Little AndrewANDREW LITTLE (Leader of the Opposition): I move That the House take note of a matter of urgent public importance. This has been a most unfortunate episode in the history of the very fine Public Service in New Zealand and the reputation that it has established over many many years and many decades. This has been a tawdry exercise and a failure by a Government department and a failure of oversight by a Minister who frankly knows better.Going through the factual background we know that in 2013 concerns and questions were being raised by senior staff of the Ministry of Transport about the processing of invoices for that ministry. They were invoices related to services taken on by the organisational development group which was an outfit within the ministry under the control of Joanne Harrison. The problems were that there were erroneous invoices there were invoices that did not have sufficient explanation about what they were for and there were invoices from a single outfit that when added up were outside the threshold of arrangements that could be entered into without a contract. That ensured that a lot of money was being paid to an individual outfit that given the amount being paid should have been the subject of a properly tendered contract and that did not happen. That went on throughout 2013 and 2014.In late 2014 Joanne Harrison the head of the organisational development group took a trip overseas to attend a conference that it then turned out was a conference that had been cancelled. It was cancelled before she left New Zealand. So the full costs of that and appropriate per diems and other costs were then paid out by the ministry. In 2015 the ministry investigated changing its accounting and business processes so that it would introduce automated invoice processing. At that point it was unrelated to the allegations being made by those staff who had raised concerns about the invoice but this is where it gets interesting. Before the ministry had even taken on software for the automated invoice processing—before the ministry had changed its processes or started any implementation—a redundancy exercise involving staff in the accounting function who might have been displaced by the implementation of the new processes started and got under way. It then turns out that advice on the redundancy process that affected staff in the accounting and financial section was the subject of advice from Joanne Harrison as effectively the HR guru in the Ministry of Transport. It turns out that advice was given—and taken for some inexplicable reason—to let staff go before their positions were actually redundant.Here is what Sandi Beatie the investigating official said about this—Sandi Beatie was the one who wrote the report that was released a couple of weeks ago. She noted that the timing of the redundancies was interesting and wondered why they were made 2 weeks before Christmas when the ministry knew at that time that it did not even have a transition plan or any new technology in place for moving to automated invoice processing. It let these people go and then it turned out that they were the people who had raised the concerns about the invoices that related to an outfit connected to Joanne Harrison who had applied irregular processes over those invoices.Sandi Beatie went on to say that the three redundancies in the finance team premised on the introduction of automated invoice processing occurred 7½ months before the system even came into effect. She went on to give her conclusion that at that time there was no legal justification for letting those people go on the grounds of redundancies. Their positions were not surplus to requirements at that time and Sandi Beatie goes on to say: this is an area in which I conclude that Ms Harrison's influence played a part." There is no question what was going on here: Ms Harrison having been caught short—having in fact been caught out at a very early stage—took steps to remove the people who were calling her out. At that point an important check and balance was lost within the ministry which allowed Joanne Harrison to carry on committing fraud that she was subsequently convicted of in 2016 and sentenced for earlier this year.We rely on good honest hard-working public servants to be vigilant in their jobs day after day after day and when they see wrongdoing to be able to call that out—to have the comfort to call it out. In fact it is so important that this House passed legislation to afford those public servants protection for doing so. The Protected Disclosures Act is a vital part of the protection of taxpayers' and citizens' interests when it comes to the conduct of our public services.We had these staff making their disclosures and in fact one of the staff members formalised their disclosures under the Protected Disclosures Act. That Act has as its objects three principal things. The first is allowing disclosure and investigation of serious wrongdoing—it has to be serious; but there could not be anything more serious than financially ripping off the organisation that you are a senior employee of which was what these staff thought they were seeing. It turned out that they were right and at the time they had their suspicions—and they were right to have those suspicions—they took the appropriate action.The second thing that the Protected Disclosures Act is meant to do is to protect employees making those disclosures. That is what it is set up for because it is true that in some workplaces including in public workplaces and Government departments there are sad characters who when they are called out or called to account get vindictive get intimidatory bully and take action against those calling them out. The third overarching objective of the Protected Disclosures Act is of course to promote the public interest. Anything that makes sure that taxpayers' money is properly spent spent within its mandates spent within the rules of the department whose responsibility it is to manage it—that is in the public interest.These three employees did everything right. It is very sad that when one of them who went on to get other temporary work and was found by their new manager to be so good—to be so good—that they wanted to increase their pay and went through to get authority to increase their pay the person who blocked that in a nasty vindictive mean miserable way was Joanne Harrison. She was not going to let go. We should be glad that she is behind bars. She is a vile person. She has caused distress to the innocent lives of a number of public servants who were just trying to do their jobs.The question is: what was the Minister doing? It cannot be possible that the Minister did not know what was going on. The chief executive knew what was going on. If the chief executive has suspicions of a fraud and requires an investigation to take place—because he commissioned an investigation—he has got to let his Minister know. It turns out that the chief executive's investigation exonerated Joanne Harrison—it made some tweaks to the processes but left everything to go as it went. There is another disturbing aspect to this as well that it is timely to reflect upon. That is the culture of the Public Service—not the thousands and thousands of public servants at all levels who day in and day out do their best do their utmost give good advice work hard and do good things. It is at the senior level. It is the legislation that governs the Public Service that has fundamentally changed the culture of our Public Service to one where increasingly good people—good public servants—are encouraged or incentivised or urged to work only in the interest of their Minister and actually sometimes against the public interest. The sense of empires and kind of dung heaps is emerging in our Public Service so that the loyalty or the fealty of public servants increasingly is not to principles of good governance incorruptible governance and good quality advice across the board but to particular Ministers and sometimes to their political advancement and furtherance. That is not a healthy development.What I see when I look at the report into this matter—the investigation that was conducted into the responsible and honourable actions of these excellent public servants—is that they saw values that went beyond just their department within the ministry. They saw values that went beyond just their ministry. It was about a good Public Service. It was about them being good public servants. But they were prevented from upholding those principles and those values by the culture of that organisation.I do not want to cast aspersions on our very fine Public Service or indeed on the State Services Commission and those others who are there responsible for inculcating that very important set of principles and values that underpin our Public Service. But when you have legislation that drives heads of ministries and agencies and departments to run their organisations as if that is the only thing that matters—as if only the interests of their Minister matter—then we are in a very dangerous situation. It means we have departed from those good—some might say old-fashioned—principles of a coherent Public Service that is there to serve the interests of all New Zealanders and public servants who are there to uphold the entire Public Service through their actions and their conduct. That has got to be the aim and objective of every head of ministry department Crown agency and other public sector department. It is about upholding the Public Service and its integrity as a whole. But we have an architecture now that in my view dictates or argues for behaviour that is not consistent with that principle and this is the sort of thing that happens when we have that kind of design and architecture of our Public Service.I say this in light of the Sandi Beatie report and in light of Peter Hughes' stewardship of the report and now his commentary on it: the Government through whatever means must take responsibility for what happened to those public servants must own up to what happened and must put right what has been done wrong to them. That does mean compensation. It will mean an apology. It might mean finding an opportunity for them if they wish to do so to return to the Public Service at the level of seniority that they were at at the time that they were let go. Nothing less would be just. That commitment must be given.The next commitment must be that this Government this Minister of Transport and the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister must demonstrate that they are serious about a Public Service that in all respects and across all its people—from the chief executives of ministries departments and Crown agencies and right down the hierarchy—acts at all times in the best interests of every New Zealand citizen and every New Zealand taxpayer. We do not have legislation at the moment that incentivises or encourages that. It might just be time to review that and review our Public Service to make sure that those vital values and principles of good public service are being upheld and maintained. I do not see that in this report. I saw in this report too much acceptance of a single stream of advice from a senior public servant to the chief executive—a senior public servant who turned out to be corrupt and a fraudster. If we have a culture that allows that in the Ministry of Transport—I do not say it is happening anywhere else but if it happened there it can happen again. We must be ever alert and ever vigilant to make sure that that never happens again and above all that good public servants are not hung out to dry and do not lose their livelihoods when they step up to the plate take responsibility act honourably and preserve Public Service values.Debate interrupted."