Public Service Legislation Bill

I move, That the Public Service Legislation Bill be now read a second time.

Members of the House will note that this bill has not been reported by the Governance and Administration Committee following its consideration. It has been sent back to the House without the committee deliberating on the bill, and therefore I intend to table a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) in the committee stage that will pick up the recommendations in the departmental report that were the result of the committee’s deliberations on the bill and that encapsulates the feedback provided by submitters.

The bill aims to deliver better outcomes and better services to New Zealand to create a modern, agile, and adaptive Public Service and to affirm the important constitutional role the Public Service has in supporting New Zealand’s democratic Government—I’ve enjoyed my time in the House a little too much today, Mr Speaker, as you might hear from my voice.

Crises often bring out the best in our public servants, and they often drive the type of behaviour that this bill is incentivising that encourages Government to join up together to deliver better outcomes for New Zealanders. It’s too easy, though, for that spirit of collaboration to start to disappear once the emergency has passed. Conventional conceptions of agency autonomy tend to reassert themselves, as do the more conventional modes of leadership. We know that as we head into the COVID-19 recovery phase, we’re going to need Government agencies in all aspects and all areas of government to work together in a much more coordinated fashion to support all New Zealanders—our people, our businesses, our community organisations—through the recovery phase, and this bill helps to provide us with the tools to make that happen.

We need to maintain that impetus towards a joined-up Public Service that we saw during COVID-19. We need to support innovation and responsiveness in the way we did during the lockdown period. We need our Public Service to work as a single Public Service, not a series of silos.

The Public Service Legislation Bill is an omnibus bill that results in a new Public Service Act and amendments to the Public Finance Act 1989. The first six parts of the bill will become the Public Service Act, and they’ll repeal and replace the existing State Sector Act. Part 7 of the bill will become the Public Finance Amendment Act, which will provide the necessary financial powers and reporting obligations for the new organisational arrangements that are contained in the new Public Service Act.

Part 1 of the bill clearly establishes the purpose, principles, and values of an apolitical Public Service. It recognises the role of the Public Service in supporting the Crown and its commitments to its relationships with Māori. It affirms the spirit of service to the community that public servants bring to their work every day and that they have been showcasing during the COVID-19 emergency situation. These provisions of the bill relating to the principles and values were overwhelmingly supported by submitters.

There are some important principles of the way our Public Service operates that many, including myself as a member of Parliament, were surprised to learn are not enshrined in legislation. The law does not currently create requirements around political neutrality, around merit-based appointment, around free and frank advice—around so many of the constitutional conventions that we take for granted in our public servants. This bill addresses that anomaly and makes sure that those things are reflected in the Act.

Part 1 of the bill deals with those issues. It also deals with issues around the Public Service identity. One of the things that surprises me about New Zealand—and we are different to other places in the world like this—is that if you ask a public servant what they do for a living, they’ll typically describe the department or agency that they work for. If you ask them that question in many other countries, they will say, “I’m a public servant.” That’s not part of the New Zealand lexicon and it should be, quite frankly, and we should be proud of that.

There’s been discussion about whether the bill should specifically refer to the obligation of the Public Service to uphold the law, and one would think that that would be rather obvious, but there’s been careful consideration by the committee as to whether the bill should contain an explicit reference to human rights law and to obligations. We’ve listened very carefully to the debate over this. Consequently, the SOP will make it very clear that the Public Service does need to respect and uphold all of New Zealand’s laws, and it makes it readily apparent that that includes the relevant human rights laws.

Part 2 of the bill provides for a wider range of more flexible organisational forms in the Public Service. The State Sector Act created a series of nice, neat, vertical silos within the Public Service, and we know that that does not lend itself well to joined-up public service and to joined-up reactions and responses. This was something that successive Governments over the 1990s and in the early 2000s and even up to today have grappled with, and various different things have been tried: departmental joint ventures, cross-agency working groups, the Social Investment Board—these are examples of the sorts of approaches that have been tried by different Governments to address this challenge. The Public Service legislation that we are introducing today creates some new opportunities to create that kind of joined-up Public Service that we all want to see.

Part 3 concerns the people working in the Public Service, including the role of the Public Service Commissioner and the two deputy commissioners. It provides for the commissioner to establish a Public Service leadership team that will create system-level leadership in a system that at the moment has quite excessive devolution.

In terms of the employment ceilings, the bill provides for several means to ease the strict boundaries between agencies to ensure that there can be better mobility of staff between agencies. The bill reinforces the point that was made by the very first Public Service bill that New Zealand passed early in the last century of merit-based appointment. It is something that is fundamental to the way our Public Service operates, and it’s something that we should all be jealously guarding. No one should get a job in the Public Service because of who they know; they should get a job because they are the best person for the job, and the bill enshrines that basic principle that our Public Service has operated on for the last 130-odd years. It puts it back—

💬 Hon Gerry Brownlee: Well, the member might not have got a job.

Thankfully, that principle doesn’t apply to democracy, Mr Brownlee, as the member should be well aware.

Part 4 relates to Government workforce policy, and the bill expands the range of agencies that must have regard to Government workforce policy statements and specifies in more detail the matters that might be encompassed in that. Parts 5 and 6 accomplish the carry-over of some necessary provisions from the State Sector Act and address other technical matters, including the repeals. Part 7 deals with the changes to the Public Finance Act, which ensures as we move to more flexible working arrangements and new types of Public Service organisation that we’re still maintaining strong accountability when it comes to the expenditure of public finance.

The bill will support the collaborative and cohesive Public Service that we know is going to be necessary to address the very complex needs of New Zealanders in the COVID-19 recovery phase. They span different agency boundaries. We need the Public Service to work together in a joined-up way that’s based on the needs of New Zealanders, rather on than the needs of the individual Public Service agencies, and this bill moves us very progressively in that direction. I commend the bill to the House.

We support the intention of the bill, and that is to help deliver better outcomes and also services for New Zealanders by creating a modern, agile, and adaptive Public Service, and also by affirming the constitutional role of the Public Service in supporting the democratic Government of New Zealand. The bill repeals the State Sector Act 1988. The Act itself is over 30 years old. Although we have had 13 times of changes to the Act itself, the Act has become somewhat outdated, so we agree—we agree—that there are areas where the Public Service can do better, and we need to make sure that the Act is able to meet requirements today and tomorrow.

The Public Service is essential to the functioning of the Government, and also New Zealanders contact and communicate with the Government on a daily basis, so such services are particularly important. Overall, New Zealanders are satisfied with the services provided by our public sector. As a matter of fact, they may be very proud of our Public Service. Nevertheless, we believe the Public Service can do better.

The bill itself attempts to help create a unified Public Service that acts as a single team to provide better services to all New Zealanders. The bill also attempts to strengthen and streamline the Māori-Crown relationship, the employment of the Public Service, the leadership of the organisation, and also the Public Service in the regions. So all these are good attempts.

We support all these attempts, and we do think that there are good changes in this bill. For example, we support the provisions that enable public servants to move more easily between public agencies. We also support provisions that enable departmental joint ventures so as to better tackle those challenges that transcend individual department agencies. We also support overall public sector principles such as political neutrality, free and frank advice, merit-based appointments, open government, and stewardship.

Having said that, we have some problems with the bill. Firstly, this is an important and complicated bill and we believe it deserved a better deliberation process.

💬 Hon Chris Hipkins: Seven months.

The bill will have far-reaching implications for the operation of the Public Service in New Zealand.

💬 Brett Hudson: But it’s not a COVID bill.

💬 Hon Chris Hipkins: Some of us worked through COVID.

There is a strong public interest in the bill. Let me tell the member what the committee has done—what happened in the past few months regarding this bill. The committee spent 16 hours considering the bill, including 45 minutes on the initial briefing, about five hours on oral submissions, and just 11 hours on the departmental report, which contains 69 recommendations. National members of the committee made a consistent effort to actively engage in committee procedures in an effort to improve the bill.

The bill was referred to the committee on 23 November 2019. I, as the chair of the committee, called for public submissions the following day, without any delaying, and submissions were closed on 31 January 2020. Remember, this period coincided with Christmas and new year holidays. The committee process was then delayed due to the COVID-19 lockdown. Now, in the level 4 lockdown, we lost two meetings, and then, on the first day, we entered the level 3 lockdown, the committee had a meeting and considered this particular bill. We spent 1½ hours on this particular bill. Unfortunately, the committee lost another two meetings because of urgency—the House urgency.

So when it became clear that the committee would not be able to meet and report back that line of 8 June, National members proposed an extension of the report-back date to 29 July, and then we shortened that to 6 July and Labour MPs still opposed our request. Then the Chief Parliamentary Counsel wrote to the committee saying that due to insufficient time being allowed, the Parliamentary Counsel Office would not be able to prepare a revision-tracked version of the bill before the report-back date of 8 June. She noted that for a large bill requiring extensive or complex amendments such as the Public Service Legislation Bill, more time was needed. National members then agreed with the Chief Parliamentary Counsel and in the meeting on 3 June, we proposed yet another extension, and that is 3 July—even shorter than earlier suggested extensions. So we are disappointed that Labour members of the committee rejected the proposal again and insisted on a truncated committee process, which would compromise the quality of the bill.

This is important, complex, and large legislation. It should not have been rushed through during the COVID emergency or rushed under urgency. There is nothing urgent here, because this is a long-term reform, and it needs better consideration and care. We should deal with this with precision.

In addition to the process issue, National also has some concerns over this particular bill—for example, National is concerned about the increased size of the central government bureaucracy and increased centralisation that this bill is designed to support. The bill is a lost opportunity to improve the accountability of the Public Service and to improve the connectedness between local government and central government.

Now, this bill as it stands makes it too easy for Governments to constantly change ministries’ and departments’ names. Also, it will encourage a culture of changing names and forms of Public Service departments, rather than actually improving the delivery of public services. So I oppose the bill.

I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. I rise to speak on the second reading of the Public Service Legislation Bill.

I’d actually like to start where Minister Chris Hipkins left off, and that is to thank our public servants for the work that they did during the recent COVID-19 situation. I think I’ll echo all members on this side of the House, at least. Sam and Alma, who worked out of the National Crisis Management Centre, did a tremendous job in supporting all MPs, and I was certainly in their debt every single day of the level 4 lockdown, contacting them, asking them for advice, and asking them for assistance, and I just want to thank them very much for their work. That, to me, sums up what public service is. It’s that when we do have a crisis like that, everyone gets in, pulls together, and does the very best for New Zealand. I say that as someone who’s married to a former public servant, and they do a tremendous job on behalf of their country.

Now, I do want to run through some of the reasons we do oppose this bill, though. There are several, but my primary concern is more that this is such a wasted opportunity, and I’ll come to that in a moment. The bill repeals two longstanding pieces of legislation: the State Sector Act 1998 and the Public Finance Act 1989. Not only have they been on our statute book for more than 30 years; they also represent some of the finest traditions of our democracy. I will, with the House’s indulgence, just touch on one of those for a brief moment, which is the Public Finance Act, which establishes parliamentary control over public finances, including, for example, the appropriations that we debate so regularly in this House, and, importantly, it also outlines the principles of responsible fiscal management, which has for several decades, along with the Fiscal Responsibility Act 1994—working in tandem with that Act—put us in very good stead.

Since the passage of both of those pieces of legislation, but certainly the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1994, successive Governments have stuck broadly within a framework of fiscal responsibility, with some Governments obviously exercising more fiscal responsibility than others. But even in the circumstances of, for example, the Canterbury earthquakes, where large-scale borrowing was required, there was always a path back to some sense of normality in terms of our debt position.

Today, our debt is obviously growing at a pretty rapid rate of knots and, as I said in the House late this afternoon, a lot of that is for a very good reason, with things like the wage subsidy, and with the projections out to, I think, about 2023 being 50 percent as a percentage of GDP. That all might sound quite scary to us because we’re used to numbers far lower than that—something, usually, with a “2” in front of it, or occasionally a “3”—but just bear in mind that for about 70 years of New Zealand’s history, the Government and we New Zealanders owed more than 100 percent of GDP, and in fact it spiked. It lifted to in excess of 200 percent at one point. That’s still the case, actually, for many countries around the world, and that, unfortunately, puts them in quite a negative position when it comes to responding to issues like COVID-19, and also if they have any natural shocks in the way that we did with the Canterbury earthquakes as well.

Those two pieces of legislation, the Public Finance Act—which this bill repeals—but also the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which was passed by the Bolger Government, have set an important framework for responsible fiscal management. So, with that context, I do want to speak to this bill, and particularly to the fact that we had in this Parliament a real opportunity to build on some of the tremendous work on what needed to be worked on but also to bed in other things that do work well, and that is where this bill, unfortunately, does fall down. As my colleague Jian Yang has already pointed out in quite excruciating detail, actually—not excruciating because it took a long time to do so, but just the levels that National MPs went to to try and persuade Government to actually bring in a better process. I found that very disappointing. So this process has been rushed, despite Mr Hipkins’ comments earlier. Particularly in what should be a considered and deliberative undertaking, unfortunately, this has been one that has been pushed through with unnecessary haste.

The bill was debated at select committee during the lockdown and that was during a period where, in my view, no non-COVID legislation should have been progressed. I understand there were some discussions across the House about whether or not it was appropriate that non-COVID legislation should have been progressed during that time, and so I was disappointed that this bill was progressed despite that. MPs’ minds were elsewhere—they were on our communities.

💬 Brett Hudson: That’s right—where they should have been.

They were working with our constituents, certainly in my case and, I know, in Brett Hudson’s case—who does a fantastic job up in Ōhāriu—and I’m sure, actually, members across the House, whether they be electorate MPs or list MPs.

But it wasn’t just MPs, of course. It was also potential submitters, and they were in an even worse position than us because, as we know, New Zealanders up and down the country were losing their jobs. Often, in these cases they had children at home or had an enormous amount of other pressures on them, so to ask them to submit during that period is, frankly, pretty disappointing, and yet we had the select committee pressing on despite all that. As Jian Yang has pointed out, we tried numerous times to try and persuade the Government to extend that period. We also tried to get the bill returned back to select committee so that more time could be taken on what is a very important piece of legislation, and yet Labour members pushed on, despite those valid concerns about the state of the bill and the changes that had been proposed.

Now, I will say there are some good things about this bill, and I do just want to touch on a few of those. For a period of my life, I was a public servant, and I worked here, in fact, for a number of years, both for the Parliamentary Service and for Ministerial Services. I always found it strange when I worked here that the two organisations never seemed to align very well. They didn’t talk to each other all that much and they almost didn’t seem to recognise one another.

So, as we know in this place, Governments do come and go. They might last nine years or six years or, as it was in 1975—and perhaps later this year—just three years, and during all that, it’s not just the MPs and Ministers who are affected; it’s also the staff who are affected. They often move from Government to Opposition. Yet, despite that, there wasn’t a recognition that they should be joined up—that there should be a single approach between Ministerial Services and the Parliamentary Service.

The same is even more true, actually, for the wider Public Service: the people who, often, live in Wellington and move between Government departments for their entire careers. They might move, say, from the Ministry of Health to the Ministry of Education and then to the Ministry of Social Development, and there hasn’t been a lot of recognition across the Public Service that that is their core role. They may be employed by a different agency from time to time, but, actually, their core role is to be a public servant, regardless of the ministry, department, or agency that they work in. So this bill, I think, improves that situation quite a lot. What it allows for is the portability of annual leave entitlements, and, to me, that seems entirely reasonable.

But I do have some criticisms. Jian Yang, again, has pointed out some of those, and I’m sure my colleagues will point out some others, but the main one is that this bill is a lost opportunity to improve the connectedness between local government and central government. Despite what I’ve seen about the portability between central government agencies, that portability is also true for local government and central government. We often have people moving, for example, from the Wellington City Council to a core Government agency here in Wellington, or from the Auckland Council down to Wellington to take on a role here as well, and this bill doesn’t address that. It doesn’t address that there’s portability between central government and local government in the same way that there is between central government agencies.

We also see that this bill is wrongly focused. It dwells far too much on issues like changing the names or changing the form of departments and nowhere near enough on what should be the Public Service’s core role and what, in my view, is their core role—and what, I think that if you asked them, most public servants would say is their core role—which is the delivery of public services.

So for those reasons and for others that will be canvassed, I’m sure, by my colleagues as we head into the night—and they will be well traversed by them—I can’t support this bill. It’s a wasted opportunity and we won’t be supporting it.

I rise to endorse New Zealand First’s support for this Public Service Legislation Bill. In doing so, I echo the words of Andrew Falloon, who’s just sat down, in terms of the commendation of the role that our Public Service had in the COVID response. Prior to coming into the House, I had no previous experience of dealing with the Public Service outside perhaps the local council. I had a perception of the Yes Minister television series, which is one of the greatest TV shows of all time, in my view. But what I’ve seen since coming in here is that we’re incredibly well served by some very, very capable people.

Just going back to the COVID response, I do want to actually just have a shout-out to the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI). I know that within my role in the primary industries side of things, dealing with the various industry groups and businesses, whether it be in horticulture, the dairy sector, sheep and beef, shearing—absolutely, without exception, the feedback I was getting as they were having the interactions with MPI was exceptional. In the circumstances around that, with the speed of rolling out massive changes and communicating that response and how that would be complied with in order to keep workers safe, MPI absolutely excelled themselves in that response, from all the feedback I’ve had.

The State Services Act of 1988 and the Public Finance Act of 1989, which intersect with the precursors for this bill—it ties those up nicely, or it is certainly attempting a step in that direction. I think that’s incredibly wise, because whilst there was the nimbleness of the COVID response, sometimes that’s not always the case. The Government, to someone coming in from the private sector, is a big, lumbering beast. It has a lot of moving parts to it, and I think anything we can do to streamline those processes—and just as a small example, I was in at Invermay the other day, at AgResearch, and they were talking about the process of getting funding. When they look at what they would like to do, it starts off with the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment and at some point it cuts across to MPI, and then it drifts down to them at the coalface. I think the more seamless we can make these processes the better, and that’s exactly what this bill sets out to do.

So I commend Minister Hipkins on bringing these reforms forward. He’s certainly been a busy Minister. I’m on the Education and Workforce Committee, and we’ve had a deluge of really significant legislation coming through there as well, so I commend him on bringing this forward as well. So, without further ado, New Zealand First supports this bill.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. First of all, I would also like to acknowledge all the public servants who really worked hard during this difficult time and the challenging times which New Zealand has faced.

I would also like to acknowledge the chair of the Governance and Administration Committee, Dr Jian Yang, who really worked very hard to ensure that we came out of this process of select committee on this bill with a very good piece of work, but we are very disappointed that the Government members and the Business Committee did not give us the opportunity to follow the work. The process which we followed was that we heard the submissions and we had the revision-tracked version, where there were so many recommendations by the officials, but we did not get a chance to report back all those changes to this House, which would have improved this bill a long way.

The State Sector Act 1988 is being redone after 30 years. This is the real opportunity to modernise the New Zealand Public Service. It is the missed opportunity for substantive reform and rushed process during the lockdown that does a disservice to its importance. The select committee should have been working on COVID-related emergency legislation during the emergency when the MPs were confined to their homes, but the Government opportunistically used this to push through this large, complex, and important legislation.

Madam Assistant Speaker Dyson, I know you have been the chair of this select committee for a long time, and I have worked with you. I have seen that the intention of this select committee is always to bring the best out of the select committee process for any complex bill, and that was the intention in this process when we were going through the select committee process for this bill.

Some good points in this bill which I would like to share with this House include that it is going to bring the real connection between the Crown entities and the public sector, which is very important. The chief executives will be responsible to promote diversity and bring more inclusion into the workforce. They will be expected to build an inclusive workplace culture that attracts and promotes diversity. As we have seen in this country, it is becoming more and more diverse, and we want that the workforce and the public sector should be representative of the true population. This will need to include the removal of the barriers to current recruitment and development practices in order to ensure all people have fair and equal access to employment opportunities and career progression, which is a very important thing. We have seen that some of the areas where we don’t have that are, particularly, the Māori, the Pacific people, and the ethnics, who don’t have that progression which they should have and which they deserve.

This will also be able to deliver more innovative and meaningful programmes that have a greater impact. We want that New Zealanders should have the best out of every public servant, and this bill could have done that, provided we had had that process of the select committee.

A strong system of focused Public Service leadership is needed to improve outcomes for all New Zealanders. As we have seen, the public servants are required to give frank and free opinion to the Ministers and to the ministries while the policies are being formulated. That is a very important thing which we need to understand—that the frank and free opinion can help have better policies for New Zealanders.

The system leads will be also available to appoint based on functional experience and expertise, instead of it needing to be an agency chief executive. A chief executive will be responsible for employing their day-to-day staff, but, as a collective, they have to work together to have the better outcome for the betterment of New Zealanders.

If we talk about the culture and the behaviour, then this system will get rid of rigid systems and processes. We need to understand that there should be flexible things available. Chief executives have already started to lead together for the system. This will be formalised as a new Public Service leadership team and it will help public servants to build on the collective way of working, which, again, is an emphasis of this bill.

I hope that during the committee of the whole House, we will be able to put forward some Supplementary Order Papers which could make this bill more workable and better so that it can help the public servants. With these words, I oppose the bill at this stage.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of the Green Party to speak in the second reading of the Public Service Legislation Bill, which we are supporting, just to recognise that this is possibly—people who haven’t worked in the Public Service may not understand how significant this is. I think, quite often, there’s this discussion held about the bureaucracy in quite dismissive ways. We heard it for a few years, and I think it really undermined people’s ability to understand how central the Public Service is to everything that people need from their Government. I sometimes think of—and this may make me a bad Green—the politicians as the petrol and the Public Service as the engine. We’re the energy, but they’re the people that get us where we need to go, and it’s a really, really important relationship.

This is the biggest overhaul of the public sector since 1988 and one of the most significant overhauls in our country’s history, so it is an important piece of legislation. What it does is it sets out new purposes and principles and values, and it has these apply to Crown agencies as well as to core Public Service departments. It enables public servants to be appointed to the Public Service, and the Minister of State Services mentioned that in his speech. It’s just about actually helping people connect more to the idea of acting as public servants and having a sense of pride in that, which I think is really an important thing.

Part of what comes with this, which is a really great thing, is portability of annual leave if people move between different agencies. I think that just helps people to be acknowledged for that service to our country, and it’s a good thing. It requires diversity and inclusion in employment practices in the legislation as well, and I will speak to that a little bit more, because in the Greens, we would’ve liked to have seen the gender pay principles put into this piece of legislation. That is such a central challenge and such a core focus for the Government that I do think this piece of legislation would’ve benefited from having it in there.

It also sets up a senior leadership team of all public sector chief executives (CEs) and requires CEs to help create a coordinated, collaborative public sector, and it creates a greater range of organisational forms, including legislating for joint ventures. There’s a stand-alone, prominent clause in the legislation with codified expectations about strengthening the Māori-Crown relationship and referencing the Treaty of Waitangi—Te Tiriti o Waitangi—which is surely very central to getting anything done effectively in this country, making sure that that is in our work and centred in it. The competency for delivering on that is present in the Public Service, and this legislation helps deliver that.

I’ve seen some commentary in the media on this piece of legislation that’s been quite dismissive and worried that it’s removing power from the people in this place and enabling, I think, in this vision of the Yes Minister that Mark Patterson brought into the debate, the sense that, actually, more collaboration across Government will just enable more obfuscation and will take the ability away from Ministers to direct agencies. There was a piece I read where—and I’ll just quote from it—they were saying they imagined that one department will find it costs millions if a Minister wants blue doors on State houses and the State Service wants green doors. They were saying, “One department will find it costs millions to enter blue paint in computer systems; toxins in blue dyes will be flagged by another; and an obscure researcher will be disinterred to show indigenous birds are at risk from the minister’s colour choice. The solution will come when yet another ministry finds a green-looking paint that has been labelled cyan.”

That’s a really cynical, cynical view of our Public Service, and I think it really misses the nature of the complexity of the biggest challenges we face as a country and how they cannot be dealt with in silos. I talk about family violence in that example. A very common journey for somebody who’s experiencing domestic violence is where they may tell a counsellor or their doctor about what they’re experiencing and not get an appropriate response. There may be a police call-out and a warning given, as an example. They may be referred to a Ministry of Social Development - funded community service and get some support in that place. School might identify behavioural issues with their children, and then they may notify Oranga Tamariki. There may be ACC counselling for a parent. There may be another police call-out and, usually, the mum may want to leave with the kids, and then there’s the requirement to find housing and, often, that will be a need to try and find State housing. There may be issues about getting leave from work, and that brings in Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment oversight or the requirement to go to Work and Income. Then a case may go in front of the courts, and then there’ll be the justice system in terms of programmes for people to get help to recover or to be able to change their behaviour, and it may be a prison term and that involves the Department of Corrections.

To me, that is a very, very typical story. There’ll be multiple engagements, and all of those agencies at the moment report straight through to their Minister, only focusing on their one area and the priorities of their Minister. Part of what this Government is doing around family violence is setting up a system of collective responsibility, which is being enabled to be embedded by this legislation in recognition that we are never going to be able to turn around the endemic rates of domestic violence in this country unless we start lining up the work across those agencies and that taking independent approaches—isolated, siloed approaches—will just keep us where we are now.

We hear continually from our community organisations that at the moment, they may have funding contracts with two or three different Government agencies to run their basic service. They’ll have to make applications to each of those agencies and they’ll have to report on different criteria to each of those agencies to, essentially, be doing the work of supporting the whānau that they work with. It’s a huge waste of Government resource, and their time and ability is being taken away from being able to support people. Then we hear of examples like I heard in Christchurch last year, I think, of a woman who had come up through one of the processes we were involved in, where they’d found she was under eight different intensive case management systems through Government agencies because we hadn’t had the ability to join up and create a process that truly puts people at the centre of our work, rather than our organisational priorities.

That at the heart of it is, for me, why this piece of legislation and the work of this Government is potentially truly transformative. We have vehicles now to truly start responding to the needs of people in our community, and that, for a topic that many people may not understand or may find boring, is actually really, really exciting. I hope people will take some hope from this. While there may be things that we’ve heard in specifics that people would like to see, there’s always time for that, but I think this is a great start.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, and I rise to oppose the second reading of the Public Service Legislation Bill. I’d first like to congratulate the Greens and New Zealand First members, who both took very substantial calls on this bill. Listening to part of this bill and watching the amount of legislation today from my office, it appears that Labour members are restricting themselves to just seven-word calls, which really doesn’t show the public or, indeed, in this case, the public sector much respect for the legislation that is before the House.

This bill has much in it that is to be welcomed and commended, but it is, in fact, a wasted opportunity—very much a missed opportunity—for a couple of areas that I’ll touch upon. One is the way the process was conducted—particularly in the times it was conducted—and indeed what isn’t in the bill but should be if it really intends to deliver on what the Minister claimed is on the tin when he introduced the second reading.

Much of the select committee process was undertaken during our COVID-19 lockdown, and we were told by the Leader of the House as we went into the lockdown that only COVID-related legislation would be progressed while we were in lockdown. There was an exchange between the Leader of the House, who is the Minister responsible for this bill, and myself in the early part of this debate tonight. I happened to point out that we’d been told that lockdown was for COVID-related bills only, and his response was “Some of us were working.” Well, one could claim that’s a bit offensive, but, you know, some of us are robust and stout characters, and there’s not an ounce of irony in that statement from me—there is a bit of coincidence, but no irony.

We’re stout characters. We can take that sort of gibe from across the House, but the truth is the work we were doing included things like helping someone who had discovered that cancer had returned to get a cancelled biopsy test rescheduled, helping someone to get approval to, potentially, move a child with mental health issues from the opposite end of the island to their home, where they could be best cared for in very difficult circumstances, and helping someone in education to understand that, yes, they can travel back to their home of residence under lockdown to best be able to perform their professional duties.

That was the work for MPs. No matter what party they belong to, whether they were electorate or list, that was the work of MPs over the lockdown. It was the work that our constituents, the people of New Zealand, needed us to perform. So to take members away from those very personal and very important duties for committee processes for legislation that was not directly COVID-related was not only against what we, as members, were told as we headed into lockdown but it was, indeed, taking time from members that could have been spent on the most important and real work that they were doing under the lockdown. Instead, we ended up with what can only amount to a more rushed process than it needed to be.

Members on this side sought very fair and reasonable extensions to the select committee report-back date to allow more scrutiny and more consideration. That was rejected by Government members. That in itself is a shame but it’s also, quite frankly, wrong, given that the circumstances of the scrutiny were so impacted by the COVID-19 lockdown, and there isn’t even an excuse that somehow the changes in this bill not only warranted but needed to be progressed so quickly.

Some areas that we do agree with, for instance, are the areas focused around collaboration between Government entities and their ability to work together, principally to deliver a better outcome for our citizens. Now, we think that it’s important and is very worthy—in fact, it’s stuff that we had started doing in Government, in terms of legislation. More importantly, though, it was things that we had already put in practice in the last National-led Government. Ministerial-led clusters were delivering those very on-the-ground operations across separate Government entities, with a singular focus that was led from the top and that was all about delivering the right and better services for citizens, no matter what particular area of Government we were looking at.

One that is very interesting to me now, in my police spokesperson role—although I didn’t hold a role in that area when we were in Government; I was a mere backbencher—was the justice sector, and the Greens member, in her contribution, spoke a lot about how this bill will help across family harm and all of the contingent areas and interests in that area. Well, I would absolutely agree that these measures will help. But in terms of the need to hasten or refuse greater scrutiny, I really hope that member has visited the Integrated Service Response team, perhaps in Christchurch—and I’m sure she has; there are a couple of them around the country—where, on the ground, you have representatives from core Government agencies dealing with family harm response quite literally the day after the harm has been reported, and working very practically, pragmatically, and sensibly to seek to ensure not only the right response but also the measures that can be taken to minimise the risk of repetition or repeat offending, and they are extraordinarily successful.

Their funding was in doubt for some time, and that is a crying shame. I’m very pleased that it was extended for a period of time. It really needs to be something that we bed in in the family harm area. It should be the standard way of operating. It is a phenomenal success but it is also an example on the ground, under current law, under current modes of operation, where people from various Government agencies can come together in the same room and they have all the information, they talk freely and frankly, they make decisions together and on the spot, and they take collective responsibility and support the specific people who are tasked with leading the management of that response. It can work today. The current situation is not a need to have rushed this legislation, but yet they did.

On top of that, what is missing from this is really where the focus of these improved public services should be, which is outcomes. It just assumes that by doing these things we get better outcomes, yet this is a Government that eschews targets and measurements. It claims that they create perverse incentives, but, actually, that’s what should be in here. They scrapped our Better Public Service targets. Those are the things that should be embedded in this legislation.

More than that, earlier this year, the Productivity Commission released their report on productivity in the State sector and, quite frankly, it was a shock. Their finding was that many—far too many—Government entities have no fundamental grasp of the concept of productivity, certainly not in their own operations, and far too many of them think that productivity is not relevant to what they do. Well, that absolutely should be fundamental to what they do and how they look at doing what they do, because productivity in a State sector sense is not simply about the amount of money; in fact, that’s only a part of it—the amount of money they spend to deliver their services. It is all about the quality of the outcomes they deliver for the funding that they receive from Government—or from this Parliament, in fact—through the appropriations. That should be in the bill. It should absolutely be a centrepiece of the bill, but it’s not. It may not have been introduced in the Governance and Administration Committee, but a select committee—had it been allowed to continue as it should have—would have been a perfect opportunity to have raised that.

This bill as it stands is a missed opportunity. We should expect much more of the Government. We should expect much more of what we can come together to seek from our Public Service.

I just want to finish by reiterating also my thanks to the Public Service, particularly those that were assisting in the COVID response. They were truly phenomenal, how they worked with the interests of our citizens, our people, at the forefront of their minds and their actions. I’m going to take this opportunity to congratulate and thank the elected officials’ line. By pure circumstance, I just happened to deal with Alma more than most, and she is truly phenomenal. We oppose this bill.

This is an excellent bill and I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. The Public Service Legislation Bill is something on which I hope to have much more to say than the member for New Lynn was able to manage.

Minister Hipkins, when moving the particular reading that we’re in at the moment, said that the COVID-19 lockdown and associated issues had brought out the best in the Public Service. I’d like to join others who have noted with gratitude the commendable work of so many Government departments and, indeed, individuals within what we’d loosely call the Public Service. During that time, as a local MP, it was very helpful to be able to interact with so many who were working very hard in that environment.

However, the Minister’s point that the crisis had brought out the best in those individuals and in those agencies indicates, actually, that it’s not necessary to have this particular legislation in order for that to happen, and so what he’s indicated by doing that is actually that perhaps, to the extent that there are times when the best is not brought out in the Public Service, it’s a matter of culture rather than one of law. So, to that extent, the legislation would seem to be redundant.

Of course it’s a worthwhile aim for the legislation to join up our services that are not joined up currently. The Holy Grail that is a whole-of-Government approach is a worthy aim of course, in itself, but the reality, I fear, is that the instinct for autonomy—not to say patch protection; I wouldn’t go so far as that. But the instinct for independence amongst Government departments, I think, is not something that can be so readily solved at the stroke of a pen, albeit many strokes of a pen—truth be told, it’s rather a large piece of legislation—and it’s one more so, I think, as I said before, of a culture and a mindset rather than a matter of law.

Others have talked about the missed opportunities within the legislation, and there’s always a moral dilemma for an Opposition as to whether one supports changes that are worthwhile in themselves but do not go as far as they should in terms of areas that are not addressed. The place that we’ve landed on this particular bill, as you’ll have gathered by now, is that we shouldn’t reward that lack of vision by the Government, and in particular, I think, the lack of emphasis on accountability of actual tangible outcomes as distinct from organisational matters—the Government’s matters, you could say—and so that explains our position on the bill.

I would say, however, that there’s some pretty high-flown language and some pretty stirring stuff in the explanatory note of the bill—for example, that the single, broad policy aim is “to provide a modern legislative framework for achieving a more adaptive and collaborative public service, by expanding the types of agencies that comprise the public service, unified by a common purpose, ethos, and strengthened leadership arrangements.”

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): There are people in the gallery listening, Mr Penk, just in case you want to up your game a bit.

Pardon me?

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): There are people in the gallery listening, in case you want to up the game a bit.

Oh, I don’t think there are people in the gallery listening, Madam—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): There are—truly.

I think there are—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): They are awake.

—people in the gallery, but whether or not they’re listening—I’ll do you a deal, Madam Speaker. I’ll give them the opportunity to listen, but whether they then choose to or not will be, of course, up to them.

So, Madam Speaker, forgive me. I was running out of breath, among other things, by the end of that sentence, and what I was really saying—and you’ve given me an invitation, I suppose, to repeat it, which I will not take up; fear not—was that there’s some pretty high-flown language and some pretty stirring stuff in respect of the broad policy aims, as the bill describes. I see that it’s the result of an “extensive consultation process”, and if there are any more fearsome words in combination than “extensive”, “consultation”, and “process” in the context in Civil Service legislation, then I can’t think of them while staying awake, Madam Speaker.

I would say, though, that there is one positive change that I was able to identify when reading through the bill. There is provision for public servants to, effectively, transfer between different agencies and keep their accumulated annual leave. That seems a pretty sensible kind of thing to do.

Also, amusingly, there’s a new type of chief executive established called a “functional chief executive”, as opposed to, I suppose, a dysfunctional one. So that’s pretty positive, I guess, but it can’t overwhelm our instincts, nevertheless, to oppose the bill.

We have fantastic public servants on the mighty East Coast and this bill will build a more effective and unified Public Service, which is great for them. So to that point, I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s, again, a pathetic contribution from the Labour members, and I would—

💬 Kiritapu Allan: That’s very harsh.

Well, take it as you like, Kiritapu Allan, but I think that was pathetic, and you could have been—

💬 Kiritapu Allan: Oh wow, doubling down.

I know you’re hurt by my comments, but you’ll just have to take it on the chin, as you always do.

But I do want to commend the contributions from the New Zealand First member Mark Patterson—a full call—and also Jan Logie from the Greens. I ended up actually agreeing with much of what Jan Logie said. It surprised me completely. I stand to be corrected, but she even had a reasonable analogy when she said that the Public Service was the engine and we here—I think she was talking about MPs—were the petrol that kept the engine going. I wasn’t sure if she said “petrol” or not. It wasn’t—

💬 Hon Member: She said “petrol”, yeah.

She did say “petrol”—great. So she’s a petrol fan, just like I am.

This bill, the Public Service Legislation Bill, says some good things. You know, there are some sensible things that are written here. The thrust of a strong leadership at the top driving the culture or driving the entire Public Service as one is—it seems to me that should have been done years ago. This is a review, or a renewal and a refurb, of a 30-year-old Act, so I accept that some of these things are new, but what I would say is it seems, as Minister Hipkins himself said, the best was seen in the Public Service during this crisis, where the service got together and worked across silos—for want of a better word. They cooperated and really focused on the job that had to be done and, clearly, without saying so, they did things and probably bent a few rules to do things that were actually done and they achieved a lot of stuff, and that’s great.

So this sort of legislation, while it seems obvious because it supports the Crown in its commitment in its relationship with Māori, for example, with a flexible set of options for organisational arrangement—and it sounds fantastic, but you can’t write legislation and just have it turned on like a tap. It can’t happen unless the people in the organisation want it to happen, and Chris Penk talked about the culture of a place before any actions can really be embedded into the organisation. We saw that around the health and safety law reform, where we had legislation that led the public to become more focused on health and safety, and we dragged the public along with the legislation that was leading it. But it’s finally taken a long time for the culture of health and safety to be embedded in our workplaces on a day-to-day basis, and this will be the same. This will be the same, where we will continue to have silos, we will continue to have patch protection, and we will continue to have scraps about funding and protecting their projects in various agencies, and it will be a while before we have a situation described by Jan Logie, where we have a multiple-agency, cooperative resource available to the New Zealand public.

So, for me, what I was pleased to hear, though, is that this legislation doesn’t lead, actually, which is a good thing. This sort of follows what is starting to happen out there in the Public Service already. For example, Brett Hudson talked about Integrated Services Response teams. He talked about ministerial-led clusters, and these things are already happening. These things are already bringing in various agencies together to get a better result for all New Zealanders, and that’s a good thing.

Of course the agencies are supporting the Crown in its commitment to its relationship with Māori—that’s already happening—but now we’ve got this piece of legislation which says that it’s following what is already happening out there. It says that this legislation will “support the Crown in its commitment to its relationship with Māori:”, but that’s already happening. In regard to the same sort of thing, a “flexible set of options for organisational arrangements”—you’d think that was already happening, and I’m sure it is already happening out there.

So my point here is that while we should be careful when we lead with legislation and pull people in to follow—that takes time—we should also be careful when we try to prescribe too much. That should be left to the natural evolution of the agency and it should be left to the people in the agency to work out for themselves the best way to find a solution, and that comes from the leadership at the top across the Public Service—a leadership team comprising a bunch of senior leaders across various agencies—which sets the tone and the culture. I’ve come back to that word “culture” again, which was used by Chris Penk, which is not in the legislation, but I think it is really important to the way that the Public Service will behave.

I was interested to also think about the missed opportunities that have been mentioned already. The Living Standards Framework, which this Government has set itself, measures and sets goals and ambitions around the economy and community and individual people’s health and the environment, but I don’t see that here for the Public Service to consider when they’re making their arrangements or doing any of their actions or services, for example. So, for me, that was an opportunity, at least, where the Living Standards Framework could have been embedded in this legislation, which would still be following the practices that are occurring already in the Living Standards Framework in the agencies across the country.

As I say, you know we’re not supporting this bill. There were opportunities for other things to be included in this bill. We’ve talked about the rushed process and the lack of opportunity for people to submit, resulting in an unchanged bill being returned back to the House. That’s really not acceptable, that’s not desirable, and we can do better than that. For those several reasons, I cannot support this bill.

Kei te tautoko ahau i tēnei pire ki Te Whare.

[I commend this bill to the House.]