Urgent Debates — Teachers and Support Staff, Payroll—Ministerial Inquiry into Novopay System

I have also received letters from Metiria Turei and Chris Hipkins seeking to debate under Standing Order 386 the findings of the ministerial inquiry into the Novopay school payroll system. The release of the inquiry report is a particular case of recent occurrence involving ministerial responsibility. Although the Budget debate is ongoing, the significance of the findings and the urgent need to restore public trust and confidence in the education sector are sufficient reasons to warrant the attention of the House today by way of an urgent debate. As Metiria Turei’s application was received first, I call on Metiria Turei to move that the House take note of an urgent matter of public importance.

I move, That the House take note of a matter of urgent public importance. This Government has a habit of making its officials take the knocks for its decisions. We saw that when it apparently vindicated itself over Skycity, blaming the officials for not giving it enough information, and we are seeing exactly the same here: a Minister who has no idea what is going on in her own ministry, who is prepared to rely on advice without questioning any of it reasonably when she makes her decisions, and who is then found to have managed it so appallingly that she had to give it over to another Minister, who also cannot handle it. And this is a deal—this Novopay deal—worth tens of millions of dollars.

What do we find in this report, the Report of the Ministerial Inquiry into the Novopay Project, from Maarten Wevers? Well, I can certainly say that the public are tired of Ministers pretending that they have no responsibility for asking the right questions over these enormous projects that not only cost millions and millions of New Zealand taxpayers’ dollars but have significant implications for families and for teachers and schools, and that is what we have seen. It has been teachers and schools who have paid the cost of the failure of Minister Hekia Parata and the roll-out of Novopay. Although, it has to be said, the Novopay inquiry does highlight some of the failures from officials, it certainly does not vindicate Ministers, as they would like to say. If it did, why, then, did Maarten Wevers find that the “creation of a dedicated ministerial portfolio for Novopay, and the appointment of a new Acting Secretary gave the sharper focus for addressing the issues and improved the key relationships.”? He said that because the fact is that when Novopay was in the hands of Hekia Parata, there was no sharp focus on the issues, there was no interest in improving the key relationships, and there certainly was not any commitment to making sure that when Novopay was brought in, it would be a system that would work for families, for schools, and for teachers.

When this fiasco was in full boil, Hekia Parata was in charge, along with a woman with whom we now know Hekia Parata had a pathological problem communicating, and that was Lesley Longstone. Is it any wonder that Wevers found that key questions around the finance were not asked by the Minister, by other Ministers related in that portfolio, or by their officials, and that the decisions were rushed through without proper oversight, without listening to all the warnings from teachers and from payroll workers who said that they did not trust the system to work, because they were having to deal with the consequences of it? The context was a ministry overseen by a Minister who we now know is incapable of listening. We know that this report shows how that kind of attitude can infect a whole workplace, and how information just will not flow freely when you simply cannot trust a Minister to deal with that information effectively.

Ministers can blame officials for not giving them good advice in the crucial 5 June report to Parata, English, and Foss, but the inquiry found that there were concerns in that 5 June report that were so obvious that most of us are now left wondering why they were not picked up on by Ministers. Did they not bother to read that report? Although the officials reported that they were ready to go live and they did not think that there were any outstanding issues, in that 5 June report they also pointed to two criteria that were not being met, and they described elsewhere in the report that some criteria were only “close to being met.” With the stability of the entire education system at risk and with the fortnightly pay of hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders at risk, why did these Ministers Parata, English, and Foss not just ask a few key questions? Why did they not say to officials: “Go and get these uncertain elements checked out first. Find out why the criteria have not been properly met.”? Wevers found that Ministers at the time were not even sure who was in charge of the project and that Ministers were having meetings with these great teams of people but were completely unclear as to who had responsibility for a multimillion-dollar IT project that affected thousands and thousands of New Zealanders and their fortnightly pay. How is that even possible? What kind of mickey mouse operation was Hekia Parata, Bill English, and Craig Foss—and effectively this entire National-ACT Government—running that they did not even know who was responsible for a multimillion-dollar IT project? It was like Novopay just did not exist. It was not on their radar, even though it affected thousands of New Zealanders.

Ministers were told back in July of 2009 of significant risks with the system, and they should have been on heightened alert. We have to ask ourselves why they were so obsessed with pushing go before the system was ready to handle the problems. What kind of culture had infected the ministry that officials did not feel free to give Ministers good and honest information? What kind of culture did these Ministers create? The 5 June report—5 June was a key date according to Wevers. There was no turning back from the decisions that were made then. It was crucial that Ministers got that decision right. Ministers either did not read that 5 June report or did not read it properly. On one page the report stated that go-live was ready and there were no issues; on another page it said that there were a couple of criteria that had not been met, and not a single question was asked about those criteria or about whether that advice was really accurate.

We cannot blame Ministers for everything; I think that has to be said. But they do not work in a critical vacuum. They exist in this House to be accountable to the public. They exist to ask the questions of officials, and to make sure when they make the final decisions they are making them with full information, and with the concerns of the New Zealand public at heart, particularly when you are talking about a multimillion-dollar project that affects thousands and thousands of New Zealand families. That was clearly not the case. These Ministers took their hands off the reins and left a vacuum of leadership. That is what we have seen here with Minister Hekia Parata.

This project was given the go-ahead by this Government at a time when there were very serious concerns about its ability to go live. As a result, we have had more than 12 months now of families not being paid and people being overpaid and chased by debt collectors. Schools have had to fork out their own money to make sure that their teachers and employees were being paid. We have had schools having to use the money that would otherwise be used for the education of our kids to fix up, to patch up, the mistakes made by this Government and by Ministers who did not bother to care enough to make sure that they looked at the papers properly. The families in this country are the ones who have borne the price of the neglect by these Ministers Parata, English, and Foss. They owe it to them.

In fact, even the money that this Government has allocated to schools to help cover the costs, we know, does not cover the costs. We know that schools have lost workers, particularly payroll workers, who were extremely important and long-time employees of those schools, because of the harm that was caused by Parata, English, and Foss. Those Ministers led those schools to be existing in extreme stress for months and months on end, just for the basics, just because they wanted to make sure that their teachers and their workers were being paid their wages.

This Government clearly has a problem with workers or it would not have put New Zealand workers at such risk with such neglect and such complete lack of consideration for the people who are being affected by their decision, so much so that they did not even bother to read the papers and make sure that they had the right information to make the right decision.

💬 Hon Member: They don’t like teachers.

They do not like teachers. I think that is right. I think we have seen that in the way this whole education portfolio has played out. The effect of that has been that for many, many families, many, many teachers, and their kids, they have had real difficulty paying their bills and have borne real financial costs because of this debacle. These Ministers owe the country an explicit and very clear apology for their consistent and persistent failures over this issue. The Government has tried to make things easier and has been trying to improve the system, but there is still no certainty for schools and for teachers as to when the system will work effectively and properly as it is supposed to. We know that more and more millions are being poured into the Novopay system to try to patch it up. That is millions of dollars that are not going to the education of our kids, because it is going to patch up the IT mistakes that Novopay and Talent2 made in their process, and that the Ministers allowed them to proceed with.

This apology needs to be made explicitly and immediately to the teachers, to the students, and to the schools for the hugely destabilising effect that these decisions have had on them. They need to admit that it was a fiasco, that prudent ministerial oversight could have been avoided, and heads need to roll. We have previously called for the Minister Hekia Parata to be sacked for both this debacle over Novopay and the Christchurch schools debacle, and the persistent failures in her management of her portfolio. This report is a clear example, this report from Maarten Wevers and others, that she can be held responsible for the decision to go live, for the failure to get proper advice from officials, to ask the important questions, and to make the right decisions. The only genuinely respectable action that Hekia Parata can now make is to step down as Minister as part of her apology to schools, to teachers, and to families for the debacle that she has created. Thank you.

Today was the day the Report of the Ministerial Inquiry into the Novopay Project was released. Unlike what the Greens have just said in that last speech, where they seek to blame the Ministers, the point of the report, I think, is clearly that there is blame to go around for all parties, and, sadly, nobody has acquitted themselves with great distinction in the introduction of this project. There is a bigger question, actually, because this is not the first information and communications technology project that has had issues. In fact, it is not the first information and communications technology project with the education payroll that has had issues. In fact, you can go back to the mid-1990s and the introduction of a payroll under another company’s name where there was again an inquiry, this time by the head of the Ministry of Education, about concerns in the way that that particular programme was introduced. The net result was that a number of changes were made, and it was thought that these things would not happen again. So rather than just leaping to the political conclusion that the Greens seek to leap to, and no doubt other members of the Opposition as well, it is important to take the time to at least read a few pages of the report and ask yourself what actually went wrong here.

Sadly, what went wrong was that in a number of ways the people whom the public should be able to rely on—some of the staff, some of the suppliers—in this instance were not able to or did not fully perform their role well. The problems with Novopay, as the report notes, have affected public trust and confidence in the Ministry of Education, and, of course, also in the wider public sector. The report identifies weaknesses in project governance and project leadership that allowed the system to go live, with a number of significant risks that the ministry and its vendors, including Talent2, were, in the words of the inquiry, “over-confident of managing.” These risks, as we now know, resulted in service issues that the ministry and Talent2 were unprepared for and they were overwhelmed by their nature and scale.

The report goes into the history of what happened in the whole saga, and it goes back many years, right the way to 2005 and earlier. It makes the observation that New Zealand’s school payroll is very complex. It compares it with the health sector payroll. But it is also very complex, with some very unique elements to it. As a result there was extensive customisation of the Novopay software. The ministry notes there was a failure by the ministry to involve the users of the Novopay system in the schools and appreciate their requirements. So those two things alone indicate some of the difficulties that you can see happen in these situations when the project that was set up did not first seek to simplify its business processes, and did not stay close enough to the users of the system.

Probably one of the biggest issues was the lack of accountability for independent quality assurance. Ministers were entitled to expect that the quality assurance processes that the State sector has would have applied in this case, and, unfortunately, despite assurances that they did, this was not the case. The result is that Ministers were not well served by the information they were given on the project. The report notes that reporting to Ministers was “inconsistent, … unduly optimistic and sometimes misrepresented the situation.” I think it would be important to quote, in light of what Ms Turei has just said, what was said in regard to the June 2012 document. This is on page 88 of the report. It says: “We were particularly concerned about the 5 June 2012 document, which invited Ministers to approve the Ministry’s Go Live decision. This report misrepresented the situation in two significant ways. It suggested that the Go Live decision was supported by three members of the ICT Council, which was not the case; and it stated that Confidence Point Two criteria had been met, when in fact a number either had not been met or were ‘deemed’ to have been met (a lower criterion). These factors overrepresented project readiness and its chance of success.” That was the paper that invited Ministers to make a decision to proceed with the go-live situation with Novopay. I think it is important, whenever members get up in this House, to acknowledge that, because irrespective of your political background it is important that Ministers are able to accept the written word of their advisers in the ministries. If you cannot do that, then the Government processes break down very quickly.

Overall, this report makes for very sober reading. It confirms the view that there is a lot of blame to go around for the problems with the software program. It does provide a greater understanding of the level of fault between the organisations involved. It mentions the ministry at significant length. Actually, you do not have to go far to know that the ministry has had issues that stretch back, again for some period of time, many years in fact, including the period of the previous Government. The performance improvement review, or PIF review, for the ministry just a couple of years ago was very sobering reading indeed, and, unfortunately, its difficulties are reflected in this report. But it is also the case of being able to rely on other advisers, and I note that the primary consultancy, PricewaterhouseCoopers, has been mentioned in the report, and the State Services Commission, and Treasury as well. So it is fair to say that nobody—none of the agencies involved and none of the organisations contracted—has come out of it very well. Of course, it mentions the key supplier, the Talent2 organisation, which failed to meet a number of deadlines. But again, even that process was fraught, because it becomes apparent as you read the report that the ministry changed the specifications significantly over the period of time the project was in development.

So I think there are many places where people who have perhaps already read the report online this afternoon could shake their heads and say: “This is a real problem. This is a difficulty. Why did this happen in this way?”. I think if we come back to the issue of independent quality assurance, unfortunately, in relation to that, I think you could make the observation, as I did myself earlier this afternoon at a press conference, that a process of groupthink developed, where there was a drawing in of those who were there to provide that independent assurance for Ministers into the project itself. The State Services Commission, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and others were drawn into that project—

💬 Grant Robertson: Go on. Just take a little bit of responsibility, just a little bit.

—Mr Robertson, and basically were not able to give that independent approach, that potential to say “We should blow the whistle and not proceed necessarily with the project at this time.”

Like I say, these issues that the report very adequately lists bring a number of questions and lessons that need to be learnt for the future, and the inquiry report lays those lessons out quite clearly for the public sector.

💬 Sue Moroney: Pretty basic.

The member may say it is pretty basic, but, actually, it is pretty basic that some of the things should have been done at the outset. Seeing as we are laying a bit of blame around the place, and obviously the member seeks the desire to lay some blame, those members on that side of the House who were part of some of the original decisions perhaps should have actually called for some process simplification before the process actually began, instead of sitting there now, today, saying: “It’s nothing to do with us. Nothing actually happened when we were there.”, when quite fundamentally it happened over a significant period of time.

So where to from here? It is very important to address the issues that go forward. There will be some issues that arise out of this report. One of those issues will be, as the Secretary for Education has announced, an investigation into some employment matters. That is appropriate. There will also be other consequences of some of the recommendations in this report. More specifically, there needs to be a real think forward about how to handle these projects in future. For my money, one of the key parts of it is to actually go through that business process assessment—to go there and say: “Can we change and simplify some of these processes before we make a big change in an information and communications technology system in this regard?”. I think it is incumbent on every agency to go through that exercise and to encourage the Government of the day to try to make these simplifications before the process starts.

For this particular system, we are in the process of remediation and we have made some significant progress, although nobody would say that the system is fixed at this point. We have improved dramatically the performance pay period to pay period. We now have the situation that for five out of the last six payroll periods the error rate has decreased to less than 0.5 percent of transactions, which is good progress. Last week 88,500 people were paid a total of $173.53 million, and 29 staff were notified as being not paid. That has been reasonable progress.

The second stage is, of course, the remediation and dealing with the backlog of issues in the system. Firstly, there is the outstanding work, and there have been very, very large numbers of transactions that have to be caught up with. We are making some pretty good progress in terms of outstanding pay instructions, the backlog of inquiries to the ministry, and leave balances. I am hopeful that these would be back to business-as-usual levels by the end of June. However, overpayments resolution is taking a longer period of time, and additional work is being done into the overpayments resolution system to speed up the clearance of those issues. The next area that has to be resolved is the resolution of software defects. This last weekend a further 58 defects were closed. We are now down to 14 category 2 or very serious bugs left, nine of which are targeted for closure in June. If we achieve even half of that number, then we will have fewer than 10 category 2 bugs by the end of June. We are on target to achieve that.

But going forward there are a number of things that now need to be addressed. Firstly, usability to encourage people to use the system online is very important. Secondly, the end-of-year and start-of-year issues that we had last year need to be solved. Thirdly, we need to close the service gap that has been identified by schools. There has been good progress with the schools. We have done some surveys of the schools, and generally they have noticed improvement. But, as I said, nobody, including myself, would say at this point that we are satisfied that the project has been satisfactorily remediated.

I would like to take the opportunity once again to acknowledge the hard work being done by everybody involved in this system, particularly the school administrators, but also the teams of people working hard at the ministry, at Talent2, and around the place to get the system back on its feet. There has been some heroic work done by any number of people involved in dealing with the challenges that this system has laid out for them. I would also like to thank for their patience—severely tried at times—the staff involved with the issues that have been apparent for individual staff members. Again they have my assurance that we are working as quickly as we can to resolve those issues.

Finally, I would like to take the opportunity—although I appreciate the opportunity for sober reflection may or may not be available in the House this afternoon, depending on how the next speakers—

💬 Grant Robertson: I’m as sober as a judge, Steven.

—decide to take their view. No doubt Mr Robertson et al. will immediately decide to disappear back into the political cartoon that is their lives, and try to lay political blame where quite clearly, as set out in this report, there is a much more serious issue for the whole public sector that we need to address. Perhaps it is not too much to hope that at least some of the speakers this afternoon would seek to address that issue, rather than laying political blame. But, for my money, I know that every member of the Government is very disappointed in the outcome of this programme. I personally apologise to the teachers and administrators for the pain and suffering that has been caused to them. They, again, have my absolute assurance, as the Minister responsible for Novopay, that we are seeking to address these issues as quickly as possible, and that the lessons that are contained in this report will be learnt. Thank you.

If ever New Zealanders needed a clear example of the fact that they have a hands-off Government that is not up to the task of running the country, they got it today—yet another example today—in this, the Report of the Ministerial Inquiry into the Novopay Project. I will quote from page 1, the foreword to the report, which says: “This state of affairs and the wider disruptions that were caused were avoidable.” This, all of this, this entire shambles, was avoidable. Steven Joyce talked about there being plenty of blame to go around, and then proceeded to try to scatter it anywhere except with the Ministers who actually made the decisions to sign off on the Novopay project. He blamed the officials and he blamed the past Government. And, of course, the Government has tried to blame the schools. It has tried to blame everyone except for the three people who actually signed—put their names on the piece of paper—to say to go ahead with Novopay. Bill English, Hekia Parata, and Craig Foss were the three people who signed off on the implementation of Novopay, and ultimately they are the ones who are responsible.

It is great that Steven Joyce has apologised to all the people who have been affected by this, but why on earth did it take such a long time? Why did Hekia Parata not front up and apologise? Why did Hekia Parata, the Minister of Education, not front up and apologise for the massive turmoil that she caused within schools? I agree with another comment made by Steven Joyce. He said that Ministers should be able to trust the advice that they receive from officials. I absolutely agree with that. But Ministers get paid $250,000 a year, and one of the reasons they get paid that is to test the veracity of the advice they get and to ask some difficult questions. When officials give advice that is inconsistent, as was clearly the case here, it is up to the Ministers to say: “This advice is not good enough, and I want better.” They did not do that.

They got given advice that said, in the same report, that the milestones had been met and that the milestones had not been met. And that was signed off by three Ministers. I can tell you now that if that sort of advice were given to me as a Minister, I would not sign it off. I would go back to the officials, and the very first question I would ask them is: “Well, which is it? Were the milestones met or were they not?”. Apparently, that was too difficult for Bill English, Hekia Parata, and Craig Foss—three senior Government Ministers, and not one of them was able to spot the inconsistency in that report from their officials. Not one of them turned round and said: “I’m not satisfied with this advice. I want more information.” Not one of them thought to ask: “Has this actually been tested? Have we actually got some results to show whether this is going to work or not?”. Not one of those three Ministers asked for that advice. Had they done so, we would not be here having this debate, because it was abundantly clear before Novopay went live that it was not going to work, and any Minister doing their job properly could have established that in a very short order of time. They did not do so. They did not live up to the expectations that the public should, rightly, have of them.

Did they ask whether schools were involved in the development and the design of the new payroll system? Had they asked that basic, fundamental question, the answer that would have come back was a resounding no, and all of the alarm bells should have been ringing at that point. The people who had to use the system, the people who had to make it work, were not actually involved in the project. Had it been tested? Did they ask that question? No, they did not.

There are a whole lot of questions left unanswered by this report. The report talks about the removal of the contingencies, the phased roll-out, and the old system running in parallel. It talks about the fact that that was removed. Well, who signed that off? Who signed off the removal of those contingencies? If any Minister signed off on the removal of those contingencies, they should resign immediately, because the responsibility is very, very clear. The report is suspiciously silent on that. There is not one word on whether the Minister has signed off on the removal of the contingencies, and why not? If they did, they have to go. It is as simple as that. If they signed off on the removal of the contingencies, then the Ministers are responsible for the chaos that followed, and the blame for that rests squarely on their shoulders and nobody else’s. They can blame officials, they can blame previous Governments, they can blame the schools, but the Ministers were the ones who signed off on the implementation. The Ministers are the ones who should accept the responsibility for that.

There were known faults—multiple known faults—with the system. There was clear evidence that even if the system was ready, the sector was not ready for the implementation of it, and yet it was still signed off, anyway. The report finds, and I will quote directly, that “levels of trust between the Ministry and the sector that were necessary to ensure the success of the project were not always evident.” Well, goodness me! That is the understatement of the decade. There is very little trust between the Ministry of Education and the entire educational community. The responsibility for that rests with Ministers as well, because the Ministry of Education is ultimately left with the task of implementing the policy agenda of this Government, and it is the policy agenda of this Government that has resulted in the massive breakdown in relationships between the Ministry of Education and just about everybody who has to actually implement the policies that the Government is trying to ram through. Whether they be national standards, charter schools, performance pay for teachers, and all of those other things that this Government talks about all of the time, those things have contributed to this breakdown in relationship and clearly that has had an impact on this project as well.

So what is the Government going to do next? What happens now? Well, there are some interesting comments in the report. It talks about removing unnecessary practices—i.e., banking staffing. Is that not interesting? Basically what it is going to do is take away the ability of schools to keep and retain and use any underspend in their staffing allocations. Basically, this is another Bill English clawback—ripping more resources out of schools, ripping more money and more staffing away from schools. This is how it will make up for its failed experiment with bigger class sizes—by removing banking staffing. What does banking staffing do? It allows schools, if they do not use up all of their staffing within the period that they have been allocated, to roll it forward. The Government wants to take that away, and it wants to use its Novopay shambles as the excuse for taking away banking staffing. It also talks about reducing the complexity of collective employment agreements.

💬 Hon Members: Ah!

Ah, now here we go. Performance pay is on the way. It is now going to reduce the complexity of the collective agreements, and we can expect to see this Government trying to ram through major changes to the way teachers and those working in schools are paid. This report is all part of the Government’s plan to change—[Bell rung] Oh, that is the second 2-minute bell, Mr Assistant Speaker. That is very good; I am just getting warmed up. The Government is going to use this as an excuse to ram through changes not just to the payroll system but to the collective agreements and the very nature of teachers’ employment, and that is so totally wrong.

Ultimately what people wanted from Steven Joyce—an apology was good—was for him to stand up and say that he accepts that the Government made a mistake, the Government should not have signed off the implementation of Novopay, and, yes, this National Government accepts responsibility. And, no, nobody heard that from Steven Joyce today, and they have not heard that all the way through this debacle, which has been now going on since August of last year. It has been going on since August, and still the Government tiptoes around the edges and tries to shed the blame elsewhere. Steven Joyce even had the audacity to try to shed the blame on to the previous Labour Government, yet that was actually one of the few positive findings—that the original procurement of the payroll system was actually OK. That was the bit of it that was all right.

It became a shambles when Hekia Parata and Bill English and Craig Foss got involved. They were the Ministers who signed off on the go-live decision. I am looking forward to Craig Foss’ contribution because I have seen him taking extensive notes during this debate. As he is the person responsible for signing it off, I look forward to him standing up and apologising to schools, apologising to teachers and to support staff—because it is not just teachers, it is all the other staff who work in schools who have been affected by this. In particular, I want Craig Foss to stand up and say that he is sorry for trying to blame the schools, because when the system first went live, and all of those problems came up, Craig Foss came to this House and tried to blame the schools. He needs to stand up now, take a call in this debate, and give them an unqualified, unreserved apology, because he was totally wrong. The responsibility for this fiasco rests with him.

Kia ora, Mr Assistant Speaker. This would be a comedy of errors if it was not so serious. This is not funny, and it is a shame to have Ministers stand up in this House and, as has been said several times already, pass the buck. They passed the buck to officials. They passed the buck to the Labour Government. They passed the buck to school staff. I think that was the lowest, lowest part of this conversation. Part of the problem has been that this was a money-saving exercise. We have not seen the end of it yet. I agree with my counterpart Mr Hipkins that this is the third time or fourth time that Mr Joyce has mentioned the complexity of the pay scale structure inside our schools. Can I just say that when an IT system is developed, the machines serve us. The machines are supposed to serve us. We are not supposed to change how we do something to make it easier for the machine. When we move to that part of the world, then I hope I am not in it.

So one of the suggestions at the beginning of this process was that it was actually the front-line payroll staff who were too dim to actually input the data correctly. Not only was no training offered to payroll staff, not only did they then halfway through this process show up to training and have to teach the Talent2 people what they were doing, but the suggestion was made in this House by an elected Minister that it was payroll staff who were the problem. Yet, ultimately, the reason why a Minister stands and answers questions as the Minister responsible is that they are responsible. The buck stops there. That is why they get paid all those bucks. The buck stops there.

When I first stood for election, one of the things I said in a public meeting was to elect somebody who reads the stuff. Elect people who read the documents that they are going to make decisions on. Then elect a person who when they do not understand something that is written in those documents has the courage to ask: “What does that mean?”. Elect someone who has the courage to say as a Minister: “Explain this to me again. That doesn’t make sense to me. Bring in somebody else who can make this clear to me.” At the end of the day this is ministerial responsibility. There are Ministers here who need to take responsibility. They need to do that for the New Zealand public, and they need to do that for the staff who have been insulted through this process. They need to do that for the staff who are like the young first-year teacher down in Tauranga who lost her flat and had to move back in with her mum and dad because she did not get paid for the whole first 6 months of this year. Ministers need to take responsibility for the staff member who has a $17,000 accumulation of overpayments sitting over here waiting for the debt collector to bang on his door while his wife has not been paid for 3 months. The Ministers need to take responsibility for that stress. It is very easy to do that and to say: “It was my call and I was wrong. I was wrong. I apologise. I am sorry.” We did not hear Mr Joyce say sorry. We heard Mr Joyce say thank you. He said: “Thank you for your patience. Thank you for your time. Thank you to all the people working hard behind the scenes to put the patches on.” But we did not hear him say sorry. We have not heard an unconditional apology from anybody. I know it is the hardest word to say, but it actually gets you the furthest along the track and that is all the staff want.

This Government is exceptionally lucky that teachers love children and love their jobs and are committed to their work, because any other industry would have walked off. Any other industry would have thrown it in and said: “Until you pay us properly, we’re not going to do this any more.” But these people did not do that. These citizens stayed in the classroom and all they ask for now is, first, for somebody to take responsibility and truly say sorry; secondly, that you do not muck around with their payroll system until you get this one right; and, thirdly, they want recognition that it is still broken. The bank staffing, which Mr Hipkins referred to, is not going to wash out for another 12 months. When the headlines over this issue have gone, it will be another 12 months before schools may have to end up fronting with cash to the ministry, because of the payroll stuff-up around this, and the ministry will have to take it from their operations grant.

There are several, several things wrong with what has gone on, and we know it and we need to move on and we need to move forward. But there is obviously something wrong with the relationship between the Ministers involved here and the ministry, and that is probably more serious. If the ministry does not feel confident or brave enough to say to the Minister that “This is wrong and we can’t do this any more.” and that “Yes, we’ve spent $10 million, but to spend another $23.9 million trying to patch up a system that is terribly broken would be a mistake.”, then we have got an issue. The Minister must allow people to come into his or her office and give him or her the truth. Whichever Minister it is must be able to let those officials come in and provide the truth, even when it is bad news. Then we need to take the steps to make it right for the mass, for the citizens inside our schools.

There are many recommendations inside the report and it will take some time to digest. I hope that most of the recommendations will be listened to, but I would strongly urge the Minister who now has oversight for this issue to please talk with the sector, stop fixing it away from them, stop siloing it off, and actually go and see them, and have them input into the solutions. Do not use it as a doorway to change the pay scales. Do not use it as a doorway to save more money. Do not use it as a doorway to change anything else, because you do not have a lot of—I beg your pardon, Mr Deputy Speaker. The Minister does not have a lot of trust now, and any attempt to change the structure of pay to hide what are actually fundamental errors with a base computer system will do nothing to restore it. We have patch upon patch upon patch on this program. So even when we fix all the backlog problems and we are running at, say, only about 23 errors per pay period, it is full of patches. We are going to have to do this all again. This is not a clean program. This is not going to be the end of the issue. We now have a base program with several errors that is being patched over the top. It is not the best practice when it comes to an IT system, and I would suggest that in the next 5 years we are going to be looking at another one.

I agree with and endorse and join with Mr Joyce when he apologised, and I apologise to all those who have suffered through the unfortunate outcomes from the way in which Novopay has played out over recent months—albeit it has got quite a bit better in recent months—and the issues that have been of major concern over recent months. School staff, support staff, boards of trustees, principals—you name it—have suffered because of what this report released today points to.

I will not get political, as one or two members have done, but what I would like to do is just point out some of the facts in the report and actually let the report speak for itself. I do acknowledge members around the House not questioning those who produced the report, and I join them in respect of the professionalism and standing of the people who were in charge of it. Just a couple of things—for example, on page 79, under the section “Leadership—The Secretary for Education”. I will quote the first sentence: “The two former Secretaries for Education told us that they were clear that final accountability for the Novopay project lay with them.” That is quite clear. Yes, Ministers have responsibilities; of course they do. But Ministers—those who have been in a ministerial role or in a ministerial office—know that Ministers rely on the advice that they get from officials in response to questions asked, reports required, Cabinet guidelines, etc. Perhaps, as this report shows, unfortunately, at least in this instance, that has not been able to be relied upon.

I will just make a quote again. On page 88, which is one of the findings, it quite simply says in bullet point one: “Ministers were not always well served by the quality of advice about the project from the Ministry.” And then there are points two, three, and four, and Mr Joyce read out point four, particularly in relation to the 5 June 2012 report, which essentially recommended that Ministers sign off on the go-live. The assumption, of course, was that that advice rested on robust governance, internal audit monitoring, fairness, robustness, transparency, peer-reviewed testing and reporting, and quality control—and no unintended, perhaps, conflicts of interest and not being captured by processes that, in fact, started in 2003, as members do, I think, know. The timeline is very interesting. About eight or nine Ministers have been involved in this Novopay system. So the assumption that advice rests on robust public service ethos is, perhaps, a fair assumption. Not just in education but across Government, across Cabinet, and across Governments, the advice of professional, well-meaning public servants is relied upon and used every single day. Unfortunately, the report here outlines some instances where that does not seem to have been the case, and the Acting Secretary for Education, Mr Peter Hughes, is investigating those matters right now.

I do note that the Acting Secretary has also just put out a press release, and I do want to take a couple of quotes from that. Essentially, what it does say is: “The acting Secretary for Education, Peter Hughes, says he accepts in full all of the findings and recommendations of the Ministerial Inquiry that relate to the Ministry.” Further down, where he is talking about the system, not just since go-live but the bits leading up to go-live and the system as a whole, he goes: “In the end those efforts fell well short. The Ministry did not have the capacity—skills, processes and governance—for a project of this scale and complexity. There was not enough oversight from the leadership.” He repeats: “Government Ministers were not served well by some of the advice and reporting they received, and that is unacceptable. I have apologised to them.” I accept that apology, of course, and, as Mr Joyce and other speakers have noted, the system is running much better now, perhaps now where it was intended to be—albeit there were the problems with implementation.

But, sadly, many agencies mentioned in the report, both Government and outside of Government, have in various ways and forms somehow been captured by the changes. The customisation, contracts not being finalised, and schedules customisation have been captured by that. All that has led up to advice that is not robust, and perhaps misrepresented advice, being given to Ministers, which led to them making the recommendation to their colleagues to pick up on the ministry’s advice and to go live. So I repeat, as unfortunate—and I do generally apologise for all of those—as the angst—

Order! Your time has expired.

I was listening from my room and then I came into the House, and it might have happened in the minute or so that it took me to come down, but I think that that member, Craig Foss, did not apologise. He did not say sorry. He was the Minister in charge of the project—the Minister responsible for Novopay—he was the Minister who did not ask the questions that needed to be asked, and he was the Minister who was not getting the weekly reports that he should have been getting. He is sitting behind the Minister of Education, and it is hard to tell whether she did it deliberately or not, but someone did not do their job.

It is no good whatsoever, as is made clear to everyone who has studied Westminster democracy, to say that it is the fault of the officials. You are to blame, Minister. The Minister is to blame, and, in this case, the two Ministers are the ones—

💬 Chris Hipkins: And Bill English.

—and Bill English, but Bill English is to blame for a lot more than that. Hekia Parata’s job was to make sure that she had systems set up within her ministry whereby she got at least weekly reports on at-risk projects. Did she do that? No, she did not. That Minister does not even get proper weekly reports on her area of responsibility. And I sort of wonder why we pay her a quarter of a million dollars a year, when—

💬 Dr Megan Woods: Clothes.

Well, you know, when that is appropriate, it is appropriate. But in this case we have a Minister being paid a quarter of a million dollars a year, she has the highest-risk project going on in education—something that involves the payment of teachers—and did she ask them a single question before she signed the paper?

💬 Hon Hekia Parata: Yes, many times—many times.

Did she ask—

💬 Chris Hipkins: “Many times.” She said “Many times.”

She said she asked questions many times. Well, clearly, as is made clear in the report, there were issues at the time she signed off the go. She signed off the go, not the officials. She signed—and she is nodding; she agrees that it is her responsibility. Well, have we heard an apology from her for being an inadequate Minister who does not know how to ask a question? What is the point of having officials and blaming them? You might as well abolish the ministry if she is going to be run by officials—although that, I understand, is the approach that she prefers to take. Hard work and Hekia Parata do not go in the same sentence.

That Minister Craig Foss used to have potential. Craig Foss at one stage was seen in the same class as John Key. He was brought into the party by Brash, Boag, and that team, apparently for the difference that he was going to make. What a disappointment he has been—what a disappointment he has been. One would have thought that someone with some business experience would not just sign the paper that was put in front of him. Frankly, under Helen Clark, both those Ministers would have been gone. Both those Ministers would have had the sack. They would have been out of Cabinet because they just did not do their jobs.

Nothing can be worse for people—maybe those people over there do not understand it. People who are lords and ladies and rich former business people do not care about income and wages, but most New Zealanders do. Most New Zealanders care about getting their pay, and not only the teachers but the support staff in schools. The members opposite might think that payroll is not that important because it is not that important to them and it is not that important to their funders and to their mates. This is a classic case of those members getting too close to the people who have things and not understanding people who do not. If those members did understand how important pay was, how important salary was, how important wages were to ordinary New Zealanders, they would have made sure that they read the papers that were put in front of them, that they took the warnings, that they asked the questions, and that they did their jobs properly. But instead we have over there two very guilty Ministers—Ministers who do not do their work. I do not know whether it is ignorance or laziness. I really do not know whether Hekia Parata is as silly as she pretends to be, or whether Craig Foss is as lazy as he pretends to be. It does not really matter whether it is laziness—

Order! [Interruption] Order! Your time has concluded.

Pay period 5 has just finished, and in that pay period 88,524 people were paid a total of $173.55 million. The PricewaterhouseCoopers report shows that complaints and notifications were received regarding 0.39 percent of staff across the country. Twenty-nine staff were notified as not paid, 115 were overpaid, and 199 underpaid. Affected staff were from 234 schools, or 9.5 percent of schools in the payroll system. This is obviously unacceptable. This is totally unacceptable, and the Report of the Ministerial Inquiry into the Novopay Project makes sobering reading. The inquiry was undertaken by the former Chief Executive of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Sir Maarten Wevers, and chairman of Deloitte, Murray Jack. Their 113-page report contains 15 significant recommendations and was presented to the Government just last Friday. The ministerial inquiry team has produced a comprehensive report outlining the history of, and issues within, the school payroll system, and it concludes that there were many factors over many years that contributed to the problems with Novopay.

I understand that Peter Hughes, the Acting Secretary for Education, has written today to all school principals and board chairs to personally apologise to them. He has also written an open letter of apology to all staff in schools. I personally, as a foot soldier in the National Government, someone passionate about education, and chairman of the Education and Science Committee, express my sincere regret to all staff members, who do an outstanding job throughout the country. Of course, these problems have made their task a lot, lot more difficult. We acknowledge that, and the Government will be acting upon these findings.

What were some of the key findings? Some of the key findings were to do with the project life cycle: “The schools payroll environment is overly complex as a result of an accumulation of historical changes. There was no serious attempt to simplify collective agreements or Ministry or school business processes before embarking on the Novopay project.”—the retrospectoscope is a hugely useful instrument in medicine, and so it is in this instance—“This was an underlying cause of later problems. The strategic decision to change from purchasing software to an outsourced service was valid, but the rationale was simplistic. Customers’ perspectives, particularly those of the boards of trustees”—and I acknowledge Tracey Martin, who has spoken earlier—“were insufficiently considered in the business case. The Ministry’s requirements for the outsourced service, as outlined in the Request for Proposal, were too high level to convey the full complexity of the required solution.” So, as I say, it is easy to be wise after the event, but these are the results of this very in-depth and comprehensive report that we have received from two very able investigators. The report continues: “The process of gathering user requirements was poorly managed and took too long. The failure to involve users appropriately was a key weakness. The Ministry was negotiating on behalf of the users in the schools sector without an appreciation of all of their requirements.”

One of the points that did come out was that the papers presented on 5 June 2012 to the Ministers, following the so-called “Confidence Point Two”, actually misrepresented the state of the project. It was found that “Ministers were not always well served by the quality of advice about the project from the Ministry. Reporting to Ministers was inconsistent and at times unduly optimistic, and sometimes misrepresented the situation. In oral briefings to Ministers, officials often expressed confidence and reassured Ministers”—who were asking the questions—“that risks were in hand … We were particularly concerned about the 5 June 2012 document, which invited Ministers to approve the Ministry’s Go Live decision. This report misrepresented the situation in two significant ways. It suggested that the Go Live decision was supported by three members of the ICT Council, which was not the case; and it stated that Confidence Point Two criteria had been met, when in fact a number either had not been met or were ‘deemed’ to have been met (a lower criterion).”

I think that to start off with it will be worth making a statement—a very common and well-used statement—and that is: something that has been made crooked is hard to make straight. When we stop and think about those original decisions, it is easy to be wise afterwards, as has been communicated in this debate. The Report of the Ministerial Inquiry into the Novopay Project certainly does leave us with some very strong messages. As the member for the Kaikōura electorate, I want to say a special thankyou to the teachers, the principals, and the boards of trustees of the 36 schools that have had to endure this whole process, which, once it started rolling out, has been an incredibly bumpy ride, to say the least.

The ministerial inquiry has certainly taken its toll, when you stop to think that we no longer have either of the two Secretaries for Education with the Ministry of Education. The problem with Novopay has also affected the public trust and confidence in the Ministry of Education, and no doubt concerns us all, as it does us on this side of the House. Given the weakness of the project governance and of the project leader, it is clearly evident that the governance and leadership were not adequate, and that a number of significant risks with the Ministry of Education and its vendors, including Talent2, showed and displayed an overconfidence in approaching this situation.

I would have to say that the complexity of anything like Novopay is well beyond the member for Kaikōura. However, there are people who practise these fine arts, and everybody who goes to work in New Zealand expects that on a given day—a predetermined day—they will be paid. For that not to happen is a disappointment and an utter failure on the part of any employer. Whatever came at the ministry and Talent2, they were totally unprepared for it. One’s thoughts do go out to those Ministers who had oversight, in the way that information was relayed back to them. How do you cut through and ask those searching questions and get into areas that are dark and dingy and that people are espousing as being ready to go?

When you talk about the school payroll, it is complex, but that is not an excuse. In the very essence of a systems analysis, complexity should have been a fundamental part of the life cycle of the development of the Novopay system. The fact that it is now extensively customised is a concern. It needs to be very quickly stabilised. It is heartening, though, to see that 0.5 percent or less of mistakes have been recorded over the last quarter or two. However, there is a long way to go to get out of the woods. We have just got to be very, very aware of the lessons that we have learnt during this miserable process. There was no overall accountability for independent quality assurance—some very fundamental failures there. The project has cost $23.9 million more than was estimated, and has a total cost to date of $56.8 million.

So what have we learnt? Well, we have learnt that implementing a system with the complexity of Novopay—of a payroll system involved with the education system—is incredibly difficult and high risk. We on this side of the House certainly welcome this report. We offer our sincere apologies for any difficulty, frustration, and hardship that have come upon the fraternity of teachers, boards of trustees, and schools as a whole. In conclusion, I would like to make the comment, as quoted by the Minister responsible for Novopay: “There are substantial lessons to be learned by the Ministry of Education in a number of areas which the Acting Secretary of Education is taking steps to address.” Thank you.

I think it is very important at the outset to say that this report on the Novopay system does scatter around the blame for what happened. We have had Ministers on their feet, and they have talked about the problems with the Ministry of Education, the problems with the State Services Commission, the problems with PricewaterhouseCoopers, and the problems—goodness only knows—probably inside the schools. And we have got a whole lot of blame in here about how complex it is to pay people who do not all work a 40-hour week in one place, and how terribly, terribly difficult all of that is. But there is something missing from this report, and what is missing from this report is the acceptance of blame from the Ministers who got the 5 June report in 2012 and said “Go live”. That is what is missing from this report, and that is fundamentally flawed.

This report ought to share the blame across not only those officials who were working on this issue but also those Ministers who finally took the decision to go live on 5 June 2012. Those Ministers are Hekia Parata, Craig Foss, and Bill English. It is a fundamental principle of our Westminster system that Ministers will take responsibility for the actions of their agencies. It is unacceptable to have Ministers come down to this House and tell us that they are not going to take that responsibility. The speech that Craig Foss delivered in this House was disgraceful. He went out of his way to find quotes in the report that would mean that he did not have to take responsibility. He took a press release from Peter Hughes, who says that, yes, the Ministry of Education is going to take its share of the responsibility, and he used that so that he did not have to take responsibility. That is wrong. It is wrong for Ministers to stand up in this House and not take their share of the blame. We on this side of the House are not saying that it is just the Ministers. Of course it is not just the Ministers. But, as Trevor Mallard pointed out, what is the point of having a Minister, or Ministers, paid a quarter of a million dollars if they are not prepared to stand up in this House and say that they got this fundamentally wrong on 5 June 2012?

It is important to look at the report. Mr Foss alerted us to page 88 of the report. It is actually important to look at the report and see that Ministers were briefed in May 2012 about what was happening. And in that paper that they were briefed on they were invited to consider arrangements for rapid decision-making if it became necessary to terminate Novopay. So Ministers were being told in May that things had got to such a point that it was possibly necessary to terminate the contract with Novopay. A matter of mere weeks later they received a briefing that gave contradictory advice about whether or not all the milestones for the project had been met—only weeks after being told that they might have to terminate the contract—and the Ministers said that it was all fine. They said that that was all fine and that they were going to sign it off. That is not adequate oversight by Ministers.

Ministers are paid the big bucks to ask the hard questions. They are meant to ask those questions, and they completely failed to do so in this case. They got a report in June that said that there were 150 software defects and 5,913 payslip errors in the testing. That is just the testing—nearly 6,000 errors in the testing and 150 software defects, and that was just weeks after being given advice that they may need to terminate the contract. Yet all three Ministers—Hekia Parata, Craig Foss, and Bill English—signed it off. That is not the kind of ministerial oversight that New Zealanders would rightly expect.

This was a complex process; there is no doubt about that. That should be all the more reason for Ministers to give it an even more thorough oversight than they might have, but knowing these risks existed, the Ministers signed it off. That is bad enough, but what makes it so much worse is that the Ministers have failed to take responsibility today. We have had all kinds of faux apologies over the last few months. We have had people apologising for the difficulties that have been caused and apologising for the extra work that has been put on staff. They are not real apologies. They are not apologies that say: “I am the Minister, and I stuffed up. I made the wrong decision. I didn’t ask the right questions.” There has been no sign of that kind of apology up to today, and no sign from Ministers who have spoken in the House today. They would much rather get the officials and throw them under the bus than actually admit their role. That is, as I said, a fundamental breakdown in what we call the Westminster system of Government.

There is a chapter in this report called “Leadership”, and it starts off by talking about the Secretary for Education. That is a flaw in this report, because if we are talking about leadership, then leadership comes from the Minister of Education. The Minister should be the person at the top of that section, and instead what we see immediately is the term “The Secretary for Education”. There have been faults by officials in this process—quite clearly. Where is the acknowledgment of fault from the Ministers who said “Go live” in June 2012 when they were presented with contradictory evidence?

I also want to pay tribute today to the school staff who have dealt with the problems that have come up from this. As most MPs in this House will have done, I have been in schools in my electorate as they have tried to grapple with Novopay problems. I have seen school administrators with decades of experience reduced to tears because they could not make this system work, and, in the early days particularly, they got the reaction from Government that it was basically their fault. That was the message. Craig Foss, when he was the Associate Minister of Education, was sending out the message that it was the fault of the school administrators. They deserve a proper and thorough apology from Craig Foss and the Ministers on the other side of the House because of the stress that they went through. School administrators have had to give up their jobs because of the stress—that is what has happened across New Zealand—and those staff deserve better.

I also think that the teachers and the other school staff who have been affected by this deserve a tribute, because they have shown up to work day in, day out. It is not just the teachers; it is the support staff. It is the teacher aides, who are often paid just above minimum wage, who need that pay. They rely on that pay. They live week to week. They need the money. Ministers over there may not understand that, but that is what was at stake here: people who need the money.

When New Zealanders go to work they deserve to expect to be paid. When people go to work in New Zealand they should know two things: that they are going to come home safely after a day’s work, and that they will actually get paid for their jobs. That did not happen here, and that did not happen for far too long before this Government actually got up and said it was going to try to do something about it. That was the fault in leadership that should have been found in this report.

It is not only in respect of 5 June that we need to look at this. I am interested by a line in the report that talks about the context in which this happened. I will quote from page 83 of the report: “The Ministry’s relationship with the schools sector has in recent times been uneasy, and sometimes highly politicised.” That is what it says in the report. Where do the politics come from? The politics come from the National Government. It is the policies of the National Government that have been imposed on the sector, which the sector knows are wrong and will damage educational outcomes. It is that environment of politics, which has come from the Minister and this National Government, that is mentioned in this report as the context in which the ministry was managing Novopay. I think that is a very interesting line, and what that speaks to is that this Government should be shouldering its share of the blame for this debacle. It has failed to do that in the past, and it has failed to do that today.

I just want to finish—very briefly—on the point that Chris Hipkins raised about two of the recommendations. One of those is around the recommendation to modernise the collective agreements in this sector. We will be watching that like hawks, because that sounds to me like more from this Government to undermine collective agreements. We will not accept this debacle being used as an excuse by this Government to undermine collective bargaining rights. There is also the idea of changing banking staffing arrangements, which allows schools to accumulate hours.

This Government has made a mess of this payroll system, and this Government should apologise for what it has done, but what it must not do is put pressure back on to schools. They have had enough from this Government, they deserve better, and they deserve a proper apology and some responsibility being taken for this debacle by these Ministers.

Tēnā koe, Mr Assistant Speaker. Thank you for the opportunity to speak in this snap debate on Novopay. I think it might be helpful if we just review what was intended by the introduction of Novopay. First of all, it was intended that we have an up-to-date payroll system that would manage the complexities of over 100,000 pay instructions every fortnight to a diverse workforce, with different arrangements, across the country. Everyone who has been involved with Novopay set about it with the best intentions. There was no one person who decided that they should get involved in this and work it so that it would be difficult; it would be a problem; it would underpay, overpay, or not pay teachers, support staff, and principals; or it would create headaches for every school administrator. That was never the intention. The intention was to have a much better payroll system, driven by a very clear understanding some years ago that the payroll system that was then in place was no longer going to be capable of meeting those needs.

Members in the Opposition—Labour and the Greens—seem to be under the misapprehension that, somehow or another, there was an intention that this would all go wrong. Nobody wanted that; nobody wants that now. There also seem to have been a number of allegations that Ministers on this side of the House have been completely culpable and unwilling to take responsibility. Again, that is not true. What is clear from this very comprehensive and very thorough report that has been written by the well-respected, senior, experienced former public servant Sir Maarten Wevers and another very experienced businessman and adviser Mr Murray Jack is that there have been a range of people involved over the many years of this particular project. In fact, if one looks at the report there are three pages about ministerial responsibilities, and there are a number of Ministers who have held those responsibilities over the years, beginning with the decision in 2003 and 2005 that the system needed to be replaced, progressing through the signing of a contract, which was done under Minister Mallard, then under Minister Maharey, and then Minister Carter, who in fact signed off the Novopay contract with many of the schedules attached to it not yet filled out. Nevertheless, again, it was with the intention that a better, fit for purpose payroll system would be devised and implemented that would see all of the complexities, which have been much talked about, dealt with and teachers, principals, and support staff paid.

Of course, our Government came in and inherited it, and we have also been part of the process of design, development, and implementation. This report—a very thorough and comprehensive report, as I said, prepared by Sir Maarten Wevers and Mr Murray Jack—canvassed that very extensive history over all of that time, from 10 December 1999 to the present date, and, as the Minister responsible for Novopay made clear when he first took over this responsibility, there is absolutely enough blame to go around. It is not something that any of us celebrate on this side of the House, nor should it be the case on that side of the House. What was intended was that a fit for purpose, 21st century payroll system would be designed and delivered. Did that happen? No. We know that now, we knew that comprehensively from when the system went live in August last year, and we have seen a momentum of errors that have beset that system. We know that many people were underpaid, overpaid, or not paid, and we have apologised to them and continue to apologise to them because that was never the intention. We want people paid on time and paid what they are owed in their banks, as intended, and we want to see that occur.

Where are we now? Well, significant progress has been made. We have already heard from previous speakers, including the Minister responsible for Novopay, that five out of the last six pay rounds have been very successful in terms of error rates. We know that we have invested more money to fix the problems and to recognise the significant contribution that has been made by school administrators, in particular. We acknowledge how hard it has been for them and the call on their time, and how difficult it has been for everyone embroiled in this process. We are working to get everything fixed and we are making progress. Talk about taking responsibility: we instituted a technical review, and the recommendations of that are being followed through. We instituted a ministerial review, and today’s debate is driven by the fact that we have a 113-page report that sets out in thorough, comprehensive, and transparent detail all of the issues relating to the Novopay situation. Where to from here? Well, a number of findings have also been made in this report that we will be following up on because we want to get this right—we want to get this right.

There have been suggestions from the Opposition that this has been an exercise in shifting blame—not at all. This report is very clear about where responsibilities have lain at different points in the process. I want to make it clear that not once—not once—in the time that I have been Minister of Education, and that is almost 18 months to the day, have I bagged the Ministry of Education, and I do not intend to start now. Novopay has contributed significant difficulties and challenges, and they are being tackled. The Acting Secretary of Education, in the 4 months that he has been in place—and I would like to acknowledge and thank him for the work that he has done—has instituted a number of immediate changes, seeking to ensure that the systems and processes within the Ministry of Education are robust. For instance, he has put in place new governance arrangements across the ministry. He has implemented new project management arrangements and accountabilities to deliver on the Better Public Services targets and other ministerial priorities. He has put in place a new risk management approach for the ministry. He has started an end-to-end review on how we manage private and sensitive information. He has talked to a range of agencies, groups, and members of the sector across the sector, and he has started a process of culture change in the ministry with a focus on teamwork, service, and flexibility.

But there are also a whole lot of other things that the Ministry of Education has been doing, and is doing, successfully. It has focused significantly on our Better Public Services target. We have a Better Public Services target that recognises that we need to have more young learners involved in quality early learning, and that we need to have more young people at and above the national standards, and more young people—

💬 Chris Hipkins: Just say sorry.

—passing National Certificate of Educational Achievement level 2. If the member had been here in the House for the bulk of my remarks, the member would know that I have canvassed all of these issues, including the responsibilities that relate to all Ministers since 1999 and the decisions that have been made at different points.

💬 Chris Hipkins: Did she say sorry?

Indeed, I have, and I am now talking about the significant contribution that the Ministry of Education has been making, is making, and will continue to make across a raft of issues, including how we attend to and address all of those arising out of Novopay; the challenges to the repair of relationships that must occur within and between the sector and us; and how we ensure that the sector has confidence that the system is meeting its needs. We know that that is increasingly occurring.

We are focusing on fixing this because we want teachers, support staff, and principals paid on time. We want boards of trustees and school administrators to have all of this pressure alleviated. We want a system that works, which, indeed, was the intention of the previous Government when it first signed off this system. All of us, I believe, have had the best intentions of ensuring a 21st century, fit for purpose payroll system. That is what the sector deserves and that is what we are bent on providing. That is why we have this report today, setting out for us not just the technical detail, which we have canvassed, but all of this detail here. We have lessons to learn and we are moving on with those. Thank you.

The debate having concluded, the motion lapsed.