O'Connor GregGREG O'CONNOR (Labour—Ōhāriu): I know one is not permitted to use irony in this House but I don't think there's any danger of that because we are really in an irony-free zone here because what we hear from the Opposition they're either berating Government for too much expenditure or berating them for not spending enough. There has not been a speaker that has spoken in the last week and a half now who has not spent at least half of their time—Opposition speakers I'm talking about—berating Government for not spending more. One speaker even berating Government for not basically bribing Pfizer.So those watching here will be rightfully scratching their heads. So what we really need to understand is what we are here to do today. I think it's—my maths is not that good—three months ago in this House we passed the Budget. Now the Budget was where the Minister of Finance stood and outlined the expenditure for the next year essentially. That then required like all expenditure by Government to have a legal basis for that expenditure. I'm on the Finance and Expenditure Committee. We had the Minister of Finance come to our committee and explain what he intended for the expenditure. Various committees had various Ministers come in with their appropriations and talk about how they were going to spend the money.Now I can just as I go through the bill talk about this expenditure. Now there's two things you can do when an economy starts to change. One of them is you can stop spending. You need look no further than what happened in 1929 in the United States and the world when we had the Depression. Well it was only a recession. It turned into a depression because everybody stopped spending money. It was only during the late 1930s—particularly in New Zealand—with the New Deal plan in the United States that we started spending money that actually living standards started to rise.Now I grew up on the West Coast of the South Island and we used to drive to Nelson. We'd drive through the Golden Downs forest. The Golden Downs forest was built with borrowed money by those who went back to work. I remember going through my uncle's belongings when he died and finding a little slip telling him to turn up there. Now the generation that benefited from those forests weren't that generation; it is the generation today where those forests are being harvested. That's what this is about.Now we're again hearing the Opposition talking about how the size of the spend in the Estimates bill and I was lucky enough to speak in the general debate today. During that debate I talked about how New Zealanders can be reassured and I referred to what had happened up in Auckland last week and the fact that we had people on the ground there at the time that that offender offended means that the system was working. It meant that the ticks and balances were working and—without repeating the speech—essentially it showed that those at home can have faith that we have systems that work in this country.The other thing we hear is those opposite talking about how terrible things are with COVID. It was only I think earlier this week I heard Mr—oh I could call him the honourable Michael Hosking" talk about how brilliantly they do things in Singapore and asking why we aren't more like Singapore. Singapore are about to enter another lockdown. They have lost control. Matt Doocey: Back to the bill.GREG O'CONNOR: So at some stage just actually have a look—SPEAKER: Order!GREG O'CONNOR: —and have some faith in our system.Matt Doocey: Oh I was just helping you out. SPEAKER: That's my role.GREG O'CONNOR: That's why I bring this back—as Mr Speaker I know you'd be very keen for me to do—SPEAKER: It can't get any broader than a Budget bill.GREG O'CONNOR: —to the imprest bill and what people can do is ensure that we have the systems in place so that when we make decisions and when we decide that we do need to spend we're not going to lock ourselves down. We're not going to cancel the apprentices as we did in 2008 during the global financial crisis but we're going to ensure that for this generation this is actually an opportunity.What I see here is the spending that we're looking at through this—and this is spending that is actually an opportunity. Already we are seeing the results. We look at the unemployment rates and how our unemployment rates despite the predictions of where our unemployment would be at the onset of COVID—actually I understand we are the third most employed people in the world. We're way ahead of people we like to compare ourselves to: Australians United States Canada etc. The OECD average is 6.6 percent at a time we have 4 percent. Yes the previous speaker talked about the inevitable increase in benefits over this time of this second lockdown. That is an inevitability. But it isn't the expenditure we have; it's the faith that we have in the systems that bring us here and that is what this bill is about.For those listening at home who will be confused perhaps by the plethora of terms being used essentially this is about making sure that the money that has been appropriated for running this country for the next year is done so. We as the Finance and Expenditure Committee represented by members of all parties here have put the Minister and various Ministers through the scrutiny to make sure that the money is going to be spent correctly in the way it should be. This bill is about ensuring that now there will be sufficient money for this country to do the right thing to continue with its COVID recovery as soon as we are able to put this latest lockdown behind us and to ensure that should there be another one we're in a position to handle it. So it gives me great pleasure to speak on this bill and I commend it."