Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you Madam Chair. Dr Duncan Webb didn't need to give the Minister of Finance a pat on the back. The Minister did it all by himself. I'm only being partly flippant. I think he does deserve some kudos for his management through a difficult period. But my role isn't to pat the Minister on the back; it's to scrutinise his performance and the financial performance of the Crown accounts which I will do. I want to quote firstly before asking two or three questions of the Minister from page 11 of the Budget Policy Statement 2021 and I'm going to go back and relate it to 2019-20 which is pretty much where we're at although I realise it's a random walk across two or three years. It says at the top of that page: We went into COVID-19 in a strong position with net core Crown debt below 20% of GDP and running surpluses." Well it left three words out of that sentence because it was "and running surpluses into the ground". Now the Minister mentions the Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update (HYEFU) and I'm going to mention two. The first one is HYEFU 2016 which projected an out-year financial total Crown operating balance before gains and losses for 2020 to be $6.8 billion and for 2021 $8.5 billion. Now by December 2019 well before the effects of COVID we were projecting for 2020 a loss—no surplus of $6.8 billion but a loss of $0.9 billion; a nearly $8 billion turnaround in financial performance under this Government—and projecting in the following year a skittish $0.1 billion surplus compared with what the previous Government was forecasting of $8.5 billion. That's a $15 billion turnaround projected in two financial years that had nothing to do with COVID. Now my question to the Minister is: is my mathematics correct because they are directly out of the documents that he himself has just quoted? Now the second question and my analysis of the quality of the spending—yes to the Minister we needed to spend a lot of money to keep the economy going and the National Party supported that. But I want to look at both the quantity and the visibility and the transparency of the spending around COVID. So firstly in respect of transparency what we have been trying to do is clearly identify the spending that was related to COVID and that resulted from the pandemic from the structural spending that has been simultaneously incurred by this Government. I'm talking about jobseeker support increases. I'm talking about winter energy payments and a number of things that are not necessarily COVID-related or at least certainly not time-bound because the things that we've got to spend on matters to do with for example COVID testing border controls wage subsidies of course—they're all time-bound. Much of the spending that we have seen incurred by this Government as evidenced by HYEFU and the Budget Policy Statement is locked in in perpetuity. We've been trying to distinguish between the two and we can't and I think from a transparency perspective that's really important. I'd like the Minister to comment on how we are able to discern the quantity of the Government's spending. Thirdly I want to talk about the quality of the Government's spending because the Auditor-General was very critical I think of—gently critical—understanding the context of the amount of spending related to COVID as part of COVID recovery and response: $50 billion allocated. It was a slush fund—that's understood—but—Hon Grant Robertson: Ha! Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: Well it was. The Minister didn't have it appropriated to various votes. He had a great big bucket of money and he asked the Parliament to come to this place and he came here and said "Trust us. We'll do the right thing." and Parliament said "Yeah OK." It was a slush fund and now we know that the Auditor-General has been quite critical of the quality of the analysis about the value for money on that. Now I accept that last year there was a time when that was a problem. But the Office of the Auditor-General basically said that they were "unable to readily … determine how much expenditure the Government has even decided to approve for the Covid-19 response". They said "It is difficult if not impossible to get from [existing reporting] an overall picture of how much … funding has been allocated and how much has been incurred on various initiatives to date. … There is a public interest in information that lets people see how public money is being spent." and the Minister on behalf of the Prime Minister in this House on 11 February said that he was working with Treasury on how to respond to the Auditor-General's comments. I think it would be really helpful if we could get an update of progress on that matter."