SpeechHon KIRITAPU ALLAN (Associate Minister of Finance): Mr Speaker thank you very much for the opportunity to speak this afternoon and also I just want to acknowledge those that have been on the Finance and Expenditure Committee who have produced this report He Puna Hao Pātiki. It's been a while since I did have the opportunity to sit on the Finance and Expenditure Committee in the previous term and we got to debate and I guess be stewards of some of the amendments that were required to be made and that we did make under the Public Finance Act. Tonight I will briefly touch on some of the points and some of the highlights that the select committee have made but in particular I wouldn't mind turning to He Puna Hao Pātiki particularly with a focus on some of the measures that we've introduced—obviously this is our fourth wellbeing Budget in a row—to look at how those have changed over time what's guiding them what we're hoping to achieve from that approach and how we're tracking.In terms of where we're at as a small Pacific nation in the context of a global world we're all acutely aware of the economic pressures and strains internationally. Inflation rates around the world are very significantly high. We've got supply chain issues. We've got a whole range of issues that are impacting on us. And our fiscal and economic position here domestically as He Puna Hao Pātiki observed is that we've had a significant increase in debt over the last year—19 percent. COVID-19 set the environment for that.However I guess one of the things I reflected on and it's come through in this report is some of the challenges that we have been engaged in as a consequence of COVID and of course the war in Ukraine is doing its fair dash as well—I think that one of the things that's stood us in good stead and this is highlighted in the report itself is that our economic position coming into the pandemic was sound and it's meant that our economy has come through COVID and the COVID shock almost better than anywhere else. The evidence for that is in the fact that we have received two triple A credit ratings from two leading agencies and that's in the middle of a pandemic. It's not something that too many countries have the privilege of being able to say.Our GDP is up. Our unemployment is at record low levels. We're all well familiar with the 3.2 percent that we're across nationally but today we had some good results for the Māori unemployment rate specifically. I think it's down to about 5.5 percent. I think I saw the Pasifika unemployment rate was down at about 5.4 percent. So these indicia are all I guess benchmarks of a sound economic position despite the strong winds that have been in our face.The next measure we can look at is wages. Our wages have outpaced inflation up until this recent inflation spike and they are forecast to do so again in every year after 2022. So that means obviously that households will be better off and in particular better off under Labour. And of course our debt is set to peak at about half of Australia's around a third of that in the UK and around about a fifth of the US'. That's measured consistently as a percentage of GDP. Probably because I've been knee deep in it for some time I want to look at the impacts of the Living Standards Framework and the relatively newer framework He Ara Waiora. So a part of Treasury's vision and this was covered off in He Puna Hao Pātiki has been to lift living standards for all New Zealanders and to achieve that vision the Living Standards Framework and He Ara Waiora have—well they've both evolved over time. And as each Budget has come through over the past four years we've seen a growth in terms of different iterations in how they're measuring our wellbeing across the board how they're measuring the wellbeing of New Zealanders. The Living Standards Framework reflects the local and international developments in how we are conceptualising and how we are measuring wellbeing. Now it's slightly evolved since I sat on the Finance and Expenditure Committee a little while ago but the four—Dr Duncan Webb: We've missed you.Hon KIRITAPU ALLAN: Yeah it's gotten better a lot better. I was like huh! It's a little more nuanced and you can tell that that's growth isn't it! But the four wealths that underpin it—that's the natural environment that's the social cohesion the human capability and the financial and physical capital—those spread out into a range of different measures by which we can assess how people are going. One of the things that's been really interesting over the past year or so is that we've been asking from the Government side of things agencies and asking Government departments to move beyond the silo to move beyond the silo when it comes to achieving these wellbeing move beyond the silo when it comes to setting—we're requiring agencies to bring together cluster budgets so that they are (1) prioritising across sectors (2) working towards shared outcomes that are important across sector and (3) ultimately so that we can see the tangible outcomes in whether we use the Living Standards Framework but through that holistic wellbeing lens. I think that's something that's steered us really well as we went through our COVID recovery. I think it steered us really well in terms of where we invest money how we look at the overarching—it wasn't just bottom lines that steered our investments over that period. It's not just those bottom lines that are how we assess where we are at as a nation. But I remember when we were looking at things it was: what does bring about wellbeing in those times of real challenge? People being able to come together as communities in various different ways was a part of it.I remember one of the key things that we all decided collectively was that the arts were so fundamental to wellbeing across the board that that was one area that we didn't want to see fall off—one of the things that often can fall off when we're going through economically challenging times. I've just been over the weekend to the largest ever kapa haka festival Te Matatini. We made decisions to invest in those types of communities those types of performance—well cultural bastions—because we decided that a pandemic shouldn't obliterate those communities. And actually if we encouraged those communities to come together we would see benefits across health housing knowledge and skills cultural capability and belonging—all of those types of indicia that perhaps for some on the other side of the House aren't as important but to us it has been.As I look across the country and have been able to see how this framework has driven our mind-set in terms of where we decided to support I can see that it's landed. Really in my mind we've been quite privileged to be able to see how communities have come together and that being manifest across a range of different wellbeings. I'm really proud of the fact that Minister Robertson did that for us as we were going through the pandemic. One of the other key areas that the committee looked into was obviously the net worth across the board but also the large-scale asset programme and whether or not that had had some successes. I'll leave it to my other colleagues to pick up the ball on that one. But just again thanks for the work that you did team. It's a good piece of work and it's a great report.