McKelvie IanIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you Madam Speaker. I always quite enjoy following the co-leader of the Green Party. He always comes up with something new and the new thing I have just learnt—and it clearly is part of the wellbeing technology—is that of a professional job. Frankly I think this bill's a little bit of an amateur job but none the less we'll get on to that in a minute. The last speaker also gave me little confidence in a competent Government and it's taken them three years and many weeks of urgency actually to finally get this piece of legislation back for a second reading. If that was part of the confidence and supply agreement with the Greens well they've got it here at last. We in the National Party most certainly support the wellbeing aspiration of New Zealanders and that was emphasised in the speech that our leader Todd Muller made in Te Puna a couple of weeks ago. There's no question that we all come to this House for the same reason; we just have very different ways of going about it at times and I don't think that this bill is a way that—well I know that this bill is not a way we would have gone about this and I'll explain why. We also support the view that Governments should have a broader focus than just GDP as the range of measures of success. One of the great challenges that this Government's going to face in the next year or two or whoever is the Government in the next year or two will be—Hon James Shaw: Thank you for your endorsement. IAN McKELVIE: —you might hope you're not James—the fact that if the Government's not careful it's going to be the sole instigator of GDP in this country and that for an economy is a massive challenge. So I think that in the aftermath of COVID it's most important that we have a broad source of GDP and that our Government encourages private enterprise to get moving on a lot of the issues that they would be very good at. The Public Finance Act is one of the pillars of Government in New Zealand and I agree with the Minister that it's a very good piece of legislation. It's stood us in very good stead over the years but it cannot be all things to all people. If it's meant to be all things to all people it will most certainly undermine its focus and the very important role it plays in New Zealand's economic structure. I'm one of those people who believes decision making involves something of a hierarchical process and if we undermine the hierarchical process we will not always get the outcomes we're looking for. I listened to a number of the submissions on this bill and I thought that some of them were very good submissions on wellbeing and I guess the thing that I wondered was how it actually fits into the Public Finance Act and how some of those submissions fitted with what this bill is designed to achieve. One of the submissions I particularly enjoyed and the first thing is it was a submission from Marilyn Waring who talked at length on issues of wellbeing in New Zealand. It's been of course a lifelong—I suppose you could almost say—love for her and a thing that she's concentrated on and she had an opportunity in this bill to put her point very strongly. But under this bill in the first part of the bill the Government's required to report annually on its wellbeing objectives in the Budget. One would imagine that for this to mean anything we'd be provided with comparisons or with a form of measuring those wellbeing objectives and I have yet to see any proof that that's going to be given to us in a form that is easy for the public to understand and is usable. The second part of the bill relates to Treasury's role in this and Treasury is to report periodically on the state of wellbeing in New Zealand. I think the bill recommends that periodically" might mean "four years" or four-yearly which clearly means that you're going to get in one term of Government a year with no report in it and maybe the other two with a report in them and you'd never know how that would work out. But how this relates to the first requirement of the Government to report on its wellbeing objectives I'm not quite sure. There's no clear direction on how that would happen and I can imagine the vociferous noise coming out of finance Ministers of all ilks when Treasury reports something they don't like because you only have to listen to the actions of this Government when Treasury's talked about things they don't like to see that Treasury will come under significant criticism if in fact it doesn't agree with the Government's view. So I think the whole objective of this is a bit unusual. In the Minister of Finance's first reading speech he stated—and I've yet to understand it fully—"the exclusive focus of the Public Finance Act on fiscal matters means that we are not in creating our Budget looking at the full range of measures that define a country's success from an economic point of view or indeed specifically here that define [what's] in a Budget." I think we get elected to this House to bring our collective views to what appears in a Budget at the end of the day. To achieve that we rely on a whole lot of information given to us by all sorts of agencies but we—most importantly—need to understand the facts and we often don't understand those facts. Given the statement by the Minister of Finance in his first reading speech I don't think that that—including in the Public Finance Act—is going to make it any easier or any simpler for the Government to develop a Budget. I just think that it's blurring the edges basically. I think that we need to have sound concrete statistics and shortly after arriving on the Government benches this Government scrapped the 10 public service targets that the previous Government had put in place. Those public service targets measured things specifically and they were very useful determinants of what was going on. The other thing they've done since then was to scrap the health targets and I think we can argue all we like about the structure of the health industry in New Zealand but the health targets were a very useful indicator of what was going on. I'm testament to that because I've now got a new leg and I tell you what an amazing difference it makes to you. If the health system can provide a difference like that to people's lives we need to be measuring how quickly it's doing it and how efficiently it's doing it. I think it's most important that we have targets in our system and that we not only have targets but we have measurements that we can clearly understand and that are accessible and easy for the public to understand. That's one of the challenges I think we have with a lot of things that we do in this House: we don't make it easily understandable. The other thing is that I referred earlier this afternoon to a select committee process that I thought was pretty extraordinary and it was hugely collegial. The select committee process on a lot of these bills doesn't consider alternative views and this one didn't consider many other views at all. It pretty much came back to the House as it was but that's not unusual for legislation to do that after going through a select committee process. I think it's critical that we have a strong resilient and sustainable economy and good decision-making by Governments and good policy development and legislation regulation made by Governments is absolutely critical to good decision-making and to a good strong and sensible economy. Lastly I just want to refer to another issue that James Shaw talked about and that was that there are many other measures than financial capital. I suppose being a farmer I know there are many other measures than financial capital because the financial capital is the last thing you need to consider in running a business like farming. You need to have it of course but actually there's a whole lot of other capital that you use in the course of farming: environmental capital livestock wellbeing—all sorts of things. So I think the background I come from gives you a very good understanding of all the types of capital you need to run a business or a society and actually farms in a funny way are societies. They're societies of animals and humans all mixed together and I think it's pretty important that we understand that. So I'm not sure where this bill's going to get to or where the result of this bill will get to in the future but I do think that trying to combine all of those I suppose "wellbeing factors" into a thing called the Public Finance Act—I don't think that's the answer. I think there are much better ways of doing that in the future. Thank you Madam Speaker. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): The next call is a split call."