SpeechDAMIEN SMITH (ACT): Thank you Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of the ACT Party today to speak to the motion and the Estimates for Officers of Parliament. It's a great day for the ACT Party in the sense that we're now the third-biggest party and we get to speak in advance of other parties so that's good. So in terms of the three areas that we're discussing the Auditor-General is forecasting serious deficits in the future years—$8.5 million in 2022-23; $9.1 million in 2023-24. So this requires significant action by the House. We agree with the recommendation to increase funding. So for 2023-24 there will be an increase from $30 million to $38 million. Central and local government spend more time on audits. We have $170 billion worth of public money annually that has to be audited. The Office of the Auditor-General needs to be strengthened as Government prepares its agencies. It includes schools and local governments consistently that failed to deliver on public trust and the ability of the Government to deliver basic public services has been eroded. Also in 2021-22 the highest number of discretionary reports were published by the Auditor-General in its history. These publications included working on the cost of living payments water services reforms the central COVID-19 response the city rail project—in which the Government learnt a lot from the Auditor-General which it didn't know—and the Strategic Tourism Assets Protection Programme. It is vital and important that the Government programmes are being held to account by the Auditor-General. Similarly the Ombudsman is under pressure and the recommendation to increase appropriations in 2023-24 will go from $45 million to $54 million. Dealing with increasing numbers of Official Information Act complaints has been occurring in the era of what we were told was the most transparent Government ever. Over the 2021-22 year we now have set a new record for expenditure and it's up 31 percent on the year before. These include silly things like Mr Willie Jackson's saga over the trend of human errors when his office should have been not blaming process but blaming the Minister himself; the Stuart Nash emails; and the latest saga which we find out today from the Minister of Education is that the attendance figures—when asked why they didn't want to reveal them they just didn't want to release them. So this is the sort of stuff that has to be stopped by funding these organisations to do their job absolutely proper.We note that the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (PCE) is not asking for much at all and as my colleague said $3.9 million to go to $4.3 million a year which considering the insights and leadership of the PCE is good value and shows considerable financial discipline from the PCE that other agencies can learn from and should emulate. We don't always agree with what comes out of there but even though it does make sense it's an important intellectual contribution to New Zealand's environmental and climate policy and it seems to be the agency that can do it most effectively. It is regarded as a credible and independent agency unlike any other commission. And Simon Upton has been reappointed to another five-year term and it's very pleasing he will get to continue to guide the agency so $4 million is very small for such an influential agency.So this expenditure has risen because of lack of Government transparency lack of ability to cost up its projects properly and it's called on extra resource from these agencies at a time when we have a cost of living crisis. So we're especially interested in supporting this tonight. Next year may be different but it's important that the Government recognises that this is not just a set of agencies that can be used; it is a set of agencies that have real teeth and will hold them accountable in the future.