Robertson GrantHon GRANT ROBERTSON (Minister of Finance): Firstly just to extend my apologies to the committee I wasn't aware that the National Party had decided not to take calls or play its role as the Opposition and so I was engaged in a media phone call which I concluded as soon as I could to make sure I could get down here and answer those questions.For the benefit of the member Louise Upston it's worth just taking a step back and thinking about what the Public Finance Act is and the role that it plays in terms particularly of determining what happens at Budget time. So the specific reference in Part 1 is to the contents of the Fiscal Strategy Report. A number of the matters that the member raised as to what New Zealanders would be concerned about—you mentioned about safety in their own home. Arguably at the moment the Fiscal Strategy Report which is the core element of the Budget for which the Government of the day is responsible does not provide for talking about that very issue and that's the reason for expanding out what is required of a Government—to be able to reflect a wider set of objectives beyond a narrow fiscal set. And what the Government has said all along as we've gone through this process is that of course we'll continue to report on those core fiscal objectives and you will see that from Budget 2019 and Budget 2020 but that in addition to that we want to broaden out the range of things a Government should be reporting back to the people of New Zealand to the very matters that the member is raising in her contribution.Hon Louise Upston: Why did you scrap them all?Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: We didn't scrap them all; we're including them in the Budget. The Public Service targets—and if the member really wants to get into the Better Public Service targets firstly the previous Government didn't put any reference to that within the Public Finance Act so therefore there was no accountability in reality on that which is why the previous Government kept changing those targets when they couldn't meet them. So they'd change—Hon Louise Upston: Making them harder because we achieved them.Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: No not making them harder; changing them because they couldn't meet them. This provision in this bill which we're debating here as opposed to anything else makes sure that every Government no matter who that Government is has a responsibility to report on wellbeing objectives.To answer the second part of the member's question as to why those objectives aren't then prescriptively defined it is because we want this to work for each Government. Now we can and in this Government we have said we have wellbeing objectives. They're based on Treasury's Living Standards Framework. We have accountabilities within that. We have a dashboard and you can see how it works—we have chosen to use something called a wellbeing outlook to be able to measure ourselves against what is in that Living Standards Framework and the dashboard that is created of indicators for that. Another Government may choose to do that a different way and what the Public Finance Act is now providing for is that you have to do it but the way a Government chooses to do it has flexibility. So to me it's the best of both worlds. We get a wider set of measures of success but individual Governments get to decide how they want to do it.