O'Rourke Denis: Official Information (Parliamentary Under-Secretaries) Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeO'Rourke Denis: Official Information (Parliamentary Under-Secretaries) Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 25 May 2016. Volume:714;Page:11301. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENIS O’ROURKE (NZ First): New Zealand First supported this bill at the first reading to go to the Government Administration Committee because it seemed to us to be a pretty common-sense sort of a bill—that parliamentary under-secretaries should be subject to Official Information Act (OIA) requests for information in the same way that Ministers are.At that time of course David Seymour opposed the bill and we in New Zealand First were pretty comforted by that because of course he always gets things wrong so by supporting it we thought we must be getting it right. He said the bill was “inconsequential in every practical sense” given that his decisions as Parliamentary Under-Secretary to the Minister of Education responsible for charter schools and as Parliamentary Under-Secretary to the Minister for Regulatory Reform would be copied to the Minister and so an OIA request would better discover those decisions direct from the Minister and not from him. That was his reasoning.But strangely he also said that the Official Information Act was there to “keep tabs on what the executive was [doing]” and that this bill means that “We’ve now abandoned that principle” apparently because he does not see that a parliamentary under-secretary is part of executive Government. Well hello? If he does not understand that he has joined the Government in an executive position then there can be little hope that he will actually do anything useful in that position either and therefore there could be no useful official information he would possess that could then be obtainable under the Official Information Act.He also said: “All [the bill] does is attempt to attack me and while I am a little bit flattered I cannot support the bill.” In fact he has been more flattened by the bill than flattered by it because he also said that the bill was “silly”. Yet he now announces that he will support this “silly” bill so what does that make him? The answer I think is self-evident by self-definition.But this has led to a rethink by New Zealand First because if Mr Seymour now supports the bill we are worried about our initial support for it. After thinking it through we can no longer support the bill and we now feel strongly that we must oppose it.There are two good reasons for that. The first one is that the bill is actually completely unnecessary and the appointment of a wet behind the ears first-term MP as a parliamentary under-secretary actually shows that. He is not even well-named as Mr Seymour for the position when he clearly sees less than most as far as his responsibilities are concerned. So what possible use could he be in regulatory reform which he clearly has got no actual experience of whatsoever and what possible use could he be supervising the obviously failed charter school programme? Therefore what possible useful information could be obtainable from him on any of these areas that cannot be got from actually reliable sources?In fact I am unreliably informed that an OIA request already made of him for all information in his diary concerning his duties performed so far was returned with this result. Yes it is a blank sheet of paper and that is about as useful as information from Mr Seymour could ever be.Secondly there would be many other problems in getting useful information from Mr Seymour because even if he did have any useful information which we doubt it is very unlikely that such an inexperienced parliamentary under-secretary would understand it enough to make any worthwhile comment on it. Then there is a question of how long getting the information would take—possibly as long as it would take to get the Parliamentary Library to get the answer for him because he would not know what the answer would be. That of course actually makes him redundant and it would clearly be much better to go to a reliable source to get the information one might want on the subject that Mr Seymour is the parliamentary under-secretary in respect of.In fact the only thing I can see that Mr Seymour and ACT have achieved so far is the disappearance of the last red telephone boxes in New Zealand’s streets. Many think that that was because of increased mobile telephone use but the truth is that the primary use of telephone boxes was to provide accommodation for ACT Party meetings. But with ACT parliamentary representation now provided by Mr Seymour even that requirement has now dwindled to zero.Finally what the bill does do is it redefines the term “Minister of the Crown” to include parliamentary under-secretaries. We in New Zealand First cannot actually bear the thought of having David Seymour as a genuine Minister of the Crown. Clearly the crowd he once met with in telephone boxes around the country does not think so either because it does not do that any more. So for that reason amongst all the others New Zealand First can no longer vote for a bill doomed by what it cannot possibly achieve which is obtaining useful official information from Parliamentary Under-Secretary Seymour.