Goff Phil: Customs and Excise (Border Processing—Trade Single Window and Duties) Amendment Bill Biosecurity (Border Processing—Trade Single Window) Amendment Bill — Third ReadingsText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Customs and Excise (Border Processing—Trade Single Window and Duties) Amendment Bill Biosecurity (Border Processing—Trade Single Window) Amendment Bill — Third Readings[Sitting date: 19 March 2014. Volume:697;Page:16811. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill):What an extraordinary speech from Maurice Williamson. I was really glad that there was a doctor in the House Paul Hutchison because Maurice Williamson went red in the face. He huffed and he puffed but what he could not do was hide his embarrassment. That must be the first time that I have heard a Minister get up and confess in his third reading speech that he had stuffed up in the Committee and had not done his homework. Not only had he not done his homework he was being entirely disingenuous about what happened in the Committee because what we know happened in the Committee was that the Minister of Customs admitted there had been a budget blowout—from $75 million out to nearly $90 million. That is a 17 percent blowout. And do you know what he did not explain? He did not explain why there had been a blowout.Hon Maurice Williamson: We did. It’s in the questions.Hon PHIL GOFF: He did not—no it is not. It is not in the answers to the question. The Minister is yet to explain to the House why his budget has blown out by 17 percent. He has yet to tell the House whether that is the end of the process or whether there will be further cost escalation. He has yet to tell the House where that $13 million came from. Is that going to be at the expense Minister—before you leave the Chamber—of the other services that the Customs Service is offering? What happened?The Minister explained one thing when the bill was in Committee. He said that there had been two variations—two variations—that had caused extra cost. Was that an admission that the Government was to blame because the Government having set out the plan for IBM then kept moving the goalposts so that the costs went up? And if that is the case I am really worried because I remember the INCIS program. There are a few others. I think Paul Hutchison was here in the 1990s when under a National Government the police budget blew out $100 million—down the drain with nothing to show for it. This is where institutional memory is quite useful. When we did the select committee inquiry what did we find? There was a failure of the INCIS program with $100 million of taxpayer money down the drain because the Government kept changing its mind and changing the requirements. That is just what we heard from Minister Williamson in the Committee of the whole House: the Government had changed the requirements.So maybe the Government is to blame. It was its incompetence. But then the Minister said in Committee one other thing. I have got my notes and the Hansard is there. He said that there are contractual obligations and that they will hold people to account. Well that suggests that the Minister was blaming IBM. My colleague David Shearer asked the question of whether the Government is going to sue IBM to recover some of that money. Is it IBM that is to blame? Or is it the Government because it kept changing its mind on what it actually wanted and what it needed? Then we tried to find out from the Minister. We tried to screw the information out of him about what the problems were with the system. He said that there were defects. He admitted there were defects. “It didn’t quite work.” was the phrase that he used. Well what did not work? Is it being managed? Is it being resolved? Has it been resolved yet? Is the problem ongoing? Is the problem still to be resolved? None of those questions—asked time and again in the Committee—was answered by the Minister and he comes in here with disingenuous outrage to say that they had all the answers. The problem is that in the Committee of the whole House the Minister gave no answers.Then there were other things. He said that all the information was there. Well I recall and Hansard will have recorded that in the second reading of the debate on this bill I asked questions about IT problems and I challenged the next National speaker to get up and explain what those problems were. There was silence. Nothing was said. The Minister has made no press statement no public comment about why these problems have existed how serious they are and whether they are being resolved. We are yet to hear those answers and the challenge on the next sitting day will be for the next National member to explain what has actually gone wrong here.Then the Minister came into the House and used the word “sneaky”. He said that we had accused him of being sneaky. No Hansard will prove that that is not true that that is dishonest. It was the Minister who said that an honest customs official and an honest contractor were being sneaky by acknowledging that there were problems. That is how keen the Minister was to cover it up. His first answer to my question was: “Who told you that?”. He said: “What sneaky person behind a gorse bush let out that information?”. I am glad the Customs Service and the contractors have been honest about that because the Minister has been anything but honest. It is not the person or persons who said there were problems in the system who were being sneaky; it was the Minister who never fronted up not in the House not in public and not through the medium of the press to explain what was happening with this new system.This is a new system which we on this side of the House support. It was a concept that came out of a Labour Government and it is a concept that is a good concept. I am not challenging the concept; I am challenging the implementation by this Government because we have put up with INCIS under a former National Government and right now we are still putting up with Novopay. It is 2 years after it was introduced and “Mr Fix-it” was put in place—because Craig Foss had failed to fix it—but “Mr Fix-it” has not fixed it. It is getting worse. We deserve to know in this House whether this system of the Trade Single Window IT support is suffering the same sorts of problems as Novopay.I know there is one difference. One difference is that there is a parallel system. The old system is still in place: CusMod. Is that the only reason why this is still working—because they are relying on the parallel system? We deserve an answer to that. I understand that CusMod was due to have been phased out by now. Is that correct Mr Hayes? Is that correct? That is what we understood at the Committee I think. What we now know is that this system the old system is still being generated because the new system is failing. They will not tell us how it is failing the degree to which it is failing but we know there are problems. We know the problems from the body language of the Minister when we met in the Committee of the whole House. We know the problems are real because of the body language of the officials. We know the problem is real because of the pretended offence that the Minister took about us even raising it. But it is right to raise it. I want to know when the Minister became aware of that problem. Why did he not tell the public? Why did he not tell the House? Why was it that he was reticent and it took Customs Service people and those dealing with the Customs Service to bring out to the public that there was a real problem being faced here?It is a tragedy that a concept that is a good concept—it is a great idea to bring together into a joint border processing system both the Customs Service and the Ministry for Primary Industries to have a single window system that is a single portal so that there is a one-stop shop for business. It is a great idea if we can make the system more efficient. It is a great idea for business if it reduces their costs. It is a great idea for the consumer if it means cheaper goods because the border processing costs are lower. It is a great idea if it makes New Zealand internationally competitive.But what we know from the Committee stage finally when the Minister who had never done his homework and admitted that he had not done his homework is that there is a problem in the system. The National Government owes it to the people of New Zealand and it owes it to this House to explain the precise nature of that problem. We do not yet know from the Minister whether the problem has been fixed. My challenge to the National Party member who rises to his or her feet to take the next call is to explain to us what the problem is. What required a blowout of $13 million extra? Is that the last of the blowout? This is only tranche one. Are we going to have the same problems with tranche two? Is this going to be another Novopay-type episode where the Government fails to put in place the machinery necessary to implement a change that is desirable?People in New Zealand have had a gutsful of a Government that cannot manage its IT system properly. Why was the Government not more up front about this? Yes I accept that there was a figure buried in a Customs Service report. I never heard the Minister say a word about it. He never came into the House and answered the questions in the second reading debate. He did not answer the questions—and I took four calls—that were put to him in the Committee stage. This is a Government that has not been upfront. This is a Government that has mismanaged the IT processes. This is a Government that is still to come clean with New Zealanders about the precise nature of the problem.