Bayly AndrewANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua): Thank you very much Mr Speaker. As has become evident National will be opposing this bill. I just want to say at the outset that National is absolutely committed to improving the wellbeing of New Zealanders and when I say that and use the word wellbeing" in that context that means a holistic wide approach. I acknowledge the previous speaker Kiritapu Allan. There's always been concern about GDP being an appropriate measure and maybe we are preoccupied by it and most indices used to measure countries around the world obviously revert to that. So the issue of how as the Government we best devise policies that make sure that all New Zealanders and particularly vulnerable New Zealanders are looked after catered for and have their situation improved over time is the conundrum of all Governments. So with that context when National was in power we were very very focused on measuring—well first of all setting objectives and then measuring them and being accountable for them. I know there's been some comments made about that. The only thing I would say to people is that if anything you might have accused National of being preoccupied about setting objectives and measuring them and trying to be accountable for them. I've never met anyone who said to me that National was soft and flabby and never sought to put in place good objectives and to actually make sure we were accountable. I've never heard anyone say that to me. Some of the targets that we put in place just to give an indication of the extent of them—and not just purely financial measures but we had very specific measures around reducing welfare dependency increasing participation in early education and childhood education infant immunisation rates reducing assaults on children NCEA qualification rates reducing total crime reducing reoffending. So you can sort of see—that's just some examples of some of the ones that we had. Underneath each of those areas there was a whole raft of quite specific measures. The thing I would say to all members: the hardest thing about putting in this type of framework is actually having the intellectual grunt to work out what are the key drivers that if you measure it will actually result in change. It's very easy to set easy targets but they don't actually drive particular outcomes. When we were talking about the bill in the committee of the whole House before—there's obviously a requirement under the bill for the contents of the Fiscal Strategy Report to first explain how the wellbeing objectives have guided the Government's Budget decisions and secondly if the wellbeing objectives that guided the Government's Budget decisions differ from those indicated the Budget Policy Statement then indicate those differences. So I went to the Wellbeing Budget and the last one I could find was the 2019 one. As I indicated before the thing that I find most alarming about this approach and if the Government is set on adopting this—and obviously this bill will pass through today with Government support members all coming together on it. The targets that were specified in the Wellbeing Budget I have a problem with them because as I have talked about before the first one I come across is "A new frontline service [measure] for mental health with a $455m programme providing access for 325000 people by 2023/24". So that is a financial measure. That's about how you spend money. That's about saying "We're going to spend lots of money". It doesn't necessarily lead to better outcomes.I know that there's a lot of argument that even though the Government has announced a $1.9 billion spend in mental health and has probably only spent $27 million if you just subtract that from the moment this as a target is meaningless. All that just says is "We're going to spend lots of money". It doesn't measure the outcomes and that is the thing that I find really really concerning because if that is the trend of how this is going to be used in future Budgets whether by the Labour-led Government or by National then I think we will be making substantial changes because I think everyone in this House wants to see improvement in the lifestyle the life situations of many of our most vulnerable and that is not the type of thing that's going to achieve that. I think with that sort of background I just can't see how we can actually move forward with this. The Living Standards Framework—the previous speaker spoke about this. I am a member of the Finance and Expenditure Committee. I did listen carefully to the range of economists and the thing that came through very clearly in their discussions with us and they were well considered was essentially we are at the bleeding edge of trying to develop this framework and even they are not in a situation where it is defined enough. It's an exciting concept but it hasn't reached the level of detail that is necessary to be able to put this into a Budget statement and use it. We talk about human capital we talk about physical capital and all these different—there's actually four of them. But the lack of detail around it is a big issue. If anything I think this bill is probably premature because if I look at how it's been used previously I don't think it's leading to better outcomes. Certainly you couldn't look at any of those measures and say how that will improve the mental health of people or child poverty rates which are also specified in there. All I've seen is that actually rates are going the other way unfortunately. I think we need to get to a situation where we can have a holistic conversation around how we're going to achieve it. But the biggest thing and the biggest challenge is actually setting meaningful objectives and KPIs and delivering them which is the ultimate outcome. So the issue around delivery is actually crucial and I know my caucus members are going to talk further on that but as I've said before this is one of those bills that makes you feel good and it provides a warm glow but unfortunately it's a warm glow of incompetence."