Sowry Roger: State Sector Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Sowry Roger: State Sector Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:610;Page:7358] 
Hon ROGER SOWRY (Deputy Leader—NZ National) 
: 
 I do not think I have ever seen a Minister so embarrassed about a bill than the Minister we have just heard from. He managed to get up and mumble his way through his departmental notes making a few mumbling comments about it and sitting down as quickly as possible. That is because he is embarrassed to be here. 
This will not the first time this week we are led to believe that this Government will be carrying out retrospective legislation. The bill we are passing today is deemed under the commencement clause to have come into effect on 1 October 2001. This Minister has been so hopeless in trying to shepherd this bill through that he actually gave up on it. He wheeled it in with all the bluster and might he could muster at the time and decided that this was the “Get Work and Income New Zealand Bill”—merge Work and Income New Zealand with the Department of Social Welfare and create a new superministry the Ministry of Social Development. Then his plans got derailed. We had a court case and a whole lot of other issues that arose around the dismissal of Christine Rankin and the Minister’s blameless life of excellence. We went from there into another round of restructuring involving the Department for Courts and the Ministry of Justice. 
This bill that we are passing on 29 July 2003 is deemed to have been passed on 1 October 2001 so the bill will be voted for and passed by a whole lot of United Future members of Parliament who are voting for legislation that is deemed to have come into force before they were even in Parliament. In fact the leader of United Future was voting on this side of the House at that stage. Now all of a sudden he has changed his mind. The only principle that party has is to support this Government and it has now decided that all the things it said about this bill in 2001 are wrong and should be forgotten. Now it is going to vote as it always does with the Government and pass the bill into law. 
This is not good legislation. It gives the Government the power to reorganise Government departments and not have to come back into the House to seek a mandate to do so. This is the sort of bill that can allow Ministers to get rid of their ministries such as the Ministry of Youth Affairs which we know is one that is particularly targeted. The Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs and the Ministry of Consumer Affairs are probably others. We know that the Government is quite keen to get rid of those ministries and now it will be able to do that without any need to come back to Parliament to have mergers and new arrangements with the staff affected scrutinised. This legislation gives the Government and the Minister of State Services the power to say to a chief executive: “If you and your department are going to continue to inhibit this Government’s advice then watch out. We can now get you because we have legislation that will enable us to do that.” 
I will give members an example. We all know that this Government does not like public servants who give free and frank advice. I saw a piece of advice that went through the Ministry of Education recently. Typed in the space where the conclusion should be were the words: “Minister to write.” There is nothing about the department being fearless in recommending things to that Minister of Education. No he writes his own conclusions in his departmental Cabinet papers. It should not surprise anyone that that is the same Minister Mr Mallard who comes into this House with this legislation so that he can wander into a troublesome department—one of the smaller ones—that might well be causing him a bit of grief by holding out for its own group in society and saying things that the Government does not like and tell it that if it does not buckle down there is now legislation enabling the Government to easily subsume it into a larger department without having to go to Parliament. 
 I think that is outrageous. If this side of the House had done that the Labour Party and the trade union movement would have been up in arms about the rights of Public Service Association members and the rights of workers in the departments to negotiate new contracts and to make sure that their terms and conditions were being carried over under the same rules. All that is gone. There is no concern at all for Public Service Association members. They do not get consulted anymore. In fact the bill we are passing today came into Parliament as a 13-page bill and sat here for 2½ years. Then last week we saw the Minister drop a 13-page block of amendments into the House. That tells us we have a Government that is not interested in process and is quite happy to come in here and pass legislation in 2003 that is deemed to have come into force in 2001. 
I want to spend a few moments talking about retrospective legislation. One of the most impassioned speeches I have heard in my time in this House about retrospective legislation came from the current leader of United Future Peter Dunne. I can remember him railing long and hard against Governments passing retrospective legislation. I can remember the Greens doing exactly the same. The Greens have long stood out in this House and said that they will not support retrospective legislation but on this bill they seem to have forgotten that. The Greens have long said in this House that they stand up for the rights of the union members yet on this bill they have forgotten about that. They do not care at all about the workers in those departments that are being merged. 
I will be watching very closely to see how the Greens in particular vote on this legislation. I hope they will continue to oppose this bill because it is particularly bad legislation. It is the sort of legislation that a Government wheels in when it wants a big stick to hold over the head of a few troublesome public servants. They might be the kind of public servant who would write in a memo that they were hung out to dry because everybody from the Minister down agreed to lie and then he or she was the only one singing that tune. One can imagine a public servantwho had been a bit troublesome—and we know that with regard to the Immigration Service the Minister has been caught out a couple of times and once blamed her officials. She is now caught out by something that has still has a little way to go over the next few weeks where she has obviously been party to something that is now starting to unravel. We can imagine that that department and chief executive will suddenly find this piece of legislation hanging over his or her head and the Immigration Service might find itself a new home—a nice convenient way for a Government to tame and cower the public service. That is why we oppose this piece of legislation.