Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Well thank you very much Mr Chair. I'd like to start by just following on. The Minister's being quite exasperated to try to explain the workings of the Public Finance Act and he clearly professes to understand it very well. I—Hon Grant Robertson: I'm not exasperated—always happy.DAVID SEYMOUR: He says he always has. I note that last year's Estimates in part were spent on purchasing land at Ihumātao using money appropriated for the land for housing fund. The Auditor-General in response to my complaint concluded that the ministry did not seek—CHAIRPERSON (Rt Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! Order! The member will come to this debate.DAVID SEYMOUR: Mr Chair I'm very much addressing this debate. We need to know that the money that is being appropriated is going to be spent correctly and it's relevant that last year they didn't do it. I'll finish by saying what the Auditor-General said: the expenditure was incurred without appropriation and without authority to use imprest supply."So the first thing I'd like is for the Minister to actually give a reassurance to the committee that if we go through this whole process under the Public Finance Act he actually intends to spend money legally this year because unfortunately according to the Auditor-General they weren't able to do it last year. So while the Minister is up lecturing people about the Public Finance Act he should get up and just tell us the Government intends to spend money legally this year because it's very important to New Zealanders.I'd like to talk a little bit about the COVID-19 Response and Recovery Fund: in particular does the Government have sufficient modelling and understanding of the costs of lockdowns and is it prepared fiscally to compensate? I'd like to ask: how many weeks over this financial year is an upper and lower limit and an average it assumes that there might be spent in lockdown? People need to know that there is going to be due compensation. I'd just point to many people in business right now. They hope that if they can get through this period then they're going to be able to recover. They hope people will spend like mad before Christmas. But if they don't keep their working capital sustainable and make it through the period from now to whenever this lockdown ends—especially for us poor Aucklanders and Aucklanders refugee down here in Wellington—then they're not going to be there to capitalise on that recovery and I'd ask the Minister: have they considered the resurgence payment? Now people have been very glad of it because they recognise that the wage subsidy doesn't cover all the costs a business has. Businesses have costs that are fixed—rates rent electricity other utilities—and they're grateful that they got one week of resurgence payment. The problem is that this short sharp lockdown hasn't been just one week. It's been many weeks and it seems to be going on and if those businesses run down their working capital and aren't there to capitalise on the recovery then we're all going to be in some difficulty especially those people who are currently struggling enormously with great anxiety facing enormous uncertainty about their future with those businesses.So has the Minister considered how many weeks of fiscal support might be necessary in this particular year for alert level 2 3 and 4 restrictions and the impact they have? What sort of envelope has he worked in lower and upper limits and expected number of weeks and will he consider making the resurgence payment multi-week just as sadly lockdowns have become multi-week?But of course there is a cost to doing all that and it's particularly a cost that falls on lower generations. I was reading an article in the New Zealand Herald by another member of this House called Brooke van Velden and she said that the impact on younger generations is twofold. One is that we've just taken on $140 billion over the four years—that's what the Government is proposing to do. Now New Zealand hasn't increased its productivity—which I hope to get to in a later speech—but has increased its debt that it needs to service. Even if interest rates don't rise and I'm sure they will it's still an enormous amount of principal to service and second of all a combination of monetary and fiscal impulse means that asset prices have gone through the roof in New Zealand: $200000 for the average house. A couple in their 20s trying to save a 20 percent deposit on an extra 200 grand they've got to save 40 grand after tax to stay still. They feel their future slipping further away.So my final question is what has the Government done to think about the intergenerational fairness because the debt and the asset price inflation seems to have hit younger New Zealanders much harder than others. Thank you Mr Chair.Hon GRANT ROBERTSON (Minister of Finance): Well that was a very muddled and confused speech there by the member David Seymour. Firstly the member said that the Government has "taken on $140 billion worth of debt". He knows that's not correct. He knows that that is—CHAIRPERSON (Rt Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! Order! Now the member will withdraw and apologise.Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: I withdraw and apologise. The member I'm sure will know that that is a forecast—a debt forecast—rather than an amount of money that the Government has taken on. The other response I'd give to the member is to say that the radical transformation from David Seymour and the ACT Party from their concern about the fiscal expenditure to now just "Why don't you spend more money? Why don't you spend more money?" is quite remarkable and I do note that as I said to Mr Woodhouse there were political parties who had decided that they wanted to spend the COVID fund. Similarly the ACT Party had its views about what it wouldn't spend the revenue it wouldn't generate and how it would get rid of parts of that fund. So I find those positions interesting in light of the debate today.The member expresses a concern for the intergenerational impact here and I think that I'm going to take him at his word as I must and say that I share that concern. I share the concern that future generations coming out of COVID need to know that the New Zealand economy and New Zealand's society is going to be there in the way that they would have had expectations and certainly their parents and grandparents would have had as well. What we know is that the approach that we have taken to COVID-19 has allowed the New Zealand economy to recover better than almost any other."