Robertson GrantHon GRANT ROBERTSON (Minister of Finance): I'm very conscious of the fact that the Labour Party does have limited time here as well so I'm not going to be able to respond to every single statement that's made by a member. But I do think the member Julie Anne Genter who's just resumed her seat is raising some very interesting issues around public finances. We don't get many opportunities to talk about the detail of the Public Finance Act much to my chagrin; we should be talking about it more often. I would like to respond to the points that the member has made firstly around the amount of money that we do allocate to services like health and education and the importance of us investing in those in a way that supports not only our long-term economic goals but the broader wellbeing goals that we've got. I very strongly support that. That's the reason why this Government over its successive Budgets has increased our spending in that area and has devoted more time to it. It's actually what lies behind the wellbeing approach which is to say that more narrow measures of economic success are not necessarily going to deliver the overall outcomes that society wants. So therefore it's important to have all of those matters considered within what we're doing. It's not that we don't focus on the importance of generating wealth and prosperity but we care about what happens with that how it's shared how communities are strengthened by it and what it does to the environment.So I say to the member yes I absolutely get that. I've had two opportunities to talk to Janet Yellen in the last few weeks. I'm particularly interested in for example her proposals around supporting the OECD's—around corporate taxation. That's been a long-term project at the OECD that has not progressed—Andrew Bayly: Are you going to put it up?Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: —and having the US behind it is an exciting development. For the members who are starting to interject on my left it's interesting to note that the United States is now going to have the same corporate tax rate as New Zealand which is an interesting development isn't it Mr Bayly. So I think that's a really interesting area for us to continue to pursue. On the second point that the member made around the future of the Public Finance Act I would say this: the Public Finance Act has given New Zealand a number of very useful things. One of those is the transparency that it gives us around what happens in our accounting subject to the points that we were discussing before. The other is that it does impose some disciplines upon Governments and I do think that is useful. What we can do in any given situation though is react to it. So for example the Government's long-term fiscal objective is to stabilise debt and then begin to reduce it from the middle of the 2020s onwards as financial conditions permit. We have to acknowledge that we are in a period of time in which we do need to be spending more. We do need to be borrowing more in order to do that. So the Act does give us that level of flexibility. Where I think the member has a very good point is around the way in which we think about for example capital expenditure. One of my frustrations on becoming the Minister of Finance was the fact that because we are using those public accounting standards the moment that we decided for example to invest in some aeroplanes for the Defence Force which I recall some discussions with the member about that in the past—even though we were not actually incurring that expenditure for two or three or four years the moment we made the decision that then took up that year's capital allowance. That was not a particularly useful approach. So we invented multi-year capital allowances that are four-year allowances that give us a lot more scope to be able to look at the way that we invest.The member is correct to say that the definitions of capital and operating expenditure for a Government are not as delineated as they might be in some other areas. And one of the defining elements of what is capital expenditure is in fact that the Government continues to hold and own that asset essentially in perpetuity. I get what the member is saying as to whether or not that is actually an adequate definition of what capital expenditure is. We are in the process of a reform programme for the Public Finance Act. I would love to talk a little bit more about what that looks like and I'll have the opportunity to do that when we bring legislation before the House in the future.