O'Rourke Denis: Official Information (Parliamentary Under-Secretaries) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeO'Rourke Denis: Official Information (Parliamentary Under-Secretaries) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 14 October 2015. Volume:709;Page:7254. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENIS O’ROURKE (NZ First): Initially there are a few words I would like to mention in favour of this bill. Firstly it is short concise effective common sense necessary and annoys the young wet behind the ears member for the ACT Party. All of those are the great advantages of this bill and therefore New Zealand First will have no hesitation whatsoever in supporting it.It is a common-sense measure because actions taken by parliamentary under-secretaries being actions taken by politicians ought to be subject to the fullest possible scrutiny by members of the public. Currently the public cannot do that because parliamentary under-secretaries are effectively protected from it by the way the current law is written and that is wrong. They should be subject to the same Official Information Act rights by the public as any Minister but also any public servant who has to provide information or any Public Service agency that is also subject to that Act. So when you think about the whole spectrum of information that the public should be able to obtain they should be able to get it from any person who is related in any way to Government functions and that is the point.That is where Mr Seymour got it wrong because it is not about delegations and it is not about who has responsibility for information; it is about who actually has information that the public wants to be able to access. For that reason alone they should be able to access it directly from parliamentary under-secretaries in the same way that they can access it from Ministers or from bureaucrats or from Government agencies. So as far as New Zealand First is concerned it is unacceptable that people can be delegated Government functions as politicians and yet be protected from the Official Information Act. So that is why we say it is common sense that this piece of legislation should pass.This Government has an extremely bad reputation for secrecy especially on its record with the Official Information Act. Only this week we have seen solid evidence of that because the secrecy around the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement negotiations and the content of that agreement whatever it might be remains secret for no apparent reason.David Seymour: Ha! Eleven other countries?DENIS O’ROURKE: It is for no good reason whatsoever—absolutely none. And this member over here can snigger but the people of this country want to know what is in that agreement and the High Court has ruled only this week in the Kelsey case—Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Come back to the bill.DENIS O’ROURKE: —that that information should be available. So what I am saying is that this Government has a very bad reputation as far as Official Information Act matters are concerned and it should welcome the opportunity to support this bill to show its commitment to providing in a transparent way the information that people in New Zealand want to get from wherever in the Government whether it be from parliamentary under-secretaries or anybody else.Finally by opposing this bill this Government is showing two things. First of all it believes it needs to protect its parliamentary under-secretaries because of their sheer ineptitude in being able to do their jobs properly and Mr Seymour falls directly into that category. He is a parliamentary under-secretary only because of a political deal done with the National Party so that it could stay in office. Nobody would dream of putting a wet behind the ears MP like this in a parliamentary under-secretary position. He simply cannot handle it and this Government knows it so it wants to protect him from the ravages of the Official Information Act. Secondly this Government wants to hold on to its bad habit of secrecy so it will not support this bill but New Zealand First will.