Shaw JamesHon JAMES SHAW (Minister for Climate Change): It's always a pleasure to follow my good friend and colleague Fletcher Tabuteau on matters of finance and the Budget. I wanted to start in this final appropriations debate for this year's Budget by responding to some of the criticisms that we've received on the other side of the House. I heard the phrase responsible spending" being used a lot to suggest that actually a lot of our spending is not responsible and that you can only rely on National to do responsible spending.Hon Member: That's right—that's right.Hon JAMES SHAW: So I just wanted to pick up a couple—how did it work out with Novopay? How did that work out? That was a contract awarded to an Australian human resources company with no IT experience and it cost the country absolutely billions of dollars. That was good. How about that SkyCity convention centre?DEPUTY SPEAKER: How about the Estimates?Hon JAMES SHAW: OK. Well it is a debate Madam Speaker and— DEPUTY SPEAKER: I know you're responding to the points made in the debate but it would be good to tie it into the Estimates.Hon JAMES SHAW: I will absolutely do so. My point being that there is certainly no monopoly on the wisdom and on responsible spending on the other side of the House. I was also just going to mention the Saudi sheep farm. That was my personal favourite. That was a good use of public finances. I want to turn my attention in particular to the COVID-19 Response and Recovery Fund (CRRF) the $50 billion appropriation that was made in Budget 2020 in order to deal with the various phases of the Government's response to the COVID-19 crisis. The first thing I'd actually like to do is to congratulate and to acknowledge the Hon Grant Robertson Treasury and actually the whole Public Service because the Budget effectively got written twice. We went through the whole normal business-as-usual process got right to sort of pretty much the end of the process as the last packages were being drawn up and then of course the pandemic crisis hit our shores and everything changed. What that meant is that the Budget essentially had to get rewritten again in a very short period of time. I know that Grant and the Treasury team and the Public Service did an extraordinary amount of work under incredible pressure at a time when we were also shutting down much of the country to go to level 4. The COVID-19 Response and Recovery Fund that $50 billion appropriation is kind of the centrepiece in terms of Budget 2020 of how we were going to respond.We did cop some criticism for not saying up front how all of that would be spent. But the whole point here is that we are in an evolving crisis where new information is being revealed on a daily basis—certainly at that point—or several times daily basis and we also don't know how it's going to evolve in the future. There's about $14 billion left of that appropriation that hasn't been committed and the reason for that is that if there is another outbreak and we have to go into some other state of lockdown and God forbid another state of emergency and level 4 then you've got to have some money in the tank to be able to deal with that the way that we did the first time around. So in terms of responsible spending that is entirely the appropriate response.The other thing that I wanted to point out is that the economy needs liquidity at a time like this. One of the things that the previous Government did during the global financial crisis is they actually turned the screws on a bit much for a bit too long and actually it prolonged the economic downturn. So you know putting cash into the economy via the CRRF is an entirely appropriate response. The one thing I'd like to say about that though is that it does have to get paid back. It is tens of billions of dollars and it is going to take a very very long time to do so. Therefore we have not just an economic duty but a moral duty to future generations of taxpayers to make sure that that stimulus spend in this year's Budget—that every dollar available of that is put to work on resolving the long-term challenges facing this country because otherwise we present future generations with a double whammy. Not only do they have to pay their taxes to pay back the debt that we're running up in order to get ourselves through this crisis; they're also going to have to pay additionally to get themselves through whatever crises are facing them. And we already know what those crises are. First amongst them is the climate crisis. That is the omni-crisis that affects housing it affects inequality it affects public health it affects local government and it affects infrastructure. We have an absolute responsibility to ensure that this stimulus spend is a green recovery and sets us up for the long term and reduces that future burden on future generations."