Offices of Parliament — Address to Governor-General

I move, That a respectful Address be presented to Her Excellency the Governor-General commending to Her Excellency the alterations to the appropriations for the 2020-21 financial year in respect of Vote Audit, Vote Ombudsmen, and Vote Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, and the estimates of expenses and capital injection for the 2021-22 financial year in respect of Vote Audit, Vote Ombudsmen, and Vote Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment.

This is an annual event that the Parliament goes through. It concerns the appropriations for our three Officers of Parliament: the Controller and Auditor-General, the Ombudsmen, and the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. It sets out any alterations to their appropriations for the current year. This, for every other Government entity, is done through Supplementary Estimates. Officers of Parliament are subject to a different process—this process, and I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a moment. And it also sets out the main appropriations that will be included in the main Appropriation Bill that the Minister of Finance will introduce on Budget day. The process maintains the independence of the Officers of Parliament. It is not the Government that sets the budget or that agrees to the alterations to that budget for these entities; it is the Parliament as a whole. And that is what this motion is all about: maintaining the independence.

The proposals in the address have been examined by the Officers of Parliament Committee, which has the Speaker as its chairperson. The committee’s report explains the detail and it examines the issues behind the numbers proposed in the Address. It includes the fact that the Auditor-General is needing to retain skilled staff and deal with some remuneration issues there. It increases funding for the Ombudsmen in order to allow for them to inspect managed isolation and quarantine facilities and deal with complaints relating to COVID-19 and deal with security requirements from a significant increase in threatening approaches from aggrieved complainants. And with regard to the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, it addresses their main cost pressure, which is the need to find new premises.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. As the National member of Parliament on the Officers of Parliament Committee, I stand in support of this motion. I just want to challenge one Chris Bishop, who raised the importance of the Regulations Review Committee, which, I must say, compared to the Officers of Parliament Committee, pales in significance.

💬 Hon Chris Hipkins: I’m off—I can’t cope!

It is Thursday, by the way. As the Minister outlined, to maintain the independence of the Officers of Parliament, the Public Finance Act 1989 provides for funding for the Office of the Controller and Auditor-General, the Office of the Ombudsmen, and the Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, and this is to be determined by Parliament through the Officers of Parliament Committee, which we are debating today.

We received submissions from each office for the proposed alterations to their 2020-21 appropriations and their draft budgets for 2021 and 2022. For the Office of the Controller and Auditor-General it was very clear that COVID had disrupted the Auditor-General’s work programme. The alterations that we are debating today in this motion allow for the transfers to the 2021-22 budget for the Auditor-General to conduct and continue this work.

For the Office of the Ombudsmen, we support the transfer between budgets, 2020-21 to 2021-22 due to the impact of COVID on these officers and their work plan as well. For the Office of the Ombudsmen, I’d also like to acknowledge the work that they are undertaking, have undertaken, and will undertake in the future with these budgets into the 32 managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) facilities that the Government has set up in response to COVID. The Office of the Ombudsmen goes in and inspects these MIQ facilities. We support their bid for increased funding to continue the great work they do.

Finally, for the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, we support their increased funding to allow the commission to secure suitable permanent accommodation. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. The Green Party supports this motion. The Ombudsmen, the Auditor-General, and the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment all provide very valuable services, not just to this Parliament but to our democracy and to Aotearoa more broadly. It is obviously clear, looking at these appropriations, that COVID-19 has affected their work programmes, as obviously it’s affected everybody’s work programmes in the country, so I just want to recognise the public servants who work for those officers who have continued to work for New Zealand during this time—and, actually, not just for New Zealand, because they do play a role in the Pacific as well, supporting democracy in our Pacific region. So the Auditor-General is the auditor for the Governments of Niue and Tokelau and the secretary-general of the Pacific Association of Supreme Audit Institutions. The Auditor-General also seconds a staff member to the Solomon Islands. I think, given how disruptive COVID-19 has been to the Pacific as well, that support is important and necessary, and I thank them for continuing to do it.

It is clear, in our view, that actually the Officers of Parliament don’t have the kind of resources that they need to do their job as effectively as they could if they were properly resourced. So, for example, when Governments and their agencies misuse the Official Information Act, the Ombudsman needs the resources to be able to take action on behalf of the public and their right to that information.

The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, under several commissioners over many years, has built a strong, bipartisan support as a champion of the environment. The Parliamentary Commissioners for the Environment (PCEs) never pull their punches—no PCE has—and they’ve provided us with very valuable information and analysis to move environmental policy forward. Their work around pest control really helped to settle the debate around what it is that we need to do there, around fracking, and, of course, they were instrumental in helping lay the groundwork for the zero carbon Act and for the support right across the House for the zero carbon Act. So they have assisted all of us in this House and in previous Parliaments to do our job better. Therefore, as we think about future appropriations I think we need to really interrogate whether they have the resources to do that job as effectively as they might otherwise. Because, I mean, their appropriations in the grand scheme of things are pretty tiny, and I think that we could look at that.

We are building up some pretty good environmental law here in Aotearoa. I would like to say that if we were to fund the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment more, I would like to see them be empowered to take stronger action on behalf of the environment. Environmental legal aid is tiny and clearly isn’t enough to support those kinds of actions on behalf of community groups who have to really beg and borrow and hold bake sales to take on huge and well-funded corporate polluters. I would argue that we should consider giving the PCE the power to fight for nature in the courts, so actually to take actions on behalf of the environment themselves, and I think that we need more powerful and more independent voices in our democracy in that sense.

I also want to raise something that is a bit of a hold-over from the last term, which is around whether we should have more Officers of Parliament. You may remember there were some discussions in the last term around creating an independent parliamentary budget office. Many countries have parliamentary budget offices of one form or another to support Parliament to better scrutinise the Government’s fiscal management, which is something that I think is in the interests of the Opposition, but also in terms of improving the performance of the Government itself. I’d like to see that work picked up again and I think that those kind of programmes ought to be debated on their merits. I think one of the issues that we have here is that we get sidetracked into arguments about whether an $11.7 billion fiscal hole may or may not exist when, if you had an institution like an independent parliamentary budget office, they could clear that right up, and I think that would be in, kind of, everybody’s interests. I’m sure I’m not the only one who saw the irony when the National Party first misunderstood the Green Party’s tax policy and then put out statements with incorrect maths. It would be helpful, I think, to the functioning of our democracy to have an independent parliamentary budget office so that we’re all operating off the same balance sheet, so to speak.

So I do hope that we are maybe able to make some progress on that, but I am pleased that this House today will continue to fund the Officers of Parliament that we do already have and I just want to close by again suggesting that we do look at those future appropriations and question whether or not we are funding our democracy to the extent that it deserves.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of ACT in support of this motion, which is about the appropriations for the Officers of Parliament. Like Matt Doocey before, I have the privilege of sitting in on and attending the Officers of Parliament Committee, and I think that now more than ever we need transparency for the public’s faith in our democracy. I think that is the strength that the Auditor-General’s and the Ombudsman’s offices have for our democracy. When we see things like the Government’s actions to do with managed isolation and quarantine and the border, that’s where the Auditor-General steps in, and I think we need to see more of that. I think we will be seeing more members of the public raising issues with how the Government has managed the borders, vaccinations, and a whole range of Government actions, and I think the Ombudsman’s office will be highly utilised. Therefore, I rise in support of transparency and for faith in our democracy. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Motion agreed, and Address agreed to.