McKelvie Ian; Rurawhe AdrianIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. It's a great privilege to follow Deborah Russell. I followed her around for two months during an election once. There are many ways of hiding bad news and camouflaging reality and this term the well-being Budget" is the best I've heard of yet. I couldn't understand how they got to that point until I heard Deborah Russell talking about the ancient philosophers and now I understand the Labour Party policy perfectly. The real issue with this though is earlier on we heard Michael Wood talking about comparing the Government's annual report to that of a big company. In some ways they're absolutely right. They do that. The problem is the difference generally is the standard of bookkeeping and the thing that really concerns me about where we'll get to in the well-being Budget is how accurate the bookkeeping is. I think the thing about Budgets is Budgets need money and to acquire money you need a strong and vibrant economy. The thing that primarily concerns me about the state we've got to right now is that we've spent a fair bit of time in the last 18 months driving foreign investment out of the country and putting foreigners off coming to New Zealand to be educated to assist in our workforce and to build our economy. So once you do that—Hon Member: Rubbish. IAN McKELVIE: —well it's proved by the facts—you start to weaken the growth of our economy. When you've got a massive predicted spend such as we have with the Provincial Growth Fund and with the free tertiary education for first-year students—and of course I have said in the House before that I can hardly criticise that because I got a free education myself and look where it got me. But the thing that worries me most is the way this money is being distributed and to match that to some of the aspirations of the well-being Budget is very difficult. I've yet to see any evidence of the Provincial Growth Fund and its spend being matched to well-being and people's better interests. One of the things that bugs me in this House are the bombastic comments of he who refers to himself as the first citizen of the provinces. Well I hate to disappoint him but actually the Governor-General is the first citizen of the provinces and if he'd ever read our constitution he'd find that out—well not the constitution but the pieces that make it up. So I think that the real challenge we've got in New Zealand is around the things that basically make people's lives better. If we're going to invest money in free education for those who were managing without the free education—in other words there's been no increase in those people getting into that business—and splash money around the provinces in a manner that has yet to create more than about 45-odd jobs and has yet to create anything concrete for the people of our provinces who need a better lifestyle then I think that's probably irresponsible. I think that when you look at our provincial areas the places that really need money spending on them are health and education. That is particularly applicable to remote rural New Zealand where services have been withdrawn over a number of years and where it's very difficult for young people to get a decent education because there's just not the scale or the bulk of people that can create an environment that's challenging and that also enables those schools to be able to provide the broad enough education for those kids going to those schools. Those are the challenges we face in rural and provincial New Zealand. It's not around growth. Tourism is doing well. Tourism is doing very well on the back of decisions of the last Government. So those sorts of things are growing well in New Zealand. In fact they've grown too well in lots of parts in New Zealand and now we're stretched for infrastructure to support them. That's where the Government needs to be spending its money—on infrastructure that then provides jobs for those young people that live in rural and provincial New Zealand. I think that if we spent a lot more energy on that and a lot less energy on splashing money around things that don't matter so much it would be a whole lot better for New Zealand. Now I want to talk very briefly about the well-being Budget and the fact that we've spent a lot of time defining well-being and quantifying well-being. We've basically picked up an OECD definition of all this and adapted it to New Zealand's conditions but we haven't adapted it to New Zealand's conditions—we've just picked it up. New Zealand's a very different country than the rest of the world and we need to be specific in what we do. It's a great opportunity for us. If we want to go down the well-being path it's a great opportunity for us to develop our own system our own measurements and our own accountability and I've got some serious doubts having read all the information on this that we've actually got an accountability and reporting factor that will do us any good in the future. So I don't have a problem with embedding well-being in the Government's Budget Policy Statement provided that we do it in an accountable manner and I've got serious doubts that we will do that. I think that there are some flaws in this system. I think that it will take a whole lot of rectifying and you've got to have money to do it. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): This is a split call—five minutes."