Public Service Bill, Public Finance Amendment Bill

I move, That the Public Service Bill and the Public Finance Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

Now, these bills repeal the State Sector Act 1988 and replace it with the Public Service Act 2020 and make amendments to the Public Finance Act 1989. This is a very significant day for the New Zealand Public Service. Before I get into the detail of the bills, I do want to take a moment to acknowledge our hard-working and dedicated public servants up and down the country. There is no doubt that in a time of emergency, we see the Public Service at its very best. We see our public servants going out of their way to ensure that New Zealanders get the support that they need in extraordinary and often very, very difficult circumstances. What a time of emergency also highlights, however, is that our Public Service sometimes strains under that pressure when it requires joined-up Government approaches when all aspects of Government need to work together, hand in glove, to provide New Zealanders with the type of support that they need. So this these bills deal with some of the biggest impediments to that collaborative and joined-up approach that we expect to see from our Public Service.

We do need to see the Public Service organising itself much more around the needs of New Zealanders, the needs of New Zealand businesses, rather than organising around the needs of the Public Service. The State Sector Act 1988 was a watershed piece of legislation that fundamentally changed the way a large part of our governing apparatus in New Zealand operates. It has had many, many strengths. It certainly strengthened the accountability of the Public Service with regard to the efficient use of public resources. It strengthened the lines of accountability between chief executives of those departments and Ministers, and between the chief executives and those working underneath them, and that was of course a very welcome development at the time.

But what it has done over time is it’s reinforced a view that the Public Service should operate in silos. The reality is New Zealanders do not live their life in silos. We do not wake up every morning thinking, “I’m going to attend to my education needs at a certain part of the day, and then I’m going to attend to my health needs, and then I’m going to attend to my other needs.” Actually, we’ve got to have public services that can work and operate around the needs of New Zealanders all of the time, and I believe that these bills will go a significant way to ensuring the Public Service can do that. We’ve got a Public Service that is incredibly well respected by New Zealanders and around the world, and that is something that we should all be very proud of.

So the bills help us to reconnect with a spirit of service to the community. It reconnects us by unifying the Public Service around a common purpose, principles, and values, something that has been sorely lacking from the State Sector Act. It will ensure that the Public Service operates with integrity and continues to earn and retain the trust, confidence, and respect of New Zealanders. A review of the statutory framework for the Public Service, the State Sector Act 1988, was carried out in 2019. There was extensive public consultation before legislation was drafted. I do want to commend those working at the State Services Commission for a very robust process. These bills didn’t just emerge out of nothing; there was a very robust consultation process in which people had the opportunity to put forward their views on the strengths and weaknesses of our existing arrangements.

Consultation occurred based on several aims. One was affirming the constitutional role of the Public Service in supporting New Zealand’s democratic form of Government. That’s very important. The Public Service does not stand alone from Government. It is the delivery arm of Government, and the constitutional role of the Public Service is to support the elected Government of the day. The reforms occur around the goal to create a more modern, agile, and adaptive Public Service, and, of course, to deliver better outcomes and better services for New Zealanders.

So I’ll briefly touch on each of the parts of the bills. Part 1 of the Public Service 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 commitment to its relationship with Māori, something that has not been well captured by legislation in the past, and it affirms the spirit of service to the community that public servants bring to their work every day, and I think every one of us can attest to that. We see that in our local communities.

Part 2, very significantly, provides a wider range of more flexible organisational forms for the Public Service. These will enable the Public Service to respond more effectively and quickly to multi-disciplinary cross-agency issues and challenges, and to the changing priorities of the Government of the day—of course, Government priorities do change from time to time, and particularly when there’s a change of Government.

Part 3 concerns the people working in the Public Service. It begins with an expanded leadership role for the Public Service Commissioner. The new name—being the Public Service Commissioner, replacing the State Services Commissioner—I think better accurately reflects the nature of the role. It also creates a more joined-up leadership of the Public Service and provides for new future and system-level leadership roles. The good employer provisions carried over from the State Sector Act 1988 are modernised, with explicit reference to diverse and inclusive workplaces and the workforce, pay equity, and recognition that remuneration decisions must be made free of gender and other bias, something that this Parliament has been working hard to achieve.

Part 4 relates to the Government workforce policy and the use of workforce policy statements to set out the Government’s guidance and expectations for agencies on employment and workforce matters. Parts 5 and 6 carry over some of the necessary provisions from the State Sector Act 1988 and address other technical matters, including the repeals. And Part 7 covers the amendments to the Public Finance Act that are required to allow for the increased flexibility in working arrangements created by departmental agencies and to account for the new Public Service organisational forms.

So to sum this up, it is a very big day for the New Zealand Public Service. There has been several years of considered work that has gone into creating these bills. I do want to thank all of those who have been involved in the process. It’s a piece of work that I am very proud of. I commend these bills to the House.

This legislation represents a lost opportunity to substantially upgrade one of the most important statutes that we have within our Parliament. This legislation has been the victim of both poor policy and poor process, and National is disappointed that we are not able to support them. Now, we absolutely agree that the Public Service that supports the Government of the day is a defining factor that makes New Zealand such a great country—hugely proud that we have a Public Service that is to a large degree free of corruption. In fact, when National left Government in 2017, we were ranked the least corrupt country of 196 countries in the world, and that reflects well on our Public Service. I am one of those that hugely values the fact that we’re not like the United States, where all the senior levels of the Public Service disappear. We have a genuinely politically neutral Public Service, and that needs to be jealously guarded. Equally so, it’s important that our Public Service is as open and transparent as is possible and practical, and that is an area that needs further reform and where this legislation represents some lost opportunity.

National’s biggest concern with this legislation is the lack of focus on getting good value for money for the taxes that New Zealand’s 5 million citizens pay. Yes, it’s important the Public Service is politically neutral, that it’s transparent and those things, but, actually, one of the most important things is that it spends public money wisely and carefully. I cannot believe that the parties in Government—Labour, New Zealand First, and the Greens—voted against National’s amendments that would’ve put a value in the public sector that they have a duty to spend public money wisely and effectively.

The reason I think historically that’s so important is that when the State Sector Act 30 years ago—when we last wrote this legislation, the public sector had an appalling reputation as being bloated and wasteful. All those trends are coming back again, that the needs of the centre outweigh the actual delivery of public services for New Zealanders. I give a simple example: the Ministry of Education, one of the agencies the Minister of State Services is responsible for, had 2,632 staff when our Government left office. It now has 3,487. That’s an increase of 33 percent in the number of officials within the Ministry of Education, a one-third increase, in the same time as there’s been a 1.2 percent increase in the number of teachers. I think the average tax-paying New Zealander wants their money going into those front-line services rather than into a bloated bureaucracy, and that is the risk of this legislation, that, simply, we expand an ever-growing Public Service that is not focused on the activities—the health services, the education services, the justice services and the other things—that are so important.

The second disappointment I have with this legislation is with respect to the linkages with local government. What this legislation does is miss the opportunity to get a far greater level of connectedness between that huge part of the Public Service that is in local government. So many of the Acts, the laws, the grants, the public money that we in this Parliament provide is actually delivered, either in regulatory services or in terms of finances, by the local government sector. There was a real opportunity to create a deputy commissioner of public services for local government. There was a real opportunity to enable staff to be able to move between local and central government and to build their skills. There was a real opportunity to provide our elected representatives, our mayors and our councillors, with a robust audit of the capabilities of their organisation, in the same way that our State Services Commission does for public agencies. The Government missed that opportunity for an incredibly important improvement in the public services.

Then the third issue on which I must express concern is the way in which the changing of Government agencies and departments has become an excuse and made easier rather than actually improving services. This is a Government that is radically changing our polytechnic sector. All of our polytechs are being merged into one amorphous, big institution. We’ve got a report from the Government that they’re going to make radical changes to the other really important public service of health services, with a report that recommends whole new organisation of health and of our district health boards. What this legislation does is reduce Parliament’s role in the reorganisation of Government departments.

Here’s the balance that we need to find in this legislation: in the United States, it is my view that their public service legislation is so restrictive that the institutions of State cannot adapt to the changing issues of the time, that they’ve got old, cumbersome departments that are out of step with the issues that face that particular country. I fear we’re in the opposite, and that is that every time there’s a new issue, we reorganise the Public Service—continuously changing. A classic example in the term of this Government is this Government created the new housing and urban development ministry, and it supposedly was going to deliver the 100,000 KiwiBuild houses. I have never in my political career seen as big a public policy failure as KiwiBuild. That promised New Zealand 100,000 homes and is yet to deliver 400 of those homes. It was an example of where the Government believed that they were going to be able to address a real issue through reorganising Government departments rather than actually being focused on the delivery.

I want to point out the very poor process with this important legislation. The Minister introduced a 200-page Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) with 500 clauses in it on Tuesday night—law that will be in place tomorrow. Who in this Parliament seriously believes—I’ll put a bet on it: there is not a single MP in this Parliament that has read that law. I found an error in the law, that subsequently was corrected, just by chance during the committee stages that we had to repair. This is Mickey Mouse legislation. Not a single Government member chose to take a call. I sat on the Governance and Administration Committee. I have never seen and been so embarrassed that MPs were so lacking in engagement on one of the most important Acts that this Parliament in this term will pass. Nobody could give a hoot from the Government benches about the detail of that legislation. There was zero engagement at the select committee. Parliament has just rubber-stamped a massive SOP without any of the proper investigation and proper consideration of a bill that is so important to New Zealand.

This legislation is a lost opportunity for New Zealand to make a step change in the improvement of our Public Service, and the fact that the Government voted down amendments at a time when we are facing the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and refused to put a requirement on the public sector to spend public money wisely and effectively speaks volumes about this Government. They somehow believe that just throwing money at problems solves them, without the requirement that, actually, it’s the effectiveness in the way in which that money is spent that we should be focused on. National does believe there is a need to upgrade the old State Sector Act of 1988, but we would want that focus on efficiency, that important issue of development of a stable and professional Public Service, and look forward to the opportunity to amend this legislation and provide the sort of framework for New Zealand’s Public Service that will not just work for public servants but one that will work for the New Zealand public.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. Just before I get into talking about these very important bits of legislation, I do want to respond to a couple of matters that member who’s just resumed his seat, the Hon Dr Nick Smith, raised with us. The first of those was his interest in value for money, and I thank him for that. I am also very interested, as you might imagine, as the Minister of Finance, in the concept of value for money. Value for money does not necessarily come from cutting services. In fact, it can lead to a significant decline in value for money.

The member raised the question of the number of staff at the Ministry of Education. The thing was that the Ministry of Education, when it was under the stewardship of the former Government, unfortunately stumbled into Novopay, didn’t build the number of schools that were required, didn’t have a proper capital unit within it, and when it comes to the polytechs, that is the very definition of the problem with the member’s premise, which is that the polytechs individually were going broke. In terms of the taxpayer, we were writing out cheques for hundreds of millions of dollars because of the poor approach taken, the cuts, the austerity approach taken. So value for money actually comes from having a Public Service that is well organised, well led, and focused on the outcomes for New Zealand, not on the turf warfare of different agencies. So I reject the criticisms of this legislation by the member who just spoke before me.

What I want to do at the start is to thank all of those who’ve been involved in this legislation. My involvement comes from my role as the Minister of Finance, but the Minister who has had the greatest impact on this is Minister Hipkins, and I want to congratulate him for a project that I know means a lot to him personally. It is a massive piece of work to reform our State sector’s legislative architecture, and he has driven it and driven it hard, and he deserves to be congratulated for that. I also want to congratulate and thank the leadership of the State Services Commission and, in fact, all of the departmental heads who’ve had a role in this legislation, and other State servants. From today, we can properly call them public servants.

That is the other point I want to make, by way of introduction—is that by the best estimate of the Leader of the House, rushing out and having a quick look at the statute book, we think that it is probably at least 60 years since New Zealand’s public servants were properly recognised in law as public servants, not State servants. Now, I know what was planned in 1988. I know what would lay behind the thinking of the creation of the State Sector Act, and perhaps going back to the 1960s as well. But now, today, we finally, in law, give New Zealand’s hard-working and dedicated public servants the right name and the right place.

And it matters. In the words of another politician in this House, words matter, and in this case they genuinely do, because our public servants serve the public of New Zealand. They actually don’t serve the State of New Zealand, per se; they serve the public of New Zealand. And haven’t we seen, in the last few months, the value of that work? I’ve actually mentioned it, and I acknowledge that today is an important day for Madam Speaker in the House, and I’ve acknowledged it before, as a former Minister for Social Development—the extraordinary work done by that ministry during COVID-19. That is just one example of the incredible job public servants do for New Zealanders every single day. Today, finally, we recognise that in the name of this legislation. I am very pleased that we are doing that.

The bit of the legislation that I am most connected with is what was in Part 7 of the legislation, which is around the changes to the Public Finance Act (PFA). This piece of legislation works in couple with the changes that we are making to the PFA not just here but also in other legislation. Recently we passed through this House the Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Bill. What that bill does is lock in within our budgeting process the concept of wellbeing. The wellbeing approach, as we’ve interpreted and driven it through over the last couple of years, is about core elements of this legislation. It’s about taking a long-term, intergenerational view of what we do with the important taxpayer money we look after. It’s about breaking down the silos between agencies so that we are focused on the outcomes for New Zealanders, not the inputs. Too often we do that, and I will admit that we’re all guilty of it at times—of focusing on the amount of money that we might get for a particular project or a particular ministry. That’s an input. It matters. It’s important. But it’s not as important as the outcomes that we are creating for New Zealanders. So that focus of the wellbeing approach, which we’re embedding in the Public Finance Act, now comes through this piece of legislation as well, and the two work incredibly well together.

What Part 7 of the legislation actually does, in part, is allow within the Public Finance Act the very flexibility that’s created by the rest of the legislation. So the rest of the legislation creates different structures for how we’ll deliver those outcomes. I want to mention one of those, and I’m pretty confident my colleague Jan Logie is probably going to mention it as well, since she’s in the House, and that is around the joint venture on the elimination of domestic and sexual violence. The interesting thing about that coming together of about eight or 10 different Government agencies is that when we set about doing it, we didn’t have a name for it, because, actually, the concept wasn’t there. It was called a joint venture, and now, within this legislation, we formalise that approach.

Now, why does it matter for me? It matters for me because that goal of eliminating domestic and sexual violence, which is shared by everybody in this House—we now have the ability to say that is our goal; that is the outcome we’re working to. These 10 agencies are jointly accountable and responsible for that. They have a shared vision. But the problem that we’re now solving with Part 7 of this legislation is that if you go looking for that joint venture in the Budget or in the Government’s accounts, you won’t find it. You’ll find 10 different bits of it that you have to put together to then say “That’s the joint venture”. Now, that might sound like a simple thing, but its consequences are much more significant. It means that we don’t have, within the monitoring structure, the ability to see it as one from a financial perspective. That changes with the legislation that we’re passing today. That is the kind of approach that will deliver value for money, and more than that, it will deliver the outcomes that we all share when it comes to making sure we eliminate domestic and sexual violence.

I see huge opportunity for this kind of approach across Government, where we focus on the outcome, we break the silos down, and we actually have the legislative mandate that sits behind it. It’s exciting, and when I’ve done my addresses over the last few years to the Institute of Public Administration, the audience is full of young public servants who want this. They see themselves as public servants and they want to work on these big issues together across agencies. Today’s legislation puts in place the framework for that, and that’s why I’m very proud of it, and that’s why I commend it to the House.

This legislation is a once-in-a-generation update of the legal framework governing the foundation and operations of the Public Service in New Zealand. I was very much impressed at State Services Commissioner Peter Hughes’ stories about the evolution of New Zealand’s Public Service. I shared a vision of many people for New Zealand Public Service, and that is a streamlined, modern, agile, and adaptive Public Service. Make no mistake: New Zealand Public Service still performs very well by international standards. Nevertheless, we believe the State Sector Act 1988 has its limits. So we need a new Act which will be able to serve us not only for today but also for tomorrow. So that is why we are having these particular bills.

National supports many changes to the legislation to update, basically, the legal framework. For instance, National supports the changes to enable public servants to move more easily between department agencies. We also support provisions that enable departmental joint ventures so as to better tackle challenges that transcend individual Government departments.

Now, we say that we support many changes, including the cultural change that would enable public servants to feel that they belong to one particular system, they are part of one particular system, regardless of which agency they work for. So this bill will have far-reaching implications for our Public Service. And there is a strong public interest in this. For that reason, we should not have rushed the process. Because we really rushed the process, we now have concerns. National members of select committee tried time and time again to extend the report-back date so that we would be able to fully scrutinise this particular bill. However, Government members of the committee declined our requests. Now, our concern is, because we do not have time to fully examine all the provisions, this legislation will not be able to serve what it is supposed to achieve.

I’ll give you an example. A good example is New Zealand Human Rights Commission’s concern. They are so concerned that the chief commissioner, Paul Hunt, wrote a letter to me saying that they are deeply concerned about this particular legislation in terms of the impact on human rights. Now, I’ll read the letter. This particular letter says, “As it should, this bill expressly recognises the human rights of public officials. However, it does not explicitly require or even encourage public officials, when performing their duties, to take into account the national and international human rights commitments repeatedly affirmed by New Zealand over many years.” Originally, they thought the committee would be able to make an amendment. But because the committee was not able to report on the bill, and therefore the committee could not do anything, then the chief commissioner wrote to the Minister asking for a Supplementary Order Paper. But then the Minister declined. So if the committee had the time to consider the bill more fully, then we might be able to consider issues like this. But because we did not have time, therefore we were not able to consider all these issues.

So this is a good opportunity, but we missed the good opportunity to make these bills better bills. For that reason, I oppose the bills.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Thank you for the opportunity to rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak in support of this legislation, the Public Service Legislation Bill, now in two parts. I simply want to add to the conversation in the House by acknowledging Minister Hipkins and, actually, Minister Grant Robertson and their efforts. I see the Public Service in the gallery this afternoon, and I simply wanted to take this opportunity to congratulate them on their incredibly hard work—the undertaking that they have gone through to get this legislation in front of the House as it is today.

I just outline very briefly what we are seeking to achieve through this legislation. We are enabling the Public Service to deliver better outcomes and better services. We are creating a modern, agile and adaptive Public Service and affirming the constitutional role of the Public Service and supporting New Zealanders’ democratic form of Government. In seeking to achieve these, New Zealand First supports this legislation. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, for the opportunity to participate in the third readings of these bills. As has been mentioned by earlier speakers from this side, we are not supporting this legislation. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t acknowledge the work of public servants in this country. I would like to acknowledge the State Services Commissioner, Peter Hughes, who is sitting in the gallery to see the process of this legislation. I want to say that during these hard times, the public servants have delivered world-class service to the citizens of New Zealand.

I have travelled around the world, from time to time, and have always been admired by others because of our public servants. I have hosted a lot of public servants from overseas in Parliament, from time to time, who come here to learn from our public servants how they operate during the processes. That shows that our public servants are very well recognised all over the world.

The reason that we are opposing this legislation is the process. The Public Service Legislation Bill was referred to the Governance and Administration Committee just before Christmas, and I would like to acknowledge the chair, Dr Jian Yang. He took the initiative and immediately called for public submissions before the Parliament closed for the Christmas break. Then, in February, the Parliament was not reconvened, because of the COVID conditions around the country, and that really left us with no other option than to take submissions over Zoom meetings—whereas the Government instructed to all select committees that only those bills which are related to COVID should be addressed. But this bill was not related to COVID, but this bill, in a generation, was going to be revamped and realised, and we wanted the best outcome out of this. The select committee, I think, on both sides, whether it was Government members or Opposition members—their intention was to improve the bill. A lot of hard work was done, and I would like to acknowledge the officials for their support in improving this legislation. The departmental report was ready, which was discussed in the select committee at length, and a lot of changes were made during that period.

The only thing that was left was that the Parliamentary Counsel Office had to redo the bill and make the amendments in the bill. That opportunity was requested by us from the Opposition side, but the Government MPs declined that request. And that is where I think the process is lacking behind. This legislation—which would have been very good legislation, because a lot of hard work was put in during the select committee—could have gone through this whole process, the committee of the whole House and the third readings, in lesser time than what we have taken in this one day or so.

So I think the intention of the legislation is really good, but the process has been very shambolic. And that is why the National Party is opposing this legislation.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to rise in the third readings of the Public Service Legislation Bill and the Public Finance Amendment Bill, and offer the Green Party’s support for this incredibly important legislation. It has been good to hear the importance of this acknowledged by all speakers across the House, even those who have some issues with the legislation and may not be voting for it today. Actually, I think some of the really key components of the legislation will help transform the effectiveness of the Public Service to deliver. Their ability to deliver for our community seems to have been universally acknowledged, and I just want to acknowledge that today.

I, too, would like to add my voice to those of other members in this House in thanking the public servants who have been working so incredibly hard this entire term of Government, because there has been so much legislation going through, but particularly in response to COVID-19, where everything changed and normal ways of working had to be adapted. What I saw happen was some amazing collaboration between community and Government and between Government agencies that had never happened before, and it was all for the betterment of our community. I do want to acknowledge, though, that I suspect there are many public servants who are looking forward to a holiday and a slowing down in the pace, because it has been really tough and relentless. But the standard of work that at least I have seen has not slipped at all, and that is a huge credit to them.

So in terms of the legislation and the reasons that the Greens are supporting this, it is about, I guess, codifying what we may all have understood as some of those core principles in our Public Service and the principles of political neutrality and free and frank advice and merit-based appointments and open government and stewardship. I think they’re principles that we all thought were in there, and it’s good to get them now on paper and to make sure that they are entrenched in the work of the Public Service—the creation of the sense of people working for different agencies that now actually, rather than identification with the agency, it’s identification with the function of a public servant, and that core role that I know many feel of actually working for the people of this country rather than one siloed agency or Minister. It’s about the betterment of our country and it’s great to see those changes being made here.

I did hear some of the Opposition critiques around this being a missed opportunity, and a point was raised that they’d wanted to have fiscal responsibility or some other phrasing of that in those principles. The Greens were happy not to support that suggestion, because I think the way that that seemed to have been interpreted over the last nine years, I would say, has given us a sense that most people recognise it hasn’t delivered for the country: a workforce crisis within teaching and health and social work, and within our community sector hospitals, which are virtually crumbling around the staff trying to care for patients within them; where courts haven’t had their basic systems upgraded and they’re still working with huge piles of paper, and actually putting people’s safety at risk; fire stations with portaloos that are falling over; aged-care facilities without basic staffing standards that are putting our parents’ and grandparents’ lives and everyday wellbeing at risk; a fundamental health crisis; where the previous Government’s first view of fiscal responsibility meant that they thought the priority was Housing New Zealand, returning a surplus to the Government rather than building State houses. That is not a view that we want entrenched in legislation. That is not a view that we believe serves our country or strengthens the ethos of public service. We want the values and the outcomes to be up front and centre and are pleased to see that that is the general approach within this legislation.

I do want to spend, too, a few minutes talking about the different forms of Government arrangements that are enabled through this legislation, which enables interdepartmental executive boards consisting of chief executives working towards a common outcome, who will now become individually and collectively responsible for that board’s work. That’s about getting joined-up leadership. And I feel as if I can speak to this from personal experience, as acknowledged by Grant Robertson, around this Government’s acknowledgement that domestic violence and sexual violence—when we looked at all of our efforts over decades as a country to try and address those entrenched forms of violence, we saw that we’d struggled to sustain our efforts and we’d struggled to make a difference for people in our community.

One of the key reasons for that was the organisation of Government, that each agency was doing its own bit in isolation from each other. And quite often we had cases—I think it was Justice and Corrections, who were funders for non-violence programmes, and they came up with two entirely different programmes. It was the same community provider on the ground delivering the programmes to the same people, but they were expected to provide two different models of intervention with people. And that just doesn’t make sense and undermines people’s efforts to change. As Government, we need to line up our ducks. We need to actually create a coherent response to this form of violence that is centred around people’s lived realities, not just the priorities of any one agency. That is what we are in the process of doing with the joint venture.

I want to acknowledge what a big change that is for all of our Government agencies, where we know that we have teams within agencies who don’t even know what each other is doing, and now we’re trying to create understanding and collaboration across all of Government. That’s a massive job. We’re not all the way there yet by any means, but we’re making real progress. And we saw that during COVID, where the prevention responses around recognising that there was likely to be increased risk of family and sexual violence through lockdown—so Oranga Tamariki and ACC and the Ministry of Social Development came together to look at actually what kind of prevention messages could they each put out there that would make sense together, how they could each ensure that the organisations that they were supporting were able to keep delivering and were supported to do that. They worked with Civil Defence and Emergency Management to help them check in on people and make sure they were safe. We had no mechanism to do that before.

That kind of way of working is how we make a difference for people’s lives in our community. It’s so important for domestic and sexual violence. It’s also critical for issues like climate change. That is fundamentally why the Greens are so pleased to be supporting this legislation. Even while we would like to see some iteration in the future, the inclusion of national and international human rights, as suggested by the Human Rights Commission, and the pay equity principles included in the good employer section of the legislation—they are the steps that we think come next. But this is a really good start and we look forward to working constructively across Government and the entire Public Service for the betterment of our communities.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, for this opportunity to contribute briefly on the Public Service Legislation Bill, which, of course, has been split into two separate bills. Others on this side of the House have noted the shortened process as compared with the very large piece of legislation in front of us, and made unfavourable comments about the extent to which that would seem inappropriate for the purpose of scrutiny and so on. I won’t belabour that point, but I do state it for the record. On the other side of the House, we have heard a point that I think was actually pretty well made about the significance of the phrase “public servant”. I do just want to pause at this point and acknowledge with thanks those who work with and for our country to improve the lives of many of its citizens—and I used the term “citizen” pretty broadly—to the betterment of us all. So I do want to acknowledge and thank those who are directly affected by the legislation and, indeed, those who have helped put it together.

But I would say it seems a bit of a strange argument for the Minister of State Services to be placing quite so much emphasis on the importance of the phrase “public servant” as opposed to “State servant”, suggesting that the name “State servant” would imply that such people are not serving the people directly but instead serving the State. Well, if that’s the case, then officers of Parliament are not performing a function that’s directly useful to people but rather merely serving the Parliament, and Ministers of the Crown likewise, presumably, would be thought to be serving only an abstract entity and not the people of the country. Opinion may differ on the extent to which any given Minister of the Crown is indeed serving the people, but that’s not a territory for this debate—and, of course, we can have some fun on that matter in the upcoming couple of months and not the upcoming couple of minutes.

So I’ll just echo a couple of comments made by others on this side of the House rueing the lost opportunity to improve interconnectedness between and within local government and central government—and others have made similar points along the lines of those colleagues who have emphasised the importance of fiscal prudence. We made a specific suggestion regarding an amendment for that. I suppose the other side might reasonably say, “Well, of course, it should be obvious to any public servant or, indeed, any politician that fiscal responsibility should be one of the aims of the exercise that they are conducting.” Of course, that’s the case with all these principles: they’re all stating the obvious to some extent. But the purpose of the exercise is to put in black and white the kinds of things that should be taken into account on each and every occasion.

I don’t think I’ll probably be able to add much more to the debate either in terms of time or value, so, at that point, I’ll say that I join with colleagues on this side of the House and reflect the position that we’ve already stated in relation to the bills.