Seymour David; Robertson GrantDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you Mr Chair. Minister the Finance and Expenditure Committee's report quotes the Secretary to the Treasury saying that fiscal and monetary support has been necessary over the last couple of years to avoid a severe economic contraction but what she doesn't seem to say—that's the Treasury secretary—is how much financial and monetary policy support was necessary. Now Minister when you look at families facing a cost of living crisis and prices of everything going up when you talk to young people who have seen house prices go up 30 percent during the pandemic period do you say to them or do you pause for a moment and think maybe we printed borrowed and spent too much money and stoked too much inflation in the domestic economy and in house prices? Hon GRANT ROBERTSON (Minister of Finance): The benefit of governing in hindsight is that one could be perfect and so you know when one looks back in hindsight there will inevitably be things that a Government would do differently. However we did not have the virtue of hindsight. What we had was the prospect of a global economic crisis far worse than any of us had seen in our lifetimes and the Government—as all Governments around the world did—took a precautionary approach; made sure that we set aside the funding that we believed would be required to make sure New Zealanders made it through COVID-19 in a good place. And as I say while there might be specific things or ways of doing things that would be changed the outcomes actually stand up very well. So while the member might like to find a range of negative statistics it's equally possible to say we've got 3.2 percent unemployment; we've had annual average growth over 5 percent; we've been in a position where our exports have held up. Now all of these things have happened in part because of the very hard work of New Zealand businesses and workers but also because the Government has stood behind those businesses. So the member can pick things out but the member might want to pick out whether or not he thinks there should be more support for small business because I can well recall during the course of COVID-19 he and his party standing up and asking for more money to be put in place. And so the—David Seymour: Point of order. Mr Chair I raise a point of order about the nature of these debates which are new in their format and evolving. The way it works is that the Minister's time answering comes off the time allocated to ACT and we really want to use it to—CHAIRPERSON (Ian McKelvie): Order! Order! No that's not a point of order and it's not a fact. David Seymour: Well Mr Chair it is a fact that the time that he's just spent speaking comes off ACT. CHAIRPERSON (Ian McKelvie): No no it does not. It does not.David Seymour: It's not? Well that's fantastic. Well then he can carry on; I don't mind at all.Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: Thank you Mr Chair. As I said if only it were true that time came off ACT but it isn't. On this side of the House we understand it was important that we backed businesses. It was important that we backed households. When I look at the breakdown of the spending that we did undertake the bulk of it $24 billion was in the wage subsidy scheme the resurgence support payments the small business cash flow scheme—actually that's in the $11 billion that's through Vote Revenue—and $7 billion nearly $8 billion in this period of time that we're covering here in Health. These were areas that required us to support New Zealand to get through COVID-19. And when we stack it up against how we've done against the rest of the world—economically and from a health perspective—it stacks up well.