Annual Reporting and Audit Time Frames Extensions Legislation Bill

I move, That the Annual Reporting and Audit Time Frames Extensions Legislation Bill be now read a third time.

I thank all members of the House for their contribution to this legislation. I want to put on record my particular appreciation to the ACT, Green, and Te Paati Māori representatives for the way that they have approached this very simple piece of legislation. None of us wants to be in the circumstances where we are passing legislation to extend statutory time frames in this way. However, the circumstances that we live in today and the world that we live in today occasionally dictates that we need to do this.

This is, as has been said a number of times, a simple bill. It is the same piece of legislation that was passed in this House with, I believe, unanimous support last year, but, clearly, something was different for some members of the House this year. But to all those members who were able to see the bill for what it was, I say thank you.

To reiterate, there are three specific reasons that the Auditor-General came to the Government and, in turn, the Government came to this House to create this extension. The first of those is the global shortage of auditors that we are facing. As we’ve said before, in New Zealand, there’s around a 200 auditor shortage; in Australia, around a 1,000 auditor shortage. All of this causes issues during the peak season for audits, where Audit New Zealand would normally have staff come in from other private sector agencies to support them in their audits, and all of those entities are challenged by the shortage that they face.

Secondly, the other reason is partly related to that. Ongoing border closures here in New Zealand, and indeed elsewhere around the world, have led to limited movement of auditors who might normally have come in during this period.

Then, thirdly, as has been addressed through the debate, there is the high level of staff turnover at Audit New Zealand, and, as I have said on a number of occasions during the debate, that may well be a matter that the Officers of Parliament Committee choose to take up at some point. I would note for members opposite that we were advised during this debate that on 11 March, the Auditor-General was in front of the Officers of Parliament Committee and he did raise the fact that he would be looking to raise audit fees in order to ensure that he was able to pay competitive salaries for auditors. It is audit fees—those fees charged to clients—that fund this; not a Government appropriation.

There isn’t a great deal more to add to the debate. We will, when this legislation passes, enable a two-month delay. The Auditor-General has been clear about his sense of prioritisation during that period that will see the financial statements of Government and the audits of those entities related to that all completed during the normal statutory time frame, and the same for large council organisations. The Auditor-General has committed to working closely with any entity who has specific circumstances that would require their audit to be done in the normal time frame, rather than the extended time frame that has been allowed for.

I’ll just finish my contribution picking up a matter that I spoke about during this morning’s proceedings, and that is the way that an Officer of Parliament and his office have been discussed during this debate. I do have some concerns as to what I have heard at times during this debate, and I would ask members, if they have concerns about those matters, to use the Officers of Parliament Committee as the appropriate place to do this. I am here today with this legislation on behalf, in a sense, of that office, with Cabinet having taken the decision that in order to get robust audits and in order to manage the wellbeing of the staff within the Audit Office, this is necessary. But underlying issues are ones that are best addressed via the Officers of Parliament Committee.

For those National MPs who will now return to their electorates, they will proudly be able to say that they managed to extend out a debate to make sure that they fought against a two-month extension to ensure that there were robust audits. They will proudly go to their electorates and go and say to them “That’s why we’re here.”, and that’s why the National Party languishes in the mid-20 percents in the polls.

Well, first of all, it’s good that we’re coming to the conclusion of this debate, and I just want to reiterate that from the National Party’s perspective, there are no concerns specifically with the Office of the Auditor-General. We acknowledge the good work that they do and they perform a very important function, so I just want to put that on the record—I said that in the first speech that I made—but this bill is not about this. This bill is about the Government using legislation under urgency to deal with an issue that every other business in New Zealand is facing. What I’d say in response to Mr Robertson’s last comment is when each of you—sorry. When each member from the Labour Party goes back to their electorates tonight, I would like you to consider asking every—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order!

I would like the members to consider asking at every business meeting they hold whether they thought it was appropriate that the Government should pass special legislation under urgency for one Government entity and, in respect of their own businesses and their own electorate, whether it is appropriate that they have to continue to tough it out—as the Government has said all along—with respect to saying, “If you’re short of staff,”—literally—“go and hire more people and pay them more, or just train up more people, and just tough it out.”

That’s the central issue: I would like the members to be able to be honest with the people in their electorates and the business owners that they will be talking to, and simply put that question and ask the point: is it fair that the Government should use special legislation under urgency but seeks not to address the systemic issue that each business faces in New Zealand when they’re short of staff? That is the central call of the debate that we’ve been having. It’s not that the Audit Office is not justified, not that they do a poor job, not that they’re slow in doing their work; it is the issue that the Government wants to pass legislation for one Government entity, but chooses not to address this huge issue, and the biggest issue facing all businesses across New Zealand, which is, namely, “I cannot get staff.” So they don’t have the opportunity to come and get special legislation, and that’s what I think is the biggest issue with this bill.

The way that it’s being done, under urgency, I think is a bit of an issue. If we had taken this bill to select committee, I think the select committee would have been inundated with every business community grouping: Business New Zealand, the Employers and Manufacturers Association, and individual businesses—we would have been overwhelmed. I put to you, as the members of this House, that the reason that this bill was passed through under urgency was to stop that process being made public and being open to the business community to be able to participate in this debate. I think the use of urgency to do this has been another issue that is of significance, and one that’s detrimental to democracy. So that is the first issue.

The second thing is: what are the mitigations? I’ve heard nothing from the Minister, and I realise it’s not the Minister’s principal role, but I’ve heard nothing from the Government members either, about some of the mitigations, and obviously Cabinet considered this issue. They had prior, advance warning. They were made aware of this back on 16 June, had time to consider it, and even had time to draft the legislation before making us aware of the issue. The big issue is what were the mitigations, and nothing has been put forward.

So we are well aware that the Audit Office is under pressure. We need to make sure that there’s adequate funding, and I think the Minister was slightly cute: there is an appropriation to Audit New Zealand—it totals about $15 million—and the greatest source of revenue that the Audit Office receive is actually through charging other Government agencies for the audit costs. So there is a way to make sure that there is sufficient funding that the Audit Office has to be able to attract and retain its staff, and it’s absolutely essential that it does so.

We’ve heard that in previous years there’s been loss of staff, and we’ve heard this year that it was 27. The issue is making sure that the Audit Office can pay sufficient money to make sure it can compete with the private sector, and that is a crucial issue, but we’ve heard nothing about that.

The other issue is around the managed isolation and quarantine facilities. We’ve heard—TV1 made the report on 3 July—that 2,000 spare rooms are available. I’m not suggesting for a moment that we need to make those all available to audit people, but if we need to bring in good people from overseas, there will be a certain cadre. If we’re short of 27 and you work on a ratio of 1:3 for seniors to juniors, that means there’s nine extra spaces required. Again, if that’s part of the mitigation, that should be contemplated. But, again, there’s been nothing from the Government members about some of those mitigations.

I think the biggest concern is this one about the Government thinking it can do one thing for itself but leave the wider business community facing the challenges every day, and we’re seeing it flow through into the business sector now. Many business owners you talk to now are saying how they’re losing contracts and they’re losing the opportunity to grow their business, but in many cases they’re going backwards because they cannot compete. We’ve heard from Mr Simon Watts that the hospitality sector has vacancy rates up near 20 percent, so that many places are having to be in the situation where they cannot offer the same level of service because they simply do not have the staff. That is bad for New Zealand, and, what’s worse, it’s actually very bad for both the staff that work at businesses, because of the time pressure and the added pressure that they have every day at work but also for the business owners in terms of the type of proposition they want to offer their customer and their ability to compete with everyone else.

I think there’s a serious deterioration in what’s happening. The biggest issue around this lack of access to adequate labour is just a massive issue for New Zealand, and I’m really worried about that. I think the Audit Office is just a small symbol of what is happening, and we need a Government that actually starts to recognise this issue and actually starts to address it comprehensively, and not just talk about other, wider issues and say to everyone else, “Just get on and tough it out.” I don’t think that’s an appropriate approach.

Kia ora, Madam Speaker. Look, I’ve really just one thing to say. The Opposition have raised questions about the management of the Audit Office, and, as the Minister said, there is a committee which is set aside for examination of Officers of Parliament, and it would be entirely appropriate for those questions to be put to the Auditor-General at that committee. I will look forward to seeing the report of those proceedings. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I can assure Dr Duncan Webb that that is exactly what will happen, but we’re not in the Officers of Parliament Committee; we are in Parliament. We are in the legislature, being asked as MPs to pass a piece of law—and that’s, essentially, what’s going to happen soon—but it is not consistent with good practice and good democracy that the Opposition simply rolls over and does the Government’s bidding. And the idea that the Minister of Finance is cajoling us to go back to our electorates and talk about what we did this week—I’ll tell you what we did this week: we stuck up for business. We stuck up for the inconsistency that exists between the “suck it up” approach by this Government to the severe staffing shortages that are a handbrake on this economy and a Government that gives itself a pass for teachers and for auditors. We will be going back to our home areas, and we will be highlighting that inconsistency and the ham-fisted approach that this Government is taking.

There is another, I think, concerning issue about that that needs to be drawn to the House’s attention. This is becoming a pattern. Since the end of 2017, the Labour-led Government has used urgency about a third more often than the Key-English Government—and Ms Genter can chuckle away. She was a lion in Opposition when it came to the use of urgency and shortened report-backs; now, she just chuckles and thinks we’re being silly. Well, that’s fickle; that’s inconsistent.

But it has gone up by about a third, as has the use of shortened select committee consideration, because this Government doesn’t think submissions on bills and making bills better is part of parliamentary business. They think that it’s an irritant, a distraction from their centralist, socialist agenda, and that if they don’t like something, they can just change it—they don’t need to consult.

We have spent the last 18 hours considering a bill that hasn’t gone to consultation, where good ideas, suggested changes, and amendments to it that bring the bill into line with the policy intent were just dismissed as a distraction and filibustering. Well, that goes to the arrogance of this Government—arrogant and out of touch—because New Zealanders up and down the country who run their plumbing firms, who pick fruit, and who export actually pay for the public services that the Government so readily dips their hands into the pockets of New Zealanders to actually pay for. But they don’t want to help those businesses. They only want to help themselves, and that is a shame.

Now, I want to touch on a couple of things that were just briefly raised in the committee of the whole House that I don’t think were adequately addressed. One is the ability of this Parliament to scrutinise the annual reports of Parliament. The Minister dismisses that as not relevant, but the reality is that select committees will not be receiving a significant chunk of the annual reports until next year. Now, it’s customary—and the Minister has been around this place for nearly 13 years; he knows this—that that period between the end of October and the Christmas recess is actually quite a busy one for select committees as they get a jump-start on the financial review process. It’s often that they use the smaller entities to review in that period, because the larger ones actually have quite a bit more work up, and those are done, usually, in early February to March. That isn’t going to be able to happen next year, again—again—and one of two things will need to happen. Either select committees will have to defer other important work or they will have to undertake fewer financial reviews—fewer annual reviews of Crown entities—and that undermines this place’s ability to scrutinise the executive.

So for him to dismiss that as just simply a red herring is quite wrong. Regardless of whether he will, I will be asking for the Business Committee and the Standing Orders Committee to consider whether or not there should be an extension of time for this House—a similar extension of time to the one that the Government has just given itself for audits—and for the select committees to do their job. What’s good for the goose should be good for the gander. So we should not have our role in this place undermined by this Government’s failure to ensure that it can meet its legislative time frames, because it’s not the Auditor-General’s legislative time frames; it’s the Government’s legislative time frames. So in letting itself off the hook, it is putting pressure on this place.

The Minister also mentioned, apparently, that Australia has done this. Well, I’ve looked very hard and I can’t see a thing in reference to the Australian audit office providing relief to Crown entities and public sector entities in Australia with the same thing. So I will keep looking, but I think it’s rather inconsistent. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission definitely has similar relief to the Financial Markets Authority, but I can’t see any reference to the thing that Mr Robertson said in interjection on Mr Luxon about the Australian Government and public entities.

So we’re a bit of an outlier. We are just about to pass a piece of legislation that will provide relief for two years without any other plan, and—as Mr Nash interjected on me—this is the plan: just kick the can down the road. No insight into how the problem is going to be fixed. No insight into how it’s going to be prevented from happening again. No insight into how, other than the audits, the work of the Auditor-General is going to be reprioritised five minutes after the finance committee received the annual plan for 2021-22. That’s now a doorstop, because it clearly isn’t going to be able to be embarked on, or, if it is, there may be further delays in audits. So I think we were owed an explanation that did not come.

No recruitment strategy ideas, no graduate recruitment, no retention strategy, and I should also note for the House’s interest that the section of Vote Audit 2021 in relation to audit and assurance activities has gone down this year compared with last year. Now, I’m not sure why that is, but it seems highly unusual that when the salaries of auditors working for Audit New Zealand are such an issue, the vote should actually go down.

So more questions than answers, no plan, and a ham-fisted process. We’re here on Thursday morning, and the reason we are here has nothing to do with the Opposition. The Opposition is doing its job. It’s the Government that’s at fault, it’s the Government that has brought us here, and it’s the Government that continues to use urgency, time and time again, to fix its own mistakes—arrogant and out of touch.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I just want to speak simply, because this is a simple piece of legislation. At the request of the Auditor-General, it has come to the House as the primary legislation does not have the discretion to allow for an extension of time. Companies have the ability to file an extension of time for their annual returns. Companies also have the ability to file an extension of time for their annual tax returns. So it’s an appropriate forum that it comes to the House, given it is for the Crown’s accounts.

I’d like to thank the members of the ACT Party and the Green Party for supporting this prudent piece of legislation. I commend this bill to the House.

I just want to acknowledge the excellent contributions made by the Labour members, including Barbara Edmonds, the one who just sat down. The Green Party is supporting this legislation. We didn’t support the use of urgency, but we support the legislation. It would have been great if it could have been a truncated process, but I understand that that wasn’t due to the Government; it was due to a lack of an agreement to get a truncated process. I’m really genuinely curious to know what the National Party thinks they would do differently to have avoided this situation.

I’m also intrigued by the claim by the Hon Michael Woodhouse around the use of urgency, and I’d be interested to know how much of the use of urgency was directly related in the last term and this term to a COVID response, as opposed to the first term of the last National Government in 2008 to 2011, when urgency was used extremely often and not to respond to a very unusual global pandemic but just—you know. I’m sure that they’ll stand up and list some numbers that are questionable, but, genuinely speaking, I don’t believe that this Government has abused the use of urgency. We’ve been facing quite difficult circumstances with COVID-19, and of course the Government has managed that incredibly well. All around the world, people look to New Zealand to see how well this Government has managed COVID-19. Again, this—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order!

—extension of time, which is due—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! The member will resume her seat. This is a third reading of this bill. Speaker’s ruling 128(8) provides: “Members must confine themselves to the main purposes and contents of the bill; they must deal at length with matters not provided for in the bill.”

As I was literally saying as you stood up to speak, in this bill, what it provides for is an extension of time for the auditors, which had to be passed last time and has to be passed this time directly due to the impacts of COVID-19. That is the purpose of this legislation, that is the reason we’re passing it, and that’s all I have to say. I commend the bill to the House.

Damien Smith—a five-minute call.

ACT supports this bill. This is different from Immigration New Zealand as a dysfunctional department, and we don’t see that in the Auditor-General’s office. We do believe this should have been seen coming, and we do actually believe that the Auditor-General is open, but the border closure has been a significant impact on the skill shortage, and in that sense, the short-term contracts and insufficient auditor capacity is understandable. It’s not necessarily the Auditor-General’s fault.

We do have some issues around the two-year period, but the Auditor-General has given us confidence that if it moves statutory deadlines, then the resources will be allocated to ensure that larger, more significant audits are completed, as outlined in the letter, which I haven’t seen, between Mr Bayly and Mr Robertson. So the Office of the Auditor-General can also do this without compromising or breaching statutory deadlines.

To conclude, this is obviously a bill that probably no one wanted to have to bring to the House, but it is the situation, and with regards to the shortage of critical skills, there may have been a planning and allocation issue that should have been addressed by the Auditor-General’s office. So, today, we have been pragmatic about getting this work done and we’ve been pragmatic about the solution that’s required to have the Auditor-General’s office alleviate that backlog.

We are watching a beleaguered and isolated Opposition watching on while the rest of this House—as evidenced by Damien Smith, the previous speaker—take a very pragmatic and flexible approach to getting on with the business of running this country. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Well, that was certainly not Churchillian. There might have been a number of other labels that former speech from the previous speaker could have got.

I’m going to focus on something positive with this Annual Reporting and Audit Time Frames Extensions Legislation Bill. The positive—and I’ve spent a bit of time thinking about this—I’ve found in it is that actually, at long last, we are now in July of 2021 and the Government has realised there are skills shortages out in New Zealand. Their management of immigration and in allowing for skilled people to come into New Zealand—it’s finally dawned on them that it’s a real issue. The rest of us have been saying this for months. I don’t know about other members, but it is certainly coming through my door. I’ve got business after business coming in and saying, “I can’t get the people I need. I can’t get the people I need because the Government won’t allow these people across the border.”

So now we end up with the Auditor-General’s office that suddenly doesn’t have enough auditors to carry out their audits. This won’t have happened overnight; this will have been coming for quite some time. Why wasn’t it managed properly? Well, we’ll have to sheet that back to the Minister, and it wasn’t the Minister that was in the chair previously; it’s actually the Speaker of the House who has that responsibility. So that has to go back to the Speaker. One of the tenets of managing anything is to ensure you’re on top of all of the resources that you should have to deploy—not you, Madam Speaker.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Not the Speaker.

Any manager does. But this hasn’t happened on this occasion, and we’re now here, going through urgency yet again on a piece of legislation that wouldn’t have been needed if they had been on top of their game, but they weren’t.

I’ll go back to one of the things that I think is really important about this bill. If an entity such as the Climate Change Commission, who is about to go to court through a judicial review challenging their processes—if there are delays in their audit, I think there could be very serious things that are being overlooked. We just simply don’t know, of course. I don’t have any great suspicions, but there could be. What entities are they not going to audit in a timely manner? We don’t know. We don’t know about a whole lot of things that could actually be very serious for New Zealand.

This is a serious issue. In relation to the Climate Change Commission, one of their commissioners is also a research fellow with an entity that is a major contractor to the Climate Change Commission. I would love to know what’s gone on there. All of—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order!

—the audit procedures would—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order! Well, I was going to bring the member back to the bill, but he pre-empted me. Thank you.

You’re welcome, Madam Speaker. Well, sometimes it takes a little while to fill the story out.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Well, not too long.

But, actually, all of the processes that go on behind the scenes, that is exactly what an auditor would look at in an audit of the Climate Change Commission. Any other entity could be the same. This is something we must have confidence in. It’s an entity whose decisions are going to impact everybody’s—well, not their decisions, but their recommendations are going to impact everybody’s lives. We have to have confidence in that. How can we have confidence in it if we aren’t sure that they’ve been audited in a timely manner? I’ve put up a tabled amendment to ensure that they were exempted from this bill, but, unfortunately, it didn’t get past the Government, who decided not to allow it.

💬 Chris Bishop: Very frustrating.

It’s very frustrating, and other entities will be the same. You know, if we look at the councils, which of those are going to go off the list, and how does the Auditor-General choose, because, quite likely, the surprises will be exactly that—surprises. It won’t be the ones you suspect.

💬 Chris Penk: No, you don’t know until you audit them.

Not until you audit them.

💬 Maureen Pugh: The smaller ones, without the staff.

Well, all of the businesses that I have coming in my door can’t get skilled staff. There’s been a deaf ear turned from Government—“Just pay more.” Well, perhaps if they’d paid more for the Office of the Auditor-General for staff, they wouldn’t have lost all their staff to the big four audit companies.

It’s an essential service that has to be done here. Everybody else has to manage with the resources they have, and so should the Auditor-General’s office. The Minister responsible has been asleep at the wheel, and we’re all paying for it.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. To accuse the Government of not engaging when the National Party couldn’t even be bothered to speak on Steph Lewis’ extremely important biosecurity bill is just an unfunny joke. I commend this bill to the House. Thank you.

The National Party is taking this bill very seriously because when Parliament is asked to set aside the statutory requirements for an Officer of Parliament, it is a serious matter. While the Government has repeatedly in third reading speeches—from, particularly, the Minister responsible—used the shield of COVID-19 as an all-cover expression for almost anything they do, and in this case this setting aside of a statutory deadline, the reality is that we have not had widespread lockdown in the last 12 months, and we have also not had the sort of indication from the Auditor-General’s office that there was a problem with the process. For the Minister to come into the House yesterday, put us into urgency, then come through the committee stage, and then in his third reading speech continue to say “Nothing to see here—move on.” is completely wrong. Parliament is being asked to excuse an Officer of Parliament for their inability to meet their statutory requirements.

Now, if there was any other Government agency where there was this sort of failure, there would be some very serious questions being asked about the management of the organisation. That has been totally skirted over here, with the Minister of Finance simply saying, “It’ll be all OK. Most of it will get done on time. They just need a bit of an extension.” Well, the question is: where has the problem been caused? Why is the Audit Office losing staff at the rate that they are? Why is it, in these supposedly uncertain times, that this is an office that has lost 41 people, or around about—what’s that—just over 20 percent of their staff in the last 12 months? Why is it that they’ve only been able to replace half of them, and they are now some 27 staff members down?

Those are the sorts of questions that should have been teased out in a select committee process. Having the Minister simply listening to the Auditor-General and saying “Yes, you’re quite right. We’ll just ram it through Parliament.”, and then, today, reading out a letter written to the Opposition by the chief executive, full of assumptions about what our position should be, is simply ignoring the fact that it’s his failure to meet his statutory guidelines that’s the problem.

There are members over there who’ve only been in Parliament literally for five minutes, saying, “Oh, this doesn’t matter. It’s all OK, it’s only a short extension.”—well, it does matter. It does matter. Process matters, because democracies stand on their ability to withstand the scrutiny of process, and when a democracy decides “No, we’re just going to use the big 65 majority to do what we want.”, then that is very, very concerning.

The Minister said today that the appropriate place for some of these questions to be asked was the select committee: the Officers of Parliament Committee. Well, I agree with him. So why wasn’t this bill sent there, even for a short time? What was the necessity to jackboot it through the House the way it has been over the last 24 hours? It’s very hard to understand. In that committee, there could have been a greater analysis of the problem that the auditor appears to have in holding on to staff. There could have been a better understanding of the so-called, and it’s just been thrown up in this debate and I think it was just snatched out of the air—the international shortage of auditors. The international shortage of auditors.

Then, of course, the comparator with Australia: well, we’re 200 short; Australia is 1,000 short. Well, Australia’s population is about five times ours, so that’s proportionately exactly right, but are they having to do the sort of things that we’re talking about? The Minister sat there shaking his head. “Yes they are.”, he said. “Yes they are.” We can’t find it anywhere—not a mention of it anywhere. Not on the Australian parliamentary website, not in any of their news stuff—nowhere.

So there we have a Minister on the one hand saying the select committee is the place to ask these questions, but, on the other, denying the opportunity for the select committee to, in fact, make those investigations. Here’s a question for the Government members: there are eight members on that committee, it’s made up of all parties in the House—it’s the Officers of Parliament Committee. Three of those members come from the National Party. The balance are from either parties that are loosely associated with the Opposition, or Government-supporting parties, so the Government has a majority. A simple question: if there were to be an inquiry put up, would the Labour Government support that inquiry? Not a chance—not a chance. Why would they want to shoot themselves in the foot and, effectively, admit that they’ve failed in the process that we’re dealing with here today?

I heard the Green member Julie Anne Genter, in a very uncharacteristically angry speech, saying that we should all just kick this through once again because of COVID19. Well, I have to say to her that COVID-19 will not continue to be the shield for all things bad for much longer. Madam Speaker, it’s a little off the point, but one only has to look at the vaccination programme to see that New Zealand is now equal with India—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order!

Well, I’m coming to the audit on it—I’m coming to the audit on it.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): The member will resume his seat. It is a little off the point, so I would encourage and thank the member, who is going to come back to the third reading of this bill.

Madam Speaker, I’m not happy with that intervention, because I was saying that one only has to look at that and its relationship to—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order! The member will not reflect on the Chair. I’m warning him not to do that again.

The Auditor-General should be having a close look at the health ministry and its handling, for example, of the COVID-19 vaccine roll-out. New Zealand is now on a par with India, just a little bit below—or, actually, quite a bit below—Kazakhstan, and well below Belize and a number of other countries that my colleagues will be releasing in the next few days to show the need for the auditor to be on the case.

So why are we doing this? If it’s all possible, as the Minister has said, to get most of it through on time, where were the difficult ones? Why have we got a bill that actually gives him and his office the freedom over the next, really, about 15 or 16 months to take their time and decide which they will and which they won’t, and, I’ve got to say, the letter that was sent that had a so-called priority in it is not something that can be relied on, because the letter, as I said before, was full of assumptions that were totally wrong.

So I’ve also had people contact me in the last 24 hours saying “OK, it’s a shortage, and the Opposition is saying more auditors should have come into the country. But we’ve been trying for weeks to get a place in MIQ.”, even though there are some 2,000 beds apparently periodically available, and that’s a job for the auditor also. Why is that happening? Why is there no connect between the largely Government-owned airline that brings people into the country and the managed isolation and quarantine system? No one talks one to the other, there is no central planning, and they are the sorts of things an auditor should be doing. The idea that we’re going to say, “Well, we’re just going to give them a bit more time to come up with these things. Parliament’s sort of slightly interested, but we’ll let it go for another couple of months.” is, in my view, quite an abdication of the responsibilities that this Parliament has.

Had it been a select committee process where there could have been a determination about the priorities that were needed in the auditor’s office, there may have been a different result for us. But, as far as it goes, it is the Government determining they don’t want to have the scrutiny on them that they should have, and allowing all of this to go through, through this extra time period, is a huge disrespect of this House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m thrilled to be the last speaker on this bill, because it has been an absolutely arduous task listening to the waffling and the irrelevancies from the Opposition. I commend the ACT Party and the Green Party for making constructive contributions and even holding people to account in a thoughtful way. That did not happen today from the National Party, who made submissions on such things as whether apples would ripen on trees. This is irrelevant, and not very helpful, is it, gentlemen?

Thank you very much. I commend this bill to the House.