Locke Keith: Offices of Parliament — Address to Governor-General 
Locke Keith: Offices of Parliament — Address to Governor-General 
[Volume:653;Page:2601] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party will be supporting this motion. It is good to see for example that Audit New Zealand and the Auditor-General are getting extra funding. We see their performance every year most recently in the financial reviews and obviously they are skilled in making their financial case given what they do in life. 
The Green Party would like a little bit more money for the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment and the Office of the Ombudsmen. The previous speaker referred to the fact that there was not the need for the third Ombudsman although if members read the Ombudsmen’s annual report they will see that the ombudsmen are doing a lot of work and that they are very concerned about their particular function which I think most MPs uphold—that is of implementing the Official Information Act. They note: “In recent years we have observed an increasing tendency on the part of some agencies and some ministerial offices to ignore the provisions of the Official Information Act in terms of the timing of the responses to requesters.” I do not think that that is good enough; possibly they should have done a “name and shame” in this report on matters in which Ministers and officers are falling short. They also note a regrettable tendency which I think is quite longstanding in certain sectors to “game the system”. Sometimes that means to delay the provision of papers until the end of the acceptable period rather than providing them at its beginning or to keep asking for extensions. We need a well-funded Office of the Ombudsmen to try to control that. 
The office also has a need for plenty of funding because it is just coming to grips with its new requirement under the Crimes of Torture Act where it is the national preventive mechanism—that is the body monitoring prison institutions to make sure there is no ill treatment or torture under the convention against torture. The office states: “We are now in a position to begin our programme of inspections.” The Act was passed in 2006; this is 2009 so I think the office will need plenty of funding and resourcing to carry out that task properly. 
The third area I wish to mention which comes out of the report has quite a horrific figure relating to the office’s important mission of dealing with prisoners’ complaints and conditions in prisons. The report notes: “We estimated about 15 percent of all inmates should be receiving mental health care.” The Minister of Corrections came up earlier in the day with the figure of 8000 prisoners in total. If we take 15 percent of that it means that a lot of people are needing mental health care. But the Office of the Ombudsmen is doing very good work and the Green Party certainly supports what the ombudsmen are doing. 
The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Jan Wright and her team are doing very good work as well. Most recently—in this current month—they have come out with a report  
Change in the high country: Environmental stewardship and tenure review 
. They have considerable concern about the separation of land into Department of Conservation land and private land that is taking place as part of the tenure review. They talk about life block settlements around iconic sites and the intensification of agriculture around high-country lakes—lakes that have been fairly pristine in the past. But the report states that the clarity of high-country lakes should not be taken for granted. 
The commissioner and her team actually support the setting up of a high-country commission to deal with some of these problems including the vegetation problem. They say that weeds such as broom gorse briars lupins and conifers are spreading into the high country and upsetting the balance. Those weeds are also upsetting the natural gradation from alpine vegetation down to lowland vegetation and affecting the drainage into some of the lakes our hydroelectricity comes from. That is of concern. The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment is playing a very important role in bringing these matters to our attention so we can legislate on them. 
The Green Party will be supporting this motion although we would like a little bit of extra funding for the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment in particular. Thank you. 
Motion agreed to and Address agreed to.