Russell DeborahDr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour—New Lynn): We've had a long series of speeches on this bill tonight. I want to take it back to the very basics of what this bill is about and to trace some of the if you like intellectual history behind wellbeing. It matters and it matters because it is an ancient idea; it's part of the ancient wisdom.I believe one of the speakers on the other side of the House said that I was an accountant—that is in fact true. I am an accountant but as it turns out I also studied philosophy to a reasonably high level. As part of that I spent a long amount of time examining the ancient accounts of the good life and what different people thought the good life was. It relates so directly to wellbeing.The ancient Greeks in terms of thinking about wellbeing talked in terms of eudaimonia—e-u-d-a-i-m-o-n-i-a. It can be translated as happiness" but it can also be translated as "flourishing". And in terms of thinking about how to live their lives they thought "How does the civilised man"—and that would have been the way they thought about it—"achieve the life of eudaimonia? What is the eudaimonic life?" and they had different theories about it.The Cynics that would be Diogenes in the market place thought that the way to achieve the good life was to get by on as little as possible to have the littlest and the simplest things. If what you had was bread and cheese then you enjoyed that bread and cheese to the fullest and you didn't ask for any more and you simplified simplified. The story of Diogenes casting his bowl aside in order that he would drink water just out of his hand speaks to the simplicity there. The Epicureans were not the way we might think of as some who had a very sort of esoteric taste. Instead Epicureans again very much focused on enjoying what you had to the fullest. That was their account of wellbeing. I found the Stoics more interesting—again thinking in terms of how they would live the good life. And they talked in terms of control—the control of emotions. It wasn't that someone wouldn't feel emotions but that in fact a Stoic would attempt to control his emotions. There is a degree of asceticism in Stoicism but it's not extreme; it's in terms of enjoying the life you have not looking for luxuries not luxuriating in it but enjoying what you had living a comfortable life living a life in control.One of the interesting things about these ancient accounts of the good life is that they are very individualistic and they look to the individual man's account of the good life. Some of the later accounts have a more expanded idea of the good life looking at a whole of society. And this is where I think the one that appeals to me most is the philosophy from Aristotle who is the favourite—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): I would invite the member to come back a little more specifically to the bill—Hon Members: Oh!Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL: And I will. I'm moving there Madam Speaker.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): —disappointing though that is to other members of the House.Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL: In particular he had an account of the good life of wellbeing of the way that the well-rounded person lived their life. It was a man living on his property with his wife his slaves his cattle and in particular what that meant was that he had a life of autonomy—and the person who was that was a citizen; a person who had standing; a person who had his own account and was worth being considered as part of the polity of the city. Indeed that is in some ways how we think of citizens as well. Now of course in our society it is not just propertied people who are regarded as citizens; we regard everyone as citizens. We regard everyone as being important and in that regard we think it is important that everyone has access to a life of wellbeing that we structure our society and we structure our Government in such a way that we try to ensure wellbeing for all the people who live in our country—all those who are citizens here; not in the formal legalistic sense but everyone who is part of our society. And that is precisely what we are trying to achieve with this bill. We are asking our Minister of Finance we are asking the Budget process to consider not just the bare bones of—I think it was Mr Yule who put it—"GDP jobs and economy" but to think about wellbeing to think about how we achieve a good life for all our citizens. And this goes back straight to those very ancient ideas of thinking about how we achieve that good life. Now famously we know that GDP doesn't measure what we need it to measure. I think Marilyn Waring famously said that when a man marries his housekeeper GDP goes down. Part of what happens with GDP is we don't count unpaid work. GDP doesn't assess what we need it to assess and that is part of what we are trying to do with this amendment to the Public Finance Act: to achieve a way of measuring more than GDP more than the bare bones of the economy more than the basic structures. And we are trying to do it in a way that Governments will be held accountable for achieving wellbeing. So if we look at the particular aspects of the bill that's sitting there it says two very important things in the bill. It says first of all that a Government in the Budget Policy Statement each year must set up the wellbeing objectives that will guide the Budget and then it invites the Government to decide what those wellbeing objectives are. It says they must relate to the social economic environmental and cultural wellbeing of the country and to any other matters. And having set those wellbeing objectives then the Government will be held accountable on them. And it's quite important that individual Governments have the capacity to set different wellbeing objectives. Just as there were a variety of different accounts of the good life a variety of different ways of understanding what a good and flourishing life looked like for different citizens so each Government in turn could well set different wellbeing objectives could choose different ways of setting out what it intended to do of what was important to it and then how it would measure those objectives. So in terms of what is going on in this really rather short bill that's the substantial change that is sitting in there: define what wellbeing is for that particular Government then measure it because we are what we measure. So it is a profound change in the way we do our Budgets. This much-lauded Act the Public Finance Act—and a justly lauded Act—did revolutionise the way we do our Budgets in New Zealand and it was part of a whole suite of changes to the way we did our public finances at the time. But in terms of what it sets out for our framework of how we understand the role of the Government it is at best an attenuated framework. It is thin it is narrow it is concentrated only on the measures of the economy.What we are doing with this Act is we are expanding that notion. We are creating a much richer account of how Governments go about the process of governing how they go about the process of setting Budgets how they go about the processes of holding themselves accountable. That is why this is such a revolutionary and a transformational approach to doing our public finances. I am looking forward to discussing this in depth in the Finance and Expenditure Committee.The Finance and Expenditure Committee is well prepared to discuss this. In the last few months under the leadership of the former chair of the committee Michael Wood we had an intensive look at Treasury's Living Standards Framework. So we went through the Living Standards Framework. We consulted experts like Paul Dalziel Caroline Saunders Arthur Grimes and Marilyn Waring—it was such an honour to hear from her—and talked about how the Living Standards Framework was constructed what was done well about it what needed to be improved what sorts of things it tried to measure and where it wasn't measuring stuff. So as a committee the Finance and Expenditure Committee has already had a good look at some of those issues. It means it will be well briefed to consider this particular bill.I'm looking forward to considering it in the committee. I hope that in the process of doing that that as the members of the Opposition grapple with the concepts in this they too might realise that this change is worth supporting that it is worth doing something like this to make our country a better place. I commend this bill to the House."