Privilege — New Zealand Post Limited

I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. It may assist proceedings if we can perhaps get some direction from you. This report is essentially about the dishonesty of New Zealand Post when it came in front of a select committee. It will be difficult for the House to discuss that without reference to the larger context in which those events happened, and I am keen to know just what can be said. This will be a very difficult debate if it is ruled out when I refer to a culture of dishonesty, and if references to any general context of, for instance, half-truths and evasions are also ruled out as inappropriate.

💬 Mr SPEAKER: Let me say quite specifically that in commenting about New Zealand Post, a member can say whatsoever he or she likes, provided that it is within the Standing Orders in terms of taste etc., but as far as members of Parliament are concerned, there is a higher standard. This debate is about whether the House should receive the Privilege’s Committee’s report and, in fact, the actual motion is that the House take note of the report of the Privileges Committee. I would suggest we stick to the report itself and to what is in it. The member has to be a lot more careful about comments that reflect on matters outside the report and comments involving members of Parliament.

I believe it is the obligation of the Privileges Committee to call things what they are. The chair of the committee has laid out the facts of the matter in quite a satisfactory manner. The fact is that New Zealand Post was not brief in its reply. It did not make some kind of technically correct statement that was actually wrong. New Zealand Post said to a select committee that it did not have a document that it had. New Zealand Post actually had the document, and said it did not have it.

💬 Dr Wayne Mapp: And it knew it.

And it knew it. Does that matter? Yes, because that deprived Parliament of a document that, at the time, was of enormous political significance. It is very difficult to come to the conclusion that that action was not taken deliberately.

We need to send a very clear signal to our public institutions—and New Zealand Post needs to hear this today, too—that they should not take part in the Government’s efforts to cover its own mistakes. Any bureaucrat—and I have been one—has a duty to assist the Government, but there is no obligation to compromise one’s integrity or one’s honesty in order to help one’s political masters. All those who have tried to help our Prime Minister have paid a price, and this report shows that. Elmar Toime is not in the country; his position became untenable. The disgraced chairman of New Zealand Post has long gone, because in any number of the opportunities that he had, he did compromise his integrity in order to assist his political masters. I say to other civil servants that they should stop and think very carefully when they get requests from Ministers’ officers—the Prime Minister’s department, the Minister of Finance, the Minister of Education, or any of those ministers who are part of a culture of deception when they get into any political trouble.

The bit in this report that got me particularly irritated was the apology, because we now have a new paradigm for regret. It is a “Helenism”, and it goes like this. No one is to acknowledge that he or she did something wrong. Instead, that person apologises for people thinking he or she did something wrong. Members should listen to this apology: “I had no intention of misleading the House, and apologise if that was the effect of my answers.” No one owns up to the fact of doing something wrong. The fact that the House was misled, and almost certainly deliberately misled, has no bearing on this—

💬 Hon Dr Michael Cullen: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. In referring in that quotation to an answer given by the Prime Minister, the member cannot accuse another member of deliberately misleading the House. There are other mechanisms for doing that. He should be required to withdraw and apologise.

💬 Mr SPEAKER: I was not clear as to whether the member was referring to New Zealand Post’s answer or to a person in this House.

I was referring to an apology read by the Prime Minister in the House.

💬 Mr SPEAKER: The member will now withdraw and apologise for that comment.

Which one?

💬 Mr SPEAKER: Any suggestion that she deliberately misled the House.

I withdraw and apologise. There is a similarity in the report to that apology given in the House. This is the Hon Jim Bolger: “ … I apologise on behalf of New Zealand Post to the Committee if there was a perception that the Finance and Expenditure Committee and in turn Parliament and the New Zealand Public have been misled.” That is not an apology. That is not the standard that this House should accept from a public body that has lied to a select committee.

New Zealand Post had the report but said that it did not, and Parliament was deprived of the accountability that would have gone with the possession of that report. Even worse, New Zealand Post is a publicly owned body. I believe that even if Parliament accepts this report, the Privileges Committee is charged by Parliament to set a higher standard in the views it takes of people who mislead select committees and Parliament. Otherwise, we are left with that standard. Mr Toime has apologised for any perception that he misled the committee. He apologised for the brevity of his reply. Does that not have echoes of “They weren’t conscious when they made the decision. I don’t recollect. I wasn’t there. It’s not my responsibility. The reply was brief”? The reply was a lie. Let us not call it anything else.

We are spared that language in the House because we are not allowed to use it about MPs—and you, Mr Speaker, can feel the pressure that is building up in the House because we are not allowed to use that language about activities that very closely approximate it from people who are at the top of the Government and are setting the tone for the running of public life in New Zealand. Will the Government get up and argue that the actions of the Prime Minister and the way that she deals with questions of accountability and responsibility have no linkage to the events around New Zealand Post, which involved her best friend, who finally got caught out, as the chair? Of course they do. Of course the tone set by those at the top of the Government influences the civil service and public bodies. On behalf of this Parliament, if the Government is not willing to say this—and it is not—I say to the civil service and to public bodies that they should be honest. They should not take part in the spin, and should have the integrity—as they have the experience—to know the difference between assisting the Government, as they are obliged to do, and compromising their honesty and integrity. To do the latter is a blot on any civil servant and any organisation that civil servants work for.

At the time, I guess the Kroll report did not seem very significant, but in the light of the recent conduct of the Prime Minister and of the documents that regularly appear in this Parliament contradicting statements that have been made, it is timely that we debate this report—and debate it thoroughly, not just as a matter of form. I say to you, Mr Speaker, that members of Parliament do have the right of access to the Privileges Committee. We do not want to see that right compromised by the slowness of the process, and the officers of this Parliament have the capacity to make that process fast or slow. I say that if it takes another 15 or 18 months to deal with this kind of complaint, then the officers of this Parliament are letting down the members of Parliament and, therefore, the public. We want a better performance than that.

What a load of rubbish that was. Let us start off with a very few simple facts. This report is a unanimous report of the Privileges Committee. When the member suggested that somehow or other the committee was engaged in covering up the facts about this case, he was accusing his own party’s senior whip—

💬 Hon Bill English: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. At no stage did I say that the committee was involved in covering up the facts. In fact, I said that the chairman of the committee had laid out the facts in a way that we regarded as even-handed.

💬 Mr SPEAKER: That is a debating point.

What the member did say was that the committee should have concluded, presumably, that Mr Toime had lied. But the committee did not conclude that. If the member had bothered to read the report, he would have found that it unanimously concluded that that was not the case. Mr Toime was almost hounded out of this country by the Opposition, and Mr Bolger, the former leader of the National Party, condemned the National Party for that action.

💬 Dr Wayne Mapp: No, he didn’t.

Oh yes he did, and he did so in my hearing. Mr English cannot even read a simple report that states very clearly not that Mr Toime had lied, but that the answers were less than full and frank.

💬 Dr Lynda Scott: Ha, ha!

The giggling from the member of the Opposition—I wonder who has been tickling her this time—shows a misunderstanding of how loosely the National Party uses the word “lie”. On that basis, I can only assume that it must be the most frequently used word in its caucus. I suppose, therefore, that losing one’s pretzels in the election is a form of a lie, if that is the way that one uses the word. So it is assumed that Mr Carter and Dr Mapp were part of an attempt to mislead this House, because this report is unanimous and it does not state that Mr Toime had lied. That is not what this report states.

Who else did Mr English then choose to attack? He chose to attack his former leader, Jim Bolger, and implied that Mr Bolger had not made an adequate apology to the Privileges Committee.

💬 Hon Murray McCully: That’s right.

That is right, says Mr McCully. Well, Mr McCully has a lot more to apologise to Mr Bolger for than Mr Bolger has to apologise to Mr McCully for. There is no knife sticking in Mr McCully’s back with Mr Bolger’s fingerprints on it, but there sure was one in Jim Bolger’s back with Mr McCully’s fingerprints on it—just as there was in Jenny Shipley’s back, and as he keeps lining up Mr English for. As we read weekly in the Listener, Mr McCully is involved in that.

Then, of course, the other criminal is a former divisional chairman of the National Party, Mr Ross Armstrong, who did not put his integrity at question in the service of Ministers—he put the Ministers’ integrity at question in his own service. That is why Mr Armstrong had to leave—not because he was protecting our integrity but because he was impugning our integrity by his own actions. He had to go, as a consequence of that.

What has this enormous storm in a teacup been all about?

💬 Dr Wayne Mapp: It’s a cover-up.

Well, why did Dr Mapp, at the Privileges Committee, not say that this was a cover-up? Why did Dr Mapp, who is as brave as a lion in the House, not raise with Mr Bolger at the select committee the question of why his predecessor and New Zealand Post’s former chief executive had covered up the facts? Dr Mapp did not raise that question in the select committee, and nor did John Carter. They were satisfied with Mr Bolger’s apology, and they were disappointed that Mr McCully and Mr Hide did not take up the invitation to meet with Mr Bolger to receive a personal apology from New Zealand Post, delivered by Mr Bolger.

💬 Dr Wayne Mapp: Absolute fiction.

Oh yes, that is true, as well. Recollections seem to fade amongst many people at times with regard to political issues. Or perhaps the member was not conscious at the time that he did those particular things. So we find out that the National Party is not perfect, either.

So what, in fact, is this issue all about? When asked whether he had a report, Mr Toime said no. Did he have the Kroll report? No, he did not. The Kroll report was never delivered to New Zealand Post.

💬 Hon Bill English: Ha, ha!

Well, that is true. The select committee accepted that that was true. Dr Mapp, John Carter, and Mr Prebble accepted that that was true—all on the Privileges Committee at the time.

💬 Hon Bill English: What did it have?

New Zealand Post had a preliminary draft of that report. So in giving that answer, the Privileges Committee concluded that New Zealand Post was less than full and frank, and that the Finance and Expenditure Committee could have drawn a forced conclusion from that answer—a perfectly reasonable conclusion for the select committee to draw, and therefore misleading of the select committee in that respect. But that is not a lie. It is not a lie to have failed to give that information. If Mr McCully, from the vast and lofty height of full-and-frankness that he has occupied throughout his political career, tells us that that is a lie, I suggest that that will be less than a full and frank statement to this House when he gets up and makes it, as he no doubt will, with the synthetic anger that the National Party is trained in, day after day.

Mr English has come here to the House to try to rescue his leadership through getting angry about whether a preliminary draft report is a report. That is the basis now on which the once-proud National Party lives, and in order to try to survive and to do that, it has to pour nasty stuff all over its former leader, who, I thought, gave a very frank apology to the Privileges Committee. It was above and beyond what Mr Bolger had to do, since he had no role to play in the original event, at all. Mr Bolger was completely clean of any involvement in that respect. But even Mr Bolger had to be dragged in and attacked by Mr English, in order to try to save himself. It is no wonder that so many former senior members of the National Party have given up hope on the National Party at this particular time.

The debate before us is whether this House should receive this report, the question of privileges—

💬 John Carter: It just notes it.

OK, it is whether we note it. I was most impressed with the speech by the Leader of the Opposition, the Hon Bill English. He raised some issues that ran in the general debate here today—the whole notion of veracity and truth, and the very critical aspect of our democracy that unless we have truth, openness, and transparency, democracy is in peril. We have just heard a comment from the Leader of the House, the Deputy Prime Minister, that “less than full and frank” is not telling lies. As we know, our whole justice system is based on telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. In other words, one cannot be economical with the truth by not telling the whole truth, and one cannot be expansive with the truth by telling other things that are beyond the truth. We know that we have problems with the Prime Minister, but we now have a new definition of truth from the Deputy Prime Minister. If one is “less than full and frank”, that is all right, that is kosher, that is acceptable. I am saying to this House that that is not acceptable in a democracy that I want to be part of. We need an executive that is accountable, honest, and transparent at all levels.

I can understand Jim Bolger’s position. He was seeking closure, and I think he was trying to use his political skills to bring closure. The issue was not of his making: Ross Armstrong was the chairman during this unhappy incident. I would like to commend my colleague Rodney Hide who, together with Murray McCully, through sheer doggedness and determination, through thick and thin, stuck with this issue. I remember that when they first raised it, we had Government members saying that they were denigrating a fine, upstanding State-owned enterprise, and that New Zealand Post was the model of State-owned enterprises. The Minister for State Owned enterprises did all he could to protect it from accountability and scrutiny, but my colleague Rodney Hide, ably supported by Murray McCully—I think they support each other, actually—hung in there doggedly, and took the matter to the Privileges Committee.

We say that our Privileges Committee is the highest court in the land, but others say it is really just a soap-opera forum that can slap people, at best, across the wrists with a wet bus ticket. Is this Parliament satisfied that the sanctions calling for an apology from this State-owned enterprise are adequate, when it is clear that those people lied? They lied to the Privileges Committee of Parliament, and they did that very deliberately. I say that is not good enough.

But it raises a bigger issue with our executive wing of Government, and that is the halfway house that we have with our State-owned enterprises generally. It really brings home to us all the dangers of maintaining State-owned enterprises. They were only intended to be halfway houses, but by having State-owned enterprises with an ongoing life, we politicise the process. We invite this sort of situation, where they do the political bidding of the executive. That is a real worry to me. We have a danger with State-owned enterprises dominating the energy sector, and I think privatisation is clearly the step forward. I merely flag that issue in the context of this debate, because the whole State-owned enterprise model is under question because of the behaviour of New Zealand Post over this issue.

I come back to the point that truth is vital from our officials, our Government departments, and our State agencies. The role of the Minister should be to set the standard. The Minister should not be sending the message out there that it is OK to be “less than full and frank”. I condemn Michael Cullen for what he just told us in this Chamber. He said it is OK to be less than full and frank. I say that is not acceptable. We want a high standard that is based on the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—not some economy of the truth or expansion of the truth. That is not good enough. This Parliament should take heed of this debate, and reflect on whether we should receive this report, because it is a classic example, and could well become the slippery path. A slip becomes a slide when the executive starts setting unacceptable standards based on deceit and untruth.

It is very easy in a significant debate like this to get too embroiled in political tit for tat. There is a very large element of it in this case, and there is a danger that that will obscure some of the critical points that are at issue and do need to be considered. I am a member of the Privileges Committee, and at the time was also a member of the Finance and Expenditure Committee. During some of the hearings in question, I was the acting chair, so I have a range of views as to what was going on.

I want to say at the outset that I do not regard the behaviour of New Zealand Post Ltd at that time as being in any way acceptable. During the period the chairman was away—and I was standing in for him when we were in the process of examining Dr Armstrong and his senior colleagues—I received a number of telephone calls from Dr Armstrong saying: “Look, why do you want us back next week? We’ve got things to do; we’re busy. Can you give us an assurance that it won’t be for more than an hour or so? What sort of questions are we going to be asked, anyway?” The point I am making is that at that time New Zealand Post clearly saw the select committee examination—regardless of whether it was the Kroll report, or Transend, or Spain, or anything—as an interference with its normal commercial practice. We as a committee were thought of as a nuisance even taking time to ask them questions. As a consequence—I think as a sense of frustration over its part in this process—the plan of deception, which has subsequently led New Zealand Post before the committee—

💬 Dr Wayne Mapp: Why didn’t you say that at the Privileges Committee?

I did, actually. Maybe the member was, as usual, asleep. This is a serious debate, and it is not helped by trivial comments of that type.

💬 Dr Wayne Mapp: You never told us about it.

The member who interjects often proves his ineptitude, and I am sorry that this is one of those occasions.

What I am saying is that New Zealand Post did deceive the committee. Certainly, the record shows that very clearly, but I think the issue is actually a much wider one—[Interruption] I beg your pardon? Is this more “insight” from the North Shore? No wonder they laugh at the member. What the record shows is that the issue we are debating is about how effective the State-owned enterprise model is, and whether there are inherent flaws within it. Over the years that that model has been in place—long before that member was even a blot on the political landscape—we had issues in the early 1990s regarding the Airways Corporation, issues regarding Television New Zealand, and now issues regarding New Zealand Post. As the member who preceded me pointed out, I suspect that very shortly we are going to have issues regarding the various energy generation companies, as well. They all stem from what might well be an inherent flaw in the State-owned enterprise model. On the one hand, we set these bodies up to be commercially independent; on the other, every time they are challenged, they claim commercial sensitivity when asked to respond to parliamentary select committees. When select committees start to probe and push, we have things being fobbed off as non-events.

The whole debate regarding the Kroll report was fascinating. It was actually a draft report, but because it had not been formally adopted by the board of New Zealand Post, the board seemed to think that it had no official status and could not be acknowledged—even though there was independent evidence before the Finance and Expenditure Committee that such a report was in existence. The attitude that appearing before select committees is merely a performance to be gone through is symptomatic of what has become a trend over the years with State-owned enterprises and similar bodies—and in that category, I include the Crown Company Monitoring Advisory Unit and some of the old monitoring agencies that were in place for the health sector. Some years ago, when Mr Ryall was chair of the Finance and Expenditure Committee, I well recall one gentleman taking his seat and saying: “I hope this is not going to take very long. I’ve got a plane to catch in three-quarters of an hour.” It is that sort of contempt that has ended up with this case before the Privileges Committee.

The reason I was in favour of that case going to the Privileges Committee had less to do with the particulars of the New Zealand Post case and much more to do with the broader issues of how select committees can reasonably hold State-owned enterprises to account—without the excuse being made, every time a difficult question is asked, that that is “commercially sensitive, and you are not entitled to that information”. We have had that experience on many occasions. Whether or not the committee was deceived and deliberately misled by a concerted plan within New Zealand Post, or a fiction within the mind of the then chairman, is of less relevance than what we do from here on. As has been indicated, we already have a situation emerging where it would appear that a number of players in the energy sector have not been giving the full story about shortcomings from the middle of last year onwards, and we are going to face that situation again in the future. We used to have a special select committee with accountability for State-owned enterprises. From memory, it was abolished in the mid-1990s, but maybe we ought to return to that, because at the moment it is a little too easy for State-owned enterprises dealing with a specialist committee to flick it off and push it aside.

One of the issues that arose during the New Zealand Post case was, as much as anything, about how much time we were dedicating to that organisation—about the fact that we called its officials back. I cannot recall how many times we did that—Mr McCully will know—but I think it was at least on three or four occasions. That became an issue in itself, because the performance appraisal we were undertaking was traditionally seen to be perfunctory—“give them an hour or so, ask them a few hard questions, send them on their way.” That was certainly the culture within which this organisation was used to operating.

Apart from the political machinations about who did what to whom and when, the issue that arises from this report is much more about what are we going to do as a Parliament to ensure greater accountability from our State-owned enterprises in the future. Will we continue with a model that sees these things as owned by the Crown but essentially operating independently of the Crown, and how do we draw the line between the two? Do we simply do what some have suggested—that is, privatise the lot—or go the other way and bring them back under the Crown’s umbrella as Crown-owned companies? We need to face those issues, and we also need to address the more vexed question of how we exact accountability. This is a small country, and there is not a huge pool of people available to serve as senior executives or directors of those companies. The familiarity with which certain names keep cropping up indicates how tight that little circle might be, and that is another issue that needs to be examined in the light of this case.

I do not have a particular worry about accepting this report. This particular issue has gone as far as it can go, but the broader issue of the relationship of this Parliament and its select committees to State-owned enterprises, how that accountability is to be exercised, and how those enterprises are to be held to account in these areas, is one we all need to devote a great deal more time to. If we do not, then the long litany we have had over the last 10 years that I referred to earlier will simply be added to, and the New Zealand Post saga will become one more stopping-off point along the way. The real lesson of this report is to make sure we do not get a repetition in the future, and that will require action by the Government and this Parliament to ensure that all State-owned enterprises get the message about the correct way to operate.

I suppose as the member who laid the original complaint with you, and saw this matter go to the Privileges Committee, I should start by thanking yourself and the Privileges Committee for the thoroughness with which this matter seems to have been addressed, given that it has taken over 15 months. I am sure, Mr Speaker, you will have spent 17 sleepless nights, giving consideration to whether this matter should be referred to the Privileges Committee in the first place. As I said, the Privileges Committee has spent 15 months attempting to get this report back to the Parliament.

Mr Dunne made a fair point that we should try to look at some of the important issues raised in the report in terms of the future, rather than simply adopting a political take on this occasion. I am a member who, over the years, has not been seen as a show pony on the front bench, but as one of those grafters in the select committee process. As I reflect on this report I have to say that I feel badly let down. I feel that this Parliament has been let down by this report. The select committee process has been let down by this report. Today I hope to persuade members who are listening to this debate that we can and should do better with the privileges process in the future. I will not try to criticise individuals involved in the process. This is a unanimous report, as other members have said. Mr Robson inherited the chair of the committee very late in the process. Dr Armstrong and Mr Toime have long gone. There is a futility about trying to look at the specifics in a sense, but it is terribly important for the future that we should ensure that the Parliament is able to hold these organisations to account. That means that the Privileges Committee must do a better job, on our behalf, than it has done on this occasion.

I want to make a few references to the particular parts of the report that concern me. First, there is a saying that justice delayed is justice denied. I am not sure whether that is the analogy that should be used on this occasion, but I do say that a report that comes back to this Parliament more than 15 months after the complaint was originally laid by a member, is a report that is delivering no justice and will serve Parliament badly. Any hope of sending to State-owned enterprises, Crown entities, and Government departments the message that should have been sent to them was diminished when this matter was left to wait for so long, by the previous chair of the committee, Margaret Wilson. I say at the outset that the content of this report was always going to be inadequate because it comes too late to do any good.

I move to the report itself, and, like the Leader of the Opposition, I look at the finding, which was that technically the company did not give false answers to any questions asked by the Finance and Expenditure Committee. I have listened to the comments made by members in this debate. I have listened to the Deputy Prime Minister on this matter. I guess the best I can say, with regard to that finding, is that it is a most generous finding on the part of the Privileges Committee in respect of New Zealand Post’s behaviour. I profoundly disagree with it. I believe that the finding in that matter is wrong.

I want to tell the House why. As Mr Dunne has told the House this afternoon, New Zealand Post was under sustained questioning over many meetings. It had gone through a process that it felt aggrieved about and uncomfortable with. There was substantial media interest in the matters that were before the select committee and that were bedevilling New Zealand Post. It had been asked to give a series of explanations. New Zealand Post knew that Mr Hide and I were in receipt of material from persons within that organisation who believed that we were entitled to facts that were not being given to the committee or to the public. It was in that light—and I suppose New Zealand Post did feel somewhat under siege—that these matters arose.

In the previous year New Zealand Post had had to deal with aspects of the South African contract that had caused some ructions in the board room, and PricewaterhouseCoopers, the auditors for New Zealand Post, had been called in to give a report. These were all matters of context that signalled the nervousness and sensitivity of New Zealand Post on this matter.

In the first discussion in the select committee when New Zealand Post was asked for the Kroll report, it orally answered that it did not have that report. The reason it was asked for the Kroll report by myself and Mr Hide was that people inside New Zealand Post had identified this report to us as a damning report that we should know about, so we asked for it. Knowing that our informants were giving us information that was contrary to that being retailed to the committee, we formally asked the committee to request of New Zealand Post that it give us this document. The chairman of the committee correctly read to the House today the nature of the request. It was a broad request, and New Zealand Post came back with the answer that he again has faithfully retailed to the House. Had it not been for the fact that Mr Hide received anonymously in the mail a few days later a copy of that report, then New Zealand Post would have profited from what I believe to be deceit on its part.

The important question that was before the Privileges Committee, and that is before the House today, is whether New Zealand Post, in the circumstances I have outlined to the House, intended to deceive. Having been asked formally by the select committee, and in the 3 or 4 days that New Zealand Post had to deliberate on the written responses it would deliver, which Dr Ross Armstrong finally signed off, did it make a decision to deceive the committee, knowing that it had a document, which could be called the Kroll report, or did it simply not think carefully enough about it?

I am absolutely in no doubt, in my mind, of the intention of New Zealand Post to deceive the Finance and Expenditure Committee; of Ross Armstrong, as the person who signed that document, to deceive the committee; and of Mr Elmar Toime to deceive the committee, as well. I have not the slightest doubt in my mind, as someone who was intimately familiar with the proceedings and with the paperwork, that it was the absolute intention of those persons and of New Zealand Post accordingly to deceive the select committee. I say these things, having reflected very carefully on the history of those events.

One of the reasons I am persuaded to that conclusion is that if we look at the internal paperwork of New Zealand Post around that time, and I do not know whether the Privileges Committee did this, but if it had, it would have seen that New Zealand Post’s internal documentation, its internal communications, referred to this document as the “Kroll report”, not the “draft Kroll report”, or any other name. The document we asked for was the Kroll report, because we were told by people in New Zealand Post that it was called the Kroll report. It was referred to in New Zealand Post’s documentation internally as the Kroll report, and New Zealand Post knew that that was the document we were asking for, but it told us that it did not have it.

I believe that that is more than a technicality. That was an act of deceit on the part of New Zealand Post, and the Privileges Committee should have held accordingly.

I will talk about two other points just briefly. Firstly, I take exception to the references in the Privileges Committee report to the tension between some select committee members and New Zealand Post, and the rather lofty reference on page 5 where the Privileges Committee emphasises that members should take their scrutiny role seriously and follow appropriate lines of questioning.

I do not know what caused the committee to put that comment in the report, but I can say that against the background of this 80-page report of the Controller and Auditor-General, which found absolutely in favour of the allegations made by Mr Hide and myself, and which was utterly damning of New Zealand Post, I find these words in the report of the Privileges Committee to be gratuitous and insulting. I say to the chairman of the committee that he should think much more carefully about allowing those words to be imported into this sort of document in the future.

Finally, the apology that Jim Bolger gave to the Privileges Committee—and it has been rightly observed that he was not a person who had any personal culpability in this process—was a Clayton’s apology. It was an utterly meaningless apology, for the reasons that the Leader of the Opposition has spelt out this afternoon. I say to my colleagues, and particularly to those who were on the Privileges Committee, that if they are prepared to accept that sort of apology as being full and sufficient in these circumstances, then I believe they are inviting every State-owned enterprise and Crown entity to lie to select committees in the future. Yesterday in the media, I called this a licence to lie. I repeat that statement today, because I sincerely believe that. I hope that in future the Privileges Committee will serve the interests of this Parliament and its select committees better than it has done on this occasion.

Motion agreed to.

Disclosure of Select Committee Proceedings