Bayly AndrewANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua): Madam Speaker—oh hello.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): I called you already. ANDREW BAYLY: Thank you—I didn't hear you.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): I'm just not as loud in the voice as others.ANDREW BAYLY: Thank you. It was obviously the Government members trying to talk over the top and interrupt what was going on. I couldn't hear you Madam Speaker.Well I believe I'm the last speaker on this Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Bill.Dr Deborah Russell: Second to last.ANDREW BAYLY: Oh second to last. Sorry Ms Russell. The issue about this bill—and the previous speaker Jo Luxton just said well you know we don't understand it and it's wrong—it's wrong that the Opposition is so negative. I find that really quite an outlandish statement to make. One of the things that people say about National is that we are ruthlessly disciplined and have ruthless objectives. If anything they say we over-measure. I haven't yet ever met someone who's said you know National's soft and flabby. You don't like measuring and all that sort of stuff." Here we are. We've got a bill here that's starting to introduce a somewhat ill-defined concept into public finance. Just to demonstrate I think the person in National that best demonstrates that ruthless discipline in terms of making sure we deliver fantastic results and performance was Steven Joyce. In fact many of my colleagues here just talk about him just pulling out the list of the targets that we had—and we had all these public sector targets—and he would sit there and go through the 261 of those targets and ask Ministers where they got to on number 203. If they hadn't made enough progress he would be doing it. We had lots of public service targets. Just an example: reducing welfare dependency increasing participation in early childhood education reducing assaults in children increasing NCEA qualification rates reducing total crime reducing reoffending and then we had all the health targets and all these other ones that we had.Rt Hon David Carter: Where are those targets now?ANDREW BAYLY: That's right the Rt Hon David Carter. Where are those targets now? That's the issue. We ask day in and day out of the Minister of Health what's happened to those health targets. I've heard my colleagues talk about where we've got to on mental health. Literally only $27 million has been spent on it even though the Government announced they were going to spend I think $1.8 billion. Rt Hon David Carter: 1.9.ANDREW BAYLY: $1.9 billion—I stand corrected. That is the big difference. We were ruthlessly focused on it. But what we've got with this bill is a bill that gives the warm glow of incompetence. It is one that we feel like we're going to feel better we're going to make New Zealanders more connected by somehow adopting this concept of wellbeing. We have sat in the Finance and Expenditure Committee and had presentation after presentation on the wellbeing process. We've talked often about the measures that they want to adopt. It's very nice that the Minister of Finance is here. It would have been very important for him to actually be there actually. One of the things that just repeatedly comes through those presentations—repeatedly comes through those presentations—is that this is an evolving concept and New Zealand is somehow out the front. When we asked about specific measures they're in the process of being developed. We are going from one Government when we were in power that was ruthlessly—one would almost say overly—focused on targets to one that is now about wellbeing; these soft measures that are unquantified unspecified and certainly not measured. That is the interesting thing in this bill. This bill really for the amount of time we spent on it resulted as many have commented in one change which is in clause 8 new section 26NB "Wellbeing report". Rather than saying "(2) Using appropriate indicators" we've deleted the word "appropriate" and said "(2) Using indicators the report must describe—(a) the state of wellbeing in New Zealand;"—that's an interesting concept. I'm not sure how that's going to be defined yet. It sounds nice. It's got that warm glow Minister of Finance. It sounds nice. I don't know what that means. There's "(b) how the state of wellbeing in New Zealand has changed over time;". Well if we had a starting point—if we knew what the measure was—we could measure it over time but actually we're missing that first instrumental part. And there's "(c) the sustainability of and any risk to the state of wellbeing"—again beautiful language—beautiful language. I do feel warm and glowing from that. But that is the issue—that is the issue about this. It doesn't actually deliver the specific things that we really want to know. Actually we've now got a Minister who has overseen quite radical changes in the public sector. The first one was to the Reserve Bank where the Minister of Finance introduced the second target for the Reserve Bank around making sure we have full employment. Then we had the Budget reforms that we now talk about wellbeing. And now we've got this: the Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Bill. Now if we happen to be in power on 20 September I literally do not understand how we will go about trying to put this in place. I challenge all the members on the other side to be clear about it because no one in the Finance and Expenditure Committee has any oversight or understanding of what this specifically means. That's the issue with this—that is the issue with this. None of those advisers could help us on that aspect. That is why we're against it. Of course we not only want to see New Zealand improve from an economic perspective which is really good but we want to see it improve from a social perspective law and order perspective and community perspective—all that sort of stuff. To put this into a legal framework you need to have done a lot more work than what's gone on. It's nice to be able to talk about it. It's obviously going to come through in future Budgets if the Government gets back in. But unless it delivers better outcomes for all New Zealanders—unless it delivers better outcomes—it is all fluff to use the Rt Hon David Carter's comment. I think that's a shame. We should have done more work. We should have done the hard yards before we set about trying to implement a bill like this."