Allan KiritapuKIRITAPU ALLAN (Labour): It is a privilege to speak on this bill. It is a privilege to speak on this bill because on this side of the House we look back to 30 years ago when the public sector went through a raft of transformational changes. If there's anything that I can align and agree on with the previous speaker David Seymour the singular thing I will agree with is the fact that the Public Finance Act is a world-leading piece of legislation. It brought transparency and accountability into a public financial system that had none at the time; it was running awry. You had a public sector that was relatively agnostic in terms of following direction of its Ministers. You had books that were quite easily able to be—I think it's not too much of a stretch to say that it was quite easy to duck and dive and hide the true measures of what was happening fiscally within that sector and coming off the back of the Muldoon era that became very apparent across the raft of areas that greater transparency was required in the State sector. So we saw the introduction of the State Sector Act in 1988 and it was followed with the Public Finance Act in 1989.Now what that Act did then—as the previous speaker said—was it brought in a whole raft of measures that required transparency and accountability. It set targets which this House and the Minister of Finance were required to go through in terms of being able to audit those accounts of every dollar publicly spent.Now it's interesting though to note in this House that there is near unanimous support for what the intention of—and thus actually the output of—that bill was in 1989. I can say that in 1989 the Opposition sat there and said it would have absolutely no effect it would have little to do in terms of increasing transparency and accountability and it was just a raft of measures that this fairy Government wanted to bring in—much like the arguments over the course of this afternoon and this evening have been from the Opposition. What is wellbeing?" says the member over there. Well interestingly enough it was Treasury under the previous Government's watch that developed the Living Standards Framework. It sat up there on the bench but it was under that previous Government's watch where that Living Standards Framework was developed which assesses multiple capitals in terms of understanding and seeing beyond GDP what wellbeing is; what the standard of living is. If we look back to what Robert Kennedy said—and there's been a raft of measures in terms of people who have spoken about GDP but it's very hard to measure when you're using purely fiscal outputs and measures to measure wellbeing happiness and a standard of life that this side of the House thinks should be made as a benchmark for all.So when I look at the amending legislation that we're considering this evening and what it requires us to do—well it doesn't supplant one for the other as the previous member said. It doesn't trump one and trump the other; it sets out a very clear public accountability regime. For example section 26KA in the current Act sets out the contents of fiscal strategy reporting in terms of fiscal responsibilities and outputs. New section 26KB inserted by the bill is in addition to those fiscal responsibilities and accountabilities. This bill here sets out the wellbeing objectives that a Government must also be accountable to the public for. Now why is that not a good thing at any state or in any measure that we look to? Of course it's about financial wellbeing and accountability but so too the measures that were all set out in Treasury's Living Standards Framework which the previous Government actually developed.So look I'm finding this debate a little bit reminiscent of those major transformational changes that were made back in the 1980s. We could almost take word for word the Opposition's debate notes on that night 30 years ago to the debates that have been given in this House today. This side of the House and this Government has always been about transformational change. It might look a little bit tricky. It's pretty easy to criticise change but this side of the House believes it's fundamental and we're doing it."