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 2016/17 financial year in respect of Vote Audit, Vote Ombudsmen, and Vote Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment and the appropriations and information for the 2017/18 financial year in respect of Vote Audit, Vote Ombudsmen, and Vote Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. These three offices are known as Offices of Parliament, and they serve as independent statutory authorities with specific roles to play.

The Office of the Auditor-General is an office that superintends all public expenditure in New Zealand. I would like to acknowledge the appointment of Martin Matthews as Controller and Auditor-General earlier this year. As the public watchdog, the office acts as a check and balance on the public sector. Its role is to independently assess the appropriateness of Government expenditure, measured against the statements given to this House about how that expenditure will be spent effectively.

The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment plays an important role in our country. As an independent Officer of Parliament, the commissioner’s role is unique and quite different to the roles of Government agencies. Under Dr Jan Wright, the office has been clear, fact-based, and pragmatic in its approach. I want to thank Dr Wright for her valuable service as she prepares to retire in October this year.

The Office of the Ombudsmen handles complaints and investigates the administrative conduct of State sector agencies, including in relation to Official Information Act requests. In Budget 2016 the office was provided with additional funding over 3 years to clear a backlog of aged investigations that had reached an unacceptably high level. Progress on this work has been considerably faster than expected, and the backlog is now expected to be cleared by 30 June 2018, a year earlier than originally expected. This is an excellent result, and I want to congratulate the office on the rapid progress it has made. I commend the motion to this House.

I want to align the Labour Party with the comments that have been made by the Minister. I think it is probably worth doing a little bit more of a background for members as to what is actually going on here, because I would bet a reasonable sum of money that the majority of the House has no idea around the processes that are involved with funding the Offices of Parliament.

💬 Dr David Clark: Oh, that’s unfair.

Well, no, I do not think it is unfair at all, Mr Rev. Dr Clark—just to make sure that we get it absolutely right.

Because of the independence of the offices, the Minister of Finance is not the person who proposes to the House, as part of the Budget process, what their budgets should be. The decision is one of a committee, which is a cross-party committee chaired by the Speaker. It is a committee that, first of all, receives requests from the Offices of Parliament. It receives some advice on that and makes some decisions and recommendations as part of this report, and that report is picked up and moved by the Government. That is what is happening now.

I agree with the comments that the Deputy Leader of the House made around the new appointments. Martin Matthews is someone who, in my opinion, has a very high degree of integrity and a long history of public service. He was probably held back from being the Auditor-General by the fact that Helen Clark wanted to keep him as her chief executive, when he possibly could have moved on at the time.

Of course, we look forward to welcoming, in a more formal way, the Rt Hon Simon Upton when he takes up his position.

The last comment I want to make is that I was a Budget Minister. I worked the Budgets with Ministers over a period of 9 years. It was very, very rare for an agency to come offering to give money back because it had been more efficient than had been predicted earlier. I just want to place on my record the thanks of Parliament to the Chief Ombudsman Peter Boshier and his team for their attack—their relentless attack—over the past 12 months on the backlog of Official Information Act requests. They are getting a degree of efficiency into that office. They are putting an amount of pressure on to people who have submitted complaints to make sure that they are still current. I have given up on a few complaints after some discussions with them. [Interruption] Some of them were 5 and 6 years old, and even I was having trouble remembering what the hell I was complaining about and what I wanted the information for. The information was well past being relevant, and that was clearly by design on the part of Ministers opposite.

But, having said that, there have been a lot of complaints that have been satisfactorily resolved as well, and information that members of the public have been waiting for, for years, has been freed up as a result of this attack. Because it is going so well, the backlog attack, which had been anticipated to take 3 years, is now estimated to take only 2. What is also interesting is that there are fewer and fewer complaints going into the backlog because Ministers know and departments know that they cannot rely on the Ombudsman waiting a year or so to get on to them. They know that they will get a prompt hurry-up, and that means that the Official Information Act is working in a way that is closer to what was intended.

These are important independent offices, and I support the changes recommended here.

The Green Party joins with others in the House in supporting this motion for alterations to the appropriations for Vote Audit, Vote Ombudsmen, and Vote Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, and for the appropriations for the 2017-18 year.

I congratulate the new Auditor-General, and I would also like to place on record our thanks to the outgoing Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Dr Jan Wright, who finishes her second term at the end of June.

When looking at the report of the Officers of Parliament Committee and the $3.3 million budget for the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, that is extraordinary value for money in terms of the range of investigations that the office undertakes, the quality and integrity of the reports, and the evidence that they are based on. I think all of the Officers of Parliament do extraordinary service to this place in terms of the integrity of their work.

But just talking a bit more specifically about the Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, the office’s budget is going to remain static for the next 3 years. Given the extraordinary environmental challenges that New Zealand faces with our environment, I would commend to the Officers of Parliament Committee that they perhaps look at that next year. Nature is in crisis in New Zealand, and last year the state of the marine environment domain report that came out confirmed that many of our native marine animals are threatened with extinction, including more than a third of our seabird species—albatross, shags, petrels, and penguins. While there has certainly been a reduction in the number of birds that are caught and killed in fishing-nets, from around 5,000 annually to around 3,000, that is still far too many.

At the end of this month the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment will be producing a report on the plight of New Zealand’s native birds. When we have got 80 percent of our native bird species staring extinction in the face, I am looking forward to that report because the commissioner always makes a number of sound recommendations about how we can tackle the challenges that the officer’s reports address. I think one of the landmark reports from her office was in 2011, looking at the use of 1080 and concluding, after an independent evaluation, that it should be used over a much wider area. So we hope that there are similarly important recommendations in the upcoming report.

I would like to comment briefly too on the Office of the Ombudsmen. It has got a $16.7 million budget and, as the Hon Trevor Mallard noted, extra funding was made available for the office to tackle the backlog of Official Information Act complaints. There has been remarkable progress, and that backlog is likely to be cleared a year earlier than anticipated. So, yes, the office then offered up, I think, over $900,000 back. That money has, effectively, been reallocated, with additional funding provided so that there is going to be a fully resourced team to inspect prisons and detention centres around New Zealand. That is really valuable work that the Office of the Ombudsmen does. It will also help it retain skilled and experienced staff so that their salaries are competitive, and there is quite a significant capital injection of $1.2 million in the upcoming Budget to enable increased investment in ICT, which, again, should help the office stay on top of all of the complaints that are made, in terms of the way in which Government agencies deal with Official Information Act requests.

I think it was really commendable earlier this year that the State Services Commission and the Office of the Ombudsmen released, for the first time, the first set of official statistics on the implementation of the Official Information Act. That showed that in a year, 2015-16, there were over 40,000 requests for official information, and 23 percent of the complaints to the Office of the Ombudsmen needed a full investigation, and some 10 percent of those were upheld. So that confirms the value of the office and the importance of it doing that work, in terms of investigating complaints into Government agencies delaying the provision of information or not providing full information. Thank you.

On the subject of the Offices of Parliament, the Public Audit Act 2001 provides for the Auditor-General to give independent assurance to this Parliament and the public over effectiveness and efficiency, waste, probity, and financial prudence. Our question is why has it taken 196 days—some 7 months—for the Audit Office to reply to a letter we sent it in October of last year. We raised serious concerns about Fuji Xerox and the uncomfortably close relationship it has with current and former high-ranking procurement staff in the Minister of Finance’s former ministry—the one “Songs of Bridges” now allegedly presides over.

The Audit Office followed an extensive and exhaustive line of inquiry—well, it met with Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) staff to discuss all-of-Government contracts, it talked to MBIE’s auditor and audit staff, it has spoken to a person we identified in our letter, and it has considered how these relate to MBIE’s future procurements.

But this honesty-box approach sums up this Government’s entire approach to biosecurity. In order to send a clear message that under New Zealand First, any post-border incursion like pea weevil or varroa or myrtle rust would trigger an independent inquiry to be led by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, we make that statement today. We will fund it to do this because the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) cannot be trusted to investigate MPI. That is axiomatic.

Returning to the Audit Office, 7 months of painstaking work yielded just this answer: “The issues outlined in your letter have been referred to the Minister of Education, considered as part of our Audit Office work to date, or are currently being considered as part of our planned future work.”, and that is it. We raised a serious concern about Fuji Xerox promising Northland schools the earth but delivering them dirt instead. Prima facie conflicts of interest—like the former deputy chief executive officer of MBIE responsible for procurement, Peter Thomas, jumping ship to Fuji Xerox just before it won a multimillion-dollar Government contract—attracted, what? Just a Gallic shrug, like: “So what’s of interest here?”.

Within the last few weeks, though, Fujifilm Japan has delayed its annual report because of $285 million worth of accounting irregularities in its New Zealand operations. Sound familiar? Despite that, Fuji—that is, the one here—still won a contract worth tens of millions of dollars from the Ministry of Social Development under yet another of these suspect all-of-Government stitch-ups. Where there is smoke there is fire, as the National Business Review and Fairfax, to their credit, have tried to expose.

This week I was contacted by a major Japanese business journalist, and I will quote you a sentence from one such contact. He said: “We are planning to run a story on Fuji Xerox New Zealand’s fraud in the 15 May issue.” That is really relevant. Way back in Japan, they are concerned; here, no one is. The Japanese media see this for what it is—fraud—yet the Serious Fraud Office, the Audit Office, and this Government see it as a business-as-usual approach. Soon 300,000 of Japan’s business elite will learn the ugly truth about how our once-high standards in this country have been eroded by this Government’s “who you know” approach to deal making.

In 2013 Transparency International found that 3 percent of Kiwis had paid a bribe, with some two-thirds saying that corruption was on the rise, and in 2017, under this National Government, it is much worse. It is not acceptable for this Government to turn a blind eye to corruption at all levels, from appointing retreads like Dame Jenny Shipley to boards, to Immigration New Zealand’s weekly Mumbai fraud reports, fraud in the Artificial Limb Service, and all-of-Government “who you know” stitch-ups.

I could go on, but my message to the Auditor-General is this. As an officer of this Parliament, you must look behind the figures, because your response to us indicates a serious lack of forensic accounting depth. It is going to be out of Japan in a few days’ time. The question is—to that man laughing and giggling over there, because he could not give a rat’s Jerrière about integrity—what did New Zealand do about the scandal in its midst? [Interruption] There he is—there he is. He thinks it is a joke. What is his name again?

💬 Tracey Martin: Nobody knows.

I do not know. But he thinks it is a joke. It is a scandal that the Japanese are about to blow on their own operation in this country because they know that in this country something has gone wrong, and that man over there—what is his name? Just give me his surname—Brett what?

💬 Hon Member: Hudson.

Brett Hudson. Brett Hudson—he thinks it is funny.

I seek leave to table the Office of the Auditor-General’s response, dated 1 May 2017, to my letter sent to the Auditor-General on 17 October 2016 on this matter of extreme concern.

💬 Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Leave is put for that purpose. Is there any objection? There appears to be none.

Document, by leave, laid on the Table of the House.

Thank you very much.

Motion agreed to, and Address agreed to.