English BillHon BILL ENGLISH (Minister of Finance): I thank the member for his reference to Ōtākaro Ltd in Christchurch. The reason he has not heard about it is because it has only recently come into existence so that is understandable. But it is taking up the Crown's assets and liabilities that are extant from the activities of the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority and putting a board in charge of it to essentially clean up and eventually finish off the role the Crown has played in Christchurch—after a discussion about what rightfully falls to the council and what rightfully falls to the Crown. I just want to acknowledge the huge contribution of my colleague the Hon Gerry Brownlee in getting to this stage frankly. The convention centre is just one of any number of highly complex and challenging commercial and engineering problems that had to be solved in Christchurch and he has shown a remarkable ability to deal with most of them. It is that kind of pragmatism that is guiding the way the Government spends a lot of the money referred to here in these Estimates.Members may have heard this general use of the term social investment". Increasingly the Government spending particularly as overseen by Treasury funded through Vote Finance in some parts—Treasury is using these tools alongside other Government agencies. The combination of ubiquity of data and the relative cheapness of the technology that can make sense of it means that we are going to be able to develop and are now developing a much more refined view of who the Crown spends its money on. More importantly it is guiding decisions around what actions can be taken to change lives to change the trajectory over time of the lives of those—particularly the most disadvantaged—who are the most significant recipients of Government-funded services. Through the appropriations of Parliament and at relatively low cost we are building a tool kit that will enable both the Public Service and Ministers to see much more clearly and directly both the costs of failure—that is what happens to people if we spend money and have no impact or if we do not spend money where we should—and more importantly the potential impact of doing a good job of it. As time goes on more and more Government expenditure will be able to be looked at through the lens of some kind of quantification or prioritisation of investment. The equation is pretty simple. The tools that are being financed here enable the Government to look at the investment proposition for whole populations—so for instance all sickness and invalids beneficiaries now supported living payment and jobseeker - health condition injury or disability beneficiaries—or for segments of them which is actually much more important. That is you can have two people who are aged 34 on a benefit with completely different prospects. One may have turned up last week; one may have already been there for 15 years. Understanding that difference would mean providing a different service to each of those people even though they are both 34-year-old Pākehā males living in Wellington. In the past the Government was essentially flying blind. The Government has been making assumptions—often reasonably well informed—treating people in broad categories rather than groups or individuals with their unique characteristics. It is certainly going to be a challenge for the Public Service as we develop these tools because it involves a much more personally driven personally focused way of making decisions and deriving solutions. As the Committee traverses other votes we will find more and more that the tools being financed through these votes are contributing to getting better results for all the other spending."