Robertson GrantHon GRANT ROBERTSON (Minister of Finance): Thank you Mr Chair and I thank the committee for their consideration of these matters. I note a number of aspects of the Auditor-General's work over the course of this year around how we can ensure that all New Zealanders get a good level of understanding of the expenditure that is undertaken on their behalf by Government agencies. Early on the Auditor-General raised some questions around the COVID-19 response funding. In doing so he acknowledged that the Government was facing a situation where it needed to move extremely swiftly and at a scale that we had not really seen in New Zealand's recent history. As a result of that significant amounts of money have been spent. I would note for the benefit of the member asking the question Nicola Willis that we now have initiative-level information being published by the Treasury about the COVID funding that is available for people to find on the Treasury's website.One of the issues that arose during the exercise of being able to identify initiative-level spending is of course the overall structure of public finances in New Zealand. As I'm sure the member knows with the creation of both the State Sector Act in 1988 and the Public Finance Act in 1989 we devolved down all of that to an individual agency and departmental level and that is of course the process that members are indeed participating in today and do at Estimates time as well. Estimates and financial reviews are undertaken at a Vote appropriation level and there at that point people can see what the individual initiatives are.I have some sympathy with the views expressed by the Auditor-General over the course of the last couple of years about that and that does require some significant reform of the way that we do public finances in New Zealand. The Government has begun to undertake such reform and that includes as Dr Webb indicated in his opening remarks the development of the clusters which is actually to get to the exact point that the member raised which is it should be about the services that New Zealanders receive so rather than worry particularly about whether for example a family or sexual violence initiative is funded out of Vote Police or Vote Justice or Vote Women's Affairs we look at the initiative itself and say Has that worked?" That is not how things are structured today and it does make it difficult for members of Parliament and members of the public to be able to identify that. So it's the very reason why we're making some of the changes that we are making.More broadly when the Auditor-General refers to the question of performance reporting we are happily taking that report away and working out how we can develop a better longer-term approach. What that requires is actually boiling things down significantly more than we currently do. So it would require moving away from the approach we're doing today away from the appropriation-level approach to actually understanding exactly who is receiving support or is expected to receive support priority and sequencing compared with that work and the costs and options available to a Government to deliver those services. That is a significant change. I respect the Auditor-General for putting that change in front of us and I think he would understand that it will take a little bit more work on behalf of all of us to create that kind of system. But it is what lies at the heart of the modernisation of the Public Finance Act that we've been undertaking."