Robertson GrantHon GRANT ROBERTSON (Minister of Finance): Thank you very much Madam Speaker. Just before I get into talking about these very important bits of legislation I do want to respond to a couple of matters that member who's just resumed his seat the Hon Dr Nick Smith raised with us. The first of those was his interest in value for money and I thank him for that. I am also very interested as you might imagine as the Minister of Finance in the concept of value for money. Value for money does not necessarily come from cutting services. In fact it can lead to a significant decline in value for money.The member raised the question of the number of staff at the Ministry of Education. The thing was that the Ministry of Education when it was under the stewardship of the former Government unfortunately stumbled into Novopay didn't build the number of schools that were required didn't have a proper capital unit within it and when it comes to the polytechs that is the very definition of the problem with the member's premise which is that the polytechs individually were going broke. In terms of the taxpayer we were writing out cheques for hundreds of millions of dollars because of the poor approach taken the cuts the austerity approach taken. So value for money actually comes from having a Public Service that is well organised well led and focused on the outcomes for New Zealand not on the turf warfare of different agencies. So I reject the criticisms of this legislation by the member who just spoke before me. What I want to do at the start is to thank all of those who've been involved in this legislation. My involvement comes from my role as the Minister of Finance but the Minister who has had the greatest impact on this is Minister Hipkins and I want to congratulate him for a project that I know means a lot to him personally. It is a massive piece of work to reform our State sector's legislative architecture and he has driven it and driven it hard and he deserves to be congratulated for that. I also want to congratulate and thank the leadership of the State Services Commission and in fact all of the departmental heads who've had a role in this legislation and other State servants. From today we can properly call them public servants.That is the other point I want to make by way of introduction—is that by the best estimate of the Leader of the House rushing out and having a quick look at the statute book we think that it is probably at least 60 years since New Zealand's public servants were properly recognised in law as public servants not State servants. Now I know what was planned in 1988. I know what would lay behind the thinking of the creation of the State Sector Act and perhaps going back to the 1960s as well. But now today we finally in law give New Zealand's hard-working and dedicated public servants the right name and the right place.And it matters. In the words of another politician in this House words matter and in this case they genuinely do because our public servants serve the public of New Zealand. They actually don't serve the State of New Zealand per se; they serve the public of New Zealand. And haven't we seen in the last few months the value of that work? I've actually mentioned it and I acknowledge that today is an important day for Madam Speaker in the House and I've acknowledged it before as a former Minister for Social Development—the extraordinary work done by that ministry during COVID-19. That is just one example of the incredible job public servants do for New Zealanders every single day. Today finally we recognise that in the name of this legislation. I am very pleased that we are doing that.The bit of the legislation that I am most connected with is what was in Part 7 of the legislation which is around the changes to the Public Finance Act (PFA). This piece of legislation works in couple with the changes that we are making to the PFA not just here but also in other legislation. Recently we passed through this House the Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Bill. What that bill does is lock in within our budgeting process the concept of wellbeing. The wellbeing approach as we've interpreted and driven it through over the last couple of years is about core elements of this legislation. It's about taking a long-term intergenerational view of what we do with the important taxpayer money we look after. It's about breaking down the silos between agencies so that we are focused on the outcomes for New Zealanders not the inputs. Too often we do that and I will admit that we're all guilty of it at times—of focusing on the amount of money that we might get for a particular project or a particular ministry. That's an input. It matters. It's important. But it's not as important as the outcomes that we are creating for New Zealanders. So that focus of the wellbeing approach which we're embedding in the Public Finance Act now comes through this piece of legislation as well and the two work incredibly well together. What Part 7 of the legislation actually does in part is allow within the Public Finance Act the very flexibility that's created by the rest of the legislation. So the rest of the legislation creates different structures for how we'll deliver those outcomes. I want to mention one of those and I'm pretty confident my colleague Jan Logie is probably going to mention it as well since she's in the House and that is around the joint venture on the elimination of domestic and sexual violence. The interesting thing about that coming together of about eight or 10 different Government agencies is that when we set about doing it we didn't have a name for it because actually the concept wasn't there. It was called a joint venture and now within this legislation we formalise that approach.Now why does it matter for me? It matters for me because that goal of eliminating domestic and sexual violence which is shared by everybody in this House—we now have the ability to say that is our goal; that is the outcome we're working to. These 10 agencies are jointly accountable and responsible for that. They have a shared vision. But the problem that we're now solving with Part 7 of this legislation is that if you go looking for that joint venture in the Budget or in the Government's accounts you won't find it. You'll find 10 different bits of it that you have to put together to then say That's the joint venture". Now that might sound like a simple thing but its consequences are much more significant. It means that we don't have within the monitoring structure the ability to see it as one from a financial perspective. That changes with the legislation that we're passing today. That is the kind of approach that will deliver value for money and more than that it will deliver the outcomes that we all share when it comes to making sure we eliminate domestic and sexual violence. I see huge opportunity for this kind of approach across Government where we focus on the outcome we break the silos down and we actually have the legislative mandate that sits behind it. It's exciting and when I've done my addresses over the last few years to the Institute of Public Administration the audience is full of young public servants who want this. They see themselves as public servants and they want to work on these big issues together across agencies. Today's legislation puts in place the framework for that and that's why I'm very proud of it and that's why I commend it to the House."