Bayly AndrewANDREW BAYLY (National—Port Waikato): Thank you Mr Chair. I'm just getting over the rash assertion or question from the Greens member saying that Mr Robertson should spend more money. I think most people realise that Mr Robertson is a spendaholic. Actually he needs a lot more constraint.Hon Scott Simpson: He's addicted to it.ANDREW BAYLY: Addicted—that is right. So the first question I suppose I'd like to ask the Minister is how much of the COVID fund is actually left? I see that at May 2021 there was only $6 billion left of the $62 billion fund. So it would be useful just to get an update from the Minister on actually how much of the $62 billion he's blown because it is a lot of money. And then of course on top of that there's the imprest supply issue that he put through the House—another $24 billion just mild amounts from the Minister who just keeps ramming this stuff through. And of course it is big chunky amounts of money. So it'd be good if we did get an update on the COVID spend and also to what extent he's accessed the imprest supply account. The other issue I'm very keen to ask him about is—he was talking about how it's very easy to be smart after the event in response to Mr Seymour's question about the nature of the spend and whether it was good quality spend. I suppose the big issue we have with the COVID fund is that as the Minister's pointed out $24 billion was spent towards supporting businesses and quite rightly so. In fact some would argue that even now many businesses are struggling and we have many Government servants and council staff still not back at work or if they were back at work they would be supporting our businesses a lot more. That would certainly underpin the economic performance particularly of those in retail cafes etc. That is a question as to whether in fact the Minister's ever going to require people to come back from work certainly within the Government sector. But in terms of the quality of the spend other than the $24 billion that we believe is appropriate very much so there still remains the question of poor-quality spend and lack of delivery of outcomes from that. The Minister will be well aware you know part of the total of the $62 billion: a modern approach to night classes $16 million over four years; Jobs for Nature which the Auditor-General picked up $874 million; Radio New Zealand baseline. There's a whole page of spending here that no one really knows why it was included in the COVID fund and not under the sectors where it should have been allocated; and why in fact this was actually a priority during the COVID period when the Government is basically taking our debt from $60 billion to $120 billion. There's just big chunky amounts of money. Of course the Minister will recall that we wrote to the Auditor-General and the Auditor-General was pretty clear that parts of this expenditure should have been much more clearly identified wasn't and made it clear—for instance the National Wilding Conifer Control Programme said that In our view this initiative should have been included in the New Policy Initiatives … We have contacted the Ministry for Primary Industries about this and the Ministry acknowledges that there was an oversight in providing information on this initiative." There's a whole stack of these types of issues. The issue we've got is the poor quality that was rammed through in a slush fund called the COVID fund to help Mr Robertson spend more money to make people feel good but actually deliver very little real tangible benefits to New Zealand. So please tell us how much of the $62 billion is left; how much of the imprest has been used; and whether in fact we might expect to see some tangible results out of some of this wasteful spending that's been put forward."