Hughes Gareth: State Sector Management Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hughes Gareth: State Sector Management Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Sitting date: 09 December 2010. Volume:669;Page:16296. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
GARETH HUGHES (Green) 
: 
 In my second reading speech I talked about my adventure to the national archives around the corner from Parliament and about some of the documents I had seen. I tell the Committee that I got to see some wonderful documents of our history. I saw police records from the Wairau Affair. I saw a wanted poster of Hone Heke which had been found literally between the pages of another book only weeks before. I saw transcripts from the Parker-Hulme murder case which was immortalised in the movie  
Heavenly Creatures 
. 
I also saw something that I think is instructive for us today. I found some wonderful photographs of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in Egypt taken during World War II. A no doubt good-intentioned army soldier had decided to paste all those wonderful pictures into a book thereby wrecking them. I think that is the metaphor for today. I do not doubt the good intentions of what the Government is trying to do. I do not think it dislikes Archives New Zealand or dislikes the National Library. I think it is going into this merger with good intentions but I say that we will see bad consequences. 
I am a historian by academic training and those old adages ring true: “Know your history”; “Know where you’ve come from to know where you’re going.” The risk is that we will be repeating the mistakes that were made in the 1990s before those departments were separated. We will have to go through a whole process once again of disaggregating them. 
Part 3 of the bill amends the Public Records Act 2005. We are not talking about a dusty old collection of papers; we are talking about important taonga—treasures—of our New Zealand culture and our history. We are also talking about important constitutional features of our democracy. I want to re-pose the questions and answers that I heard at the Education and Science Committee from the New Zealand Historical Association. It asked whether the system was broke; the answer was no. It asked whether we were adopting best practice today; the answer was no. It asked whether the bill would take us backwards; the answer was yes. It asked whether there were risks with this bill; the answer was yes. Those risks we are talking about are to the independence of Archives New Zealand to the great work it is doing to the safe custody of our national taonga and to our international image. We are also talking about Te Tiriti o Waitangi impacts. 
When we look at the risks to the independence of Archives New Zealand we see that this bill firstly downgrades the Chief Archivist from the position of a chief executive to simply an employee of the Department of Internal Affairs. He or she will be legislatively accountable yet will have financial organisational and authoritative means counting against them because basically the chief executive—a third-tier employee—will have to comply with the culture the strategic direction and the financial direction of the Department of Internal Affairs. That is not just an academic debate; the independence of that position will be eroded. 
The Minister in the chair the Hon Nathan Guy talked about the Crown Law opinion but he did not mention how rushed it was. He did not talk about the fact that Archives New Zealand is not like the Passports Office which he used as an example. We are talking about important constitutional roles in our democracy. The risk is that the chief executive of Archives New Zealand downgraded to a third-tier official will have all the burdens of administrative work within the hierarchical structure of the Department of Internal Affairs but will not be able to sit on the executive team in order to actually make a difference. We are really talking about the worst of both worlds. 
Secondly the select committee made a good change in deleting most of the provisions in clauses 47 to 58 which means public records will be retained in the possession of Archives New Zealand and not by the Department of Internal Affairs. There were legitimate concerns expressed by people who have items in the Archives or who would like to donate items to the Archives in the future. We are talking about differentiated roles between the two different departments being taken over and the Department of Internal Affairs. On the one hand we have the Department of Internal Affairs which looks after items like censorship; on the other hand we have the important constitutional role to manage our archives well. As the Lange papers in Archives New Zealand show or WikiLeaks shows— 
The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch) 
: I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member but the time has come for the luncheon break. 
Sitting suspended from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m.