Hayes John: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hayes John: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 01 May 2012. Volume:679;Page:1809. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
JOHN HAYES (National—Wairarapa) 
: 
 No hyperbole in that speech at all—none whatsoever! It is interesting though that there is no public announcement of what the decisions are within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and its change until 10 May. No hyperbole at all? What nonsense Mr Goff! Let me say to you this: our Government inherited a situation where the economy was out of control and you Mr Goff—and Mr Peters; you were Foreign Minister at this time in your last year of office—put bucketloads of money into the ministry which this country could not afford. You opened posts in all directions and I know because staff talked to me and they were saying: “We have been given so much money we don’t know where we should put it.” Meanwhile that money was actually coming out of the pockets of your workers and my constituents. This money does not grow on trees and this Government has been put in place by the community after 9 long years of mismanagement to put things right.  
Labour increased spending by $22 billion in the last 5 years it was in office. So we employed a Secretary of Foreign Affairs and Trade and he was given quite clear instructions about looking at the management of that sector and trying to work out how to move resource from the back office to provide services to the community and to provide foreign affairs services. 
Andrew Little 
: Instructed by the Minister of Foreign Affairs. 
JOHN HAYES 
: What happened? A consultation document— 
Andrew Little 
: Instructed by the Minister. 
JOHN HAYES 
: Of course it was constructed by the Minister of Foreign Affairs; that is why you have Ministers. I realise the member has not been in the House sufficiently long to understand how it works but that is another problem.  
The ministry staff were invited to comment on the range of changes that were being proposed back in February and a number of people reared up on their hind legs. The day the document was put on the table people went berserk and leaked documents to Mr Goff who said that he was getting leaks in triplicate. And then Mr Goff started saying that the consultation document a draft document was the end result. Well it is not.  
All of the ministry’s heads of mission were brought back to Wellington about a month ago and their views were taken into account. The Minister was involved through that process as was the secretary and I commend the Minister actually for doing an excellent job. He would be here in this Chamber this afternoon defending himself if he was not doing a particularly good job with his other forum colleagues in Fiji right now. I can assure this Committee that Mr McCully has been doing an absolutely outstanding job helping bring normalisation of events back into Fiji.  
So after the consultation document went to staff there was a considerable amount of feedback from them and from other stakeholders including the Government. Many of the proposals were revised by the ministry’s management. In essence the initial proposal perhaps contained too many moving parts at one point in time and it is good I think that the Minister has said to the ministry that it needs to look at that issue.  
The decision document will be available to staff on 10 May and at that point we will be interested in Mr Goff’s comments because in my conversations with the same staff who talked to Mr Goff it is quite clear to me that younger staff members see huge opportunity in the changes that are coming up and they are really excited about the process. We have to follow the rest of the world. The only way in this country that we are going to move ourselves forward to pay for health and education is if the money coming into the country exceeds the money that goes out for things that we export and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has a really important role in this area. This is why we are trying to make sure that we are doing our level best for the ministry to operate in a focused way.  
We are interested particularly in two issues: trade and economic issues. That is why we have strengthened the promotion of New Zealand’s export goods and services through our “New Zealand Inc.” approach of coordinated Government agencies. That is why the Prime Minister the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Minister of Trade have led trade missions to the Gulf region China Hong Kong Brazil Mexico India Singapore Malaysia and Indonesia. That is why we continue to work with developing a single—