National's Amy Adams on Grant Robertson's concept of a Wellbeing Budget

Amy Adams says it will be harder to track progress under many wellbeing measures than before. Photo / Mark Mitchell

It is not that Amy Adams objects to Grant Robertson's so-called Wellbeing Budget that he is set to unveil on Thursday.

What National's shadow finance minister objects to is the notion that Robertson has come up with something dramatically new.

In particular Adams objects to his suggestion that the Wellbeing Budget is ushering in a new era of multi-agency approach to the Budget that will determine funding on an evidenced-based approach and the advice of experts.

"I think there a rewrite of history going on. It isn't the first time there have been joint Budget bids," she told the Herald.

"It isn't the first time ministers required agencies to work across silos. It isn't the first time we've focused on how the work we are doing is going to change things inter-generationally.

"That was at the very heart of the social investment work programme that Bill English pioneered," says Adams, who held the Social Investment portfolio as well as Justice in Government.

"It was at the very heart of the Social Investment Agency being set up, looking across Government, understanding that what we do in welfare can affect long-term inter-generational outcomes, things like education, employment and health for second generation, the integrated data infrastructure that allowed us to look and understand all of those component parts."

An example Robertson had used last week of the Wellbeing approach, culminating in a $320 million package to address family and sexual violence, was a continuation of pilot programmes started under National at the multi-agency level, Adams said.

"I'm certainly not challenging the funding. I think it is good funding. But to use it as an example of the new way of working somewhat makes my point, that this is not a new thing."

Thursday's Budget will be the second Grant Robertson has delivered and the first dubbed a Wellbeing Budget.

At the heart of the Wellbeing approach is the premise that measures such as gross domestic product (GDP) should not narrowly define success.

Treasury began work on a Living Standards Framework in 2011 and has developed it further to include 60 indicators ranging from empirical data such as unemployment and life expectancy to measures done by opinion polling, such as social connectedness and a sense of safety and security.

Under-secretary Jan Logie, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Finance Minister Grant Robertson at last week'sa nnouncement of $320 million to address family and sexual violence. Photo / Dean Purcell

Adams says there is nothing intrinsically different in the substance, only the presentation of it.

"The presentation and what is collected in one place may well be different," she said.

"But if you take the claim that GDP shouldn't be the only measure of success, my answer is that that has never been the only measure of success.

"We didn't necessarily publish all the targets we used to track in the various areas in the Budget documents but we absolutely published them as a Government."

The National Government had measured success through the Better Public Service targets, which Labour Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern dropped last year.

It set priorities and targets such as vaccination targets, crime-rate reduction targets and student achievements.

Adams said the targets were more definitively linked to spending and were able to be measured "to see if Government spending had moved the dial".

The Living Standards Framework was not going to be able to do that.

"I would argue we will have less definitive ways to hold this Government to account for the quality of its spending than we had under our Government."

She said that with the exception of child poverty reduction, in which the Government had established clear and measurable targets, it would be more difficult to assess the quality of spending in health than previous measures such as the average waiting time for cancer treatment, the wait time at emergency departments, and vaccination rates for children.

Amy Adams says Grant Robertson has been too blase about how tough the business community has had it. Photo / File

Adams has been critical of Robertson's decision to give himself more headroom for possible borrowing $17 billion next term, by lifting the upper limit for net debt from 20 per cent of GDP to 25 per cent.

That was his response to slower growth affecting revenue and putting pressure on his spending promises.

Robertson was quick to point to the global slowdown in growth as impacting on New Zealand.

"Our beef with the Government to date is that they have been blase about how tough the business community have found things," Adams said.

Not only had the Government done little, if anything to help, it had caused a lot of that pain through uncertainty and its policies.

"You can talk about wellbeing, and how you talk to your neighbours and how many hours' sleep and those esoteric things, but for a New Zealander anywhere in the country, having a job, having good incomes, being able to pay for the cost of living, having good healthcare, having kids in a school where they are learning well, having the community safe, they are the fundamental parts of wellbeing," she said.

"And if you don't look after and nurture the economic piece, your ability to do anything for intergenerational wellbeing is really constrained."