Offices of Parliament—Address to Governor-General

I move, That a respectful Address be presented to Her Excellency the Governor-General commending to Her Excellency the alterations to the appropriations for the 2004/05 financial year in respect of Vote Audit, Vote Ombudsmen, and Vote Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment and the appropriations and information for the 2005/06 financial year in respect of those Votes and Offices of Parliament. Very briefly, this is a special procedure followed for Offices of Parliament to ensure their independence. The Officers of Parliament Committee considers the appropriations and makes recommendations. I then move a motion in the House and, if the House agrees, that then becomes the appropriation for those offices. That ensures, therefore, that the Minister of Finance does not operate, in effect, a political control over the budgeting of those offices.

National will be supporting this motion. I was on the Officers of Parliament Committee that looked very closely at the appropriations. There are just a couple of points I want to make concerning this report.

Firstly, I draw the House’s attention to the Office of the Controller and Auditor-General’s proposed retirement plan. The retirement plan was based on the 2004-05 Budget round submission in which the Office of the Controller and Auditor-General indicated it was investigating its eligibility to be part of the State Sector Retirement Savings Scheme. Circumstances prevented the office from becoming a member of the State Sector Retirement Savings Scheme, so a separate retirement savings plan was created in September 2004. This plan replicates, with two minor exceptions, the terms and conditions of the State Sector Retirement Savings Scheme.

Those exceptions were, firstly, that members of the current Government Superannuation Fund scheme are entitled to join the Office of the Controller and Auditor-General’s plan, but would not be eligible under the State Sector Retirement Savings Scheme. Secondly, the scheme does not create any obligation on the office to increase the employer’s contribution beyond the initial 1.5 percent. The State Sector Retirement Savings Scheme commits all member employer organisations to increasing their contribution in line with the overall scheme. The Office of the Controller and Auditor-General cannot make such a commitment, as Audit New Zealand is required to fund its employer contribution from fee recoveries. Any increased contribution across the whole of the office, including Audit New Zealand, can be considered only in light of its ongoing and sustainable affordability. That was the case that the Office of the Controller and Auditor-General put up.

Our committee disagreed with that and said that there was no foundation for it, and that the funding provided for the Office of the Controller and Auditor-General’s retirement plan should reflect the funding that would be available under the State sector scheme. It was very clear that we disagreed with the case put up by the office. The Office of the Controller and Auditor-General is entitled to depart from the policy of the State sector scheme. We considered that the cost of doing so should be met from existing funding and should not be treated separately. So we recommended an appropriation of $97,000, GST inclusive, for 2004-05 and the out-years, to fund provision of the office’s retirement plan to all employees, except those who are members of the Government Superannuation Fund. That was where we departed from what the Office of the Controller and Auditor-General asked for at the time.

I also bring the House’s attention to the Office of the Ombudsmen, because there was much discussion about what was happening about the office’s prison investigation support. If we look at the background of the prison complaint investigation support, we see that in 1995 the office was resourced for three full-time prison investigators to enable it to undertake more focused work dealing with prison complaints and incidents in custody, such as deaths and specific concerns from inmates. Then a regular plan of prison visits was instigated, where each institution is visited, on average, nine times each year to supplement direct demands from inmates in the specific inmate-related incidents in penal institutions. Since then we have seen a huge increase in the demand from prison inmates for such a service. In the report from the Office of the Ombudsmen it is noted that the number of complaints received from inmates has increased significantly, from 760 in 1994 to 2,598 in the year ended 30 June 2004. That is an average of 866 per prison investigator. Those numbers are conservative as all telephone inquiries of complaints are not recorded. So there has been a huge increase in prison complaints, and the office is expected to provide a service for dealing with them.

The issues one needs to consider are that prison investigators are specialists in their particular field, that their workload is both high and demanding in the number of complaints required to be actioned, and that they have considerable and growing work stress relating to the constant need to deal with many difficult and very often unreasonable individuals. There are some pretty substantive statistics to show which prisons the complaints to the Office of the Ombudsmen are coming from. Where we are seeing a huge increase in prison complaints the question has to be asked whether the Office of the Ombudsmen should be handling them? There was a view within the committee that the Department of Corrections should be looking at those complaints. We do not know the nature of the complaints, but the demand on the Office of the Ombudsmen is increasing, because it is a facility available to the inmates. We ask whether the Department of Corrections should not have some responsibility for dealing with those areas.

Another issue the office raised was that it also carries out two visits to each of the 40 tertiary institutions throughout the country. So that, once again, is a demand on the office. There is also an increase in parliamentary requests. As we move into election mode there is an increasing demand from various political parties—all political parties, no doubt—and they will be seeking extra support from the office with regards to information they require.

Finally, I will move to the Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. One of the areas that we found quite strange was that the office was doing report reprints and was asking for a one-off appropriation of $67,000 with GST inclusive for the year 2004-05 to meet the costs of additional print reruns. The question that comes out of this is why it is not user-pays. If someone wants a report after the initial runs are done, why should there not be a user-pays system in place whereby money can be sourced in that area?

The other interesting point is the increased baseline funding of $400,000 that has been recommended. The increased funding should allow the office to expand its capacity to address Resource Management Act issues, which have been increasing over the period of time, as well. Last year the office had 150 complaints under the Resource Management Act, so there are some issues there. The increase in funding was recommended by the majority in Committee. National is happy to support the appropriations and the Government motion.

The Greens are supporting this report on the alterations to the appropriations for Audit New Zealand, the Ombudsmen, and the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. I have been representing the Greens on the Officers of Parliament Committee, which is a committee that works very well. We clearly support the adjustments for the Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. The office does a tremendous job and needs a bit of improvement on its current baseline. As the committee members agreed, the office has put out some very effective reports. We had quite a bit of discussion about how to get those reports out into the community more effectively.

One of the important reports that has come out over the last year is called Growing for Good: Intensive farming, sustainability and New Zealand’s environment. It is about sustainable farming, and the problems of the degradation of the environment, and in particular of waterways, as a result of intensive farming, particularly dairying. The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment brought out in that report the importance of getting agriculture to be sustainable, not just to have a nice environment but also for the economic interests of farmers. As water quality declines, so effective dairying declines. The commissioner wrote in that report that the application of nitrogen fertilisers to land has gone up 160 percent in 6 years. If we are to protect our waterways, that is not sustainable. Another issue is that nitrogenous fertilisers are produced by using oil-based products. The oil is getting more expensive, and our farming may become more expensive in the future if we do not take that in hand.

As a result of the report of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Fonterra and various other agencies bought into a Dairying and Clean Streams Accord a few months later. The accord is yet to be fully implemented, but the idea is that the dairy companies, the dairy farmers, and the Government are working together to try to get cleaner water and cleaner lakes, and to have a much more sustainable system. The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment has an ongoing role to monitor that. The Greens certainly support the increased provision in this report. There is a provision for report reprints—and the Growing for Good report may have to be reprinted. It is of interest not only to New Zealanders but to people in other countries.

The international links of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment are very important, too, because if one wants the best practice in a commission like this, one has to maintain those overseas links. The committee was a bit distressed that the overseas study tour, which was planned by the commissioner to check out the evolution of thinking on environmentalism and sustainability, had to be postponed because the commissioner did not have enough money. So we recommended that the commissioner be given another $15,000 to enable that study tour to proceed, and hopefully that recommendation will be passed today.

There is also another provision of $400,000 to maintain the capability and capacity of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. When one reads back through some of the work the commissioner has done, one can see that it is very current. A lot of the questions that he has addressed are ongoing issues that we as a society and as a Parliament are addressing. For instance, in last year’s annual report, there is discussion of vehicle emission controls. The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, like the Greens, was very hopeful that this Government would address the question of emission controls.

The report states: “A vehicle emissions’ screening policy is also to be phased in over the next two years, with standards to be set based on vehicle age and recognition of the emissions capability of older vehicles.” Unfortunately, we have learnt over the last week that the only track that the Government was going down on vehicle emission controls at the time of warrant of fitness tests has fallen over, because it is deemed to be too expensive and too inaccurate.

💬 Hon Judith Tizard: Nonsense. You’re determined to misrepresent it.

The Minister is calling out, but I see that the Auckland Regional Council, in a statement in the last couple of days, has also expressed some concern that there has been such a delay in this area. We will certainly be working with the Minister and the Government, and hopefully getting advice from the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment on how to proceed with this a bit better and how to take in some of the best practice overseas. Perhaps, when the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment goes overseas on his study tour, one of the things he could look at is how vehicle emission controls work overseas so that we can build on other people’s good work in Europe and places like that where they do good testing.

The other issue that is very current in the report of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment is the whole question of the Albany to Pūhoi motorway. He played quite a role in that. As he pointed out, there was a big problem with adverse effects both on the environment and on some of the native bush and wetlands. He was rather disturbed that Transit New Zealand had advised him that road tunnels were perhaps not the best way to go. The report states: “I was particularly concerned about this line of argument as it removes tunnelling as an option for New Zealand, even where it may have clear environmental, social, or economic benefits. I subsequently urged Transit to develop a more explicit policy process for evaluating roading developments that may involve tunnelling.” He states later on that he was pleased to report that Transit has since reviewed the tunnelling options and, on 6 August 2004, announced that there would be a tunnel as part of the plan. So I think that just shows the importance of having that provision in the appropriations in order to enable the capability of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment to be maintained.

There was a previous speech on the Office of the Ombudsmen about the extra $126,000 that has been put into prison investigation support, with $191,000 being added in the 2005-06 year. The increase of prison visits, from 760 to—in 2004—2,598, is quite dramatic. I disagree with the National Party speaker that perhaps that means the Department of Corrections should take more responsibility for that, and take a load off the Ombudsman, because the increase in the number of complaints shows deficiencies in the prison system. There is the whole history of the “goon squad” and, hopefully, the legacy of that is being rectified now. There is the court decision whereby a number of prisoners have gained compensation because of their mistreatment in solitary confinement. I know from my own experiences in visiting Ahmed Zaoui in Pāremoremo prison that he suffered abuse of his human rights in that respect, too.

So there is certainly a need for the Office of the Ombudsmen to continue its considerable role in that area, although there is now talk in Parliament of establishing a prison inspectorate. If that inspectorate were independent, it might take some of the load off the ombudsmen, which would be a very good thing. There are 1,300 Official Information Act requests that the ombudsmen have to deal with, and the average time taken to fulfil an Official Information Act request is 69 working-days—which is quite a long time—so if we want to reduce that, we have to resource the Office of the Ombudsmen properly, in the way the committee has suggested. As the previous National Party speaker suggested, it is in the interests of parliamentarians too, who generate a lot of those requests.

There have been only 15 requests under the Protected Disclosures Act, a statute that the Ombudsman is responsible for helping to implement. That may be indicative of some problems with that legislation. People have to go over all sorts of hurdles before they get to the Ombudsman, and that may put off some people who wish to whistle-blow. Perhaps the Office of the Ombudsmen could enlighten us as we go down the track as to whether it is working as it is supposed to.

United Future supports the Government motion in respect of Vote Audit, Vote Ombudsmen and the vote for the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. I take the opportunity to make a few brief comments about Vote Audit.

Recently I was privileged to be in London as part of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association seminar. During the time I was there, a very important commission, the Commission for Africa, was announced. That commission devotes a lot of time to figuring out ways to reduce poverty in Africa, including the write-off of debt for those nations that are now so indebted that they have no way of repaying their debts to the international community. The central issue that came out of that was the issue of governance. When I heard about that issue, my thoughts immediately went back to events such as those in relation to Te Wānanga o Aotearoa that we have had here recently in New Zealand. They really emphasised the same point: that governance is now a very key issue in the distribution of funds from a large entity like the Crown to smaller entities such as non-governmental organisations, and in the way they apply that money. It brought home to me how important that is, so I am therefore delighted to see in the draft plan for the next year that the Auditor-General intends to look very deeply and analytically at the whole area of governance, and at how we can improve that in New Zealand. I think we need to take that on board.

The second thing that emerged from that seminar for me, to do with the role of the Auditor-General in particular, was that we are very privileged in New Zealand to have an Audit Office with such high standards. That is not the case in many parts of the world, and we do indeed need to maintain, if you like, our world-leading position in relation to the audit of all the Crown’s expenditure.

This is a very key vote, and with those remarks I signal again that we will support the motion.

Just briefly, I suggest to the Green member Keith Locke, in so far as emissions from motor vehicles are concerned, that he comes along to the Regulations Review Committee, a very exciting committee that sits at 8 or 8.30 on a Wednesday morning, as we are looking at that particular issue at this very moment in terms of the regulations that are before us.

In relation to the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, I tell members that I read with interest the article from Dr Morgan Williams on the protection of the Waitakere Ranges. He made the very good point that the draft bill is imprecise. I notice that even the Mayor of Waitakere has said that the bill needs to be worked up. But the important point made by Dr Morgan Williams was that some aspect of compensation should be considered, and I hope that, in any working up, that point is considered, as well. If we want to quote the Great Charter, the Magna Carta of 1215—and I notice Mr Copeland’s comments—we see there is some provision even in the Magna Carta for the protection of persons’ property rights, and that particular right goes back to 1215. [Interruption] Yes, I know. I am just quoting the member’s bill. I have read the explanatory note and the reference to the Magna Carta.

The other point I make in relation to Dr Morgan Williams is that the phrase “death by a thousand cuts” actually goes back to the Sung Dynasty of about 905 AD. It is not a phrase that Dr Williams coined; it relates to a person being killed by a thousand cuts. I would say, on behalf of the people who live in the area bounding the Waitakere Ranges, that they are the people being killed by a thousand cuts—by various forms of Government taxation and various Government measures that are preventing them from enjoying their properties. If this bill were passed—a bill that affects the outskirts of the ranges, the land leading up to the ranges—we would see the people themselves dying by a thousand cuts, rather than the ranges.

Everyone in Auckland supports the ranges; there is no one who does not support them. It is an Auckland right—[Interruption] I am not sure whether Mr Prebble has been to any of the meetings; he has shown a total lack of interest in those meetings. The Government should keep its sticky hands off the Waitakere Ranges.

I rise on behalf of the ACT party to speak to the debate on Vote Audit, Vote Ombudsmen and Vote Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. Those are all Offices of Parliament, and I think it is appropriate we debate those matters. In the Officers of Parliament Committee I actually moved a number of reductions in these votes, some of which were accepted by the committee. But in relation to others, I was unsuccessful.

💬 Hon Dr Michael Cullen: Shame.

Thank you. As the Minister of Finance has said, it is a shame. It was possibly as a former Minister of Finance that I did move those reductions, because the motion still concerns substantial amounts of money, and we should look at it just as hard as we look at the vote of any other Government department. These Officers of Parliament perform what I would like to think is an important role, but I am concerned about whether they are doing so.

I will start first with the ombudsmen. New Zealand was one of the earlier countries to have the position of an ombudsman. When we analyse what the ombudsmen do today, we see that over half the work is about dealing with prisoners’ complaints. Now, here is an Office of Parliament set up to look after complaints by members of the public in dealing with the civil service, yet what are the ombudsmen doing? They are dealing with complaints from citizens who are in jail. One may say that citizens in jail are entitled to make complaints if they have not been dealt with properly. That is true, but within our prison service and under our—I think namby-pamby—Corrections Act, there are a whole string of ways in which prisoners are entitled to make complaints if they have not been treated properly. But that is not enough for prisoners. They are entitled to pick up their freephone and ring the Office of the Ombudsmen. So many prisoners ring that office that we are being asked by the ombudsmen to put in what is really a call centre, so that New Zealanders who are in jail can ring them. Well, naturally they do that. One of the penalties of being in jail is that there is nothing to do, so prisoners who have nothing to do decide to complain.

What do prisoners complain about? Apparently, one of the terrible complaints, which the ombudsmen get a lot of, is that there is a lot of thieving in prison. Well, why are we not surprised at that? We have put the crims in jail and they pinch from one another, so they ring the ombudsmen. What are we doing? We, as a Parliament, are voting the ombudsmen more money. Now, I said to the Chief Ombudsman at the committee, and I will say it here, that that is not what his office was set up for. The ombudsmen should not be taking complaints from prisoners; the ombudsmen ought to be saying to prisoners that they should complain through the procedure this House has put in place for them. We did not set up the Office of the Ombudsmen for that reason, and that is one of the reasons why I will vote against this motion today. I am opposed to it, and I say that the ombudsmen need to send a signal to prisoners.

The second thing that worries me about the Office of the Ombudsmen is that one of the things the ombudsmen are supposed to do is to enable law-abiding citizens to have their official information requests actioned. The ombudsmen are supposed to keep an eye on the Government. Does the Chief Ombudsman do that? No, he does not. The Chief Ombudsman is the most gutless one that we have had.

We have Ministers—Mr Maharey in particular, but also the Minister of Education—who now say, when MPs ask for information under the Official Information Act, that they think it will cost a huge figure to be able to provide the information. That may even be true, as they are so incompetent! Those Ministers say that if members of Parliament pass over a great part of their salary, then they may make the information available. Now, that is contrary to the spirit of the Official Information Act, and we would expect the Chief Ombudsman to be on television every night, severely criticising Mr Maharey and Mr Mallard for saying that. But, does he criticise them? No, he does not. He is too busy taking telephone calls from people who are in jail. That is what he thinks his job is. Well, it is not. His job is a much tougher one than answering the complaints of rapists and the like, who are concerned they can no longer get a good view from their prison cell. The Chief Ombudsman’s job is actually to hold Ministers accountable. That may be uncomfortable, but it is what he ought to be doing.

Then, of course, we come to the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, who wants us—and unfortunately I persuaded the committee of this—to chop down more trees in order to print more copies of his reports, which, he tells us, no one will actually buy but which people want.

Well, the demand for free services is infinite, and if we are prepared to let the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment send his free report to anybody he can think of, of course he can justify his position. Then, when he has sent them all out—and, as I say, the demand for free copies is infinite—he will then say that there are a lot of people who want to hear his views on various things. Maybe they do, and maybe they do not. But if people at least had to pay a nominal amount for the reports—perhaps just pay for the cost of the paper—I predict that we would find that the demand for the commissioner’s reports was much lower than he would have us believe.

I believe that if each one of these departments, which grow in number every year, was to come in front of us, it would tell us that the demand for its services was such that it should have more staff, office space, and money. However, I would also draw the attention of the House to the fact that a lot of the work that the Officers of Parliament do is actually the work of MPs. When I first arrived in this House there were 87 MPs, and now there are 120. I would like to think that the extra 30 members of Parliament are doing some work. If they are, it would follow that we would probably need fewer of these various parliamentary officers. It seems to me that at some point someone has to get up and ask when the whole process comes to a halt, because we could put up an argument for any amount of expenditure on things like the ombudsmen and suchlike.

I know I must sound like a Minister of Finance again, but I was extremely unimpressed by the Audit Office coming along and saying to us that although there have been superannuation requirements that have been met for the whole of the civil service, the Auditor-General has decided that they are not adequate for his department. That is a very, very serious matter for a head of a department to do, because he is actually saying the superannuation requirements that have been given to the rest of the civil service are unfair. If he thinks that, he ought to make that case properly. But what the Auditor-General has done is to take money we have given him to audit the Government accounts, and he has decided to give it to some of his staff. I think that is absolutely wrong. It has been my experience as an MP that no one is trustworthy with his or her own superannuation. MPs have been through that lesson, and the Audit Office is no better than us.

Who guards the guardians? Well, in this case the Auditor-General is our guardian, and I express to him my strong disapproval of that move. The committee did not agree to approve that extra funding. The Auditor-General can still provide it, but what is outrageous is the way that he will do so, which is by not doing the job that he is actually employed to do, because one cannot spend money twice. I am very critical of a very important senior Government servant like the Auditor-General—I think that he cannot have thought the issue through—deciding to reach a different sort of superannuation arrangement for his staff from the arrangements we have for the rest of the civil service. If the whole civil service system is unfair—I do not think that it is, although anyone could make an argument for better superannuation—then that matter ought to be taken up on behalf of the whole of the civil service. It should not be done in this cavalier way. I think that it was an abuse of the Auditor-General’s position.

Accordingly, we will vote against the whole report, in order to indicate that view to the Officers of Parliament. They should set a high standard, and should not be the first to jump over for extra money.