Wagner NickyHon NICKY WAGNER (National): Thank you very much Mr Chair. Part 2 of this bill as we've heard makes two amendments one to do with the State Services Commission's investigation powers and the other to do with setting out the codes of conduct. I do appreciate the Minister in the chair Chris Hipkins talking about how those codes of conduct can be specified and bespoke and tailored to the types of roles people have in the State services. But I really want to look at the investigatory powers and the additional sections of the Inquiries Act which have been included in this bill. This bill seeks to update the commissioner's advisory powers under the Commissions of Inquiry Act 1908. So it's an Act that has really truly done its time and I think it's really important that we regularly update some of these older bills. Interestingly enough even though with these bills often the actual values don't change we need to modernise and simplify the provisions so that they are fit for purpose in the future. So bringing the Inquiries Act of 2013 into this bill makes common sense and I think it's particularly interesting what we've heard in terms of privacy and I'll come to that a little bit further in.First of all delegation of an inquiry—I think that's important. We hear here that under section 21 of the Inquiries Act and section 23 of the State Sector Act they allow for the commissioner to delegate under certain powers an inquiry but unfortunately there's a conflict between both of those Acts—slightly different rules about that. So the Governance and Administration Committee has recommended inserting a new clause clause 8 inserting new section 9A(3A) which will make it clear that [the] delegation under section 21 of the Inquiries Act must be carried out in accordance with section 23 of the State Sector Act." I think again this is a good example of getting clarity in this bill.I'm always interested also in these clauses exempting inquiries from privacy principles and the two principles they are exempting for are principles 6 and 7 of the Privacy Act 1993. For those who don't have that up their sleeve what they actually mean: privacy principal 6 is "Access to personal information" and privacy principle 7 is the "Correction of personal information". I think it's been quite an interesting and useful debate that we've had from my colleague the Hon Dr Nick Smith which the Minister has also spoken about in terms of whether this should only be for the State sector or whether it should also be available in terms of the private sector.But what we're saying in this bill is that the purpose of this exemption is to ensure that inquiries have access to the best evidence—the best evidence—by allowing witnesses to provide evidence in confidence and also without being concerned that a third party could have access to this information. Although the committee thought that this exemption was important it wanted to make sure that it only applied to inquiries made by the commissioners that were formal inquiries. So in other words you can't use it willy-nilly; it has to be a formal inquiry before you can have these exemptions under principles 6 and 7 of the Privacy Act.I think the committee also recommended that the bill provide a way to signal that an inquiry has been initiated and the exemption applies and so they did quite a lot of work in terms of amending clause 8 and proposing new sections to make sure that the commissioner had to have a written certificate in order to initiate an inquiry. It also set out in the bill what that certificate should include also making it clear that the commissioner's power to make a certificate could not be delegated. So again the commissioner has to be responsible if he is going to make a certificate. Furthermore added to that there were further accountability and transparency measures which is always a good thing.I think the issue around that in terms of reporting is that the State Services Commission annual report had to include the number of certificates that had been issued and a summary of each inquiry so that therefore the public and anybody reading the annual report would know which inquiries they're doing and why they had been initiated. So we think that's an improvement to the Act and we support that."