Public Service Legislation Bill

I move, That the Public Service Legislation Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Governance and Administration Committee to consider the bill. At the appropriate time I intend to move that the bill be reported to the House by 28 April 2020.

The purpose of the bill is to build a more effective and unified Public Service. We live in a rapidly changing world. One could compare the state of our current Public Service legislation with the analogue system. We’ve moved into a digital era, and the legislation that governs the way our Public Service operates needs to be updated in accordance with that. The public’s expectations of what is possible have changed. Their expectations about what can be provided, when it can be provided, and how it can be provided have all changed, and our public services need to be able to keep up with those things.

The overarching aims of the bill are to enable the Public Service to deliver better outcomes and better services; to create a modern, agile, and adaptive Public Service; and to affirm the important constitutional role that the Public Service has in supporting New Zealand’s democratic form of government. To achieve these aims, the bill repeals and replaces the State Sector Act 1988, which was a watershed piece of legislation in its time. It also amends the Public Finance Act to reflect and support the changes that we are making.

We’ve reached the limit of what we can achieve within the confines of the current statute. The State Sector Act is 30 years old. It’s been amended 13 different times, resulting in a law that no longer sets out a clear and consistent vision for the Public Service. It was designed for its time, and since then, of course, there have been major social, economic, and technological changes, and some of those have been on a global scale.

The current Act—the State Sector Act—has provided significant benefits to New Zealand in terms of the efficiency and effectiveness of individual agencies, but it has not served us well when it comes to some of the larger challenges that require Government to act in a more joined-up way. It does not mean—and our work here does not mean—that we believe the New Zealand Public Service is in any way broken; in fact, New Zealanders are incredibly lucky to have a good, robust Public Service that delivers a consistently high standard of service to Government and to New Zealanders. This is about doing even better and about rising to the challenges of the future. It’s also about reconnecting with the spirit of service to the community that is imbued in so many of the people who work in our public services. It’s about unifying the Public Service around a common purpose, principles, and values—principles like political neutrality, free and frank advice, and merit-based appointments, those things that we take for granted but are not currently actually protected in our Public Service legislation.

To achieve these objectives, the bill changes the basic system settings, and it tackles the underlying issues that have increasingly become barriers to progress. It does this by clearly establishing the purpose, the principles, and the values of an apolitical Public Service as well as its role in Government formation. It does this by supporting the Crown in its commitment to its relationships with Māori. It provides a more flexible set of options for how the Public Service can organise itself to better respond to specific priorities, and in doing this, we continue the trend of successive Governments since the original State Sector Act was passed in providing greater flexibility. It allows public servants to move between agencies more easily, and it strengthens leadership across the Public Service, and particularly providing for system and future-focused leadership.

The current Act that we have doesn’t articulate the purpose or the role of the Public Service. Public servants have a vitally important constitutional role in supporting New Zealand’s system of government, which is why the new Act includes incentives to act as a more unified system. The bill states what the purpose, principles, and values of the Public Service are, and it acknowledges that the spirit of service is fundamental to the characteristic of our Public Service. It puts the responsibilities on Public Service chief executives to ensure that the principles of the Public Service are upheld. It allows the commissioner to issue standards and guidance on integrity and conduct. It allows public servants to have the same rights as all other citizens under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and the Human Rights Act—for example, the freedom of political expression—and it provides that Crown agents are part of a unified Public Service for some purposes. We have to recognise that we have a number of Crown agents that are delivering what could be regarded as core public services to New Zealanders.

The current Act is silent on the Crown’s relationship with Māori, and that is something we are changing. We’re requiring chief executives to operate as a good employer, recognising the aims and aspirations of Māori, the employment requirements of Māori, and the need for greater involvement of Māori in the Public Service. The bill puts this right. It explicitly recognises the role of the Public Service in supporting the Crown in its relationship with Māori under the Treaty of Waitangi, something that, again, successive Governments have signed future Governments up to a range of new commitments that we will have to uphold and fulfil. So, to carry out this role, Public Service leaders will be responsible for developing and maintaining the capability of the Public Service to engage with Māori and to understand their perspectives.

Under the current Act, each department has got a narrow focus on a particular identity and outputs. Officials are incentivised to focus on their own agency rather than encouraging a wider, more collaborative system approach. In order to address today’s very complex challenges and issues, we need to span agency boundaries in a more collaborative and cohesive Public Service. The bill provides for two new organisational forms within the Public Service, which will help the Public Service act as one when dealing with specific challenges and issues of the day.

Interdepartmental executive boards will consist of groups of chief executives working together towards common outcomes, who are both individually and jointly responsible for that board’s work. The board will have the ability to employ staff, enter contracts, and administer appropriations. Public Service joint ventures will enable joined-up service delivery through vehicles that enable a smaller number of agencies to hold joint resources, including assets and staff and mechanisms to support sustained collaboration by larger numbers of agencies. The bill will allow public servants to move more freely between agencies by providing for the transfer of leave entitlements, and it also provides explicit recognition of the value of diversity, fostering inclusiveness, placing responsibility on chief executives to promote inclusiveness in employment and workplace practices.

Although steps have been made in the right direction to join up the leadership of the Public Service and put emphasis on system and future leadership, the current model for the Public Service emphasises leadership of discrete entities with a focus on short- and medium-term planning. We want to strengthen this system through the bill by requiring the commissioner to establish a Public Service leadership team: a team of Public Service chief executives charged with developing and driving the Public Service strategy for an agile, connected Public Service system—essentially formalising what is a current practice.

It provides for the designation of chief executives as system leaders, responsible for leading and coordinating work on a particular subject matter area across the Public Service—a system that was actually introduced, and I give them credit for this, under the last Government. This formalises that approach.

It allows for the appointment of a second statutory Deputy Commissioner of the State Services Commission, who will have responsibilities to achieve objectives in a designated area, and it requires chief executives, either individually or as a collective representing a sector, to produce long-term insights briefings—something that I think will improve the quality of debate in New Zealand as we make a higher quality of information available leading into an election campaign, rather than providing that information at the conclusion of an election campaign, as we do now.

In summary, this bill will transform the Public Service for the good of New Zealanders. It will make it easier for the Public Service to tackle the biggest issues that challenge the Government of the day. It acknowledges the spirit of service to the community. It enshrines long-held principles and values of the Public Service, such as political neutrality, free and frank advice, and merit-based appointment, and it will have a unifying effect on our public services. These changes will ensure that the Public Service operates with integrity and that it maintains the trust, confidence, and respect of New Zealanders—something we must never take for granted. I commend the bill to the House.

National will be supporting the introduction and referral of the Public Service Legislation Bill to select committee. There is much we support in this bill, in the updating of our legislation that governs our Public Service. There are also areas of which we have some concern and look forward to scrutinising through the select committee process.

I want to firstly say that there is a huge amount about the New Zealand Public Service that is good. It is so important for New Zealand, and when I have—since holding this portfolio—looked at other jurisdictions, our Public Service is politically neutral, and, actually, that is not true for the senior office holders of many of our similar countries. The fact that our public sector has quite high levels of accountability, particularly in terms of expenditure of public money, was pivotal to the State sector reform of 1988. Also in terms of the thousands of New Zealanders who work in our Public Service and are dedicated to providing New Zealanders with first-class public services across so many important areas. I want to acknowledge the important work of Paula Bennett, who was the former State services Minister, who began the review of the 1988 State Sector Act and who, alongside the Rt Hon Bill English, initiated some of the important thinking of trying to get a greater degree of cooperation across Government agencies so that we get over the silo mentality in addressing some of the most challenging social issues that our country faces.

I want to talk about two particular areas where we are supportive of this bill, and then some of the areas of which we have concerns about. The first thing is that we have had situations where a Public Service department has restructured, the employees of that department then go and seek employment in another part of the Public Service, and the State incurs a substantive redundancy bill, even though the person is working for the Public Service the very next day. We think having a more unified approach across the public sector prevents some of those sorts of anomalies that to the average taxpaying and hard-working Kiwi do not make sense.

The second area of which I’ve indicated National is supportive in the new Public Service Legislation Bill is the new mechanisms that are proposed for getting cross-agencies to work more closely together. It is a natural response to the work associated with the Social Investment Agency that National established within the State Services Commission. The new provisions of this bill that we are supportive of will actually enable that sort of model to be expanded.

I want to talk about four areas where we have some concerns about the bill. The first is that pre-1988 we had a very inefficient public sector—the Gliding On programme, or Yes Minister in the UK context, that took the mickey out of just this massive, dysfunctional bureaucracy—

💬 Hon Chris Hipkins: It was a documentary!

—was part of—Chris Hipkins interjects that Yes Minister was probably a documentary. I have some sympathy for that view, albeit it really challenges us in looking at this bill to ensure that the elected representatives do retain their authority and their important role in the Public Service.

But my concern is that in the Government provisions around the new principles that apply to the public sector, National is concerned that the importance of that efficiency—that importance of making sure that every dollar of taxpayers’ money is spent wisely within the Public Service—is not there. There are a whole lot of principles of which we agree with about Public Service neutrality, but, actually, one of the really important issues for our Public Service is that they are delivering value for money, and that every dollar that they spend on behalf of New Zealand taxpayers is spent as though that person themselves has had to earn that hard-earned dollar. The world and our own history is littered with examples of where public money is not spent wisely and why that is a really important part of the principles that we want to apply to the public sector.

The second area of which the Parliament has to find a balance is this: what level of flexibility do we provide in legislation for the reorganisation of State departments? Here are the two extremes. You’ve got some Governments around the world where there’s so limited capacity to be able to restructure the public sector that you end up with Government departments that are way out of touch for the changes that do occur in nations. And so I don’t want a very rigid public sector that’s not able to restructure and change with the times. But, equally, we need to be very careful that we don’t continuously turn the Public Service on its head.

I get quite frustrated—having been in the House for some time—that an answer to a public issue is to rename or to reorganise the public sector. It’s sort of the easiest exercise in the book—as if we change the name of the Department of Social Welfare to the Ministry of Social Development. And I could give you another hundred examples of where changing the name and reorganising the department becomes an excuse for, actually, the sort of reforms that will make a difference in New Zealanders’ lives. So Parliament, in this Public Service legislation, needs to provide a balance between enabling State sector agencies to change and be restructured, but not to have it so loose that we have a continuous sort of rolling maul of a Public Service always being reformed and restructured. My first look at this bill is that it goes too far down the road of making it too easy to be able to continuously change the public sector.

The third area in which National has some concerns about this bill is around the accountability of chief executives and those that work in the public sector, because here’s the trade-off. If we go pre-1988, in the old State Sector Act 1962, if there was some sort of a mess or appalling failure within the public sector, everybody ducked for cover. There were no clear lines of accountability and, in my view, that made for a weaker Public Service. You do need to have agencies that have very clear objectives. You need to have a clear chief executive who is in charge of that agency for delivering value for money for the public sector but also delivering the important outcomes that this Parliament has charged that agency with.

Our concern in respect of this bill is that that accountability is being blurred, and there is a trade-off, because if you want to provide the greater flexibility of agencies being able to work together, that is a good thing, but if it turns into everybody being involved and nobody being accountable, actually, the quality of the public services that New Zealanders have will be worse off. That is why National wishes to retain the strong public sector accountability that, in my view, was a very substantive improvement on the pre-1988 State Sector Act. We worry that in the provisions of this bill—of sort of creating everybody doing everything, holding hands together, and singing “Kumbaya”—we lose the focus and the accountability that actually is important to getting results.

The last point I want to note is a concern about the shortened report-back time that the Minister has signalled. We need to recognise that, actually, the legislation that governs the organisation and the management of our Public Service is incredibly important. We are talking about agencies that expend over $80 billion every single year. We are talking about an Act that was last reformed 30 years ago, and it is likely that this Act will, hopefully, serve our country for the next 30 years. A good period of the time between now and 28 April actually is the holidays. We think there is no justification, for such an important bill, for the shortened report-back period. The Government has been mulling over these issues for over two years. It’s not unreasonable on such a large bill with such huge public significance for Parliament to be able to have the normal six-month process. The Parliament should not have to pay for the Minister meeting a slower timetable than he had set out around the introduction of this bill, and so we would wish the Government to reconsider about the shortened report-back period.

It’s my great pleasure to rise in support of this bill, and I want to start by paying tribute to my colleague and friend the Hon Chris Hipkins. This has been a very large piece of work, and—in reference to the member Dr Nick Smith’s comments that he’s just made—it’s one that’s already had extensive consultation.

I think Minister Hipkins would have been about the same age as the pupils from Akaroa who are up in the gallery today when the 1988 bill was passed. I think he might have submitted on it, even at that point, such is his interest in the State sector. But what Minister Hipkins has brought to the House today I regard to be one of the most significant legislative changes that we’ll be making in this term of Government. It is the complete rewrite and modernisation of our State Sector Act, and Minister Hipkins deserves a lot of credit for the work that he has done here.

Equally, as he himself noted in his speech, there have been changes to the State Sector Act over the years, including by the last Government, and some of those actually have been particularly useful for being able to make advances on what I regard as the core issue that lie behind this bill—that is, the ability to break down the silos of Government. All MPs will know that as we travel around the country, one of the things that is raised consistently with us is the issue of the siloing of Government. When people—as Minister Hipkins is fond of saying—wake up in the morning, they don’t think to themselves “I’m going to deal with the Ministry of Social Development, followed by the Ministry of Health, followed by Work and Income, followed by Oranga Tamariki.”; they think about their interactions with the Government, and what we need to do is create a Public Service system that responds to that.

Now, I want to be clear: there were some excellent things that occurred as a result of the 1988 legislation, and my particular area of interest here comes from its companion legislation, the Public Finance Act (PFA), which was passed the following year. Those two pieces of legislation did bring a lot more sharpness in the focus around accountability and, in particular, in terms of the PFA, around expenditure accountability and authorisation but also around the State Sector Act, around transparency of objective-setting within Government, who was responsible for what—clear lines of accountability and reporting. Those are good attributes of the State sector legislation, and we want to maintain those.

However, where the State Sector Act has proved to be inadequate, and, indeed, in some cases beyond inadequate to actually being obstructive, is in trying to meet the complex challenges of the world that we face today. If we want to address issues like climate change or like inequality, then we have to have a more joined-up Public Service. We have to have a Public Service whose objectives are clearly focused on those outcomes, rather than on the inputs that each agency might put in place.

This came into stark relief for this Government when we tried to do something different when it came to the elimination of domestic and sexual violence. Now, again, previous Governments had undertaken coordinated work in that area, but it wasn’t fulfilling, I don’t think, what any of us would want in terms of the objectives that we have around the elimination of that scourge in our society. So the Government set about putting together a single organisation or entity that comprised of eight different Government organisations to work together towards one set of goals and one set of outcomes, and that’s the work that Jan Logie has led as Parliamentary Under-Secretary to the Minister of Justice, and she’s led it tremendously well.

But, just as an example to highlight the difficulty in doing this, when we came to do this, there was no name for the entity. We couldn’t find anything inside the Public Service system that we could call it. We ended up calling it a joint venture because, I guess, that’s what it is. It’s a joint venture of eight different Government agencies and there are parallel NGO bodies that work with it, but that, to me, is a symbolic example of the fact that the system and the organisation and the legislation is not currently facilitating agencies working together on that way. So, as Minister Hipkins has already said, the legislation actually now allows for those forms to be properly recognised and to be supported by a structure that actually incentivises agencies to get in there and help solve those complex, multifaceted issues.

Through this bill that’s in front of the House today, we’ll make some further amendments to the Public Finance Act to support this. Essentially, what that means is that these new organisational forms like the joint venture will have the ability to administer appropriations and report against any assets and liabilities that they may manage on behalf of the Crown. That is important, because right now, if you go to the Government accounts and go looking for the joint venture on the elimination of domestic and sexual violence, you won’t find it. You will find it in eight different appropriations, and that just doesn’t make sense and it acts as a barrier to cooperation and collaboration.

So that change, facilitated through this bill, is, I believe, a significant and important one in allowing the Government to get on with the job of meeting the expectations of citizens around how their public services will work together and that they will be focused on the outcomes that they desire. So those changes are important. I want to reiterate we have kept in place within the Public Finance Act and, indeed, within the State Sector Act that clarity of role and clarity of accountability that the 1988 Act brought, but we are opening up some more flexibility for how that can be delivered in order to do it in a more coherent way.

Beyond that, I believe that Minister Hipkins has outlined in some detail what he’s been trying to do here. This is, effectively, to my mind, a significant modernisation of our legislation in an area where that’s been needed, and—Minister Hipkins has mentioned it—that is around the way that the Public Service thinks about issues related to Māori. It’s fair to say that, probably, in 1988, we were just at the point where those issues were becoming more prominent, and it’s timely, 31 years on, to be able to say that, actually, in a cross-party way across this House, we share an understanding of the importance of the relationship between the Crown and Māori, and we need to reflect that in our Public Service legislation. So the clauses in this bill that go in that direction are important, and they reflect, I think, where modern New Zealand sits today.

The other point I’d just like to make—and it’s to pick up on the comments made by former Minister Nick Smith—is around what actually is meaningful change in the Public Service. It is absolutely true to say that the system we have at the moment means that we have entities that are created not necessarily for the best reasons. Former Minister Smith used the example of the Ministry of Social Welfare. I would use the example of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE). I don’t believe the creation of MBIE was actually built on how the agency should best work together; I think it was built on how Steven Joyce wanted to build an empire. It has ended up—I have to say—as a fairly unwieldy entity, although it’s being well managed at this point in time. But we do actually need to make sure that the way we organise the Public Service is based around the outcomes that we want and the expectations of New Zealanders.

I want to just make a slightly longer reference to the point that I made at the very beginning of my speech around the report-back time for this bill. This is a piece of legislation—and the policy principles within it—that has been extensively discussed since we came into Government. There has been significant consultation, including with the Opposition, which is as is appropriate, and I do believe that the report-back time that the Minister has put in place is the correct one. We have heard from a lot of stakeholders, both inside the Public Service and outside of it, that they want us to get on with the job when it comes to this kind of legislation. We’ve done a lot of talking. We’ve done a lot of consulting. The issues are clear. I look forward to the select committee process and the feedback that we’ll get in there, but, actually, this is an issue where we have done enough work to be able to just get on with the job and make sure that we get some legislation back before us within a few months’ time.

So I am very pleased that this bill is before the House today. I think it represents, for this Government, the kind of legislation we want to put forward: one that emphasises the importance of collaboration within our public sector; that emphasises the importance of public services being responsive to the needs and interests of our community; that emphasises our commitment to making sure that Te Ao Māori, the Māori world view, is understood and is part of how our Public Service operates.

I also want to finish on a final point, and that is to say that despite the fact that this legislation is significantly changing the way we organise the public sector, it is by no means any kind of statement against the public servants who serve us today. We are incredibly well-served in New Zealand by our Public Service, who act without fear or favour—whomever the Government is—in the best interests of the people of New Zealand. We should be incredibly proud of our Public Service. Today we’ve talked a little bit about where we stand in the Transparency International ratings and where we stand in the ease of doing business ratings in the world. A lot of that is down to the hard work and the ethics of our Public Service. They deserve our congratulations. This piece of legislation will support them in everything that they do. I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It sounds awfully as though peace has broken out. I’m sure it’s a good—

💬 Hon Grant Robertson: Ha, ha! It won’t last.

💬 Hon Chris Hipkins: It won’t last.

There’s no chance of it lasting that long, but it might last out for this bill. Anyway, I’d like to echo a few of the words, particularly of my colleague on this side of the House, regarding the political neutrality of the Public Service and how important that is. I think many of us know that the—let’s take the US federal system, where a new President comes in and 5,000 senior public servants lose their job that day. That’s not possibly a system—not that I’m ever about to criticise other countries’ systems—that’s going to embolden someone to be politically neutral when they’re making decisions. I think it makes it very difficult for those who work in the levels under those 5,000 to maintain any sense of political neutrality when they have that sort of situation happening. That’s just simply that our Public Service has moved on over the years in a slightly different way from some other countries.

There has been an awful lot of talk about the excellent work of the Public Service, and my experience as a former Minister has been that I have been consistently impressed by the decency, the hard work, and the commitment to fulfilling Government priorities over the years, in almost every case. I think when I look—and that’s probably like my colleague, the former Minister Nick Smith—at when we can have, actually, good, friendly relations with people who now serve another Government, that’s a very good indication as to the strength of the political neutrality, that there is, in fact, no patronage, no appointments to the senior Public Service based on, you know, political parties or personal friendships.

I think one of the things that I would like to say is that it has not always been quite like that. It may shatter the general peace that’s broken out, but I do want to acknowledge that a former chief executive Christine Rankin was extraordinarily badly treated by an Opposition in the 1990s. I think one of the things that we should always think about is that these public servants, who do the jobs that we as either former Ministers or Ministers ask them to do, have an accountability to try and do their best to follow Government policies and to do their best to do so. It’s not OK to take them aside and to take them apart, frankly, in a public way. That happened to Mrs Rankin.

When we look at working across agencies, the big issue is always around budgets, actually, and also priorities for those particular agencies. Certainly, when we were in Government, we brought in, in the justice sector, a working arrangement between the Ministers of Justice, Police, Corrections, and the Attorney-General. I’m not sure that the current Government does that, but we certainly found that a very useful way so that we could actually encourage—because our Ministers worked together—the chief executives to work together accordingly. That reached its pinnacle, really, frankly, in the Justice Sector Fund. That was a fund that each of those agencies—and certainly the Crown Law Office never had much to give in, I must say—could put any money that they hadn’t used from their last budgets in together so that other agencies could use that, those other agencies being in the justice sector. That was all around bringing down crime, which we had some very good success with, and also about looking at innovation.

Trying to get any innovative actions through the Public Service processes, particularly around Treasury, can be quite difficult, and so sometimes it needed something that we could actually try without having to prove it would already work, which is really hard with innovation. It’s very hard to prove it will work when you haven’t actually tried it. So we found that very useful.

I think too, though, that there needs to be another issue that we deal with in the select committee, and that will be the issue of accountability. It is very easy to say, “Well, we’ve all got to hold hands and work together in the Public Service. We’ll all just, you know, be happy with a common goal.” It is difficult to do that when someone is the chief executive of an agency and that agency then has to be held accountable for its performance, which is where targets actually are quite useful. It is important with that that the Government and the Parliament itself in the select committee looks at this and says, “So how do we have a situation where everyone can work together for the common goal? But, by the way, we want to make sure we can hold agencies accountable to do their part.” I do always have a little concern with all this holding hands and singing “Kumbaya” together, that we make sure that agencies do have accountability, because you can end up with situations where everyone is accountable, which means nobody is accountable. That’s the problem. So that’s going to be really interesting, teasing that out in select committee. I think that’s one of the issues we see with attempts that have been made in the past. It’s going to be really important that that accountability function is robust.

So, in general, we support this bill going to select committee. The Opposition will be taking a very constructive and helpful role in this. I think it’s something that we can all agree on. We can be proud of our Public Service, but we can also be awake to the fact that times change, technology changes, needs change, and there’s nothing wrong with being able to look to the future as well.

I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to add our support to this Public Service Legislation Bill, and a fairly substantive bill it is too—190-odd pages. I commend Minister Hipkins for bringing this forward—a very busy Minister. I note I’m on the Education and Workforce Committee, and there are waves of legislation coming before us. It might suggest you need a hobby, Minister. But no, this is—

💬 Hon Chris Hipkins: This is it!

—a substantive—ha, ha! Unfortunately, it may be for you. So we’ve heard the importance, of course, of the Public Service as the foundation stone of good, effective, and efficient Government, and, you know, the three tenets of this bill: creating a modern, agile, adapted Public Service; affirmation of the constitutional role; and the democratic imperative of it being apolitical. And I think that is the strength of our democracy, and, also, I think, for continuity, particularly if you’ve got a change of Government, if you’ve got that institutional knowledge that comes with it and is able to come with it without fear or favour, I think that’s incredibly important in terms of the continuity of good Government through electoral cycles.

I note that it repeals and replaces the State Sector Act 1988 and amends the Public Finance Act. The State services Act seems to have been amended some 13 times, which does mean that it is now quite convoluted. It does add a degree of flexibility which appears, at face value, to make a lot of common sense for staff to be able to move easily between agencies and to cross-pollinate their ideas. Of course, technology and systems development has moved on a lot from 1988, and it’s how do we utilise that for the efficient delivery of public services—this bill does provide the framework for that to happen more readily across the various Government services.

Actually, the four previous speakers, I note, have been former or current Ministers, and they have sung the praises of the quality of our Public Service that they have up to their level of experience. As a relatively new member, I must say that I’m constantly blown away by the quality and the depth of experience that we’re able to call upon within our Public Service. I guess coming into this, my perception was around that Yes Minister model where befuddled politicians were bamboozled by clever public servants who actually ran the Government. I’m not sure that that’s totally the case, but you can see that we as politicians do have to be on our game where we do have to be able to put up arguments against very well resourced and capable public servants who have, in the main, or, I’m sure, exclusively, New Zealand’s best interests at heart.

I note that this legislation also does look to update the Crown-Māori relationship and Treaty of Waitangi issues, and, of course, that’s appropriate. It’s important that that’s consistent across Government.

There are two new organisations formed with this. The interdepartmental board, where CEOs can work together, and it does have some capacity to employ staff, so that appears, at face value, to be a positive step. And the mechanism for Public Service joint ventures, so there’s the ability for joined-up Public Service delivery, and others have referenced this in their contributions. It requires the State Services Commissioner to establish a leadership team and it establishes a role of a Deputy State Services Commissioner.

Increasingly, we are, as a Government, facing significant, large, multigenerational public policy issues—and we had, of course, the zero carbon bill go through the other day—and, referenced also earlier, how we deal with intergenerational poverty and large social issues like that. And having joined-up mechanisms to deal with that outside of those silos will be incredibly important to modernise our public services so that we can respond in a nature that is proportionate with the scale of the problems that we’re dealing with. Even within my own sphere, in the agriculture sphere, I had, just before coming into the House, a meeting with a group of high-country farmers in terms of tenure review and issues around that. While ostensibly you would think that was a Ministry for Primary Industries issue, it’s actually a conservation department issue, a Land Information New Zealand issue. More and more we’re looking, when we talk about the agricultural space, with an environmental lens over it. So we need to make sure that we do have the ability to respond as a Government and that our Public Service has the mechanisms in place to be able to respond in a joined-up manner to those multifaceted issues that we are increasingly facing.

So I look forward to the progress of this bill through the select committee. It is a substantive piece of legislation, and they will have some work to do to make sure that it comes out the other end as intended, to make it the positive step forward to futureproof our Public Service, hopefully, for the next 30 years, as the previous legislation has done in the past. So, without further ado, I commend this bill to the select committee on behalf of New Zealand First. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Needless to say, we support this bill to the select committee. During the 18-odd years that I’ve been floating around in public life, you come to realise pretty quickly the value of the Public Service in whatever form it takes. I think it’s essential that we have a very strong Public Service, not the least reason of which is to make sure that when we elect various people to positions of power, the Public Service is there to control them. It’s not such a bad thing at times, because it’s necessary—and you certainly see that in local government. The Public Service is hugely important to us in New Zealand, and I, like the previous speakers, have great admiration for them.

I did want to come at this from a slightly different angle though, because it’s interesting—with the exception of my cricketing colleague, and I note that England are under a bit of pressure today again—all the speakers that we’ve heard from have been Ministers. You have a very different perspective of the Public Service as a Minister than you do as a backbencher in this place. I suppose I just wanted to issue a ward of worming—that was an interesting term, wasn’t it?—a word of warning to those backbenchers amongst us who have a penchant for attacking members of the Public Service when they come before select committees: you’ve got to remember that one day you might be on the other side of the fence, and the Public Service will take a very different view of you. I think it is something that people tend to forget in this place, and I’ve seen one or two of our current members of Parliament have that problem.

This Act replaces the State Sector Act that was put in place somewhere in the 1980s. As we’ve seen recently again in this Parliament, things that have been around 30-odd years or more do tend to date a bit. I think it’s necessary that it is brought up to date—and, I guess, I think the changes are positive.

I did want to touch on one change that I think is going to be tricky to deal with, and that’s—and I know the terminology is very general at the moment—where it talks about forming boards of State sector chief executives. I think those State sector chief executives are going to come to those boards with the best of intentions but they’re going to find themselves, from time to time, compromised. I think we’ve seen this on all sorts of boards that I’ve been around in my lifetime, where you have representatives of a group on a board, it’s very difficult to then become part of the whole and represent and take back to the bit of the whole the pieces that are important to make the whole work. I think that’s going to be very testing. I admire the aspiration of it, because I do think it’s good. But I do think it’s going to be very tempting to get that to work as it’s intended. I hope it does work, because I think, if it does, it will add a whole lot of value to what we’re trying to do here as parliamentarians.

A couple of other things that interest me as well are that it mentions in the course of this legislation the ability to restructure—or rationalise the nature of our district and regional branches and the boundaries that apply to them—of some of our State sector organisations. That really interests me, particularly in the Rangitīkei, because when you go to Taumarunui, you go out of Taumarunui for health to the Waikato, for social services to New Plymouth, for the police to Whanganui, for the regional council to Palmerston North, and, blow me down, you’ve got to go to Taupō to do your shopping. It’s extremely complicated and very confusing for people that live in those parts of rural New Zealand. We don’t realise in this place quite the challenges that they have, and I’m sure that the State sector departments have, in delivering a joined-up service or structure to those smaller communities that are more isolated in New Zealand. So I hope that that’s able to come out of this bill and work as well as it works—obviously, in built-up areas and cities, it’s much easier to operate these services, and I think they work differently, in my experience, in cities than they do in the regions, but none the less, it’s important.

There was one other thing that intrigued me about this, which was that in the build-up to it, and in some of the work that’s been done before, it talked about a lack of public interface in this bill. Well, the State services have a massive influence on what happens to us as people, and there might not necessarily be much public interface between the Public Service and what happens in Parliament, but what they do is hugely important because it impacts everyone in New Zealand and it impacts on all of our lives in some form or other. So it’s very important that members of the public peruse this bill and make sure that when it finally comes out for its third reading, or ends up in its third reading and comes out as law, it’s actually in a form that’s going to work for the rest of New Zealand. I think that’s very important, and I think it’s important that the people of New Zealand understand how the system works and why it’s established to work in the manner it does.

It’s no small piece of legislation. It’s a very important piece of legislation, and it will, I think, come in for quite a lot of scrutiny at select committee, even though it is operating under a shortened time frame.

So I look forward to the progress of this bill. I admire, I guess, the idea of it, and the thought that’s gone into putting it together, and I’m sure it will get great scrutiny, as I’ve said, and come out the other end in good shape. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Kia ora, Madam Speaker. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. I rise on behalf of the Green Party to support this legislation. I acknowledge the Minister, Chris Hipkins, who’s done a good job to get it to this point in the House, and the team behind it.

It’s always interesting to follow the member Ian McKelvie in his contributions. I think he’s quite an erudite member and brings down that real home experience to the debates in Parliament. I guess, two reflections: I found it quite interesting, the diversity of interactions that, say, someone in Taumarunui would have to have with New Plymouth and Palmerston North and a host of other centres. You wouldn’t design a system like that, would you? But that’s the system we have today. Also, his reflection around the interface of backbench members with the public sector. Now, it’s been one of, I think, the privileges of the Green Party, in our first opportunity to be in Government, to actually work much more closely with the public sector and public servants. I wonder if this is an opportunity for the House to actually encourage members of Opposition parties who haven’t had the privilege to be a Minister to have more ability to interface with who I believe—and I echo the sentiments of other members in the House—are incredibly dedicated, hard-working individuals. The old Roger Hall Glide Time cliché is well left in the past. These are high-quality public servants with the national interest at heart. Instead of just the two, maybe, interactions a year in select committee with annual reviews or, potentially, Estimates, I think we should encourage that, because these are the Ministers who will be working with them in the future.

I’d like to acknowledge the public servants in New Zealand. My father worked for the IRD for many, many years, so I saw it from that perspective. He always had the joke “It was a taxing job”, which he used at every single barbecue and Christmas. Now, he, alongside his colleagues, worked incredibly hard, but his career with IRD was in the wake of the big reforms of the 1980s, and, of course, our State Sector Act dates from 1988. I was seven years old at the time. This is something that is high due for reform and modernisation.

This, I think you can quite easily say, is one of the largest reforms to the public sector in New Zealand’s history, and I think it should be commended for its scope, for the scale, and for the intentions behind it. Every single issue that we have in New Zealand, be it swimmable rivers or climate change or transport or housing, has a Public Service dimension, and New Zealanders have to interface with the public sector many times across their lifetime, so we want to have a service which lives up to the high-quality expectations of New Zealanders. If we’re going to tackle some of these long-term systemic problems, we need a high-performing, agile, innovative public sector.

Three areas I’d like to touch on in particular. The first, I guess, is the structural, and while acknowledging this isn’t the most sexiest topic to be discussing, it is the foundation of a well-functioning democracy. I think many of our positive attributes as a country—and many other countries do look at New Zealand with a jealous eye—have come down to the Public Service, the apolitical nature of them, the fact of our low levels of corruption, high levels of integrity; again, not the sexiest topics to be debating, but fundamental for a functioning society. It’s something I’ve only really appreciated with the privilege of being an MP and interacting with so many people across my career. So establishing the values, the principles, and the purposes of an apolitical public sector is crucial in this large legislation.

Now, the second major area—and this is where I think the innovative aspect comes in—is changing the way that the 1988 Act provided for Government structures. Now, by allowing departments, that was very much par for the course with governance thinking of that time. However, what we’ve wanted and the public have demanded is the ability for the Public Service and the Government not to think in silos, not to just think of something as a discrete box that maybe on the margins interacts with other areas of Government department; they just want to see joined-up thinking. They don’t care about the structure of the body providing the advice or the service. They just want to make sure there’s good advice or a good service being provided. So the ability to reform this to add other structural categories from interdepartmental executive boards, to bring those heads together through interdepartmental ventures, to actually deliver those services, I think is a positive innovation.

I wasn’t aware that the 1988 legislation was silent on the Treaty of Waitangi. I think that shows the date and the genesis of that legislation. So I’m glad that is being included in this new legislation at the moment. From a Green Party perspective, you know, it’s something we’ve really urged Parliament to consider, actually taking that further so that this legislation actually gives effect to the Treaty of Waitangi, our foundational document, the heart of our modern constitutional relationship. So that’s something we’d like to see strengthened.

Now, this is the point where the public gets their say. I note it is a shortened select committee, but I do urge the public to have their say, because everything they care about—from rivers to transport to roads to climate change to jobs—has an impact on this legislation. So please, I urge them to have their say. Kia ora koutou.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to be talking on the Public Service Legislation Bill. I just want to start by saying the New Zealand public sector is normally regarded as being top-notch, one of the best in the world. So I think, in that context, we should be looking at what this bill is seeking to achieve, which is a further improvement to make sure that our Government entities are the best that they can be. I think we’re all aware of the need to be able to have multiple entities working together to achieve a better and a more holistic outcome. We were certainly trying it and doing it when we were in Government, and, obviously, this bill is another way of furthering that intent.

I think sometimes we have missed out on the opportunity. A case in point: often when we are building a hospital—and Dunedin is an example of that; we’ve got a major hospital spend under way—I think in many cases, a lot of Government entities will regard that as a project in itself, which is to build a new medical facility at substantial cost, and that’s fine, and it needs to meet the needs of health and medical needs of New Zealanders going forward. But those sort of projects have the ability to offer much more than that. They could offer roading advantages and what that might mean—how a city layout is configured after the construction of the hospital. It might have an element of Housing New Zealand, where new houses are built. All those sort of wider economic projects and context, which often also have a council overlay, are an opportunity to actually achieve much wider outcomes rather than purely delivering a new hospital. I think this is the type of legislation that might help in achieving those sort of outcomes.

So in that regard, obviously, we are very supportive of it. We certainly have tried to do it ourselves. I think the ability to look at appointing leaders who will be appointed for their skills in functional leadership is another aspect that’s quite different, and I think to administer funding and employ people on a cross, sort of, service or functional lines is an additional element which is provided for in this bill.

But I think there are a couple of things we’re concerned about in the bill, and one is that there are times when certain entities will want to be very commercial in their approach. They won’t want to be fettered or, in fact, inhibited in making quick decisions and moving quickly, and I think there is a line that needs to be drawn about when that might take place—and also some of the provisions around the collective employment provisions, which, no doubt, will be thrashed out in the select committee. But I think, in general, I’m looking forward to seeing this come through to the Governance and Administration Committee. It’s an interesting concept. It also does raise the issue not only about how State services and public services are organised but also how Ministers are organised to actually manage this new type of entity.

But the last thing I would say is I think it’s a shame that this piece of legislation has been brought to the House so late in this parliamentary cycle and, consequently, there is a rush to see it pushed through the consultation process. I think that’s slightly unfortunate because it’s more worthy than that, and, certainly, hopefully, the select committee gets a good opportunity to assess it and to make some further recommendations. Thank you very much.

This is a split call.

Madam Speaker, thank you for the opportunity to take a call on the Public Service Legislation Bill. I’d also like to begin by acknowledging the Minister, the Hon Chris Hipkins, for bringing this bill to the House. I have heard him speak a number of times around the Public Service sector working closer together, rather than working in silos—coming together and, basically, working together, which certainly makes it better for the members of the public.

I’d like to begin by just sort of outlining a story that I’m sure many of us have heard from constituents who have been to our offices. The story goes like this: if somebody has a certain need they may contact an agency—for example, Work and Income. They will give all their details to Work and Income, and they’ll work through a process with Work and Income. Then, they would need to get in touch with Housing New Zealand on a related issue to their conversation with Work and Income. When they get to Housing New Zealand, they’ll have to relitigate all the information that they’ve given to Work and Income. Then they may need to talk to the IRD, or there might be an ACC aspect. And we’re talking about a person’s life here that has a number of different aspects to it, and if that person needs to engage with a number of agencies around different aspects of their life, it’s much more helpful and much more better—well, it’s much better for that person if the agencies are working together, particularly on the information they have.

So the first point I’d like to highlight is the aspect of how this bill unifies the public sector—having them working together rather than working in silos. The important aspect here is that this Government is taking a collective approach to our public sector. Rather than looking at one aspect of the public sector here and another aspect over here, we’re looking at it as a whole and at how can the public sector serve New Zealanders.

There was an excellent example last year of the public sector working together in the Wellbeing Budget, where we had 10 agencies that worked together on the family violence and sexual violence aspect of the Budget. It was called a joint venture. The agencies worked together to put their Budget bids in, and they are now working together to administer the money that was provided from that successful Budget bid. So this piece of legislation basically looks to embed that philosophy of the agencies working together.

The second point I’d like to raise is that I’d like to thank the public servants for the work they did. Last year, the Government instituted core State sector public servants receiving at least a living wage of $20.55. But the aspect is around future-focused leadership. We live in a world that’s constantly changing—it’s constantly evolving. Services are moving to an online model at times, but the question is: how can we provide a high level of service that at times may not be face to face? Now, I know for a lot of people they do prefer face to face, but we do have the aspect of online available to us. But how can the agencies work together to deliver a service that is diverse and that reaches a wide range of people, whether those people be urban or whether those people be rural? And future-focused leadership is important in this area, and leadership from all the agencies working together to provide that service.

I also was not aware—as the Green member, Gareth Hughes, said—that the 1988 legislation of the Public Service did not mention at all the Treaty of Waitangi. So I am also very pleased to see that the Treaty of Waitangi is embedded in this legislation, and that there is a focus on greater involvement of Māori in the Public Service, and also recognition of the Treaty of Waitangi as our founding document in everything that the Public Service does.

Just a couple of other quick points—this legislation allows public servants to move between agencies more easily. That links to the aspect around a de-silo—if that is a word—removing the silos that have existed; a wedding of the agencies so that people can move between the agencies. And I think that’s an excellent thing, because people will take experience from one agency to another agency and vice versa, from one agency to another. And people will be rubbing shoulders with people from different agencies and basically having a common understanding. So, an excellent piece of legislation; I’d like to commend the Minister and commend this bill to the House.

I rise to speak briefly on the Public Service Legislation Bill. Now, the State Sector Act of 1988 has played a significant role in the past 30 years in regulating the Public Service sector. We now have a Public Service sector with an outstanding international reputation. But, nevertheless, over 30 years many things have changed, so I would like to go through some of these changes.

First of all, we have witnessed a change in our demography. Over the past 30 years, the population in New Zealand has changed substantially. We now have a much more diverse society, including the Chinese community—a much larger Chinese community in New Zealand. So with the change of population, we have a change of culture, so we now have a multicultural society. So this change means that we need to somehow reflect in our Public Service sector to reflect multiculturalism in New Zealand, so we need a more diverse public sector.

A second change—technological change. The change of technology in the past 30 years, we can see, is really extraordinary in our human history. Now, of course, we have digitisation, we have modern communication, and we also have artificial intelligence. All these are now being used in our Public Service. And, therefore, we need, somehow, to catch up, to make sure we are able to use our modern technology more efficiently.

And thirdly, with a change of modern society and demography, old values have changed. For example, we now have a stronger sense of human rights, stronger sense of gender equality, transparency, and ethnic equality. Again, our Public Service sector should reflect modern values.

With all these changes we also look at best practices. So we have seen the changes of best practice globally. We believe a unified Public Service is now best practice, and we need to have a cooperative approach with collective responsibility to tackle New Zealand’s big challenges. And, of course, the public now have different expectations—for example, they now expect a more efficient, more transparent, more diverse, more inclusive Public Service sector with a better gender balance.

Finally, we see that the structure of the Public Service sector also has changed. For example, we now have more agencies like ACC, New Zealand Qualifications Authority, New Zealand Transport Agency, Housing New Zealand, so these new agencies should be regulated. So I support this bill and refer it to the Governance and Administration Committee, with the aim of creating a modern, more agile and adaptable Public Service. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a real pleasure to have the opportunity to talk about this bill; I rushed into the House because it’s important that I do, considering I am the member for Rongotai, including the mighty Chatham Islands.

When I look at my seat and the coverage of it, being a third of the city, it is, can I say, the home of public servants. It’s at least one-third of the city where many, many, many of the workers who live there work in some way for some entity as part of something, but when you talk to them, sooner or later you find out that they are actually working for the Public Service. I want to congratulate all of those who have put in work, but in particular, the leadership of the Minister, Chris Hipkins, because this has been a piece of work that’s a long time coming. And I know, when I look up into the crowd here, I see some young people from Te Kao—nau mai, haere mai, welcome.

But I was recently talking to someone in Kilbirnie, actually, who said that they had come from the provinces and made the transition to work in a big city like Wellington for the Public Service. I thought that was something that they had always aspired to because their relations had worked historically for the Ministry of Works and in other local agencies, and to be given the opportunity to come to the capital and work for the head office—for want of a better term—was a real privilege to do that. So kia ora to the whānau up there.

The one thing I really like, though, is the flexibility around what’s being proposed here, because what this does—and I learnt this in local government too—is sometimes you have a set of goals or visions or pieces of work that need to be done and the structure of the service delivery agents don’t go hand in hand; what’s being proposed here is that you can now bring people together from those agencies. I heard the Minister of Finance, Grant Robertson, talking about this: it breaks down those silos.

So I can see why the Opposition is supporting it, because they too know that when it comes to delivering on the promise, whatever that may be, you need a group of the very best people. Sometimes that means getting those from across the Public Service, regardless of entity. When you look at the structure, be it a ministry, a Crown entity, a State-owned enterprise, an independent Crown enterprise, and the like, you just want the very best people to ensure that they deliver the project.

We are in the year of delivery, the party of delivery, and so this is all part of that vision to ensure that the goods get delivered and the people of Aotearoa New Zealand ultimately benefit from the policies and visions that we’ve put in place. So, in terms of tackling those long-term challenges, putting in place things, it may take much more than just three years—maybe 30—but this is part of that structure of a Public Service.

Can I say, too, how proud people have been. They know this is coming. Some have worked on it, and they have said, “It’s great that we are now able to move more easily between agencies.” I am hopeful that that will extend to, say, their leave. I know some agencies have got it sorted. I know that within the police service, you can work across the many divisions and branches within that entity and you take with you your entitlements. I guess that’s important because it gives people hope and it also means that they feel valued, because often they may not get the credit for some of the work that they do because they’ve had to make a sudden transition or there’s been some restructure solely to deliver the project that they’ve been working on.

I know others want to talk about the commitment and relationship with Māori, and that’s being talked about too. That’s important because we are seeing a Public Service that is embracing things Māori. It’s taken 30 years, dare I say it, since the State Sector Act was put in place all that time ago. But it is relevant; it is timely. It’s well overdue, dare I say it. But what we do have now is it is enshrined where things will be considered and not just an afterthought. I commend this to the House.

It’s my pleasure to take a relatively short call on this bill. This is a big step forward. I want to acknowledge the Hon Paula Bennett, and yourself, Madam Chair, and your Cabinet colleagues, who formed this view that the public sector needed to be reorganised and structured in a better way to work together. I absolutely believe that this is the right thing to do, and our party and this side of the House is prepared to support it because what it does is it futureproofs the Public Service and the way it operates.

I know in previous roles I’ve had, I’ve often seen silos of one department, another department, and another department. They won’t always talk. Many of them won’t work together, and often—and I acknowledge the Minister the Hon Nanaia Mahuta in the Chamber today—in the local government world, local authorities are trying to work with various Government departments, and it’s not always easy. So, I think any structure that gives leadership and the ability for Government agencies to work together more collaboratively and in a different way than they have in the past is a good thing.

I like this bill because it states the purpose, principles, and values of the Public Service but also talks about the responsibilities, how they’ll be carried out, and sets a framework for how that is all governed and managed. I give the House a couple of examples. In Hawke’s Bay, we tried to set up what we called an Intersector Leadership Group, to deal with issues in the community that intersected between local and central government. One of my major frustrations in the role I previously had before coming to this House was that you always heard from the Government departments how difficult it would be to get budget, reallocate resources, or make a change to policy without head office. So they’d invariably run off to head office, we’d have a meeting, head office didn’t really understand it, and it was almost impossible to get many of those things over the line.

So in an inability to work together, we pursued with that regime. It was led by a couple of pretty talented chief executives. I’m pleased to say that there are now some changes being made, and some of the central government agencies are now way more responsive. But if we are to sort out issues, particularly in the regions away from Wellington, then we need to have structures that allow collaboration, a certain amount of autonomy, and some overall direction and guidance. For that reason, I have great pleasure in supporting this bill.

Mr Speaker, I thank you very much for having the opportunity to speak on this bill. It’s great, too, as a former public servant, to be able to see great improvement in an area where there’s always room for more improvement. It’s good to see here a bill that really enables the Public Service to have far more flexibility. Before I move on, I’d just like to note that the Te Kao dairy does the biggest ice creams in New Zealand, and big shout-out to upstairs. Thank you very much for coming today.

In terms of funding, it’s really good to see an alignment between what the Minister of Finance and what the Minister of State Services are talking about, because we start to see how this Government is building a picture of where those pieces join together, to make not just the Public Service able to operate more fluidly but to enable the way that they are delivered funding and the way that funding reaches New Zealand to be more closely aligned. That has been a fundamental blockage in the system in the past.

It was only this morning that we heard in the Justice Committee, in terms of the reviews there, how there’s been some really significant improvements in terms of family violence, with all of those agencies that had been funded under the same budget that were able to work together with shared goals and shared outcomes, and to be able to deliver this in a way where they are all able to take recognition and be held accountable through that process. So that’s a new process as a result of the most recent Budgets and it’s enabling better services to be delivered to New Zealanders.

I’d like to use an example, and this is no criticism of anyone in particular, but it is to show how what we saw this morning in the Justice Committee has changed from previous practices. In terms of the establishment of something like the Gang Intelligence Centre, where we had eight different agencies, all with their different hats on, all with their different funding, all with their different priorities, who were trying to deliver outcomes, it was incredibly frustrating because from the ideas that were happening in Wellington to the practicalities that were delivered to New Zealanders, there was a huge gap. There was a problem, and so much of public servants’ time and consultants’ time can be wasted in terms of trying to argue where that alignment sits.

So being able to have one common goal in how that funding is lined up really stops those examples that we have seen time and time again in the New Zealand Public Service of not being clearly aligned in terms of what the outcomes are. Each of those different entities had their own accountabilities in the past. They had their own requirements and their own different ways of thinking, to be frank. So by aligning those from the outset provides not just better quality policy advice but also better deliverables when you translate from policy, from the idea into implementation and practice. And I think that saves money all round as well for New Zealanders. A good idea doesn’t always perfectly translate into a good practice, and the value of increasing the emphasis on collaboration, which is what this bill does exactly—what that does is it enables those parts of Government that do the policy development and those parts of Government that do the implementation to talk up front.

As a former employee of two public services, both the Office of Treaty Settlements and New Zealand Police, to see the benefits upfront of policy and operations being side by side and discussing how an idea will hit the road, how that idea will practically be implemented, can save the taxpayer so much money and can save New Zealanders wasted time in having to fill out forms or do things unnecessarily. There are huge benefits that lie in what this bill sets out, to enable delivery to people and a better use of Government funds to be set from the outright, and I’m personally really excited to see where that can take us.

While it’s great to see agreement from both sides of the House—and I’m pleased to always see that particularly in an area that I am passionate about, in an area that holds so much benefit for how we’ll be operating in the future—it’s been interesting to note the little points of difference we’ve heard today in this debate so far. One was, first of all, the Hon Dr Nick Smith, who spoke about the most important thing of the Public Service being “that I’m getting value for money; making sure that they’re not getting too much pay if they’re going from one agency to the other; or making sure we’re getting everybody working as hard as they possibly can, and not having a Gliding On situation.”, whereas I beg to differ.

I would see the best value in our Public Service being really good quality advice, and its people who have the confidence and the ability to work in an apolitical way, in a way that gives them the time and the research, the knowledge—all of those things that, put together, make a really good piece of advice that can inform ministerial decisions in the best way possible. By enabling that collaboration, that contest of ideas, by enabling that process to happen in the best possible way, that puts us ahead of the world in terms of the quality of our Public Service. And that’s something that I’m incredibly proud of having here in New Zealand. So I would say that the real value of our Public Service is the top-quality advice that we get, and it’s important to continue to improve how we do that.

I’d just like to note, too, that it’s really encouraging, on that note, to see some of those really fundamental values that the Public Service has always known now being sort of written in. So those areas of political neutrality, free and frank advice, and merit-based appointments are to be embedded into the new Act. I am really encouraged by seeing how well that goes.

In terms of, also, getting back to that robustness of advice, the best possible way is to enable officials, no matter where they’re from, to be able to do that. We have had many examples—and I’ll say, yes, they’re from both sides of the House—where what we’ve seen is an outcome delivered already to officials. I can remember one in particular around crushing cars where we were told straightaway to go away and do that, and you worked backwards. So I have to say, developing a regulatory impact statement that references German reality TV isn’t a good practice. It’s better-off to have some really good research to determine what a problem is, what other agencies are doing already, how the problem is working, and what the best course forward is.

So it’s having a far more transparent Public Service; having one that’s more able to be apolitical, to do the work, to have that area, that produces better quality policies, produces better quality laws, and produces better quality outcomes for New Zealand. It makes us proud to be a Government, to be an institution in New Zealand that can hold its head up and say, “We did a good job here. We understood this problem. We analysed this problem. We identified the risks. We identified the opportunities. And we made these decisions based upon good quality advice.” That is the real strength that the Public Service delivers, and this piece of legislation enables those strengths to go forward even more.

The last point I’d like to make is the fantastic piece in this bill that particularly acknowledges the role of Māori and our obligations under the Treaty of Waitangi. This has been previously silent in Acts, and it’s really interesting when you get your statements of intent from all your departments, you’ll see right up front that “We operate under the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi”. I’m always interested to ask, “How do you do that? How do you do that on a daily basis? How does that look in your staffroom or in your practices or in your policy work?” And you always get in Cabinet papers a statement that you’ve complied with the Treaty of Waitangi. But I’m always a little bit unsure of how that practically happens.

So by having a State Services Act, having a piece of equipment like this in legislation to put it really clearly that there is an obligation in the Crown-Māori relationship—and it makes chief executives operate as a good employer in policy, recognising the aims and the aspirations of Māori, the employment requirements of Māori, and the need for greater involvement of Māori in the Public Service, in their decision-making process—that it’s inclusive and you haven’t got people making decisions for other groups. This bill puts it right by explicitly recognising the role of the Public Service in supporting the Crown and its relationship with Māori under the Treaty of Waitangi. And in order to do this, Public Service leaders will be held responsible for developing and maintaining the capability of the Public Service to engage with Māori and to understand Māori perspectives.

The commissioner, in development with the implementation of leadership strategy for the Public Service, must also recognise the good employment requirements relating to Māori. So under the current Act, each department has previously had a narrow focus on its own identity, a narrow focus on its own goals. And what this enables is a greater platform for working together, for better outcomes for New Zealand, for better outcomes for our public servants to be able to use—

Order! The member’s time has expired.

Bill read a first time.

Bill referred to the Governance and Administration Committee.

I move, That the Public Service Legislation Bill be reported to the House by 28 April 2020.