Robertson GrantPUBLIC FINANCE (WELLBEING) AMENDMENT BILLFirst ReadingHon GRANT ROBERTSON (Minister of Finance): I move That the Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Finance and Expenditure Committee to consider the bill.I am delighted to introduce this bill which will embed the pursuit of New Zealanders' wellbeing as an enduring aspect of how our country's Budget is developed. In the precincts of this building a month or two ago I spoke at a conference for the 30th anniversary of the Public Finance Act. It would be fair to say that when I looked at the remainder of the list of speakers I thought perhaps I may not have been entirely welcome at the event and I did miss out on the dinner where Ruth Richardson and Roger Douglas reminisced about the creation of the Public Finance Act. I didn't take the opportunity—I had considered—of reminding Roger Douglas that one of my first significant political acts was to march up to him at a public meeting at Otago University and say How do you sleep at night?" Interestingly he said "Very well actually."That conference did highlight for me the aspects of the Public Finance Act that are positive and that we do need to celebrate and that is the fact that internationally we have a system of public accounting that is well regarded; it is transparent; it requires Governments to report on a regular basis to be able to give the public of New Zealand a very clear idea of the state of their finances both at Budget time and indeed throughout the year; it also has put into law fiscal sustainability as a concept and those are important things. It actually introduced accrual accounting and it would be quite odd I think for most people who work in the Public Service of New Zealand to consider a time before accrual accounting. So there are some good things within the Public Finance Act.But it has long been my view—and I know the view of other parties who make up this Government—that 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 should be in a Budget. So as part of the Labour Party's confidence and supply agreement with the Green Party there was a commitment to look at alternative indicators of success and sustainability and we've taken that on and actually gone significantly in advance of that in the legislation that is in front of the House today. What we are doing here is embedding the concept of wellbeing at the core of the piece of legislation that defines how we put Budgets together. For those who are interested in the particular detail of that there are two documents that effectively make up the Budget documents that are managed in a sense by politicians and they are the Fiscal Strategy Report and the Budget Policy Statement. What most people are thinking about when they think of the Budget isn't all of the accounts necessarily; it's the narrative it's the description that goes around that. What this legislation does is say that in that Fiscal Strategy Report and in the Budget Policy Statement the Government must explain how wellbeing objectives have guided the Government's Budget decisions and if the wellbeing objectives that guided the Budget decisions differ from those that were indicated in the Budget Policy Statement and then obviously in turn in the Budget Policy Statement itself those wellbeing objectives have to be there. Those objectives relate to the social economic environmental and cultural wellbeing of New Zealand and New Zealanders and to any other matters that the Government considers support long-term wellbeing in New Zealand. That is a fundamental shift in the way we put Budgets together and we did this this year within the Wellbeing Budget. So we produced for example a wellbeing outlook to replace the economic and fiscal outlook that has traditionally been inside the Budget. That is because it's important for New Zealanders not just to see how we're going on those core fiscal measures around issues like debt and the surplus and Government spending—and they are important and they are still there—but in addition what we are doing to address the wellbeing of New Zealanders the living standards of New Zealanders through the lens of those other objectives around economic around social—natural capital and human capital. So that is what this bill does and I am extremely proud that we are putting this in front of the House now at this time in New Zealand's history because 30 years on from that Public Finance Act we as a country need to accept that if we are going to get on top of the big long-term issues and problems and challenges that New Zealand has we have to embed in our legislative framework a focus on those challenges. They can't just be dealt with through the framework that we were left with at the end of the 1980s because the companion bit of legislation to the Public Finance Act is the State Sector Act and Minister Hipkins has reforms for the State Sector Act that will shortly be put before the House. What they are designed to do is to create the idea of a unified Public Service to break down the silos that have bedevilled Governments in New Zealand for the last 30 years. It is these two bits of legislation together that I believe will have a fundamental effect on the way we do Government in New Zealand to the good so that we will actually look at how we address those long-term issues not at just the inputs not at just the amount of money that goes in not at even which Government department is responsible but rather focus on those outcomes. So as we did in this Budget if we are trying to address an issue like domestic and sexual violence what we did under the leadership of Parliamentary Under-Secretary Jan Logie is actually bring those agencies together set a goal one outcome—not an outcome based on the individual agendas of the agencies but on what is needed for New Zealand. The same with the other objectives that we had in the Budget around child wellbeing and mental health: they are not the sole responsibility of any given agency and it is vital at Budget time that we are talking about them. So the major manifestation of that in this year's Budget was the child poverty report which is covered by a different piece of legislation that also amended the Public Finance Act. That requires us to report on actions we are taking to reduce child poverty and improve child wellbeing. What this bit of legislation does is take that a step further and say we need those wellbeing objectives to be clear right across the Budget not just in one area like child poverty but in fact across all of those areas of our economic social and environmental wellbeing. So this is an important bit of legislation because the legislative framework is what guides the work of the Public Service. It's all very well for an individual Minister to decide as I did with this year's Wellbeing Budget that this is how I want to run it but actually it's important for getting the Public Service on board to pass this legislation so it's understood by everybody that wellbeing actually is what matters the outcomes are what matters and yes part of that is being fiscally responsible. This does not change those aspects of the Act but what it does do is put an imperative on Governments to talk about the effect of our Budgets to understand how those social objectives are being advanced to understand how we're protecting the environment to understand how we are lifting our own people in terms of their health and their education. This piece of legislation will strengthen our public finance system. For me it is the first stage of reform. The next stage of reform is actually looking at the way in which Government agencies themselves do their work their planning their accountability documents. What this piece of legislation does is set out that at least once every four years the Government has to produce an overall stocktake of our wellbeing and the indicators of wellbeing but in the intervening period what we need to do is make sure that Government agencies are acting together that they are actually working towards these wellbeing objectives. That will be the next stage of reform as we look towards how they go about their planning documents how they go about their accountability regime and how we ensure that they work together. So this is a piece of legislation that I am immensely proud of. If I look back over the last 30 years yes there were some good things that came from the Public Finance Act around transparency and around accountability but that piece of legislation was inadequate to reflect the values of New Zealanders the value that we ascribe not just to being fiscally responsible but to being socially responsible to actually delivering to New Zealanders wellbeing and increased living standards. We will not get there if we don't have the legislative framework to back us up and that is what this piece of legislation is designed to do. I hope that all parties in the House will send this bill to select committee so that we can hear from the public of New Zealand about what they want from the Budgets that come out of this House so that it reflects their values because it is my judgment that this bill that embeds wellbeing in our public finance framework does reflect the values of New Zealanders—that we value yes prosperity but we value who shares in it as well."