Bayly AndrewANDREW BAYLY (National—Port Waikato): Thank you Mr Speaker. Well I think that speech just tells it all. Unfortunately we are all part of a committee called the Finance and Expenditure Committee and that speech just highlights the deficit in terms of the ability to actually talk to a report which is what this session tonight in the House is about rather than give a political rant about National and leadership and things like that.Look I just take issue with some of the stuff. The member talked a good game about equality and of course what we do know is that we had 100000 children in a poverty gap and that number has increased over the last five-and-a-bit years. We are seeing so much hardship and division in New Zealand at the moment at a financial economic and social issue that personally I find very concerning. Because not only does New Zealand have a huge economic challenge ahead of it but it has a huge social challenge in terms of how we bring people back together how we actually create an environment that people want to live in in New Zealand and feel that they're getting a fair shot because certainly that's not the case.And to say that the Government is undertaking targeted support which we all know in the most recent example has been an absolute disaster. Where if you're a university student you cannot get access to the so called $300-odd that people have been given but they're those type of people who are not earning money who want to earn money but and for some perverse reason are not getting access to it and yet people living overseas as Mr Bishop talks about lawyers overseas in London are suddenly finding they're getting money from the New Zealand Government; it's outrageous.Anyway this report is one of four as no doubt you know having been here an exceptionally long time. So we've had a long-term financial statement—SPEAKER: A lot longer than these reports have been around.ANDREW BAYLY: Yes I know. Yes. We've got the local long-term financial statement which is published every four years. We've got the long-term insights briefing which is something that Treasury does every three years. We've got the Wellbeing Report which we debated not long ago which is a document published every four years. And of course this is the Investment Statement which I'd just remind actually what it's about which is: describes the state and value of significant assets and liabilities of the Government how these have changed over the value over time which is obviously a four-year cycle and how they are forecast to change over the next two years and the changes since the last statement.So I think the first thing is there is an absolute enshrined principle—and it's embedded in the Public Finance Act—which is we need to ensure that we have sustainable and resilient public finances that will bolster living standards for future generations. That's a crucial pivot or tenant of what we should be discussing about in this report. Because obviously this report lays out the assets and liabilities of the Government and I think what we've seen is certainly there's been an increase in the net worth of the Government. We've seen the value of assets now it's been quoted regularly before about $440 billion liabilities total about $281 billion and now we've got a net equity of roughly about $160 billion.Just as a side note I wish we would be able to work out what the net equity of the water companies is going to be because no one can tell me what that is. They can tell me what the assets in the balance sheet—and the liabilities. But even the officials can't. But at least at central government level we do know what the core value of that which is about $160 billion.Interesting I note that if you look at all the balance sheets of the Government the intellectual-property component has steadfastly remained at about $3 billion-$3.5 billion and that's been going in the balance sheet for quite some period of time. As the Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs mistakenly said last night in the debate about the statistics and data bill or the Data and Statistics Bill that in most cases public companies a significant amount of their value he said it was related to data. It's not. It's actually related to the intellectual property. I think one of the key things in the Government's balance sheet is the huge undervaluation of its intellectual property. Something that I've regularly asked finance Ministers and the Treasury secretary and for some reason it's something that keeps slipping through but I would imagine that if you looked at the intellectual property that resides in every Government agency State-owned enterprise (SOE) whatever if it was taken from a private-sector perspective that value would be significantly enhanced because of the embedded intellectual property that sits and resides in those balance sheets in those operations.I think my colleague Mr Simon Watts made a good point current borrowings costs if you go back a couple of years' ago it was about $2 billion. It was about the cost of running the New Zealand Police force; now about $4.7 billion. So as he noted about the total cost of the justice costs in New Zealand or just to put it in another perspective it's about the same cost as operating Vote Defence about $4.8 billion-$4.9 billion. So what we're doing is every year we're taking what we could have spent on defence or justice and paying it to people often located overseas in terms of those who hold our Government debt and as we all know most of that Government debt is owned by foreigners. So what we're doing is just taking that money which could otherwise be spent on very useful projects and in fact taking it offshore.So this is the central issue about this report which is: what is a prudent level of debt and how should you structure the balance sheet. There's a challenge that really we've faced over the last couple of years between investing now and preserving our resilience for the future. I think the COVID situation over the last 2½ years has highlighted the infrastructure challenge we've got you know poor connectivity in rural areas is just one example where it's just an absolute pressing need for substantial improvements in that service. I know there's been some investment but it's of a minor nature. There's still huge restrictions. That deficit in infrastructure is really really important.But the resilience going forward and our ability to invest for the future has to some extent been diminished significantly by the increase in debt over the last 2½ years. If you look back 2½ years' ago to March our debt was sitting roughly at about $60 billion and now it's sitting well over $120 billion. It's doubled over the last 2½ years. Whilst some of that expenditure's been useful—no doubt we would've done the wage subsidy and certain elements of that—there has been an incredible amount of money that literally has gone into the ether and no one can point to. It's not like it's been used to build new infrastructure. It has just vanished into the ether. Now what that means is that whilst our debt was a very low rate of 19 percent it is now well over 30 percent and likely to increase further over the next couple of Budget cycles. Or hopefully for the Budget cycle 2024 there will be change. But we are seeing our options for future investment seriously diminished as a result of Government expenditure and Government spending. Of course we've had a Reserve Bank alongside that has just undertaken a mass amount of liquidity easing or buying of bonds which now means that we've got $60 billion of additional debt taken on to account into the Reserve Bank which means that of course because Adrian Orr the Reserve Bank Governor signed an indemnity with the Minister of Finance we've now got a mounting liability was about $5 billion was in this report about $7½ billion now is well over $8 billion and likely to increase further as interest rates rise. We have got a staggering amount of new debt that's come into New Zealand. We have reduced our options to spend on good stuff in the future whether it's infrastructure whether it's social spending and that is the wasted opportunity that we've seen.