Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of the Green Party to speak in this the second reading of the Public Service Legislation Bill which we are supporting just to recognise that this is possibly—for people who haven't worked in the Public Service people may not understand how significant this is. I think quite often there's this discussion about the bureaucracy in quite dismissive ways that really—we heard it for a few years and I think it really undermined people's ability to understand how central the Public Service is to everything that people need in terms of from their Government. I sometimes think of—and this may make me a bad Green but I think of the politicians as the petrol and the Public Service as the engine. We're the energy but they're the people that get us where we need to go and it's a really really important relationship. This is the biggest overhaul of the public sector since 1988 and one of the most significant overhauls in our country's history so it is an important piece of legislation. What it does is it sets out new purposes and principles and values and has these apply to Crown agents as well as core Public Service departments. It enables public servants to be appointed to the Public Service and the Minister of State Services mentioned that in his speech just about actually helping people connect more to the idea of acting as public servants and having a sense of pride in that which I think is really an important thing. Part of what comes with this which is a really great thing is portability of annual leave if people move between different agencies and I think that just helps people be acknowledged for that service to our country and it's a good thing. It requires diversity and inclusion in employment practises in the legislation as well and I will speak to that a little bit more because the Greens—we would've liked to have seen the gender pay principles put into this piece of legislation because that is such a central challenge and such a core focus for the Government that I do think this piece of legislation would've benefited from having it in there. It also sets up a senior leadership team of all public sector chief executives (CEs) and requires CEs to help create a coordinated collaborative public sector and creates a greater range of organisational forms including legislating for joint ventures. There's a stand-alone prominent clause in the legislation with codified expectations about strengthening the Māori-Crown relationship and referencing the Treaty of Waitangi Te Tiriti o Waitangi which is surely very central to getting anything done effectively in this country making sure that that is in our work and centred in it and that the competency for delivering on that is present in the Public Service and this legislation helps deliver that. I've seen some commentary in the media on this piece of legislation that's been quite dismissive and worried that it's removing power from the people in this place and enabling I think in this vision of the Yes Minister that Mark Patterson brought into the debate the sense that actually more collaboration across Government will just enable more obfuscation and take the ability away from Ministers to direct agencies. There was a piece I read where—and I'll just quote from it—they were saying to imagine that one department will find it costs millions if a Minister wants blue doors on State houses and the State Service wants green doors and they were saying One department will find it costs millions to enter blue paint in computer systems; toxins in blue dyes will be flagged by another; and an obscure researcher will be disinterred to show indigenous birds are at risk from the minister's colour choice. The solution will come when yet another ministry finds a green-looking paint that has been labelled cyan." That's a really cynical cynical view of our Public Service and I think it really misses the nature of the complexity of the biggest challenges we face as a country and how they cannot be dealt with in silos. I talk about family violence in that example: a very common journey for somebody who's experiencing domestic violence where they may tell a counsellor or their doctor about what they're experiencing and not get an appropriate response. There may be a police call-out and a warning given as an example. They may be referred to a Ministry of Social Development - funded community service and get some support in that place. School might identify behavioural issues with their children and then they may notify Oranga Tamariki. There may be ACC counselling for a parent. There may be another police call-out and usually the mum may want to leave with the kids and then there's the requirement to find housing—often that will be needing to try and find State housing. There may be issues about getting leave from work that brings in Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment oversight or the requirement to go to Work and Income and then a case may go in front of the courts and then there'll be the justice system in terms of programmes for people to get help recover or to be able to change their behaviour may be a prison term and involve Corrections. To me that is a very very typical story and there'll be multiple engagements and all of those agencies at the moment report straight through to their Minister only focusing on their one area and the priorities of their Minister. Part of what this Government is doing around family violence is setting up a system of collective responsibility which is being enabled to be embedded by this legislation in recognition that we are never going to be able to turn around the endemic rates of domestic violence in this country unless we start lining up the work across those agencies that independent approaches isolated silo approaches will just keep us where we are now. We hear continually from our community organisations that at the moment they may have funding contracts with two or three different Government agencies to run their basic service. They'll have to make applications to each of those agencies they'll have to report on different criteria to each of those agencies but essentially to be doing the work of supporting the whānau that they work with. It's a huge waste of Government resource and their time and ability is being taken away from being able to support people. Then we hear of examples like I heard in Christchurch last year I think of a woman who had come up through one of the processes we were involved in where they'd found she was under eight different intensive case management systems through Government agencies because we haven't had the ability to join up and create a process that truly puts people at the centre of our work rather than our organisational priorities. That at the heart of it is for me why this piece of legislation and the work of this Government is potentially truly transformative. We have vehicles now to truly start responding to the needs of people in our community and that is for a topic that many people may not understand or may find boring actually really really exciting. I hope people will take some hope from this. While there may be things that we've heard in specifics that people would like to see there's always time for that but I think this is a great start."