Wood MichaelMICHAEL WOOD (Labour—Mt Roskill): I am very pleased to rise and speak in support of the Public Finance (Sustainable Development Indicators) Amendment Bill. In opening my comments I do just want to pay tribute to Mr Shaw and the Green Party for putting this bill forward to the House because I think it is a bill that focuses us on the future and the kind of country that we want to be. Mr Shaw very aptly made the point that unless we actually identify where we want to go and unless we start measuring it we are probably not going to get there and we are certainly not going to develop the kinds of policies that we need.Mr Shaw also put forward a quote that I am sure we might hear during other speeches during this debate but I am going to repeat it. It is one from the great Robert Francis Kennedy: GDP measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile." Really that goes to the core of the purpose of this bill. It is about amending the Public Finance Act as we have heard by putting forward sustainable development indicators into it and establishing a set of principles for what sustainable development actually means. The core of Kennedy's quote I think is very hard to argue against—and I would be surprised if any speaker in this House put forward arguments against it tonight—because what good is GDP if you cannot breathe the air around you? What good is GDP if you cannot swim in the rivers? What good is GDP if you are too scared to set foot outside your house because your community is not safe? What good is GDP if our schools and our hospitals and our community infrastructure are crumbling around us? What good is our GDP if we pass on environmental social and other deficits to future generations? What good is GDP if the country that we hand on to our kids and our grandkids is not as clean is not as sustainable is not as hopeful and is not as good in all of the ways that matter as the one that we inherited? That is what this bill speaks to. It speaks to it by doing what we do in this House—by looking at legislation by actually looking at how we make decisions. I think the key point that Mr Bishop missed in some of his comments—and I want to address a couple of those now—is that what it actually does by putting these indicators into the Public Finance Act is give us a basis for making decisions that are not based just on that crude simple measure of GDP. Mr Shaw spoke and in all of the notes in support of his bill there is nothing to say that we should not be measuring GDP as Mr Bishop suggested at one point; simply to say that that is not a sufficient way of measuring our success as a country. As Mr Shaw said this is not something that is crazy and wild and out there. This is what the OECD is doing this is what Canada is doing and this is what the European Union is doing.In my old union job—the biggest corporates in New Zealand the Australian-owned banks have corporate social responsibility programmes that do exactly what this bill attempts to do. I say that if Aussie-owned banks in New Zealand are up to these kinds of sustainability indicators then why on earth would we as a country and why on earth would this Government not be prepared to measure ourselves against them? The mechanisms in the bill are pretty simple—a set of sustainable development measures—and they are listed in the bill. Mr Bishop made the point that those could be contestable; they could be arguable. Maybe there are too many. Maybe there are some things in there that are extraneous and other things that would be more important. I thought Mr Bishop's discussion on that was actually quite apt. It is exactly the kind of discussion that we should be having in the select committee on this bill. If we respect the underlying principles as Mr Bishop seemed to indicate in the first half of his speech then let us actually look at it properly and see if we can implement it in a way that works across this House.I do want to note this document which Mr Bishop Mr Foss and others in this House have explored in depth in the Finance and Expenditure Committee. It is a 2016 statement on long-term fiscal position. This is exactly the kind of stuff that Treasury—the grey men in suits—is saying is important as we plan policy for our future prosperity as a country. Putting these measures in the Public Finance Act as the bill proposes is about making them real about giving them life and about making this House accountable to those sorts of values not just that crude and simplistic measure of GDP.The Labour Party will be supporting this bill and I challenge the members opposite: if you really are the pragmatic modern progressive conservatives that you claim to be join with us in the select committee in making this bill work. Thank you."