Brooking RachelFinanceRACHEL BROOKING (Chairperson of the Finance and Expenditure Committee): Thank you Mr Chair. I was so eager to get up as the chairperson of the Finance and Expenditure Committee to speak about the annual reviews that we undertook.Before I start with that I would very much like to thank the staff who do these report backs to Parliament which can be found in this volume. They do a great job and if anybody is spending their Tuesday afternoon watching the House then I would very much recommend—if you're ever interested in what any different agency does—that you go and have a look at the select committee's annual report back on them.Chlöe Swarbrick: Great read.RACHEL BROOKING: Great read" we're hearing—they are they are.So there were a number of entities that we did a very quick report back on. There were no matters to bring to the attention of the House for Kiwi Group Holdings Ltd Ōtākaro Ltd Southern Response Earthquake Services Ltd and the Government Superannuation Fund Authority. But we did have hearings and reported on the Guardians of New Zealand Superannuation Inland Revenue Department New Zealand Green Investment Finance Ltd New Zealand Infrastructure Commission New Zealand Productivity Commission Office of the Controller and Auditor-General Pike River Recovery Reserve Bank of New Zealand and Treasury. And of course we did the Financial Statements of the Government of New Zealand for the Year Ended 30 June 2022—that is different from the sector reports and found at the front of the volume.I'm going to focus on the Treasury review and some themes that came through throughout all of our reviews. For me one of them that was brought to our attention was the issue of improving accountability and transparency of public finances and particularly with the issue that the Public Finance Act focuses on vertical as opposed to horizontal reporting. I will go briefly to the Treasury who commented on this when we were asking questions about it. And we were asking particular questions because the Auditor-General has raised this in a number of different reports.So the current legislative arrangements in the system are focused on reporting at an appropriation level. The Secretary to the Treasury explained that it would be useful to enable reporting initiatives that span multiple appropriations involving different agencies working together or initiatives at a sub-appropriation level. We heard that this is a complex challenge because the Treasury is operating in a system where the legislative foundations IT systems and capabilities across agencies are not structured consistently. Despite this we heard that the Treasury is always looking to improve the quality and information within the public finance system to create stronger accountability and transparency.I'll pause here to note that the committee remains interested in this topic and that we've also—separately to this annual review process—heard from both the Auditor-General and the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment which probably you wouldn't necessarily expect the Finance and Expenditure Committee to be talking to.We also of course heard about how this topic of accountability and transparency does relate to the Wellbeing Budget and how that's worked through the Living Standards Framework and He Ara Waiora. Also related to this transparency theme there was discussion around the COVID-19 Response and Recovery Fund and we heard that lessons had been learnt from that and that those are now being applied to the Climate Emergency Response Fund.Treasury also noted that the clusters that we have now in justice and natural resources now have quarterly reporting and there's work on how to make those programmes work as well as they can. Some other themes included the liability for entitlements under the Holidays Act 2003 and we heard that both Treasury and the Auditor-General are committed to assisting with this issue. Other issues that were traversed or themes that reoccurred throughout reports were the tax revenue increasing and also issues around workforce—specifically within the different agencies having turnover issues but also for the country as a whole. And some of that of course relates to productivity which was another theme. We also heard about inflation a number of times.I'll skip now to cyclone and storm recovery. Of course this is outside of the period that we were discussing but we did still have very good interactions with the Minister for Cyclone Recovery with Treasury and with other officials about the impacts of those events on both our economy and of course those communities involved. Thank you."