Robertson GrantHon GRANT ROBERTSON (Minister of Finance): I thank all members for those interesting and insightful contributions that they've made. In terms of answering Mr Bishop around the Infrastructure Reference Group broadly speaking my answer to the question is yes. Crown Infrastructure Partners manage the Government's portfolio of projects within the Infrastructure Reference Group. They are undertaken then in turn mainly by a combination of local government private sector entities and some Government entities. There is a role in there for Ōtākaro down in the South Island helping to manage those projects and also Kānoa—the regional development unit. So overall yes I am satisfied with what's happened there. The member is well aware that decisions were taken after that momentous day on 1 July when Mr Jones and Mr Twyford announced this where we did rephase some of those projects. Obviously COVID-19 was the cause of the fund being created but equally has caused significant issues in construction generally which I'm sure the member is well aware of. The quarterly reports as he notes are available. I did suspect that the member might ask me some questions about this so I did go and check to see if there was any update from the quarterly report. Obviously the next quarterly report will be out shortly but I can inform the member that around 208 of the 233 projects have started construction; 42 have been completed. I would note that again we rely upon partners for the delivery. The funding's there the Government's approvals have been done—with the exception of one project—but the remaining of them all have been done from our end. The construction environment's a challenging and difficult one. I do note that the member's colleagues right around the country are delighted to attend the openings of various aspects of the Infrastructure Reference Group's projects. In answer to Mr Bayly's question he's correct. The exact number is $61.65 billion. What happened there is members will recall we allocated an additional $7 billion around the time of the Delta outbreak and then a further $5 billion around the time of the Omicron outbreak. As at the Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update (HYEFU) cut off we'd allocated $52.7 billion of that. It's obviously increased as we've managed the current COVID support payment and significant additional costs for the health system particularly around the issue of vaccines and making sure that we've got enough testing kits and so forth available. I do believe this is an important fund and one that's served New Zealanders extremely well. And I don't believe that Mr Bayly can actually point to much within the fund that at various times his colleagues have not asked for us to spend more money on. As at the HYEFU date that I mentioned before it was $24 billion through Vote Social Development $11 billion through Vote Revenue $7.3 billion through Vote Health $5.4 billion through Vote Business Science and Innovation $4.7 billion through the Housing and Urban Development $2.2 billion through Education $1.8 billion through Transport $1.6 billion through Building and Construction. All of that information is available for members on the Treasury website but I think in all of those sectors New Zealanders have benefited significantly from that funding. In terms of Mr Seymour's question we've covered this material a bit in the House. The most obvious example is the fuel excise duty and the road-user charge changes which have actually made a significant difference for New Zealanders: for some of them between around $12 or $15 per tank—so 12 or 15 bucks a week that they are saving as a result of that. More broadly than that those New Zealanders benefit from properly funded health and education systems and making sure that they have good quality public services in front of them.In answer to Mr Court's question the Government has said consistently that when it comes to particularly transport projects we're certainly open to the idea of public-private partnerships. We've looked at different ways of those being financed and the special purpose vehicles that are enabled under the Infrastructure Funding and Financing Act are a good example of that and there's a couple of really interesting projects in the Tauranga area that are designed to have a robust public-private partnership - type approach using the special purpose vehicles. However the member will be aware that we are rightly cautious about the widespread use of public-private partnerships having had the pleasure in the last couple of years of overseeing the end of the work with Minister Wood on Transmission Gully. I can inform the member there that the $400 million or so blowout on that project is going to cost New Zealanders day after day after day because of the appallingly designed and negotiated public-private partnership that the National Party put in place for Transmission Gully.