actual mental health delivery, which is a woeful effort nearly three years after a Government came in promising urgent and rapid response to the number one issue of the day, and they’ve been slow and ineffective.

So I’m not impressed by some glossy document being produced at the Budget calling itself a wellbeing Budget—having the arrogance to suggest that every Budget that came before wasn’t concerned about the wellbeing of New Zealanders. Of course they all were—all of them have been. You don’t have to be so arrogant as to assume you’re the first Government to come along and care about the wellbeing of New Zealanders, just because you list a whole bunch of things and actually don’t deliver them and have lots of intentions that you haven’t followed up on.

So poverty; so jobs—well, we’re losing jobs, and you can’t blame the Government entirely for the job losses, of course, that we’ve experienced over the past couple of months. They are to be expected from the extraordinary circumstances that we’ve had to deal with, with the closing of the economy. But the relevant question now before the country is: well, what are we going to do to reduce the damage in terms of job losses, and how are we going to get the country back on track? That’s where it becomes important to have a clear economic plan and good results from the investments that are then made. At the moment, the only economic plan that I can find that’s guiding the Government is debt-fuelled Government spending on a colossal scale and waiting for a vaccine.

It seems to me that this country deserves better than that and needs better than that, and that’s what we will be delivering over the next couple of months. When we think about a wellbeing Budget, we think about a Budget and Government policies and Government direction which is about encouraging the investment in the private sector to drive growth. It’s the tens of thousands of businesses, large and small—individuals and families making decisions about, “Yes, the world’s changed; I think I can make a go of this area here or this area here.”—figuring out how to, first, save their businesses; second, to rebuild their businesses; and, third, hopefully, to grow those business.

Policies that enable people or encourage people to do that by not overtaxing them, not regulating them to death, not changing the rules all the time, and allowing some investment to flow from offshore into those businesses—that’s the sort of thing that will improve the wellbeing of New Zealanders, because it will enable them to have a better chance of getting a job, a satisfying job, so that they can look after themselves and their families, so that they can provide opportunities for their kids to get ahead and know, and have the comfort to know, that their kids will be growing up in a country where they feel like they can reach their aspirations here. That’s what we all want to see in this country. It’s what we strive towards: a place where young New Zealanders can feel not like they’re making some kind of lifestyle choice to live in this beautiful country of ours but that they are confident that they can reach their full potential in a dynamic, growing economy that produces the jobs and opportunities that they need.

So that is my view of wellbeing, and it’s a pity that we’ve got a Government that seems to confuse the statement of good intentions and the reality of delivering on those. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Mr Speaker, it’s been interesting to me in the last few days—as I’ve moved about my home in Titirangi, as I’ve come down here to Parliament, as I’ve been out and about—the place feels pretty much like usual: cars on the roads, people in the cafes, retail functioning, people at work. In fact, were it not for the closed borders, things would feel pretty much the same in New Zealand.

Why is that? It is because this Government put the health response first. And that, to me, is a metaphor for what’s going on with this amendment to the Public Finance Act. It’s a wellbeing amendment, and what it does is it says that wellbeing matters, that measuring it matters, that if we put that front and foremost in our minds, we will get the rest of it right too, because, contra the previous speaker, Paul Goldsmith, we are not the servants of the economy; the economy is the servant of us, and it’s the servant of our wellbeing. That’s what this bill sets out to achieve: that, as well as having all the fiscal measures in the Budget, as well as focusing on economic measures, we will also—not instead of, but also—have a look at wellbeing measures. And that is actually going to be tricky to do.

I want to remind the Opposition and people listening at home that, when GDP was first introduced, our gross domestic product, it was a controversial measure and it was disputed for many decades as to what exactly should be included in GDP—that, at present, some things that we value, that have enormous value to us, never make it into GDP. Famously, Marilyn Waring has pointed out that women’s work doesn’t get counted in GDP, that GDP has some extraordinary difficulties in it in terms of things like—the production of milk powder counts for GDP, but breastfeeding a baby doesn’t. So it’s interesting what we do and we don’t value.

What we are trying to do with our wellbeing bill—it will take time to correct those things—is to add measures of wellbeing to what gets measured for the purposes of assessing the economy. I think that’s a really important thing to do in terms of our Budget. So what is important to New Zealanders? What are we trying to measure through wellbeing? Well, we’ll work that out over time. We have got the starting place of the Living Standards Framework. We’ve got the starting place of Stats New Zealand indicators. They will get us under way. So that’s a really important thing.

Now, I just sort of want to say here that—there is a quote I want to put out here in terms of thinking about what actually matters to New Zealand. So Richard Easterlin, the recognised founder of wellbeing economics—he was just quoted by the previous speaker—says, “If you look at what has been done”—this is a really interesting quote and it really focuses on wellbeing—“If you look at the concerns that are most important for people’s wellbeing, it’s three things: their job, family circumstances, and their health. The New Zealand approach involved a composite of attention to health and a job. So [what we did with] the wage subsidy, income support for the people that did leave their jobs … meant that people did not suffer nearly as much as they otherwise would have.” Again, it was a focus of our Government’s approach that was around wellbeing—and that’s terribly important to us as we face the COVID threat.

This is revolutionary work in a small and incremental way. Politics is a conversation. Economics is a conversation. The conversation over what wellbeing is—and how it should be measured, and what we should focus on—will go on for years and years and years, as it should, as it should. But, above all, we’ll be guided by the basics. And for those basics, I want to refer to something that a great Labour Prime Minister said—Norman Kirk—and we quote it often because it is dear to our values: New Zealanders don’t want much. What they want is someone to love, somewhere to live, somewhere to work, and something to hope for. That is why I endorse this Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Bill.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I must say, having listened to the member who’s resumed her seat, Deborah Russell, this is not this peace and love out there in the community. I don’t see it recently. People are getting sick to death of being told to go round and be kind to each other when all they want is the Government to be competent. I think that, instead of having a bill called the Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Bill, we could just have instead a “Public Finance (Competence) Amendment Bill”. People actually want the Government to do its job, and what we’re seeing is an awful lot of talking about how it’s going to be peace and light and everyone’s going to just be happy and friendly and everything’s going well and we’re going to start measuring it, when we’ve got a Government that no longer measures the sorts of things that a lot of people think a Government should—for instance, whether or not they’re actually undertaking the COVID-19 tests on people when they come through the border. People, strangely enough, think that that’s actually quite important, and I know that the other side might not like hearing that, but that is actually the sort of thing that people want to know about.

They also want to know that something’s happening about reducing assaults on children, and yet this Government has actually scrapped the targets about reducing assaults on children. As part of wellbeing, they might want to consider whether or not we could be looking at increasing participation in early childhood education, and yet that target that the National-led Government had has been scrapped by this Government. They might also, as part of wellbeing, think that it’s a good idea to increase infant immunisation rates, but again, that target has been scrapped by this current Government. The public might also think that part of a wellbeing amendment bill might actually be focused on things like reducing total crime and reducing reoffending, and of course those have also been scrapped by this Government. This is a bill which is all about promoting an ideal which is that everyone’s going to be all feeling well and it’s all wonderful.

Actually, you can’t legislate for that. It’s not possible to legislate for people to be having good wellbeing. What it is possible to do is to actually have a Government showing competency. We talk about something like mental health. Huge amount of effort put into mental health over various years by very, very many very deeply committed people, who have tried their very best in difficult situations. Instead what we’ve seen is a big announcement in last year’s Budget on mental health funding. The trouble is almost none of it’s spent. What we saw instead on the ground was that the mental-health workers who had been for some years working with Counties Manukau police, Christchurch police, and also Wellington in the watch-houses—or as they call it the custody suites—removed; removed these people from the front line, where they were doing a tremendous amount of good. Where’s that in the Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Bill? Where’s that? Where’s the practical application of wellbeing? And the answer is that this Government’s simply not up to it.

The member who’s resumed her seat has talked about issues like jobs as being very important for people’s wellbeing—it certainly is. And what we’ve seen so far are 40,000 people whose jobs have been lost through absolutely no fault of their own. And that is the sort of thing that we’re going to be seeing more and more in this country. Once the wage subsidy finishes, once people start to realise that there are no jobs that they would be otherwise expecting, when we see a generation coming through that is looking at their education having been completed and no job to go to, that is what’s going to affect people much more than a bill coming through Parliament telling us that we’re going to take wellbeing seriously. People want their jobs, and the one thing that we know from any person is that being able to work, to be able to feel that they can contribute in a positive way and to feel that their contribution is valued and properly rewarded, is the single-biggest thing that anybody can do to help someone else’s wellbeing. That is also the single-biggest thing that anyone can do for themselves, to help themselves mentally, physically, and financially.

It is really important that New Zealanders have some confidence in this Parliament in being able to help set some of the leaders around how we can keep people in work. What we can do, for instance, is we could, as part of this bill, be thinking about whether or not we could be fast-tracking any infrastructure projects, which we’ve talked a lot about in Parliament but seen nothing of. We could, as part of this bill, be thinking about how we can help get people back into work where they have lost their jobs. Think of all the people in the tourist industry who have lost their jobs. Where’s their wellbeing going to be on any matrix that this Government may wish to implement? It’s going to be pretty bad.

I saw just recently on television a story of a man who is a pilot who is now working sorting mail for New Zealand Post. He showed the most incredible mental strength of being able to adjust his expectation of what he is able to do at this stage and showed incredible resilience. Most people in New Zealand will not have that sort of resilience. Most people will not be able to adjust themselves, their expectations, and their own mental health to be able to deal with the situation that’s coming down the track at them, and that is the economic crisis that we are moving into. This is actually a time when the core functions of Government need to be very focused on how to reduce compliance costs, to reduce costs generally on businesses, and to keep people in work. As that gentleman showed on television the other night, all work is good work if you’re paid for it and your health is actually part of that equation.

Work is incredibly important. I am seeing people who are now deeply angry that their wellbeing has been put at risk by the lack of quarantine at the border. I have seen people who have moved from hoping everything was fine and their wellbeing would be fine to now wondering if they have not been told the full truth about what was happening, and that is what we’re seeing. That is the single-biggest concern—the fact that they do not trust what is being told to them on the health front. So how can they possibly trust what is being said on the economic front? This country is going through, and is about to move into, a very, very dangerous economic time—a dangerous economic time for generations to have to deal with, to repay debt, to be able to deal with the fact that a lot of people who are used to working are no longer going to be able to work. They are going to deal with the fact that many students will be coming out of training and not being able to work. What this Government should be focused on is how to get people into work, and one of the best ways is to make sure that those businesses that employ people are focused and able to actually employ people.

Instead, almost everything we’ve seen from this Government has been about restricting employers’ ability to employ people, by putting rules around them, making it harder to take people on who you want to give a chance to. These are the sorts of people who are going to need help, and the best way of doing it is not about imposing more costs and restrictions on employers but actually helping those employers to be able to take risks and to give people an opportunity. Most people in this country are not employed by the Government. We should be very deeply grateful for that. That actually means that most people are engaged in activities that the Government shouldn’t have to constantly interfere in, and most people are employed in small and medium size businesses. And it’s those people, those small and medium size businesses and the owners of those businesses, the people who have risked their own capital and, in many cases, their entire financial wherewithal to employ other people—they’re the people who need help. They’re not the people who are going to be impressed by a bill called the Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Bill.

What they’re going to be doing is saying, “When is this Government going to give businesses a break? When’s this Government going to listen to small businesses? When are they going to look at those who actually employ people, who risk everything to do that, and give those people a hand?” And that hand is not a hand to slap them down; it’s a hand to build them up.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise to offer New Zealand First’s continued support for this Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Bill, which looks to upgrade the Budget-setting framework to take in a broader suite of measures. As we know, GDP is a very blunt tool. In fact, as Dr Russell outlined in her contribution, the bloke that actually developed it warned against using it as a very narrow measure, because it is a measure of economic activity but it is very narrow.

We saw that in the previous term of the Government, when we had this illusion of what was called at the time a rock-star economy, when we had massive inequalities building up in this country. We saw people living in cars and on the streets and things that I never thought I would ever see in New Zealand. Those things were happening and were gathering pace whilst the very wealthy in this country were doing very well, thank you. Also, there’s the issue of negative externalities, and we’ve seen that in the environmental space, where some of our practices had led to negative environmental outcomes that we are now having to go back and try to reverse engineer and rectify.

This bill does mean that the Government of the day will have to take in social, environmental, and cultural wellbeing alongside economic benefits. I think it speaks to New Zealand’s character and our egalitarian heritage and ethos that I think most of us would aspire for this country to have. That’s been our history, and this bill encapsulates that. We don’t have to look too far back to the “mother of all Budgets”. The “mother of all Budgets” wouldn’t have got through this framework—that kind of slash and burn - type mentality that had repercussions for decades to come. This would not allow that.

You know, I listened to the previous speakers from the National Party talking about—well, I’m not sure what they were talking about, essentially, in terms of where they were coming from, because I’ve heard their leader, when asked what their plan was, say, “Well, we don’t know if we’d borrow more or we don’t know if we’d borrow less.” And, judging by some of the announcements that have come out since then, it will be borrowing more; essentially, paying employers to take people on. Last time I heard, that was called socialism, and I never thought I would hear that from the National Party, but it seems to be the muddled position that they are in at the moment. They just do not seem to know where they stand. But at least, under this piece of legislation, when it goes through, they will have to take into account this broader suite of measures.

This is a more modern lens to have for our Budget-setting framework, so New Zealand First will continue to support this bill. Thank you.

If I could just, first of all, comment on the contribution we’ve just heard from Mark Patterson. He said that he didn’t believe that the Ruth Richardson Budget of 1991 would have been accepted by this House under the new rules associated with the wellbeing framework. I might point out to the member that even Grant Robertson, in introducing the second reading of this bill, pointed out that Budget 2020 did not meet the wellbeing framework that the Government’s promoted, either, because there simply wasn’t time, in view of the COVID crisis, to adhere to the rules that the Government’s attempting to establish around a wellbeing framework. So I don’t think there’s much validity in the argument advanced by Mr Patterson.

Can I start by saying I don’t think there would ever have been a member of Parliament elected to this House that didn’t come into this House caring for the wellbeing of all New Zealanders. To suddenly think that Budget after Budget’s been presented in this House without a care at all for the wellbeing of New Zealand is, frankly, just nonsense. We had the first Wellbeing Budget presented with a lot of fanfare last year. Then, within 12 months, we had the next Budget, the 2020 Budget, delivered into this House and the framework being promoted by the Government—it didn’t have time to meet its own framework.

I say to the Government that, at a time when this country’s facing an economic crisis like we haven’t seen for 160 years, to start fiddling around changing the Public Finance Act with a little bit of fluffy nonsense shows just how out of touch this Government is with the suffering that most New Zealanders are facing today. We have massive and growing unemployment, we have business under real stress, and the Government’s answer, in the dying days of this Parliament, is to bring forward a bill for its second reading which adjusts the Public Finance Act and incorporates the wellbeing framework. It just staggers me how out of touch Labour, New Zealand First, and the Green Party are with the situation—the economic crisis—that exists in this country today.

Grant Robertson, in his contribution, noted the importance of the Public Finance Act enacted in 1989, coupled then with some very good work which the Hon Ruth Richardson did do: the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1994. Both those pieces of legislation combined are recognised right throughout the world as delivering a fiscal security to Budget preparation that’s been adhered to by successive National-led Governments, by successive Labour-led Governments—basically, since the 1990s. But to come to a situation today whereby simply putting in a bit of fluff around wellbeing is going to suddenly change the nature and the delivery of wellbeing to New Zealanders, frankly, just does not stand the test. The Government should be facing the crisis that this country’s in. There is real suffering out there. We all now know of businesses that were supported temporarily with a wage subsidy, and now that the wage subsidy is coming to an end, they are having to face laying off staff because businesses will not survive.

Deborah Russell mentioned that everything was back to normal. She mentioned that retail in this country is good. Go and talk to the retailers, Deborah Russell. Just walk down the main streets of Wellington or Christchurch or Auckland and see for yourself that retailers are struggling. Everything is not fine. What New Zealand wants at this stage is a Government of competence. We started this term with a lot of talk around building tens of thousands of houses and KiwiBuild. That’s almost been taken out of the lexicon now because it was an absolute failure.

I do accept we then moved to the challenge around COVID-19, and for a long time the people of New Zealand were prepared to go along with the border restrictions, with the level 3, level 4, level 2, and now to level 1, in the belief we were getting COVID-19 under control in this country. But they expect—and, in fact, they demand—some competency around quarantining and some competency around our borders. Even today in the House, we cannot find out how many people have left compulsory quarantine—assured of testing before they left—how many people have now been able to leave from there without any tests being done? To me, it’s simple. In fact, I think the Prime Minister gave us a figure this afternoon in question time: 4,300 people have now been quarantined and have left. The very simple question the country’s asking is: how many of those people were tested?

Now, it just defies belief that the Ministry of Health has not got a record of every COVID test, the person that was tested, the date it was done, the time it was done, and subsequently add to that record whether it was a positive test or a negative test. It just defies belief that that figure can’t be available. And, in the meantime, while we’re asking for competency from this Government, all they can do is rush forward with a piece of legislation that, incidentally, was introduced in the House last year, in September, reported back this year, in March, has sat on the Order Paper and suddenly, in the last few weeks of sitting of the 51st Parliament, Grant Robertson decides it’s important enough to bring it into the House to progress a second reading today. It’s that lack of competency shown by the Government that has every New Zealander worried.

Can I just say, in my final comments on this piece of legislation, that the select committee received numerous submissions. We spent some hours working on this piece of this legislation, and we made one momentous change, one momentous change that Deborah Russell as the chair will be forever proud of. She has recommended, out of the whole bill, we remove the word “appropriate”. So new section 26NB, in clause 8, “Wellbeing Report”, as introduced said in subsection (2), “Using appropriate indicators, the report must describe—(a) the state of wellbeing in New Zealand; and (b) how … [it’s] changed over time; and (c) the sustainability of, and any risk to, the state of wellbeing in New Zealand.” Fluff words, and our contribution through hours and hours of select committee work was to suggest the removal of the word “appropriate”. Give me a break!

If this is the most important thing this Government can do at a time of absolute economic crisis, God help us, and hurry up and bring on an election—19 September 2020—and let the country wake up to the total incompetency of this Government. May we not see another three years of the incompetence of Labour, New Zealand First, and the Green Party.

It is always a pleasure to follow the Hon David Carter in debate. I want to just start by thanking him for his acknowledgment of what a well-crafted piece of legislation this was when it first entered the House—that it required so little amendment as it passed through its select committee stage. I also want to thank the Hon Grant Robertson for bringing this legislation to the House and ensuring that we are going to be able to get through it before the House rises for the election. That is because this piece of legislation was actually part of the Green Party’s confidence and supply agreement with Labour. It is good to be part of a Government that is delivering on something that the Green Party has stood for for several decades in this House. I also want to acknowledge Dr Kennedy Graham, because in some ways this bill is the inheritor of Dr Graham’s member’s bill of some years ago, the Public Finance (Sustainable Development Indicators) Amendment Bill, which was a first cut at saying, well, look, if you had to start thinking about a broader set of measures for the sustainable development of a country as part of your fiscal and budgetary process, how would that look?

I missed some of the earlier contributions, I’m afraid. But I have to say, having listened to the contributions of the Hon Judith Collins and David Carter, I have some good news for them. One of the things that they were asking for is competent Government and why we don’t measure competent Government. And I have some good news: (a) there is a competent Government, but (b) trust in Government is one of the measures that form the wellbeing framework. So we are actually doing the very thing that the Hon Judith Collins spent a good portion of her speech asking for, which is, actually, when you elevate it up, what we refer to as social capital, and the idea that you can trust in the institutions of Government and the broader Public Service are part of what got us through the worst of the COVID-19 crisis. Because we had built in this country, over many decades, a sense that we are all in this together, there’s a strong sense of social capital, and that needs to be nurtured if we’re going to get through the rest of this crisis.

Ms Collins also asked for a measure about reoffending. The health of the justice system and the rate of reoffending is one of the things that forms the measures in the wellbeing framework. I’ve got some news for the Hon David Carter in this, as well, who said, “Is now the time, when we’re in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, to be looking at the wellbeing of our people?” I would say this is exactly the time that you want a coherent framework, a comprehensive and cogent framework, for looking at how our people and our country are doing. Ms Collins asked about, “What is the practical application? Is this just some kind of piece of fluff?” Actually, the good news, again, for the Hon Judith Collins is that the practical application of this comes down to our budgetary processes. The idea that, actually, bids that come forward to Treasury have to be measured not only on their traditional benefit-cost ratios but on this broader set of measures that says, well, how are they building our social capital, our human capital, our natural capital, our built-in environmental and cultural capital, as well. So all of the things that they were asking for, we are delivering, and it’s a shame that they can’t support that but there we go.

Now, I would like to just come back to some of the substance of the bill and some of the history which is reflected in it. One of the questions that have been raised in this debate is why it is that we’re amending the Public Finance Act in reference to these questions around this broader set of measures as opposed to any other part of our legislative framework. If you think about finance as the measurement and management of built and financial capital, that has been the way that, you know, we’ve treated the role of Government in this country for a very long time. That is, of course, what the purpose of the existing Public Finance Act is: is to say, well, how does Government measure, manage our built-in financial capital and assets.

Now, my second professional job was at that crazy hippie organisation Pricewaterhouse, back in the late 1990s; so this is over 20 years ago. Pricewaterhouse started looking at non-financial forms of capital that would be important in the measurement and management and running of its large corporate clients around the world. We started looking at things like social capital, and natural capital, and intellectual capital, brand value, and so on. A series of intangibles—or some were tangibles and some were intangibles—that added to the value of a company that far outstripped the aggregate of its, kind of, hard assets and financial capital. This was largely derived on some earlier thinking in the 1990s about the idea of a balanced scorecard that companies were starting to develop: the idea that you would have some kind of dashboard that included the company financials but also started to look at things like how are your people doing, how is your product doing, and so on—this idea that you could develop a comprehensive view of the organisation that included, but was not limited to, its financial wellbeing. And so, really, all we are doing here is taking thinking that is decades old—it stretches right back to the 1990s when the Public Finance Act had its genesis. And 20 years behind some of the most conservative accounting organisations on the planet, we are starting to think about how we incorporate that thinking into the running of a country. It’s that simple. That’s what we’re doing. We are developing a comprehensive set of indicators across our financial, our economic, our social, and our environmental capital and saying, “How are we doing as a country?” And our traditional economic measures have an important role in that, but it is not limited to that.

The reasons for that have been well articulated on this side of the House. When you focus only on a narrow set of economic indicators, you lose the sense of how you’re actually doing as a country. That is why we had year after year of GDP growth and people living in cars and garages growing at the same time. We had years and years of GDP growth and an extension of pollution in our rivers that got to the point that you couldn’t actually swim in them anymore. Years and years of GDP growth and the worst housing crisis in this country’s history, locking out first-home buyers, driving up house prices, causing endemic poverty around New Zealand. If you are going to have any sensible way of running a country at all, you have to look at these things side by side, and that is why the correct location for this work is inside the Public Finance Act, because, like I said, this thinking has been around for decades, the idea that financial capital is not your only form of capital. And for us to be able to have any sort of coherent sense of how our financial capital is doing versus our natural capital versus our social capital or our human capital, those things have to be inside the same framework. That’s it. It is actually very straightforward. It’s very simple. It’s been around in the private sector that the National Party has worshipped at the altar of for decades. We are merely adopting what is now common practice around the world.

David Carter did say that our existing fiscal framework is the envy around the world; it’s been acknowledged around the world. So is this. This is derived from an OECD framework; it has been picked up by other countries around the world—Ireland is the most recent country to say that there is no reason that, just because we innovated something 30 years ago, we can’t innovate something else now that will be similarly adopted around the world. There is a recognition that, actually, the framework that we’ve operated under for three decades now has run its course and we do need to innovate. We do need to think more about the next 30 years and how we manage ourselves as a country. So I am delighted that we are paying attention to this bill at this particular time. It is critical that we look at the wellbeing of our people during the COVID-19 crisis, and I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I always quite enjoy following the co-leader of the Green Party. He always comes up with something new, and the new thing I have just learnt—and it clearly is part of the wellbeing technology—is that of a professional job. Frankly, I think this bill’s a little bit of an amateur job, but none the less we’ll get on to that in a minute. The last speaker also gave me little confidence in a competent Government, and it’s taken them three years and many weeks of urgency, actually, to finally get this piece of legislation back for a second reading. If that was part of the confidence and supply agreement with the Greens, well, they’ve got it here at last.

We in the National Party most certainly support the wellbeing aspiration of New Zealanders, and that was emphasised in the speech that our leader, Todd Muller, made in Te Puna a couple of weeks ago. There’s no question that we all come to this House for the same reason; we just have very different ways of going about it at times, and I don’t think that this bill is a way that—well, I know that this bill is not a way we would have gone about this, and I’ll explain why. We also support the view that Governments should have a broader focus than just GDP as the range of measures of success. One of the great challenges that this Government’s going to face in the next year or two, or whoever is the Government in the next year or two, will be—

💬 Hon James Shaw: Thank you for your endorsement.

—you might hope you’re not, James—the fact that, if the Government’s not careful, it’s going to be the sole instigator of GDP in this country, and that, for an economy, is a massive challenge. So I think that, in the aftermath of COVID, it’s most important that we have a broad source of GDP and that our Government encourages private enterprise to get moving on a lot of the issues that they would be very good at.

The Public Finance Act is one of the pillars of Government in New Zealand, and I agree with the Minister that it’s a very good piece of legislation. It’s stood us in very good stead over the years, but it cannot be all things to all people. If it’s meant to be all things to all people, it will most certainly undermine its focus and the very important role it plays in New Zealand’s economic structure. I’m one of those people who believes decision making involves something of a hierarchical process, and if we undermine the hierarchical process, we will not always get the outcomes we’re looking for.

I listened to a number of the submissions on this bill and I thought that some of them were very good submissions on wellbeing, and I guess the thing that I wondered was how it actually fits into the Public Finance Act and how some of those submissions fitted with what this bill is designed to achieve. One of the submissions I particularly enjoyed, and the first thing is it was a submission from Marilyn Waring, who talked at length on issues of wellbeing in New Zealand. It’s been, of course, a lifelong—I suppose you could almost say—love for her and a thing that she’s concentrated on, and she had an opportunity in this bill to put her point very strongly. But, under this bill, in the first part of the bill, the Government’s required to report annually on its wellbeing objectives in the Budget. One would imagine that, for this to mean anything, we’d be provided with comparisons or with a form of measuring those wellbeing objectives, and I have yet to see any proof that that’s going to be given to us in a form that is easy for the public to understand and is usable.

The second part of the bill relates to Treasury’s role in this, and Treasury is to report periodically on the state of wellbeing in New Zealand. I think the bill recommends that “periodically” might mean “four years”, or four-yearly, which clearly means that you’re going to get in one term of Government a year with no report in it, and maybe the other two with a report in them, and you’d never know how that would work out. But how this relates to the first requirement of the Government to report on its wellbeing objectives, I’m not quite sure. There’s no clear direction on how that would happen, and I can imagine the vociferous noise coming out of finance Ministers of all ilks when Treasury reports something they don’t like, because you only have to listen to the actions of this Government when Treasury’s talked about things they don’t like to see that Treasury will come under significant criticism if, in fact, it doesn’t agree with the Government’s view. So I think the whole objective of this is a bit unusual.

In the Minister of Finance’s first reading speech, he stated—and I’ve yet to understand it fully—“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’s] in a Budget.” I think we get elected to this House to bring our collective views to what appears in a Budget, at the end of the day. To achieve that, we rely on a whole lot of information given to us by all sorts of agencies, but we—most importantly—need to understand the facts, and we often don’t understand those facts. Given the statement by the Minister of Finance in his first reading speech, I don’t think that that—including in the Public Finance Act—is going to make it any easier or any simpler for the Government to develop a Budget. I just think that it’s blurring the edges, basically. I think that we need to have sound, concrete statistics, and shortly after arriving on the Government benches, this Government scrapped the 10 public service targets that the previous Government had put in place. Those public service targets measured things specifically, and they were very useful determinants of what was going on.

The other thing they’ve done since then was to scrap the health targets, and I think we can argue all we like about the structure of the health industry in New Zealand, but the health targets were a very useful indicator of what was going on. I’m testament to that because I’ve now got a new leg, and I tell you what an amazing difference it makes to you. If the health system can provide a difference like that to people’s lives, we need to be measuring how quickly it’s doing it and how efficiently it’s doing it. I think it’s most important that we have targets in our system and that we not only have targets but we have measurements that we can clearly understand and that are accessible and easy for the public to understand. That’s one of the challenges I think we have with a lot of things that we do in this House: we don’t make it easily understandable.

The other thing is that I referred earlier this afternoon to a select committee process that I thought was pretty extraordinary, and it was hugely collegial. The select committee process on a lot of these bills doesn’t consider alternative views, and this one didn’t consider many other views at all. It pretty much came back to the House as it was, but that’s not unusual for legislation to do that after going through a select committee process. I think it’s critical that we have a strong, resilient, and sustainable economy and good decision-making by Governments, and good policy development and legislation regulation made by Governments is absolutely critical to good decision-making and to a good, strong, and sensible economy.

Lastly, I just want to refer to another issue that James Shaw talked about, and that was that there are many other measures than financial capital. I suppose, being a farmer, I know there are many other measures than financial capital, because the financial capital is the last thing you need to consider in running a business like farming. You need to have it of course, but, actually, there’s a whole lot of other capital that you use in the course of farming: environmental capital, livestock wellbeing—all sorts of things. So I think the background I come from gives you a very good understanding of all the types of capital you need to run a business or a society, and, actually, farms, in a funny way, are societies. They’re societies of animals and humans all mixed together, and I think it’s pretty important that we understand that.

So I’m not sure where this bill’s going to get to or where the result of this bill will get to in the future, but I do think that trying to combine all of those, I suppose, “wellbeing factors” into a thing called the Public Finance Act—I don’t think that’s the answer. I think there are much better ways of doing that in the future. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

The next call is a split call.

I’d like to begin by acknowledging the optimism of the previous speaker, Ian McKelvie, around this Government being returned after the election. So thank you for that vote of confidence, to the member. Look, this bill is about leadership. It’s about the Government putting the wellbeing of people at the centre of all it does. I’m just going to take a very brief call, but I’d just like to highlight that something that’s come out of this bill is the Waikato Wellbeing Project, which is a regional initiative based on 10 Waikato wellbeing targets, based on the UN Sustainable Development Goals, an exciting project that we’ve seen come from the leadership the Government is providing. I expect we’ll see more of that, more of those examples spring up across the country. I commend this bill to the House.

It’s a pleasure to take a call on this bill. I wish to reflect on what a couple of my colleagues have said prior to me taking this call, and that is that it’s all very well setting targets and it’s all very well incorporating wellbeings, but what’s more important is what you actually deliver on and how you measure yourself.

So the principal difference, I think, between both sides of the House is that National has had targets when it was in Government. It had 10 Better Public Service targets. They were measureable, and, effectively, they measured a whole lot of things, including reducing welfare dependency, increasing participation in early childhood education, increasing child immunisation rates, reducing assaults on children, increasing NCEA qualification rates, reducing total crime, and reducing reoffending. That was a set of targets, they were measured, they were looked at, and they were reviewed on an annual basis. We also had a whole heap of targets in the health sector, which sought to measure the performance, the number of operations, the number of electives. This Government came in and, basically, chopped all that out, and said, “We’re kind and caring, and we’re different to the last lot, and we are going to make a fundamental difference.”

In reality, on just about every single measure I can think of, probably every measure, I can’t see any of that being achieved. Whether you’re talking about housing, whether you’re talking about mental health, big promises have been made but there are no specific targets to measure any of it. As a result, over time, we have learnt through written and oral questions from Ministers the rate of delivery. The housing one’s a classic—the housing one’s a classic: big promises at the election but a spectacular failure nearly three years into that first term of Government. Light rail’s another one—big promise.

💬 Dan Bidois: How’s that going?

I don’t think it’s going anywhere. I don’t actually think there is a plan, and it’s certainly not going to have been started by the start of this election.

So if you look at all those things, it is very easy to bring in a wellbeing sort of set of measures in the Public Finance Act and all you do is dilute and diffuse the objectives of what the Government’s doing because there’s no measurement around it; there’s no long-term, sustainable targets. We’re just going to look at a series of things and it’s going to influence our policy. What New Zealanders need is delivery of things that they are promised at the election from any political party. Our party—this party that I’m part of—have sought out to name and list some pretty significant targets, and the Rt Hon Bill English was largely responsible for that, because he saw, over his time in Parliament, decades of people talking about doing things and nobody ever doing it because it wasn’t measured. We oppose this bill on the basis that it just adds fluff—as the Rt Hon David Carter has said previous to me—just adds fluff to a whole lot of stuff, and it’ll make no difference whatsoever to anybody in terms of delivery. Who’s going to look at it, who’s going to listen to it, who’s going to read it?

In relation to Mr Jamie Strange, who spoke previously to me about the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, I’ve been to New York a number of times and I’ve sat in those meetings and they’re all laudable what they want, but, fundamentally, what New Zealanders want is a job, somebody to love them—as I think Deborah Russell said—some shelter, and a sense of safety; that’s really what they want. They’re not interested in what the United Nations is saying—they’re not interested in the United Nations. When you boil it down, all this is is diluting targets that the Reserve Bank and a whole lot of other people have to measure because the fluff gets so murky that they don’t know who the master is.

We oppose this bill. We had some set-out, clear, difficult targets to achieve, but we had them on the basis that they made a difference to New Zealanders’ lives, and as such we oppose the bill.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m pleased to take a call on this piece of legislation. What we have with this piece of legislation is a bill that embeds the wellbeing approach by requiring the Government and Treasury to report on the objectives and the state of wellbeing of New Zealanders. Why is that such a terrible thing for members opposite to comprehend and understand? It’s disappointing, to say the least, to see members opposite joking and ridiculing the wellbeing of New Zealanders, the arrogance and negativity to call it fluffy nonsense. Since when has caring about the wellbeing of New Zealanders been fluffy nonsense? Disappointing—negative National, as always. I commend this bill to the House.

Madam Speaker—oh, hello.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): I called you already.

Thank you—I didn’t hear you.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): I’m just not as loud in the voice as others.

Thank you. It was obviously the Government members trying to talk over the top and interrupt what was going on. I couldn’t hear you, Madam Speaker.

Well, I believe I’m the last speaker on this Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Bill.

💬 Dr Deborah Russell: Second to last.

Oh, second to last. Sorry, Ms Russell. The issue about this bill—and the previous speaker, Jo Luxton, just said, well, you know, we don’t understand it and it’s wrong—it’s wrong that the Opposition is so negative. I find that really quite an outlandish statement to make. One of the things that people say about National is that we are ruthlessly disciplined and have ruthless objectives. If anything, they say we over-measure. I haven’t yet ever met someone who’s said, you know, “National’s soft and flabby. You don’t like measuring and all that sort of stuff.” Here we are. We’ve got a bill here that’s starting to introduce a somewhat ill-defined concept into public finance.

Just to demonstrate, I think the person in National that best demonstrates that ruthless discipline in terms of making sure we deliver fantastic results and performance was Steven Joyce. In fact, many of my colleagues here just talk about him just pulling out the list of the targets that we had—and we had all these public sector targets—and he would sit there and go through the 261 of those targets and ask Ministers where they got to on number 203. If they hadn’t made enough progress, he would be doing it. We had lots of public service targets. Just an example: reducing welfare dependency, increasing participation in early childhood education, reducing assaults in children, increasing NCEA qualification rates, reducing total crime, reducing reoffending, and then we had all the health targets and all these other ones that we had.

💬 Rt Hon David Carter: Where are those targets now?

That’s right, the Rt Hon David Carter. Where are those targets now? That’s the issue. We ask day in and day out of the Minister of Health what’s happened to those health targets. I’ve heard my colleagues talk about where we’ve got to on mental health. Literally only $27 million has been spent on it, even though the Government announced they were going to spend, I think, $1.8 billion.

💬 Rt Hon David Carter: 1.9.

$1.9 billion—I stand corrected. That is the big difference. We were ruthlessly focused on it.

But what we’ve got with this bill is a bill that gives the warm glow of incompetence. It is one that we feel like we’re going to feel better, we’re going to make New Zealanders more connected, by somehow adopting this concept of wellbeing. We have sat in the Finance and Expenditure Committee and had presentation after presentation on the wellbeing process. We’ve talked often about the measures that they want to adopt. It’s very nice that the Minister of Finance is here. It would have been very important for him to actually be there, actually. One of the things that just repeatedly comes through those presentations—repeatedly comes through those presentations—is that this is an evolving concept and New Zealand is somehow out the front. When we asked about specific measures, they’re in the process of being developed. We are going from one Government, when we were in power, that was ruthlessly—one would almost say overly—focused on targets to one that is now about wellbeing; these soft measures that are unquantified, unspecified, and, certainly, not measured. That is the interesting thing in this bill.

This bill really, for the amount of time we spent on it, resulted, as many have commented, in one change, which is, in clause 8, new section 26NB “Wellbeing report”. Rather than saying “(2) Using appropriate indicators,”, we’ve deleted the word “appropriate” and said, “(2) Using indicators, the report must describe—(a) the state of wellbeing in New Zealand;”—that’s an interesting concept. I’m not sure how that’s going to be defined yet. It sounds nice. It’s got that warm glow, Minister of Finance. It sounds nice. I don’t know what that means. There’s “(b) how the state of wellbeing in New Zealand has changed over time;”. Well, if we had a starting point—if we knew what the measure was—we could measure it over time, but, actually, we’re missing that first instrumental part. And there’s “(c) the sustainability of, and any risk to, the state of wellbeing”—again, beautiful language—beautiful language. I do feel warm and glowing from that. But that is the issue—that is the issue about this. It doesn’t actually deliver the specific things that we really want to know.

Actually, we’ve now got a Minister who has overseen quite radical changes in the public sector. The first one was to the Reserve Bank, where the Minister of Finance introduced the second target for the Reserve Bank, around making sure we have full employment. Then we had the Budget reforms that we now talk about wellbeing. And now we’ve got this: the Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Bill. Now, if we happen to be in power on 20 September, I literally do not understand how we will go about trying to put this in place. I challenge all the members on the other side to be clear about it, because no one in the Finance and Expenditure Committee has any oversight or understanding of what this specifically means. That’s the issue with this—that is the issue with this. None of those advisers could help us on that aspect. That is why we’re against it.

Of course we not only want to see New Zealand improve from an economic perspective, which is really good, but we want to see it improve from a social perspective, law and order perspective, and community perspective—all that sort of stuff. To put this into a legal framework, you need to have done a lot more work than what’s gone on. It’s nice to be able to talk about it. It’s obviously going to come through in future Budgets if the Government gets back in. But, unless it delivers better outcomes for all New Zealanders—unless it delivers better outcomes—it is all fluff, to use the Rt Hon David Carter’s comment. I think that’s a shame. We should have done more work. We should have done the hard yards before we set about trying to implement a bill like this.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a delight to take a short call to finish off this debate. The previous speaker who just resumed his seat, Andrew Bayly, seemed to be pining for the past when he talks about “when we were in power” and he refers to his ruthless Government that was in power and did whatever they needed to do. There was another member, Andrew Bayly. Andrew Bayly was harking back to the past, talking about Bill English and John Key. Well, actually, this is no longer the party of Bill English and John Key; they’re a totally different party. In fact, this is a party who has discovered a new word. We’ve heard it all through their speeches, a new word. It is “competence”—competence from the safe-cracking party. What a laugh! I bet you New Zealanders wish that they had discovered that word when they were in Government, because they weren’t exactly a Government of competence.

Judith Collins mentioned that people want a Government to do the job. Now, this was the National Government’s record of competence: people living in cars, under bridges, and in tents; kids doing homework in the back of the car; and not being able to jump into the stream for fear of getting sick. That is their record of competence. We are fixing all those long-term challenges, and, at the same time, we are measuring it against wellbeing measures—stuff that actually matters to people. As my colleague Deborah pointed out, the question is: what actually matters to people? Well, it isn’t anything that the National Government did when they were in power. So I commend this bill to the House. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

The question was put, That the amendments recommended by the Finance and Expenditure Committee by majority be agreed to.