Public Finance Amendment Bill

on behalf of the Minister of Finance: I present a legislative statement on the Public Finance Amendment Bill to the House. I move that the Public Finance Amendment Bill be now read a first time.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Is there a legislative statement or not?

Hon CHRIS BISHOP: Yes, I said, “I present a legislative statement”.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Oh, sorry. OK. That legislative statement is published—[Interruption] Could we have a bit of quiet so we can hear ourselves. That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Hon CHRIS BISHOP: I move, That the Public Finance Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Finance and Expenditure Committee to consider the bill.

This is an important bill and it’s a little bit disappointing that it’s being dealt with at 10.29 p.m. on Thursday night—well, Saturday night, but of course it’s still Thursday in Parliament’s time—because the Public Finance Act has served New Zealand well for over 30 years. Our public finance system is highly regarded by overseas jurisdictions. So I want to be really clear that we are not proposing wholesale changes to the Act, but we’re introducing targeted amendments to strengthen fiscal transparency, remove unnecessary requirements, and improve how the Act works in practice.

In particular, we do want to signal we are going to be paying close attention to the recommendations of the parliamentary inquiry on performance reporting, which the Finance and Expenditure Committee is conducting, chaired by the very able Cameron Brewer. The inquiry is expected to report in the middle of next year and will address longstanding concerns about how the results of spending are reported. The Auditor-General, as members will know, has pointed out, particularly this current Auditor-General or the retiring Auditor-General, that it’s not always clear to parliamentarians when spending is appropriated through the system by this Parliament, whether it actually results in positive outcomes for taxpayers and New Zealanders. That was particularly the case in the six years of fiscal profligacy of the last, failed regime.

One change we are proposing to make is around fiscal risks. Members will recall that when this Government came to office in late 2023, preparing for the “mini-Budget”, as it was then called, it was not at all clear that the outgoing Government had adequately presented fiscal risks to the new Government. The statements were opaque and did not always lead to good public understanding. There have been operational improvements by the Treasury since then, including explicitly identifying time-limited funding and capital cost escalations. The bill makes these categorisations a requirement, so there are sensible changes there.

The last Government pretended that they were the first Government in human history to care about wellbeing. Of course, it is the Government’s first responsibility to look after the wellbeing of New Zealanders. Grant Robertson had this facile and fanciful view of the world that he was the first person in human history to come up with the idea that Government should look after their citizens, and, therefore, this fatuous insight required the insertion into law, the requirement for wellbeing Budgets. And members will recall glossy documents—taken by Grant Robertson himself—of mountains, and of social and human capital. There were lots of words and glossy pictures, and we had wellbeing into the Public Finance Act.

Ingrid Leary: Talk about the bill.

Hon CHRIS BISHOP: And Government was—well, I am talking about the bill; we’re getting rid of these requirements. That’s the whole point.

The Act was amended to make the Government articulate the wellbeing objectives that would guide the Government’s Budget decisions. Of course, building a stronger economy and delivering public services are the most important contributions the Government can make to socioeconomic, environmental, and cultural outcomes.

Now, if a Government wants to dream up any old thing and call it wellbeing, then they’re well-entitled to do that. But we should not pretend that the nebulous notion of “wellbeing”, inserted into law, makes everything better, and nor does it actually lead to Governments making good decisions. I’ll tell you what isn’t wellbeing: 120 billion bucks of extra debt, a ginormous increase in Government spending—that is not wellbeing. Inflation of 7.3 percent is not wellbeing. Rents going up by $170 a week on average is not wellbeing. And here’s the kicker—a particularly not-wellbeing thing would be—

Hon Willow-Jean Prime: Is living in a car.

Hon CHRIS BISHOP: —4,000—oh, ho, ho, ho! “Living in a car”, she says. Well, I’ve got the numbers. Guess how many children ended up living in cars between 2018 and 2023? There was a four-fold increase. Jacinda Ardern spent the 2017 election campaign talking about how no child should live in a car, and the numbers went up by 400 percent. So, actually, the squawking member over there, who pretends to care about the poor, knows that Labour’s approach was a failure, and simply harping on about wellbeing does not actually lead to better outcomes. What matters is good fiscal policy. Most importantly, what matters is good public policy, and that’s what this Government is focused on.

There was a requirement in the Public Finance Act, which we are soon to amend, which required the Treasury to produce a report on the state of wellbeing. It had to happen at least every four years. There was a report in 2022, and the Treasury opined on subjects such as work, care and volunteering, cultural capability and belonging—this is my favourite one—engagement and voice, leisure and play, and family and friends. All of these things are important things—all of these things are important things. But I think Treasury should be focused, and that the bright and talented people at Treasury should focus on economic and financial advice rather than preparing reports on whether or not people have friends and whether their life has meaning and purpose.

Now, that would be an interesting study—into the Opposition, who don’t have many friends. Actually, sometimes, they probably sit there at 10.34 at night in urgency and wonder whether or not their life does have any meaning and purpose, particularly when it comes to the things they are saying at the moment about the Budget.

If the Government in the future wants to produce a wellbeing report, of course it is free to do so, but it should not be a legal requirement in the Public Finance Act.

There was this ridiculous situation where Grant Robertson used to say, “Oh, look, there’s a very high bar for new spending in this Budget. We’ve had to put everything through the wellbeing analysis.” It turned out that doing a wellbeing analysis just literally meant the Government would fund whatever Grant Robertson thought they should fund. I actually think what they used to do in the Labour Party was sit around and put up every fanciful, fantasy idea they could possibly do, put them all on the side of their caucus room, and then fire darts at the at the massive board and whatever it just got included in the Budget. How else could you explain Grant Robertson never once sticking to his operating allowance? He used to turn up here and say, “Things are very tight this year. My new operating allowance is $3.2 billion and I will definitely not exceed it.” That’s what he used to say at the Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update—HYEFU—every December and everyone would go, “Oh, OK, yeah, fair enough. That’ll be interesting to see what happens.” And every year in May, in Budget, he’d say, “Well, look, we’ve just had to push out the operating allowance.”

But the nadir of all of this was Budget 2022, which was the worst Budget in New Zealand history, in which Grant Robertson said he would stick to—from memory—$4.2 billion. By way of context, the operating allowance in this Budget is $1.3 billion, so it was already at least three times larger than this year’s Budget. And he smashed it and ended up with a $6 billion operating allowance. This was the cost of living payment Budget—remember this?—when Grant Robertson turned up and said, “I’ve got a great idea for the cost of living—not fiscal discipline and restraining the growth of Government spending and being a friend to monetary policy. No, no, I’ve got a really good idea. We’re going to give everyone a free thousand dollars in New Zealand.”—including French backpackers who worked here 10 years ago on the vineyards down South, dead people, and investment bankers in London who got a thousand bucks in their New Zealand bank accounts, who used to email me and say, “That’s my Friday night drinks fund. Thanks very much, Grant Robertson.” That was the height of fiscal largesse and stupidity. Rather than actually running sound fiscal and monetary policy and being a friend to monetary policy, he decided to give everyone free money. Of course, all the chickens eventually came home to roost.

But in relation to the allowances, that was the Budget when Grant Robertson decided they were outside the allowance—the free thousand bucks he gave everybody wasn’t counted as part of the operating allowance. So, actually, what is required for true wellbeing is actually good economic wisdom, and that’s what this Government is going is going to do.

So these amendments are important. This ended up being a slightly more political speech than I thought it was going to be, but I remembered that we made a decision to get rid of these wellbeing things and it reminded me about just what a stupid idea it was in the first place. I mean, there were endless sort of The Economist articles about what a world-leading insight this was, that we were going to enshrine in law wellbeing as the centrepiece of fiscal policy for the first time in human history—as if Grant Robertson, of all people, had this insight that no one had ever had before: that Government should look after their people. Thankfully, these days of fantastical, illogical wisdom have been consigned to the dustbin of history. Let’s make sure these useless people on the other side never get back to do it ever again. [Interruption]

That’s enough. The question is that motion be agreed to.

What an extraordinary speech from this backwards-looking and backwards-thinking Government. It’s really interesting looking at what this bill does, because I would say that at least two of the items in it are about saving Nicola Willis from her own folly, and the third one is about escaping Government responsibility.

So let’s start on saving Nicola Willis from her folly. As we all know, when that Government took office, it turned out that Nicola Willis hadn’t bothered to read the previous Government’s Budgets, hadn’t bothered to pay attention to Labour’s election Budget, didn’t worry about understanding what was going on, and it became “Oh, no. Oh, no. I have to pay for something I didn’t think I had to pay for.” That’s the fiscal risk. They spent a lot of time talking about fiscal cliffs. All they were were things that Nicola Willis didn’t bother to look at, so she didn’t take them into account. So at least part of this bill is just about saving face for Nicola Willis. That’s the first thing that is wrong with this bill.

There’s another little wrinkle in this bill which is terribly interesting, and it’s also about saving Nicola Willis. It’s the bit about enabling the use of variable measures—sorry, it’s enabling the Government to express its fiscal strategy using alternative fiscal variables, like operating balance before gains and losses (OBEGAL) versus OBEGALx—the new fiscal measure that made its appearance just this year in order to enable that Government to claim that it was meeting its objective of getting rid of the deficit. The only way it could be done was by having a new and fanciful fiscal variable that no one had ever used before, so much so that Treasury wouldn’t agree to it being called by a proper name and it had to be called OBEGALx. So two things there that are all about saving someone’s face.

And the third thing: changing the rules around wellbeing budgeting. Now, we had a good stand-up comedy routine over there—great stand-up comedy. Chris Bishop is good at that. What we didn’t have is a sensible analysis of that thinking behind the Wellbeing Budget. We all know that Government sets fiscal policy, but fiscal policy has an impact on people’s lives. We need to measure not just where money goes in and money goes out—what gets spent on particular programmes and what doesn’t—but we actually need to try to understand how it affects people’s lives.

This is something that has been worked towards by eminent economists such as Amartya Sen, trying increasingly hard to work out how we best enable people to live good lives. We’ve had a longstanding understanding now that measures such as growth and GDP do not capture the richness of people’s lives. That is what one of the most eminent economists produced by this country has shown us, Professor Marilyn Waring—a former National Party member—that we need to have a much wider understanding and a much wider measuring of what life is like for people beyond the mere dollars and cents.

That’s why we introduced wellbeing budgeting. It was to try to enable Government to do much, much better than just looking at the sterile numbers of GDP—just looking at the dollars in and dollars out. It was trying genuinely to engage with the lives that New Zealanders live and making it a key part of Government’s plan each year. That’s all a Budget is: it is the Government’s plan, obviously expressed in terms of money and all those sorts of things, but also expressed in terms of what the Government is trying to achieve. So we were to report on it, and this shoddy piece of legislation gets rid of it. We oppose this bill.

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. I actually think that when the Hon Chris Bishop gets all self-righteous and angry and talks about how terrible the last Government was, it’s a little bit because he’s probably a bit embarrassed about that previous bill that we were debating and the fact that they’ve set up yet another agency, Invest New Zealand, which could absolutely be a Utopia episode.

Look, in fact, the Greens’ interest in the Public Finance Act and improving that goes back many, many years. I mean, I think Jeanette Fitzsimons was talking about it. My colleague Dr Kennedy Graham had a member’s bill; the Public Finance (Sustainable Development Indicators) Amendment Bill was a member’s bill that would have brought in some very precise indicators that should have been inserted into the Public Finance Act. That would have been really excellent.

Ultimately, I think what was trying to be achieved by the Wellbeing Budget was trying to get at that idea that we can have better information and better understanding about how Government investment and support for people flows through and is effective or is not effective. I think everybody realises that, for decades, the traditional method of looking at it hasn’t enabled us to make the investments that we need to make, and it certainly isn’t recognising the enormous costs and risks of carrying on with the status quo. A perfect example of that is the idea of just going for growth—growth in anything. If growth is growth in fossil fuel extraction and use, that’s not a productivity gain, that’s not helping us live a better life; it’s actually putting us at risk of more climate change, which is really bad for us. It’s more storms, it’s more death, it’s more famines, it’s more floods, it’s more fires. And we know that’s already happening.

But it’s like—you’ve got to join the dots. If we have an earthquake in Christchurch, GDP will go up. It’s not that we’re better off from the earthquake, it’s just that there’s more activity as a result of the earthquake, and that’s all that’s being measured. I think we are actually having an inquiry at the Finance and Expenditure Committee about getting better measures and reporting from Government departments on the value of the things that they’re doing, and I think that is really useful and constructive. But I think the debate in the House under urgency about a bill like this isn’t very illuminating.

We should all care about having more effective measures of what it is we’re doing and more effective ways of keeping track of how Government investments are not supporting people. I was really hopeful when I first came to this House that that might be something we’d be doing by now. But instead we have this highly politicised approach, which is one Government does something, the next one comes in and says, “Oh, wasn’t that a big disaster?”, and doesn’t actually take a nuanced look at what was good and where things went wrong but just comes out, points blame, and frivolously and shallowly repeals things and then makes a bunch of announcements. It’s just like—it must be so tiring and boring for New Zealanders at home, and I don’t blame people for losing faith in the political system when all you hear is politicians on one side talking about how the other side are idiots and vice versa. Like, actually, we have some problems in common and we should be trying to work on them together. I think the Government’s reaction to the Green Budget is a pretty good example of not taking a constructive approach. They’re terrified. The Prime Minister spent most of his Budget speech talking about our Green Budget rather than looking at the merits of what we are proposing.

So the particular proposals in this bill I don’t think are particularly useful. We actually are open to the more flexible fiscal variables, but we need further time to investigate that properly. So if we have time, and I’m actually not sure if we’re doing the second reading straight after this or whether this is going to select committee—

Hon Chris Bishop: Committee.

Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: If it is going to select committee, then that will be useful. But, initially, we oppose it because of the removal of the wellbeing requirements—but are open to looking at it further in select committee.

I rise on behalf of ACT to speak in support of the Public Finance Amendment Bill. In ACT, we’re actually very excited to be supporting this because, obviously, people will know that the Public Finance Act 1989 was introduced by no other than ACT founder, Sir Roger Douglas. What he actually wanted to do was make sure that we had a set of transparent accounts and ways of looking at Government that people could understand. We are very excited to be supporting this, which is going to ensure that we continue to have that transparency, reporting, and ensuring the Government accounts are actually fit for purpose. I commend this to the House.

I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to support the Public Finance Amendment Bill. We support better Government transparency, improving fiscal strategies, disclosures, and forecasting. Also, the time frames around the Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update and Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update reports. But, bye-bye to the wellbeing objectives. This side of the House, we are interested in real outcomes. I commend this bill to the House.

Madam Speaker, tēnā koe. The opening statements from the Associate Minister of Finance referred to wellbeing and belonging, and one of the key factors that came out of a young person’s survey in the suicide prevention space was the key element of what was missing was they did not belong. So I find it interesting, in the context of wellbeing and those things potentially being removed out of this bill, and it saddens us deeply, so I’m going to help him out here.

Māori wellbeing is made up of a bunch of things. It’s made up of optimal health, and optimal health, in a Māori context, is to live longer, which is always a good thing; and to live in a context and a reality that suits the ways which make sense culturally and customarily, and ideally on our own whenua. So that’s optimal health.

Māori-owned businesses—we like those. Over COVID, the number of Māori women’s businesses that started just in their garage flourished in Te Tai Tokerau. It was a good thing. So wellbeing and trying to take care of it when COVID was going on—we did really well.

Papa kāinga lifestyle—that’s a Māori wellbeing predictor, OK? So it’s good to take note of in this discussion, Minister. The re-establishing of marae and all the things that surround the marae—that’s Māori wellbeing. It’s a bunch of stuff. It’s the flourishing Māori communities wherever you live, even in our urban Māori settings. Take your marae with you. Take your awa with you. Flourish and grow as Māori. Speaking te reo Māori everywhere and anywhere every day, just like our Kiingi said—being Māori every day.

These are the things that make a strong, vibrant, young Māori community and all the individuals that exist within it. Creating our own local, our own national, and our own international offshore relationships—a whole bunch out of the Iwi Leaders Forum have already organised their own trips. They’ve been organising this for quite some time, and, in fact, over the years, creating relationships and businesses with indigenous and non-indigenous across the world. So these are some of the things that I hope are understood when we’re describing Māori wellbeing when this public finance piece of work is being done. Because if it’s not acknowledged and it’s not considered in the thinking and in the design, then of course this Government will fail us yet again.

Sadly, the failing has already showed up in a number of bills that have been rammed through, not only last night and tonight but in the last little while. Of course, one of them which failed miserably—thank goodness, and we’re going to make the next one fail—is the Treaty principles bill. So thank goodness, because that’s when most of this House made some sense and voted it down.

But that in itself—what that says to many Māori is, “Gee, can they really be trusted?” Well, no. It takes an extreme set of circumstances for that to actually rise to the top when people think, “Gee, 100,000 people marching. Oh, that was saying something.” So it’s important for this public finance piece of work and discussion to understand that if wellbeing is a thing and you get that, do not bunch all Māori into this wellbeing as if we’re non-Māori. Don’t do that. That’s a dumb thing. Please don’t do that.

So if you don’t want to do that, you need to talk to some Māori. Just the fact that you’re rubbing shoulders next to one doesn’t give you the full analysis and understanding of what it takes to really know whether this bill and any other is going to work for us. Don’t do this work. Don’t build and design something without us. That has gone on for 180 years—so my time is really running out; dang it. But anyway, that’s what I want to say and I really want to offer the Minister that assistance and these words and these concepts so it’s understood fairly and genuinely. Tēnā tātou.

The Finance and Expenditure Committee is looking forward to opening submissions on this and running a full process as we look at the first tranche of the Public Finance Act legislation amendments. The second tranche will of course be our performance reporting inquiry and any consequences and subsequences that come out of that. So we look forward to submissions and dialogue. Thank you.

So here we are. Budget week, 11 o’clock on a Saturday night, and we’re talking about amendments to the Public Finance Act. What is the Budget? The Budget is the Government’s plan for the country over the next three years and beyond. What this bill, the Public Finance Amendment Bill, does is it rips out from the heart of the Budget process one of those key things, and that’s the wellbeing objective.

Now, I sat in this Parliament when Grant Robertson introduced the first Wellbeing Budget. Chris Bishop may scoff, but it was the first Budget in New Zealand that put at the centre of the Government’s plan the wellbeing of New Zealanders. GDP is all very nice. Growth is good in so far as it enhances the wellbeing of New Zealanders. But measuring GDP alone is not enough. After the Christchurch earthquakes, after a huge catastrophe, GDP skyrocketed as we fixed up broken buildings, but we weren’t better off. We were making ourselves better off, but the harm that had occurred—we weren’t better than we were before 2011.

So here we have it. This bill takes out the wellbeing objectives from our budgeting process. So we’re all very happy to measure how much more money we’re making or how much more so-called productivity we’re having. If we sell more cigarettes on this measure, we’re more productive.

Glen Bennett: Bonkers.

Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB: It’s crazy. If we sell more arms, we’re more productive. What does it do? How does it measure those things that really matter? That’s what the Wellbeing Budget did. The wellbeing objective is about measuring things that really matter.

How do we measure the health of our children? How do we measure the strength of our intellectual debate? How do we measure social cohesion, the strength of our communities? How do we measure the relationships between Pākehā and Māori? Well, those things this Government is not interested in measuring.

But it was a challenge and it is a challenge and it remains a challenge to ask, how are we doing? Not what’s the bottom line of the balance sheet, but how are we doing as a country? What is the health of our nation? How are our least well off being treated? What is the access to our healthcare for the most vulnerable New Zealanders—those in our remote communities, those in our poor communities? We can measure GDP in our Budget and it can look like we’re doing OK, but if only 10 percent or 2 percent or 1 percent are doing OK, I don’t think we’re doing OK; I think we’re doing really poorly. That’s not the wellbeing I want to be a part of, and that Government doesn’t want to measure how we are really doing.

Hon Kieran McAnulty: They don’t care.

Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB: They don’t care. They want to turn a blind eye to the true wellbeing of the nation because they want growth for some, but they’re leaving many of us behind. What the Public Finance Act as it stands says is “We want to know how everybody is doing.”—not just some. We don’t want the blunt measure of GDP; we want a measure of wellbeing which crosses the arc of all of what’s going on in New Zealand, and that Government’s not interested, because it just wants to look after its friends. It’s a Government of cronyism. It’s a Government of elitism. What we want is to look after all of New Zealand. That’s why this Public Finance Amendment Bill is shameful and that’s why we will oppose it.

This bill, just like this tie, is outstanding, and I commend both of them.

Tēnā koe, e te Māngai o te Whare. Me tīmata taku kōrero pēnei:

Ko tēnei ture he ture hei whakatikatika i ngā hapa, i ngā hē, o te Minita Pūtea, nā te mea, kāhore e taea e ia te kaute. Ko tāku ki a ia, hoki ki tō karaehe, tahi hāora ia rā, ako i te Pāngarau kia tika tō kaute i tō pūtea. Moumou tāima te tari mai i tēnei pepa ki roto i te Whare nei ki te whakatikatika i te koretake o te Minita Tahua Pūtea.

Tuarua: Tino pōuri ahau, te Māngai o te Whare, tēnei Kāwanatanga e whakakore ana i ngā kaupapa oranga i roto i te Ture, Ngā Whāinga Oranga i roto i te Tahua Pūtea. Kātahi anō ka tīmata tērā i te tau 2019, ināianei e whakakore ana rātou i ērā whāinga oranga i roto i te Ture

He aha ai? Nā te mea, kāhore rātou e whai whakaaro ana ki te pani, ki te rawakore, ki ngā tāngata noho motokā, ehara i te noho whare, noho motokā, whare kore. Kāhore rātou e whai whakaaro ana ki te oranga o te tangata, e whakakore i Te Aka Whaiora.

Kāhore rātou e whai whakaaro ana ki te taiao, ki te oranga o te taiao, ki te oranga o te whenua, ki te oranga o te tangata, ki te oranga o Aotearoa, nō! E whai whakaaro ana rātou ki te whakawhanaketanga i ō rātou hoa, pērā i ngā kamupene tūpeka; pērā i ngā kamupene keri hinu; pērā i ngā tāngata whai whare maha. Pēhea oti ngā tāngata, ngā tamariki, ngā mokopuna korekau he kāinga, moe ana i roto i ngā motokā? Mōhio ana tērā taha o te Whare te kī a Chris Bishop, nā mātou tērā hē. E kī, e kī!

He aha ai? Nā te mea, kāhore rātou e whai whakaaro ana ki te oranga o te tangata, te oranga o te whenua, te oranga o te taiao, te oranga o ngā tāngata o Aotearoa. Nō reira, āe, e tū ana ahau me taku riri i tēnei pō, me taku pōuri, nā te mea, tata ki te waenganui pō, te pō mutunga o tēnei tautohetohe mō te Tahua Pūtea, i tēnei wā tere, ohorere, he aha te ‘urgency’ me kī. Tērā pea, ko tēnei te ture mutunga i tēnei pō, ā, e kōrero ana tātou i tēnei Whare, (i) tēnei pire, te tango i ngā whāinga mō te oranga. Tino—āe, patua e te whakamā.

Kāhore rātou e hiahia ana ki ngā rīpoata, ki te rīpoata, mehemea ko ō rātou kaupapa e pērā ana, e whakaora ana i te tangata, e whakawhanake ana i te tangata, i te taiao, i te whenua, Aotearoa. Kāhore rātou e hiahia ana ki te aromatawai, te arotake, te rīpoata ngā mahi kua tutuki i a rātou kia pai ake a Aotearoa. Kāhore ahau, kāhore mātou e tautoko ana i tēnei ture kino.

[My acknowledgments, Mr Speaker. I’m going to begin my speech like this:

This bill is a bill to correct the errors and mistakes of the finance Minister, because she isn’t able to count. My suggestion to her is go back to class, for one hour every day, to learn mathematics, so that she can count her Budget correctly. It’s a waste of time to bring this document into this House to correct the uselessness of the Minister of Finance.

Secondly, I’m extremely saddened that this Government is eliminating the wellbeing initiative in the Act, the Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Act. That had only just started in 2019, and now they have eradicated the wellbeing focus in the Act.

Why? Because they don’t consider the bereaved, the destitute, the people living in cars, not living in houses, living in cars, homeless. They don’t consider people’s health. They’ve abolished the Māori Health Authority.

They don’t consider the environment, the health of the environment, the health of the land, the health of people, the health of New Zealand. No. They do consider the progress of their friends, like the tobacco companies, like the oil extraction companies, like the people who own multiple houses. What about the people, the children, the grandchildren instead, who have no homes, who sleep in cars? That side of the House knows that Chris Bishop said that we were to blame. What a cheek! Your front bench has changed the law for people who want to own a house.

Why? Because they don’t consider the wellbeing of people, the wellbeing of the land, the wellbeing of the environment, the wellbeing of the people of New Zealand. Therefore, yes, this evening, I stand in my anger, in my sadness, because it is nearly midnight, on the last night that the Budget is debated, in this short moment of time, unexpectedly. What’s the, as we call it, urgency? Perhaps this bill will be the last one tonight, and we are discussing this bill to take away the focus on wellbeing. It’s extremely—yes, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

They don’t want any reports to chronicle if their policies are like that, if they improve people’s wellbeing, if they develop people, the environment, the land, New Zealand. They don’t want to be assessed, to be audited, for the work they do to improve New Zealand to be reported on. I don’t and we don’t support this dreadful bill.]

As the last Government member to speak to support the Public Finance Amendment Bill, I’m all for it. I support fiscal transparency, strengthening fiscal responsibility, and improving practical operation. I commend the bill to the House.

The question is,

Motion agreed to.

Bill referred to the Finance and Expenditure Committee.