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 and capital for the 2018/19 financial year in respect of Vote Audit and Vote Ombudsmen, and the estimates of expenses and capital injection for the 2019/20 financial year in respect of Vote Audit, Vote Ombudsmen, and Vote Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment.

The passing of this motion is an annual event that is part of the Budget process. It is important that the three Officers of Parliament—namely the Auditor-General, the Ombudsman, and the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment—are independent of the executive. For this reason, the estimates for the Offices of Parliament stand apart from the process that applies to all other votes and are put forward by the House by means of the Address to the Governor-General. The recommendations contained in the Address are determined by the Officers of Parliament Committee, chaired by the Speaker, and the committee has done its work thoroughly and fairly. The committee heard evidence from all three Officers of Parliament and received advice from Treasury. Its findings are outlined in its reports on the draft budgets and alterations to the 2018/19 appropriations for the three offices.

For a decade, the Offices of Parliament have managed increasing workloads without a matching increase in funding. The report notes that there has been no significant increase in resources in Vote Audit since the 2009 Budget. These proposals begin to redress the situation. The proposed appropriations for the Office of the Ombudsman include provision for the employment of an additional 35 investigators over three years to reflect the expanding role of the ombudsmen into areas such as Department of Corrections court facilities and privately run aged care facilities. The Auditor-General has sought funding for three initiatives that among other things will improve the coverage and timeliness of performance audits, and enable it to provide new good practice guidance.

The Offices of Parliament have all established themselves as vital contributors to New Zealand’s parliamentary democracy, supporting the House in keeping the executive to account. The appropriations proposed in the Address to the Governor-General will allow them to maintain and develop their roles in order to meet new challenges. I commend the motion to the House.

It’s a pleasure to agree to the motion, on behalf of the National caucus. I was part of the meeting and I would comment that all three parties came in and made a very professional presentation to us. The things that really stood out for me—Minister Lees-Galloway has covered off a number of points in his speech—particularly around the Auditor-General’s presentation, was asking for the ability for better use of data to generate insight and to get ahead of some issues. I think that’s an extremely important issue in this day and age where we have the ability through electronics to collect a lot more data, and it’s much more helpful in people making their decisions. Therefore, it’s really important for the Office of the Auditor-General to be able to have an increased ability to represent that data in their own work. So that was really important to me in terms of the increase in funding there, amongst the other initiatives.

Secondly, it’s already been mentioned in the first speech, but the Ombudsman’s office does have a responsibility for 227 privately run aged-care facilities, as well as 58 court locations. We support the ability for them to hire extra investigators to help them in their work, because that’s quite a huge undertaking over and above all of the other investigations and things that the Ombudsman’s office is asked to take care of on a regular basis in their general line of business.

One thing I would comment on is that when we looked at the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, that office has a huge amount of work and a huge amount of responsibility in the reporting that their office does. In the current environment, with all of the things that they undertake, it’s a role that is increasingly coming under pressure, and I want to commend their efforts and their ability to do the work without asking for copious more amounts of money. So it is my pleasure, on behalf of our caucus and as part of the committee, to commend this to the House.

The Green Party is very pleased to support this motion. The three Offices of Parliament serve our public, our democracy, extremely well, and as Mr Iain Lees-Galloway has noted, this is a major increase in the appropriation to invest significantly in the work of the Office of the Auditor-General and also to invest in the Office of the Ombudsman.

I noticed in the report that the work that the Office of the Auditor-General is doing, they noted that performance audits, including of some quite significant organisations—some of those hadn’t occurred for five years. So some of this additional $5.5 million will be used to undertake those performance audits and also to increase the timeliness of that work from the current period of about 10 to 11 months to undertake one of these quite comprehensive audits, and reduce that to about nine months. It will be used to also develop new good practice guidance, because the most recent guidance that the office had issued was in 2012—that will improve public engagement and the understanding of the agencies—and to invest in technology, recognising that the current database for audits’ status that the office uses is at least 10 years old.

Similarly, with the Office of the Ombudsman, there’s quite a significant $6 million increase in the appropriation. One of those key roles is in relation to human rights, protecting human rights, particularly through the Ombudsman’s role in monitoring places of detention, whether that be prisons, Department of Corrections vans, or private, locked aged-care facilities. The Ombudsman’s responsibility for that work was initiated in 2018, so it has been a significant increase, and I think 17 new investigators will be appointed in the 2019-20 year, and then another 18 in the subsequent two years. That role is really important. I noticed on the Ombudsman’s website a media release reporting on the investigation at Hawke’s Bay prison. The Ombudsman was noting that there had been significant progress as a result of that investigation in improving prisoners’ safety, but there’s more work to do in relation to improving the conditions for remand and at-risk prisoners.

Also, of course, the work of the Ombudsman’s office in relation to the operation of the Official Information Act—one of the linchpins of our democracy, one of the linchpins of good and democratic Government and ensuring that people are able to participate in decision making, have good information about what decisions Government is making, and, therefore, have respect for our democratic institutions. The role of the Ombudsman here in investigating declines by agencies and Ministers to release information and ensuring that our Government is responsive, is efficient, is effective, and is accountable is a very important one. I think this increase in resource will go a significant way to improving the capability of the office there, given that it has overcome the backlog that the Chief Ombudsman, Mr Boshier, inherited, and he is now working with a target of ensuring that 70 percent of complaints are dealt with within three months.

In terms of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, we have had three very good Parliamentary Commissioners for the Environment, and a fourth good one now in the Hon Simon Upton. It’s the smallest of the Offices of Parliament. It has the smallest budget, but it has been responsible for some very significant reports. The Department of Conservation is about to embark on the largest ever predator control operation—over nearly a million hectares of conservation land, 12 percent of the conservation estate—targeting rats and stoats and possums. It was a landmark report by the former Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment in 2011 which evaluated the use of 1080 and found that it was an effective and really critical tool, and the former parliamentary commissioner called for greater use of that.

Recently, Mr Upton, the parliamentary commissioner, has done a very useful report on biodegradable and compostable packaging, and, again, that highlights the invaluable role that the office provides in improving our system of environmental management, providing independent advice to this Parliament, and ensuring that our environment is in a better state. So I commend the work of all three of the offices and support the appropriation motion. Thank you.

Motion agreed to, and Address adopted.