Simmonds Penny; Robertson GrantPENNY SIMMONDS (National—Invercargill): Thank you Madam Chair. Delighted to be able to speak. I wanted to talk a little bit and with my experience a little bit like my colleague Christopher Luxon having been audited by Audit New Zealand for the past 23 years I don't actually recall a year when they didn't say they were short-staffed. When my colleague Simon Watts said that there were four vacancies on the Audit New Zealand website last night I suspect that's somewhere around 9996 less vacancies than in the rural sector being advertised at the moment.But I do want to ask the Minister to just elaborate on how he feels this isn't going to impact on those who have their 31 December end of financial year date because I'm quite sure that the actions of this Government—for those entities that had a 31 December end of financial year last year—impacted on the issues we're seeing now. Because the Minister's colleague Minister Hipkins actually created another 17 audits that were required to be undertaken by the Auditor-General last year when he put in place on 1 April the new entity Te Pūkenga because that required all the Institutes of Technology and Polytechnics of New Zealand to have two audits last year. They had to have an audit for the first three months of January to 31 March then they had to have a second audit—March to December—and then Te Pūkenga had to have an audit. So how did the Minister not foresee this unintended consequence of Minister Hipkins bringing in 17 more audits?Now I was there when we had to do the extra audits at the Southern Institute of Technology and I think it probably took about two of our staff an extra six weeks of work internally. So I'm thinking it probably took another maybe three or four Audit New Zealand personnel extra time there. So surely—surely—you would see the unintended consequences of bringing in an entity. Interestingly Minister Hipkins was warned not to bring in Te Pūkenga on 1 April during a period of such unprecedented upset in the sector with COVID and everything else but he went ahead with it. It does make me think that if you lack business knowledge if you lack business experience if you lack business acumen you make a decision and then there's unintended consequences like 17 more audits and you say Oh my goodness. Look what that's done."I would have thought that before 1 April last year the Minister of Education should have been saying to the Minister of Finance "There will be more work for the auditors having to carry out these audits twice and the new Te Pūkenga audit." So I feel that the Minister needs to explain to us how he thinks that those audits didn't impact on the situation we're seeing now and given that I know pre-audits for the 31 December end of financial year will have to be undertaken in December how we're not going to see a similar flow-on impact. This is just going to keep compounding through for the Audit Office and how he thinks this is somehow going to be solved by giving a two-month extension when all it will do is run into the audits that have to occur for those that have their end of financial year on 31 December. I'd like to know what advice Minister Hipkins gave to him about "Oh by the way there's going to be 17 more audits having to be undertaken and this might put a bit of pressure on the office of the auditor." So perhaps he could just illuminate us a little in how that thinking didn't occur earlier and how he thinks it's not going to carry on and give knock-on effect to those other entities having their end of financial year on 31 December.Hon GRANT ROBERTSON (Minister of Finance): To cover the material we covered last night again this is not about those entities. This is about dealing with the hump that occurs when you have a large number of entities—much much larger than 17—who all require their audits at a similar time. That is why a two-month extension is required for that. The advice we have is that audits for those entities with a 31 December date will not be affected and I did cover that material last night."