Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): I thank the Minister. I would take issue with his use of the words cash flow supply". Actually the imprest supply is the authorisation pipeline. It's the authorisation to spend—and he is right—that usually comes from the Budget and when there are extras to be spent that's when imprest supply comes in. It's an authorisation bucket. It doesn't have the same detail in it that the Estimates of Appropriations do and therefore when the $50 billion—actually it was $54 billion last year in second imprest supply; $36 billion of operating expenses $18 billion of capital expenditure—we didn't have any sense apart from the Minister's own announcements that this so-called COVID recovery fund was being drawn down on about what was being spent when it was being spent or whether that was good value for money and I'm trying to get a sense of that now. In the first imprest supply the Minister got the $35 billion in imprest one. Most of that was in the appropriations.A couple of things: how much of the $54 billion authorisation to spend was actually spent because that authorisation has gone now and there was a Supplementary Estimates document tabled with this Budget of nearly a thousand pages and it was impossible to tell how much of that was spent and where it was spent. Secondly when he introduced the first imprest supply why did he only allow for $1.54 billion for a COVID resurgence? It's in two lines in that bill and one is $1.142 billion and one is $500 million for wage subsidies which is contained in the $1.738 billion. I ask that because that's only $1.54 billion. We've spent more than that now in this resurgence and if—Hon Grant Robertson: No we haven't.Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: Well OK. Well maybe we haven't so the Minister can just address that. Therefore how close to running out of money did we get in terms of the authorisations or was there enough in the Estimates of Appropriations in the $35 billion underspent that gave the Minister the buffer? So how much of the $50 billion authorised last year was actually spent how much is he going to spend more than the budgeted appropriations now—because there's quite a bit of COVID money in the Budget—and how can we tell when the $50 billion that he announced as a COVID Response and Recovery Fund is exhausted and then he's coming back for more?Hon GRANT ROBERTSON (Minister of Finance): So in answer to the number of questions in the member's speech and I'll endeavour to try and answer as many of them as I can in terms of the $50 billion that he refers to—and there is the issue here of operating expenses and capital expenses and capital allocations within every imprest supply bill. The advice that I have is that $33.827 billion was charged against the $50 billion. So therefore the cap wasn't reached and it never is in imprest supply bills. They're put up not as a target but as a cap because by their very nature they are there to deal with the unknown and so therefore there is not an expectation and I believe I actually said when that particular bill was passed that this did not represent a target; it represented a limit. So that's the answer to that part of the member's question.With respect to the COVID Response and Recovery Fund I know that the member is asking the two questions together and I also know that he understands—because he's just said it—that there is an appropriated sum of money for that that is separate. I would say that's not so much about this year's Estimates; it's about last year's Estimates but I will answer the question for the member's benefit. So that money had all been appropriated. As I said in this House in the last period of time not all money allocated in particular buckets within the COVID Response and Recovery Fund had been spent and so having gone back through that we have more than enough of a buffer to meet the cost that we have seen so far. In terms of the biggest amount of those obviously it's going to be the wage subsidy scheme. By the time we work our way through all of the applications that were made for the first fortnight of that scheme it will come I suspect to around about $1.2 billion and then on top of that we have the resurgence support payment which will come out and that carries on obviously so that hasn't stopped. But that will come out I suspect at around half a billion dollars so we'd end up somewhere around $1.7 billion for that first fortnight. Obviously we're now into the second fortnight and because—I think I've said in this House to the member or to his colleague—we were forecasting somewhere in the $2 billion to $2.5 billion it ended up being $1.7 billion for that first so we're significantly under where we thought we would be. But when we put together the money that was available—the just under $5 billion coming out of the Budget with the money that we then identified which came to around about $3 billion—the vast bulk of that related to the business finance guarantee scheme and some to the small business cash flow scheme and then one or two other smaller pots of money that we had allocated too that had not been spent.When you put all of that together we've got somewhere north of $8 billion that was available already appropriated and which we are not yet up against spending. What I would say to the member though is that clearly there are ongoing costs associated with COVID-19. That includes—and they are within the Estimates as well—matters such as vaccinations that includes matters such as those to do with managed isolation and quarantine and so on and so there is an ongoing need for expenditure in the response to COVID-19. But in terms of where we are now and what is being needed we have the resources that we need."