Charities Amendment Bill

I present a legislative statement on the Charities Amendment Bill.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Poto Williams): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Hon PRIYANCA RADHAKRISHNAN: I move, That the Charities Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

Kia orana, Madam Speaker. I am pleased to be taking the Charities Amendment Bill through its final stage in this House. I am confident that passing this bill will help Aotearoa’s charities to thrive while maintaining public accountability and transparency. The third reading of this bill is timely. It was just last week we celebrated Te Wiki Tūao ā-Motu—National Volunteer Week. The work that volunteers do in charities and other organisations requires significant time and effort, and passing this bill is a great way to honour and value the collective energy and mana of volunteers across Aotearoa New Zealand.

We saw again this year the real strength of communities coming together. Weather events like the Auckland floods and Cyclone Gabrielle have put people’s lives at risk, flooded homes, destroyed businesses, and closed schools. Many charities continue to be at the forefront of the response and the recovery. Charities have always been there when we needed them the most. They provide services that keep people safe, help them recover and heal, allow them to live with dignity, strengthen their mana, and support them to thrive. It is time for us to help them by removing barriers and facilitating their work.

I come from the charitable sector prior to Parliament, and I’ve heard directly from many charities that this bill will make a difference, and that’s why I’m proud to lead a bill that will help charities to assist our country. This bill makes practical improvements to the Act to make sure that legislative settings are still fit for purpose after almost two decades. The operating environment for our charitable sector has undergone significant change since the Act came into force. The disestablishment of the Charities Commission, the introduction of new reporting requirements, and changes to other legislation that charities need to comply with have prompted the need for another look at this Act.

I’d like to touch once more on the impact that the bill makes. The bill will make it easier for charities to comply with their financial reporting obligations by empowering the chief executive to exempt small charities from the onerous reporting standards. For small charities, this will reduce their compliance burden and allow them to dedicate more of their time to delivering their day-to-day mahi.

Currently, charities must file an appeal to the High Court if they wish to appeal a decision of the regulator. This appeal route can be inaccessible to many charities, given the costs, the complexities, and the time associated with taking appeals to the courts. The bill expands the jurisdiction of the Taxation Review Authority to hear first appeals under the Act. When hearing charities’ appeals, the authority will be known as the Taxation and Charities Review Authority. This change will improve charities’ access to justice by making it less costly and less complex to appeal decisions.

The wider legislative and operating environment for charities has also changed over the years. The charitable sector and the wider public rely on the regulator to make transparent, clear decisions based on best practice. The bill takes clear steps to reflect this. Because of the bill, charities will have more opportunity to have a say about decisions that affect them and give them more time to engage in the decision-making process.

We know that charities can vary in legal structure and, as a result, be subject to other obligations under other legislation. I’m pleased that the bill clarifies what it means to be an officer and what the role of an officer is. The impact of this will be far reaching and, I believe, removes the doubt about what an officer’s role is under the Charities Act. The bill also makes several changes to compliance and enforcement tools so that they are fit for purpose. Overall, the amendments that the bill makes are going to make the Charities Act a more accessible and transparent regulatory framework. At the same time, changes to the bill will help make it easier for the more than 28,000 charities that are registered under the Charities Act and help them to thrive.

As Minister for the Community and Voluntary Sector, I have been proud to lead this bill through all of its stages and I’d like to acknowledge everyone who has contributed along the way to its success. I will start by acknowledging my predecessors who started the work to modernise the Charities Act: firstly, the Hon Peeni Henare in 2018, and then you, Madam Speaker, the Hon Poto Williams in 2019 and 2020. Thank you for building solid foundations for this mahi to happen.

I would also like to thank the Social Services and Community Committee and its chair, Angie Warren-Clark, for the constructive consideration of the bill. I appreciate the time the committee took to understand this bill and the views of submitters, and I thank those who attended meetings, made submissions to the committee, and engaged with officials. Your suggestions have helped improve this bill.

Last, but definitely not the least, I’d like to thank the charities sector. The charities sector in Aotearoa New Zealand has strong public support due to their extraordinary contribution to communities across the country, from education to religious services, from health to social services, among many other sectors. Furthermore, our charities are great ambassadors of Aotearoa’s values of kindness, justice, and equality. More than 3,000 registered charities have reported overseas activities, most of them across the South Pacific, strengthening our links with tangata moana. More than 208,000 volunteers contribute approximately 1.7 million hours per week, and more than 98,000 people work full-time in the charitable sector.

I’d like to express my most heartfelt gratitude and thanks to all these people doing so much for others—people that very generously give their time and their energy and their passion to make a difference in our communities. Our country thrives and is enriched by their goodwill and open-handed commitment in every community. To all of them, I say ka nui te mihi—thank you very much indeed. The Charities Amendment Bill will benefit, therefore, not just charities but rather our entire society and our nation as a whole. I’d like to acknowledge that with a whakataukī that speaks to the importance of nourishing our communities with care: manaaki whenua, manaaki tangata, haere whakamua—care for the land, care for the people, and together we will progress. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Usually, at the third reading of a bill, it’s quite nice to stand in this House and offer some words of support for organisations that do enormous good work in our society and in our communities, and those are, of course, represented by the charitable sector. Regrettably, on this occasion at the third reading of this legislation, my National Party colleagues and I can’t support this legislation, because the Minister who has just resumed her seat takes a leaf out of former Prime Minister Dame Jacinda Ardern’s playbook, which is warm, soothing words that actually make no tangible, real difference other than minor tweaking. If there is a hallmark of this Government’s administration it is that fine, smooth, warm words are no corollary for actually delivering what they said they would promise to deliver and what they actually haven’t delivered.

So it’s important for people listening to this debate to, I think, understand a little of the history of it. Back in 2017, the Labour Party campaigned on what they called a first-principles review of the Charities Act, and that’s indeed what we thought they were going to do. As the Minister who’s just resumed her seat has pointed out, there has been a revolving door, a succession, of Ministers responsible for this portfolio, and each one of them hasn’t really been able to progress it in any sensible, reasonable way. The best they got, actually, was nothing close to a first-principles review. What they got, actually, was a review conducted by the Department of Internal Affairs, which was, effectively, a review of its self, its business unit, the charity services—hardly independent and hardly going to what, I think, most New Zealanders would understand as a first-principles review.

Now, in a previous life, I had the privilege and the honour of being the chief executive of a charitable organisation, a children’s charity, a very good one: the Make-A-Wish Foundation. I was, for a period of time before coming to this House, literally a professional wish-granter. That was quite a good thing to do. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It did good work. As I say, it’s a very good charity. An organisation like Make-A-Wish represents all that is good and decent about the charitable sector and what they do. I understand the rules, the regulations, the red tape, the administrative requirements that are imposed upon charities, because they need to be accountable, they need to be transparent, and they need to be able to justify the money that they receive, the support they receive, to their donors, to their volunteers, and to the recipients of the good work that they do. Those things are important.

Notwithstanding the very good work of the vast majority of charities, there are some that occasionally get it a bit wrong. So we need to have a framework that is open and that is transparent—those are words, also, that the Labour Government used to use; they don’t use those words any more. But those are ideals and objectives that I think every member in this House would think should apply to the charitable sector.

But what this piece of legislation does is little more than minor tweaks—little more than minor tweaks, and that’s a shame. That’s a real shame because there are some changes that are required and some updating of the original principal Act, and I think we’d all recognise that. But to come to this House now, at this bill’s third reading, and stand in the Chamber, and say, as the Minister who’s just resumed her seat did, that this is somehow going to be transformative, that this is going to be a piece of legislation that is going to do what the Labour Party said they were going to do back in 2017—well, that’s just not an accurate reflection of what this piece of legislation before the House, that we’re voting on for a third reading this time, does. It’s a very narrow piece of work.

Now, again, just thinking about the historic perspectives of charities and charitable purposes that do a community and societal good, charitable purposes are steeped in the history and annals of our democracy, really. They go back to medieval times, long before there was a welfare State, long before there were the kind of supports that are in place by Governments and taxpayers for people who might find life difficult and who are struggling. So if you go back to the original common law history of charitable purpose, it’s quite well defined. But over the years, that definition has been interpreted in a way that involves better accountability, better transparency, and justified openness of the charities that do the work and collect the money and do the good. Does this bill actually assist them in any sensible way? The answer to that has to be: no.

The bill states, as its objectives, that they want to enable simpler financial reporting for small charities. Well, that’s good, but is it transformational? No. Improving access to justice for charities and the appeals process. Well, that’s laudable, does the bill achieve that? The answer: really, no. Enhancing regulator decision-making requirements to further promote transparency and fairness. Again, warm, soothing words typical of this current Labour Government but actually failing to deliver. Clarifying the role of officers and supporting governance of charities and improving regulatory compliance and enforcement tools. Again, warm, soothing words not matched by the black-letter law that is this piece of amending legislation.

So we on this side of the House are actually very disappointed because it has been years—it’s been six long years, actually, of a promise having been made and then, progressively through that period of six years, more promises being made—“Yes, we’re working on it. Yes, we’re doing something.”, what have you—the revolving door of Ministers, each one having to come to terms and pick up the piece of work that was left by his or her predecessor, and then we get presented with this. In the dying days—in the dying days—of this Labour administration, we get this. Well, what a let-down that is to the sector. What a let-down it is to those people who in 2017 thought that the Labour Party would come good on its promise to have a first-principles review of the Charities Act. They honestly believed that that’s what they were going to get. That’s what they thought they were going to get, and that’s not what has been delivered.

But, on this side of the House, we’re used to non-delivery from this Government. We’re used to the warm, soothing words that don’t match the reality. So, on this side of the House, we find that we can’t support the legislation, not because charities don’t do good work, not because charities aren’t worthy of the support of this Chamber but because the words and the deeds don’t match—the words and the deeds don’t match.

Across my electorate, for instance, in the Coromandel, I often get to attend, as most constituency MPs do, events organised by charitable organisations. If I think about some of the charitable organisations that literally provide the foundation fabric of the communities in the Coromandel—the volunteer fire brigades, the coast guards, the surf life savers, the community groups, citizens advice bureaus, any number of them—they are literally the foundation stones and the fabric of our communities. It’s not just in the Coromandel that occurs; it’s nationwide.

So here we have a piece of legislation that had, at its inception, so much promise, so much hope for a better outcome. And what have we got? A damp squib—an absolute damp squib that, at its very best, does a couple of minor tweaks; a couple of minor tweaks that will achieve very little for a sector that actually does so much good, that needs a reform of the principal Act but it needs to be a proper, decent, and full one. It needs to be, as the Labour Party promised back in 2017, a first-principles review. That’s not what has occurred. It isn’t what is on the tin. This piece of legislation will be a disappointment to a sector that wanted so much from it, that felt that they could have been heard, could have added so much to it, and haven’t been heard. What a disgrace and what an embarrassment for the current Minister to stand in this House and try and wax lyrical about a piece of legislation—

The member’s time has expired.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Actually, it is a real pleasure to stand and speak on this bill. I just heard 10 minutes of wet and whiny complaints and not one single promise of what would be done better or how they would do better; just point the finger and that was it. But that’s not what I’m here for today.

First and foremost, I beg your indulgence: I want to just acknowledge a volunteer in the charity sector who I had the opportunity to attend an event for. Mr Alan Pine, who is a Knight of the Order of St John, received his 65-year service gilt on the weekend, and I want to acknowledge on behalf of this House his extraordinary service for a charity that has been in place since the 19th century.

I now resume back to the bill. I want to acknowledge the Minister who has progressed this bill to conclusion, Priyanca Radhakrishnan. She does know the charitable sector very well and can attest to the changes that have been made and, in fact, what a difference this will make: 28,000 charities, and about 14,000 of those charities are affected by this change. I want to acknowledge the 95 submissions and the 28 oral submitters, the Department of Internal Affairs, the Office of the Clerk, the Parliamentary Counsel Office, the Regulations Review Committee, and the Social Services and Community Committee, who by and large worked very collegially.

This bill amends the Charities Act by requiring charitable entities to regularly review their governance procedures, gives the Charities Registration Board the ability to disqualify individuals rather than whole charities, reduces financial reporting and compliance rules for those charities in tier 4, and moves appeals from the High Court, which was extremely expensive, into the Taxation Review Authority—all things that are very useful and valuable.

I would just like to acknowledge that there are 28,000 charities and we are very lucky to have such a charitable sense in this community, something we’ve not seen from the National Party today. Nevertheless, I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Well, I’m here speaking this morning on the Charities Amendment Bill. It’s a bill that I haven’t taken any part in the Social Services and Community Committee for, but it’s a pleasure to speaking on this bill with my colleague Maureen Pugh in mind, who does in fact sit on that select committee.

It’s timely that we’re here talking about the Charities Amendment Bill from the perspective of our charities and volunteers. And it was only last weekend where I was in a small town, in the heart of Taranaki - King Country, celebrating volunteers evening, and it’s just fantastic. I always say that if all volunteers stop work at midnight on any given night, nothing would happen in this country. And so I know there’s a few people that think that everything that happens comes out of Wellington, but, certainly, when you get into our small communities, it’s very obvious that that certainly isn’t the case. And a lot of those organisations are run by these very charities that we’re talking about.

So it’s a shame the bill doesn’t do what it says on the tin, because the object of the bill is to make practical changes to support charities to continue their vital contribution to community wellbeing while ensuring that contribution is sufficiently transparent to interested parties and the public. What it actually said or set out to do was simpler financial reporting. We can understand that from a charities perspective. People who volunteer and work within and for charities love to do the hands-on work that they do, the caring for people, and all of the other roles they undertake. And often it’s the paperwork that is set out in a difficult way in terms of regulation and red tape. Anything we can do to make it simpler, as a Parliament, we should do so. So it talks about simpler financial reporting to reduce the compliance burden, but it actually hasn’t done enough work, in the context of this bill, to actually show that that’s what’s going to happen.

We can all understand improving access to justice and promoting transparency and fairness. Actually, the simpler you keep something, the more the easier it is for these organisations to put transparency and fairness in front of people. We have a lot of people who take on the accounting processes for these organisations—they’re not accountants; they’re people that love what they do, and they take on a role as a treasurer and all of a sudden they find themselves deep within books, trying to understand things and learn new things. Within these charities, there’s often a turnover of people in those roles as people get worn out and pass on and the next person takes over. So no one’s against promoting transparency and fairness, but in the simplest way possible would be helpful.

So the intent was to clarify the role of officers supporting the governance of charities, and improving the regulatory tools. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do what it says on the tin, which is why the National Party isn’t supporting it at the third reading. The difficulty that we have with this is that the Labour Government included a first-principles review of this Act in their 2017 manifesto. But, instead, the Ministers relied on the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) to undertake a review of itself and of its business unit, the Charities Services. Now, it would have been prudent, in the interests of transparency, that this was an independent review rather than an internal review. And no one might be suggesting that there was anything untoward here, other than it is very hard for people within an organisation to often spot the things that they are not doing as well as they could have been. Often, when you do these things, if you don’t have a complete independent look and the body itself is involved in the review, you don’t always get a completely, I guess, thorough result where people can see things that need changes that don’t often get seen from within.

So the charities add about $4 billion worth of value to our country. What they do is they keep communities connected. We see it all the time. We’ve talked this morning, in one of the other pieces of legislation that we talked about, about cyclones and disasters and civil defence. It never comes more the fore than it does at those times, when we have all of these groups out, doing everything they can to support their communities in a time of need—right from our volunteer fire service members, to a whole range of other groups in the community that help out. There’s actually 28,000 charities registered in New Zealand. So, if we look in all of our communities, I’m always amazed at how many of these people are the glue and the fabric of our society.

So given that the Labour Party policy was to carry out a proper first-principles independent review, the bill does not deliver on that. It tweaks a few items, which could make some aspects of compliance simpler, but it doesn’t address the key concerns. It seems that the Government did not listen to the sector, who are not at all happy with their bill, and think that it’ll make their lives more difficult when they’re just trying to help their communities. I’m sure that that wasn’t the intent that the Government set out to do, but, unfortunately, that is the result that’s come from pushing this bill into the place that it’s been put—it’s not delivering what it set out to do. So none of the proposed amendments address the existing structure. The review has led to these changes and, as I said, was undertaken by DIA reviewing itself, and that actually undermines some of the trust and confidence in the aspect that there’s a bit of doubt as to whether it’s picked up on all of the things that it could have and should have picked up on.

Interestingly enough, the original Act was introduced in 2005 by the then Labour Government. However, at the committee stage in 2004, the bill was almost completely rewritten and then rushed through under urgency in a single day without proper consultation on the rewrite. How do we keep hearing this? This is 2004-2005, so we’re talking almost two decades ago, and we’re finding that nothing is really changing in terms of rushing legislation, rushing things through the House, and rushing things under urgency. Here we are, this morning, sitting in here, in an extended sitting, because Parliament is due to rise in another six sitting weeks’ time and the Government is concerned it’s running out of time, so we’re here, in extended sitting, putting through bills that the Government has indeed run out of time for. So the National Party was very concerned about the process then, back two decades ago, and now it’s concerned about the process again.

So we support our charities. We back them every step of the way with the work they’re doing. We don’t believe this bill is at all helpful in terms of completing all of the things it needed to complete to help our charities. For that reason, we can’t support it today. Thank you.

Notwithstanding the partisan carping from the Opposition benches, not particularly the member who just spoke before, but I thought the National Party member Scott Simpson was particularly dyspeptic in his contribution in the House this morning, quite out of keeping—quite out of keeping—with the subject matter at hand, which is a very sensible, very practical, set of measures to modernise and continue the task of ensuring that the regulatory framework for charities, who do so much good in this country, is fit for purpose. As the Minister outlined this morning, there’s a number of very practical changes here which will provide the regulator the kind of flexibility to ensure that the regulatory burden that falls on even some of the smallest charities, of which there are many in New Zealand today, is appropriate and won’t unnecessarily distract them from the important work that they do.

So the bill improves the process for charities to object to the decisions that affect them. It enhances the transparency by requiring the regulator to publish decisions and consult with the sector on the guidance that it provides. It gives the regulator, the chief executive of the department, the power to exempt small charities from the compliance burden. It clarifies who should be captured as officers of a charity and what their role is. And it gives the regulator a number of tools for compliance and enforcement. So I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of ACT to take a short call on the Charities Amendment Bill. I’m sure it’s no surprise that ACT is not going to be supporting this at third reading. First, I’ll just point out that obviously we’re all in agreement here that charities are an extremely important aspect of New Zealand society—highly valued. I myself have been involved in charities over the years, and still am to this day.

But the problem is this bill, like many others—I’d call it a trend, but it’s kind of an obvious transformation of taking something and interfering with it like crazy and adding more bureaucracy and compliance. And there’s sort of this notion that this House exists to just make lives of New Zealanders more difficult every single day. You know, the role of this House, as it should be, is to liberalise life for New Zealanders, and this bill does not do that.

It is a very disappointing bill, and if I refer back to the Labour Party’s 2017 manifesto, where they talked about undertaking a first-principles post-implementation review, that obviously hasn’t happened. And, you know, usually it’s a good thing that things in Labour’s manifesto don’t happen. But in this case, you know, the charity sector deserves more. This is not a law that gets discussed very often and looked at by a select committee. And speaking of the select committee, as I mentioned in a previous reading—

Glen Bennett: Great committee.

Dr JAMES McDOWALL: Yep, good on you. In terms of the submissions, I mean, it didn’t give me a great deal of confidence and there was certainly a lot of people concerned, charities concerned, with this bill, and the Department of Internal Affairs’ response and involvement, and really just the interaction with the charities sector, is probably not good enough.

I just don’t buy it: a lot of the compliance and regulations, the reasons for having these things for extra financial burdens and reporting that has to be done, I don’t buy it—there’s an ulterior motive in this. Just looking at another part of this legislation, you know, things like this bill disqualifies persons from being officers if they have been convicted of financing terrorism. You know, you kind of expect that a charity probably wouldn’t appoint someone, an officer, in that sort of situation anyway. Nevertheless, I hope that includes members of the Mongrel Mob, for instance, and their charitable work that gets funded by the Government.

So, as I said, ACT will not be supporting this bill at third reading and I do not commend it to the House. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. The community, voluntary, and tangata whenua sector otherwise known as the charities sector, is incredibly diverse: from universities to toy libraries, marae committees to large iwi charitable trusts, coast guards, sports clubs, community gardens, to large national service organisations. And in 2021, New Zealanders gave more than $4 billion to the country’s 28,000 registered charities. And the overall income brought in by these organisations is far higher than that: more than $21 billion a year, which is comparable to the value of the country’s dairy exports—interesting, in terms of the Government’s willingness to listen to this sector in comparison to their willingness to listen to the dairy sector.

This sector employs about 145,000 people. It’s massive. And, more than that, 200,000 of us are volunteers within these organisations. The Green Party has really long-held relationships and huge respect for this sector and we want a future where community wellbeing and local ecosystems are enhanced by a strong independent tangata whenua, community, and voluntary sector. So as part of our vision for achieving that, we’ve had the policy of limiting the focus of charities’ oversight to registration and associated tax issues and to resource sector-led initiatives for education and capacity building within the sector. That policy has come out of our relationship with people working across the sector and what they’ve said they need. And it’s not this bill.

We know that the sector, while contributing massively to our society and economy, is woefully underfunded and historically undervalued by Government. Governments have, I think, a tendency to treat the sector as either just a nice little thing that it pats on the head at times, patronisingly, or that it treats the sector as a cheaper version of Government, a way to get things done on the cheap, where Government then comes in and monitors and tries to control that delivery. That, as you can imagine, undermines the actual brilliance of the sector, which is its ability to respond to community needs, which they are closest to, to actually harness the relationships in the community to achieve change that has been identified by that community. Government’s approach has absolutely undermined that and it also undermines the democracy that’s inherent in those organisations, and that approach is inconsistent with Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

There have been concerns about governance across some parts of the sector. That is true. And while research has called for Government to investigate providing sufficient remuneration for provider governance boards and risk committees so providers might have access to specialist expertise to support an increasingly complex environment and risk management, I note that that is a very different approach to this one, which is a compliance tick-box approach.

I also want to acknowledge that the community has identified governance as a challenge at times and has initiated their own programmes to be building capability in a strength-based way. I just wanted to, too, acknowledge that—like, being at a launch of a research report around the barriers for banking for this sector last night—they’ve had to fundraise and go to J. R. McKenzie Trust and the Todd Foundation to get funding to do that research, because actually Government hasn’t supported them to be able to do the research to advocate for their own needs and, instead, has been spending time on bills like this about increasing compliance rather than letting them lead the work.

We supported this bill on first reading as we took the Government’s talking points—that this bill would reduce compliance costs and increase appeal rights for the sector—on face value. But then we read and heard the submissions that told us that we’d got that wrong, that the Government was not portraying or delivering on what the community was asking for. And the majority of the sector opposed this bill. If the majority of the dairy sector was opposing legislation in this House, we would be having a very different conversation to the one that we are having today. And I think that that is a signal of disrespect in itself.

The big picture of the sector’s opposition is that this bill speaks to the Government not understanding the needs of the sector and prioritising all the wrong things. Speaking to people with real expertise on this topic last night, they were frankly struggling—they were telling me that they just couldn’t understand why the Government was refusing to listen to them and their knowledge, and just going ahead. They did not hear in any of the Government’s responses to the specific issues an actual explanation of the motivation behind it or the explanation about why the community’s concerns weren’t valid, and that they were up for that conversation but it had never happened.

The sector desperately wants a Government that will support it, support it to keep making the incredibly important impact for our whenua and our whānau, and hapori, and there’s so many ways that they do it. They really want the support to be able to do more and are clear that the way the system is operating now is holding them back and that this bill will just embed that problem and, in fact, make it worse.

In more detail, their opposition to this bill hinges on several points. One, while reportedly reducing compliance costs, this bill actually adds another level of compliance by requiring organisations to review their governance procedures every three years. While it can absolutely be argued that current law requires those responsible for governing charities have a fiduciary duty to know the rules and act in accordance with them, that should actually be enough of a prompt—that we don’t need to duplicate that in terms of this piece of legislation. This bill will now require organisations to start reporting on that work, and that brings up the natural questions of how it will be measured whether they’ve done that. Will it just be a tick box and what is the value of that, and if it’s going to be more than that, then actually how is that sense of partnership and not more Government kind of judgment and scrutiny of a sector that just actually wants to be enabled rather than monitored? And what will be the consequences for agencies where they don’t do that?

We’ve also heard that it’s missing the fact that so many organisations have gone through a lot of scrutiny in terms of their governance procedures in the last few years, through COVID, because they’ve had to adapt through these times and that really the sector as a whole is moving towards Te Ao Māori models of working and very strength-based. Again, this sits in opposition to that by being a kind of a compliance regime, which is very different and undermines the culture of those organisations.

The second concern is the definition of officer in this bill cuts across many organisations’ well-considered governance and management split rules and settled practice. Government’s management split has long been an area that the sector has been trying to provide education on, trying to resolve some longstanding problems, and this actually just muddies all of that work that they’ve been doing. The Department of Internal Affairs acknowledge that expanding the definition of officer will reduce sector independence. They acknowledge that, but argue that charities still get to choose who they want. Again, it’s not consistent, and it’s not consistent with a lot of the rhetoric we’ve previously heard. Also, this absolutely entrenches a practice that is not in legislation of Charities Services being able to conduct charitable purpose reviews. That’s at the heart of why the sector has been calling for that first-principles, because that has not been working to be able to support their independence and their work. And in fact, we in this legislation are embedding that. It’s deeply problematic and there are more problems with this. But at the heart of it, the Government should be listening and enabling our community, not monitoring it.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a real pleasure to stand and speak on the third reading of this bill, and I’d like to begin by just saying thank you to all of those working in the charitable sector for the work that they do. People rely on charities for so many things in their lives—I’m just thinking about the food banks, environmental groups, and even the performing arts—and so what this bill does is it makes sure that charities can get on and do the work that they do while still being publicly accountable.

The changes that it makes create some of the streamlining. The first thing they do is acknowledge that many charities—the very small ones—are run by volunteers, and so it’s important that all of their time isn’t taken up with paperwork. So what the bill does is it enables simpler financial reporting for very small charities. It also makes access to justice easier for those charities that wish to appeal decisions of the Charities Registration Board, because what it does is it creates a charities review authority that can hear those first appeals, rather than them having to do the expensive process of getting their appeals heard in the High Court in the first instance. So this is a really important bill, and I’m happy to commend it to the House.

The next call is a split call. I call Chris Penk—five minutes.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. So to the Charities Amendment Bill, and members on this side of the House—and I emphasise this side of the House deliberately—have expressed some real misgivings about the process that’s been undertaken and certainly the result that we’ve ended up with. I say “this side of the House” deliberately, because actually it’s not just the National Party; it is also other parties who are not Government parties, fully and proper. When National, ACT, and the Green Party are all united in backing the sector against the clear wishes of the single party governing majority, then alarm bells should be ringing not only in the Beehive but also throughout the sector, as indeed they already are, along the lines that this result is certainly not that which was intended or indeed advertised by the Labour Government in putting forward the bill and certainly going back to the Labour Party policy of 2017. I understand that its manifesto policy had been to carry out a first-principles review of the Charities Act, and while this would hardly be the first example of Labour Party manifesto policy in 2017 not being reflected by reality in the subsequent six years, it is nevertheless an important one and an important one for the sector.

Hon Scott Simpson: I can’t think of a single one that they did implement.

CHRIS PENK: My colleague and friend Mr Simpson says that he can’t name any that have been implemented. He wouldn’t be far wrong, but I’m not going to use the rest of my three minutes trying to think of any. I don’t see any reason why this should be a question time.

Hon Dr Deborah Russell: You can sit down now if you like.

CHRIS PENK: It’s like a reverse question time.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Or you could just come back to this particular bill. Thank you.

CHRIS PENK: OK, good guidance. Thank you, Madam Speaker. If you think about the first-principles review that should have taken place and should have resulted in much more certainty and clarity for the sector, and if I were to approach this from the angle of being the shadow Attorney-General and being interested in the relationship between the courts and Parliament and civil society, I would note the lack of clarity that exists around charitable purpose, the concept of public benefit and who gets to decide that, and the exemption regarding political purpose whereby environmental aims as determined by some and not others get to be applied. And it seems that we have a deeply anomalous, uncertain, and unreasonable outcome to this notion that we would need to know how we can support those who support other New Zealanders and actually others around the world as well.

When we think about the idea of public benefit, there should be some mechanism for determining that other than in a very vague sense, without clear criteria, a Government agency, and certainly the courts should not be stepping into the shoes of legislators or civil society to determine what, according to a majority of the bench in any given case decides is or isn’t within the public benefit. That way lies a form of tyranny, and I know that’s a slightly ugly word to use. But taking the definition of those decision makers who are unable to be accountable or held accountable for their actions or those to be reviewable in any meaningful way, that is the result of what we have seen in the last few years in high-profile cases across more than one entity—which we don’t need to re-litigate in this House, and I don’t intend to do so—and it would indicate that the considerable uncertainty is doing a disservice to various charitable or not technically charitable entities in the country and those whom they would serve.

So if we think about why it’s important that the sector is listened to and supported, again, unusually, I will acknowledge and agree with the comment made by a Green Party parliamentary colleague, which is that taking at face value the idea that compliance costs of a financial and time nature would be reduced is something we could have and should have all supported, except that the reality has been somewhat different. The reason it’s important to try and reduce such costs and to enable greater help is, of course—and in all of our electorates we would understand the work that was done in a cyclone recovery context, as a topical example. We certainly acknowledge all those who have worked so hard on a volunteer and charitable basis for that. In the justice system we’ve got JPs, community law centres, judicial JPs, community magistrates and so on. They deserve support. This bill does not provide it to them. We oppose this bill.

I commend the Charities Amendment Bill to the House.

Mālō e lelei, Madam Speaker. As a member of the awesome Social Services and Community Committee and having worked in the charity sector and also as a volunteer for over two decades in the Ōtaki electorate, I know the bog-down of paperwork that happens in terms of reporting, and this bill stops that. We on this side of the House, the Labour Government, understand this, and we want to support those charities to get on and do with the job they love to do with their passion that is supporting New Zealanders.

This is a good bill, and that’s what that does. It supports charities, it supports New Zealanders, and I commend it to the House.

There’s nothing for a good shot of adrenalin like being told that you’re speaking 20 seconds before you stand up to speak. Yes, we are here for the third reading of the Charities Amendment Bill—and thank you, Scott Simpson, we are opposing this bill, as my other colleagues have submitted to the House. It was really interesting to note Chris Penk’s position that it’s not just the National Party that is opposing this bill; it is indeed parties physically on this side of the House. We’ve decided to oppose it because we just don’t believe that it is going to improve the current system. It is really disappointing that it will be the charities of New Zealand themselves, who, as everybody has observed, really do God’s work in this country, and we believe that they are being let down in this instance. Barbara Kuriger made the very pertinent comment too that without charities, without volunteers, in New Zealand, this country really would grind to a halt.

So, with that, that was probably the most conflicted and difficult 60-odd seconds of my life, so I too will be opposing this bill and I will sit down.

I’m really proud to have the last word, literally, on the third reading of this, the Charities Amendment Bill. It does some great things for those who volunteer and put all their time into making Aotearoa New Zealand what it is today. I commend this bill to the House.