Research, Science, and Technology Bill, National Library of New Zealand (Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa) Amendment Bill, Public Records Amendment Bill (No 2)

I move, That the Research, Science, and Technology Bill, the National Library of New Zealand (Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa) Amendment Bill, and the Public Records Amendment Bill (No 2) be now read a third time. I would like to start by thanking the chair of the Education and Science Committee, Mr Allan Peachey, members of the committee, and committee staff for their work on what was formerly the State Sector Management Bill. I would also like to acknowledge the Parliamentary Counsel Office, the State Services Commission, and affected agencies for their support.

The passing of this legislation is important, because it now provides certainty to the many staff who work in the affected agencies. They were expecting the new Ministry of Science and Innovation to begin on 1 February, and they have been working towards that. Similarly, staff in the National Library, and in Archives New Zealand, have been working towards their incorporation into the Department of Internal Affairs from 1 February next year. The passing of this legislation enables them to do that.

In referring to the debate that went on in the Committee stage it is important to identify a number of features that need to be reported and stated in the third readings. The Hon Nathan Guy made it quite clear that in the view of the Crown Law Office this legislation actually strengthens the independence of the Chief Archivist. Similarly, I reject the criticism of members opposite that statutory officers within departments cannot act independently.

💬 Hon Steve Chadwick: Oh, my God!

Ms Chadwick says: “Oh, my God!” as though with a sense of disbelief. Well, she should know that David Henry as Chief Electoral Officer, a statutory officer in the Department of Justice, has shown that statutory officers act with great integrity. He revealed the fact that Labour spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ dollars in the 2005 general election, when it ripped off taxpayers in order to win the election.

💬 Grant Robertson: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I take offence at the statement the Minister has just made about the Labour Party, and I ask that he withdraw and apologise.

💬 Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: You are objecting to?

💬 Grant Robertson: I am objecting to the accusation he has made about members on this side of the House.

💬 Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Speaker’s ruling 44/5 applies. If the member has taken objection, I ask the member to withdraw the comment.

I withdraw. David Henry showed that the Labour Party used public money and had to pay it back. What do we call it when a party uses $800,000 of taxpayers’ money that it has to pay back? I use that example not to cause controversy but to alert members to the fact that statutory officers do act with independence, and we would expect that to happen following the incorporation of these agencies into the Department of Internal Affairs.

The provisions contained in the legislation mark the next step in the Government’s drive to ensure that its administrative arrangements are organised to deliver improved services at reduced cost in the short to medium term and to future-proof the delivery of Government responsibility and services for the long term. Collectively, these and other changes add up to a commitment by the Government not to impose a one-size-fits-all approach, or a blunt chop of significant numbers of Government agencies, but to consider each sector on its own and to put in place administrative arrangements that are best suited for the sector.

This bill combines the capabilities of the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology and the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology into a new department that will clearly leave the sector with a unified strategic policy direction, with more clarity and certainty around agency responsibilities, and with reduced complexity and transaction costs across the system. The Public Records Amendment Bill (No 2) and the National Library of New Zealand (Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa) Amendment Bill will provide a simpler and more effective governance approach for gathering information, protecting information, and providing access to records and information that are vital to individual New Zealanders, communities, the Government of the day, and Parliament. Bringing together the National Library, Archives New Zealand, and the Department of Internal Affairs will provide for better, integrated decision-making and enable staff to draw on wider pools of expertise within a much larger corporate environment with reduced collaboration costs and lower corporate overheads.

As the Hon Nathan Guy said, all three of those agencies are embarking on, or are some way down the track of, a massive digitalisation of their collections and information. It makes a lot of sense to minimise and mitigate the risk of the future in that respect by bringing those three agencies together. It is actually a 21st century approach to Archives New Zealand and the National Library, rather than some sort of quaint reminiscence of what it used to be like in the 1970s when trucks arrived from the National Library to give a few books to the schools.

In summary, these bills form the foundation of a better, more integrated, and more efficient administration of the Government’s role in research, science, and technology, and for the gathering, protection, and development of some of New Zealand’s most important records, knowledge, and information resources. The Government welcomes the enactment of these bills. I think, very importantly, that the passing of these bills under urgency gives greater certainty to the staff who are involved that the various agencies will be in a position to meet the 1 February time line for the beginning of these new agencies.

It is interesting that the Minister ended his speech with faux concern for the staff of these agencies. These are the same agencies where staff numbers have been cut and morale is incredibly low, as it is right across the public sector under this Minister of State Services, Tony Ryall. It is also interesting to note that he decided to invoke the Crown Law opinion to say that the independence and the statutory functions of the Chief Archivist and the National Librarian were strengthened. That is so far from the truth it is unbelievable. That Crown Law opinion, which we had to prise from the hands of Nathan Guy before he got the twink bottle on to it, actually says nothing of the sort. It says some benign things about the legal status of the new arrangements, but because it was written before the Department of Internal Affairs’ new structure was announced, it does not cover the fact that the Chief Archivist and National Librarian will be third-tier managers. It does mention that if the National Librarian and the Chief Archivist are subservient to the chief executive, it would “impact to some extent on the National Librarian’s scope of decision making.”, so it acknowledges that the independence and influence of the National Librarian and the Chief Archivist are diminished as a result of this legislation.

It is interesting to note, as a number of other speakers have mentioned, that throughout the process of the Government deciding what it wanted to do with Archives New Zealand and the National Library, it has been almost impossible to get information out of the Minister of State Services about the proposals. I had two complaints go to the Ombudsmen, which were ruled in my favour in respect of getting information, but that took months and months. The irony is not lost on this side of the House that for the Public Records Amendment Bill (No 2), the bill that changes the nature of Archives New Zealand, we could not get official information out. Then to have Minister Guy get out his twink pen earlier today just capped it off for us, really, showing the attitude towards the importance of information, the storage of information, and the availability of information for all New Zealanders.

Obviously, as we have said before, what is now the Research, Science and Technology Bill, which was Part 1 of the original bill, is not a bill that we have great opposition to, although it would be fair to say that we have fairly lukewarm enthusiasm for it. However, we strongly oppose the other two bills that this legislation has been divided into, the National Library of New Zealand (Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa) Amendment Bill and the Public Records Amendment Bill (No 2). When we look specifically at the National Library and the contributions about it in the Committee stage, we see that I was not able to spend time on the Alexander Turnbull Library. We on this side of the House spoke at great length about the impact of the legislative changes on the National Librarian. We put forward amendments to attempt to change those so that the National Librarian could have independence and could report to Parliament, but they were voted down. But we did not really have time to talk about the Alexander Turnbull Library.

💬 Chris Hipkins: I did—I did.

Yes, my colleague Chris Hipkins did speak about it for a little while.

I want to come back to the matter whereby the librarian who is the head of the Alexander Turnbull Library will be at the fourth-tier level of the Department of Internal Affairs. That was a matter of great concern to a number of submitters who came to the select committee, and who said to us that they were concerned the status and mana of the Alexander Turnbull Library would be severally undermined by this bill. The Friends of the Turnbull Library and the National Library Society all raised concern about the Alexander Turnbull Library. That library is not a library of Government documents; it is a library of family documents from all over New Zealand, going very far back, including—and my colleague Nanaia Mahuta mentioned this—the question of documents provided by Māori.

Te komiti Māori raised their concerns with the select committee, as well. In fact, it was during the submission of Te komiti Māori that I put the question to one person who was representative of families who had documents in the Turnbull Library, and I asked whether they would think again of putting documents into the Alexander Turnbull Library if this bill were passed. They replied straight away that they would—because their concern is that the Turnbull Library represents something of significance and something of independence—rather than feel they were giving these documents over to the Government, in the form of the Department of Internal Affairs. So I think it is worth noting and reinforcing what my colleague Chris Hipkins had to say earlier on: the Alexander Turnbull Library is being diminished by this bill. There are protections in place within the National Library of New Zealand (Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa) Act, but I am not confident now that the library, having been made part of the Department of Internal Affairs, will retain the status and mana that it has and deserves.

Moving back to the question of Archives New Zealand, I think that this is a particularly sad day for us today, because we are moving back to the position of the 1990s. That position has been described by a former Chief Archivist as being one in which there was an environment of distrust and rancour. There was litigation; the matter about where the archives should be placed was taken to court in the 1990s. When Labour came into office in 1999, we moved to create a separate agency, called Archives New Zealand, to ensure that we met international good practice. The Unesco guidelines on archives say the following in relation to organisational placement: “Placement within the government that prevents the submission of the agency beneath competing interests; eliminates blurring of functions with other professional agencies and disciplines; protects against interference with agency program responsibilities under the colour of co-ordination authority; and eliminates hampering supervision and control by having little or no professional knowledge of its program responsibilities and operations.”

That was the situation in the 1990s. We were against the Unesco guidelines because Archives New Zealand was within the Department of Internal Affairs. We separated it out after the 1999 election, and the last 10 years have been marked by the best-ever operations of archives in New Zealand. Members can talk to any stakeholder around New Zealand, and they will be told that Archives New Zealand has never operated better than the way in which it has been operating today. But we are undoing today the progress we have made in the last 10 years. There has been no justification, whatsoever, provided to the Committee or this House as to why we are actually doing that.

There were some good comments from the Minister about digitalisation. As the experience in Canada showed, much of that did not actually take place; much of the perceived benefit was not there. David Shearer has already raised concerns about whether the computer systems at the Department of Internal Affairs can actually cope with this change. There is no justification for changing a fundamentally important part of our constitutional and democratic infrastructure.

We had submitter after submitter; I want to pay tribute to the submitters, some of whom are in the gallery today, and I say that the quality of the submissions we heard in the select committee process was extremely high. Not only were they based on strong values and on strong underpinnings of what an archives and a library should be but they were based on empirical experience. They were based on the experience of people working in Archives New Zealand in the 1990s, who were unable to perform their jobs to the fullest of their abilities because of the structure they were part of. It is an unfortunate thing that those people have had to come back to a committee now, after they thought all of it had been resolved at the beginning of the century. The commitment that I make to those people—and I made it in the Committee stage—is that if a Labour Party is returned to office, we will look again at this legislation and ensure there is a structure that gives proper independence to Archives New Zealand and to the Chief Archivist. We are not bound to what the structure might be, but it will be one that enables Archives New Zealand to operate independently and to the fullest ability of the people in it.

In the brief time remaining I will mention a couple of other matters, such as the whole question of transparency. I have already raised the issue of the Official Information Act and of the twinking of documents. It is very unfortunate that we will now have less information about Archives New Zealand and the National Library in the public arena. There will be no direct reports to this Parliament, and I regard that as something that will diminish those two institutions.

The National Library and Archives New Zealand are made up of much more than documents, books, and papers. Those institutions are also the professionals who work in those organisations, and throughout this debate their professionalism has been undermined by the belief shown by the other side of the House that they are simply mere bureaucrats who can be reorganised and reshuffled into any old organisation. Those people deserve far better than that; they are the custodians of our heritage. They are the protectors of our transparency and accountability in Government, and we need to support them, not undermine them. On this side of the House we will continue to support Archives New Zealand, the National Library, and the Alexander Turnbull Library, and we will ensure that in time they are returned to their proper status.

It is a pleasure to take a call during the third reading of the Research, Science, and Technology Bill, the National Library of New Zealand (Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa) Amendment Bill, and the Public Records Amendment Bill (No 2). The Government remains committed to designing a first-class State Service, and that is never clearer than when we look at combining the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology and the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology together under the Ministry of Science and Innovation. This is the first major amendment to the Foundation for Research, Science, and Technology Act since 1990, and it certainly sets up science and innovation to take us forward. We know that as an economy we need to have a well-aligned science and innovation service and commercialisation arm. It gives me great pleasure to support this legislation and commend it to the House.

Debate interrupted.