Shaw JamesHon JAMES SHAW (Associate Minister of Finance): Thank you Madam Speaker. Thirty years I think is a good time to review an important piece of legislation and so I'm delighted that we have turned our attention to the Public Finance Act. I wanted to start my comments just by responding to some of what I've heard in the debate from members of the Opposition. Ian McKelvie who has just concluded referred to one of the roles of Treasury as advising the Government on where it should go—in other words policy advice. In that sense then having a sense of the context in which that policy advice is given I think would be useful. Alastair Scott interjected a number of times asking what wellbeing is—of course he would have to ask—and I would like to say most of it came from Paul Goldsmith. Paul Goldsmith: the nature of his argument seemed to be that all Budgets are wellbeing Budgets and therefore this piece of legislation and having this kind of context for the finances of a country is irrelevant. But I just wanted to remind him of a Budget that was written by the author of the Public Finance Act Ruth Richardson and that Budget had the moniker the mother of all Budgets". In that Budget one of the things that they did was they looked at what the minimum level of income would be for someone really on the breadline—what was the minimum required to get by—and then they set income support levels 20 percent below that because they thought what that would do would be to incentivise lazy beneficiaries to get off their bums and get a real job. The consequences of that decision we are still living with today. We are still cleaning up the mess that was left by the "mother of all Budgets" and by the mother of the "mother of all Budgets". So I have to say if you had—as we are suggesting in this piece of legislation—a requirement for the Government to lay out what it thinks wellbeing is in social and in environmental and in economic terms for all New Zealanders you would have to then justify the decisions that you're making in that Budget and I find it hard to imagine how the "mother of all Budgets" would have gotten through that filter if this amendment had been in place back then. So whilst Paul Goldsmith likes to write this off as just this kind of woke irrelevancy actually the consequences could be huge for the lives of New Zealanders. I mean I think he referred to it as porridge at one point. But the people who were living on the breadline after the "mother of all Budgets" couldn't afford porridge Mr Goldsmith and so I do not think that this is mere symbolism. I think that this can have real consequences for people. I just wanted to move next to the heritage of this bill and this is a source of some pride for myself and for members of the Green Party. I want to refer if you'll allow me to read a portion of a speech given in this House by a predecessor of mine Jeanette Fitzsimons in September 1998—21 years ago. In that speech she said "After 20 years of reasoned argument one should not have to say again how inept GDP is as a measure of our economic well-being. All that GDP measures is the total amount going through the cash registers of New Zealand regardless of what the money is … spent on. It assumes that the most important thing is for the economy to be big rather than to be healthy … If there is a car crash or an oil spill the money spent on cleaning up the mess adds to our economic growth. If people drive to work the petrol cost adds to growth; if they walk it does not. … GDP totally fails to register the scarcity of resources. The first fish and the last fish in the oceans register the same. High growth in GDP is usually a sign that we are consuming our capital—both our social capital and our ecological capital."She then went on to say in 2003 "GDP is both too narrow and too generalised to measure anything useful. It does not tell us whether the poor are getting poorer and if most of society's wealth is held by a few. It does not tell us if we're paying more and more to control pollution and crime rather than for real goods [or] services." What is true is that our nation's wellbeing is not a number on a GDP chart. The tragic thing is that GDP does not measure human happiness or wellbeing; it mainly measures the rate at which resources are turned into trash. Every tonne of metal mined timber logged fish caught raises GDP. Every tonne of trash dumped raises GDP. Every million dollars we spend trying to mitigate these effects from landfill management to land restoration remediating toxic sites raises GDP. Finally she said "We will continue to be a voice for a different political philosophy a new value system … where our success is counted not by the size of our GDP and our incomes but by the warmth of our relationships with each other and with nature; by the health of our children and our elders and our rivers and our land."So this amendment of course isn't going to change all of that not at all. GDP will still be one of the core economic measures that we rely on to give us a sense of how things stand. But what we are talking about here is to create a broader view of the health and wellbeing of our country in economic and environmental and social terms. I also want to just reference Dr Kennedy Graham who a number of years ago introduced another public finance amendment bill: the Public Finance (Sustainable Development Indicators) Amendment Bill which tried to find a way of introducing some ecological indicators into the Public Finance Act so that at the very least we would be able to measure the throughput and the stocks of our natural capital in a way that referenced things against the way that we measure the economy and the state of the public finances. So that attempt—although we were in Opposition and while it was drawn from the ballot and while it did get to a first reading—unfortunately didn't progress through the House. But today's bill the Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Bill I see as the inheritor bill of Dr Kennedy Graham's Public Finance (Sustainable Development Indicators) Amendment Bill in many ways.So I do want to say that I am tremendously proud alongside Grant Robertson to be sponsoring this bill into the House because in many ways it brings 30 years of Green economic advocacy to—well not to a conclusion but to an actual evolution in how things move through.I know that other countries are feeling somewhat salty that they don't have this level of thinking in their own set of public finances. We know that other countries are looking to us and saying "It seems like New Zealand is making some real progress here in advancing economic and fiscal thinking in public finances in terms of which we're thinking about things." And I know that the reforms in the 1980s and the early 1990s—we actually exported that warts and all to some parts of the world. And whilst we're attempting now 30 years later to clean up some of the damage caused by some of those reforms I hope too that we can export the next evolution: this idea that actually we can take a more holistic more all-encompassing view of social and environmental and economic wellbeing and to say to the world "Actually there is a way that we can do this better." So to all of those Greens Jeanette and Kennedy and Russel and very many others who have gone before and who have advocated for this I say booyah."