Yule Lawrence; Williams PotoLAWRENCE YULE (National—Tukituki): Madam Chair thank you for the opportunity. While I'm new to the Finance and Expenditure Committee I do wish to comment and talk actually about the review rather than too much of the politics that we've heard particularly from the New Zealand First MPs this afternoon. While they're interesting and humorous I'm not sure they actually added a lot to the debate. If you actually look at the fiscal position that was reported on 30 June 2017 it shows an improved Budget surplus of $4.1 billion which was up $1.8 billion from the previous year. On anybody's count that is a wonderful result in terms of how the Government has run the economy.Now I accept there are always challenges—I accept that. But equally at the same time 100000 new jobs were created in New Zealand. That is all a sign of a prosperous and forward-moving economy. And at the same time the Government which doesn't always get the credit for things like this was looking at things like the Living Standards Framework Māori living standards social housing reform programmes—all things that were being worked on which actually the current Government seems to forget about.Hon Dr David Clark: Nine long years.LAWRENCE YULE: In your world it might have been nine long years but until the economy was sorted we didn't have a chance of sorting these things out. And I take you to the point where we looked at Auckland Transport as part of the review and the Auckland funding issues for transport. And it's actually really germane that today we had a bit of a debate in question time about Auckland Transport because it was reported to the select committee that Auckland Transport needs between $4 billion and $6 billion more than originally agreed between the Government and the Auckland Council and that regional fuel taxes and other things need to be looked at. It also said that the Auckland Council is at a debt ceiling. So it's actually little wonder that this current Government is taking $5 billion off regional New Zealand and investing most of that in Auckland because actually there's not many other ways of doing that. I'll come back to the Hon Shane Jones because he's going around the country—and I'm very grateful for parts of it—spending $3 billion but he's doing that only because there was a strong New Zealand economy under the National Government which had the books in such a shape that they could make such choices.I also want to speak as Mr McKelvie did previously to me on Inland Revenue which also reported to the select committee. I also want to implore and ask the Minister of Revenue to continue a lot of the work because I think most of the work that's been done by Inland Revenue is actually in the transformational programme is actually really value-add for New Zealanders. We were presented with the fact that 85 percent of all business customers now file online as an example and that's an increase of 9 percent from the previous year. I think significant progress has been made and continues to be made. Even for somebody that wants to question the numbers Inland Revenue has underspent its budget over the last five years. It had $376 million to spend and has spent only $286 million; so that's about $100 million up its sleeve for want of a better word. I think that money needs to continue to be appropriated to this Business Transformation programme because actually as we move with technology more and more people are going to file things online and it's important they be able to do it from their home base.Mr McKelvie spoke before in the select committee that one of the concerns that were expressed was about connectivity with electronic transactions and I think that is a future thing that needs to be looked at to make sure that we don't disadvantage people in New Zealand by their lack of access to the internet.If I go back to what we've reported on we have in summary a very strong set of Government accounts. We have international debt well under control. We do have some concerns with private sector debt and this is reported to the select committee. So in the select committee the review announced—and I concur with this—that there is actually a lot of private sector debt particularly in housing. If the world economy was to change and interest rates were to go up substantially that would cause quite a lot of pain.So actually as the Government moves forward with its programme and it talks about wanting to invest in infrastructure it always requires a very strong well-performing economy that is run in a disciplined way. It gives people choices. This Government has inherited the choices that were made by National.CHAIRPERSON (Poto Williams): I call the Hon Jacqui—Dean. I'm so sorry Jacqui.