Sage EugenieEUGENIE SAGE (Green): The Green Party joins with others in the House in supporting this motion for alterations to the appropriations for Vote Audit Vote Ombudsmen and Vote Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment and for the appropriations for the 2017-18 year.I congratulate the new Auditor-General and I would also like to place on record our thanks to the outgoing Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Dr Jan Wright who finishes her second term at the end of June.When looking at the report of the Officers of Parliament Committee and the $3.3 million budget for the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment that is extraordinary value for money in terms of the range of investigations that the office undertakes the quality and integrity of the reports and the evidence that they are based on. I think all of the Officers of Parliament do extraordinary service to this place in terms of the integrity of their work.But just talking a bit more specifically about the Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment the office's budget is going to remain static for the next 3 years. Given the extraordinary environmental challenges that New Zealand faces with our environment I would commend to the Officers of Parliament Committee that they perhaps look at that next year. Nature is in crisis in New Zealand and last year the state of the marine environment domain report that came out confirmed that many of our native marine animals are threatened with extinction including more than a third of our seabird species—albatross shags petrels and penguins. While there has certainly been a reduction in the number of birds that are caught and killed in fishing-nets from around 5000 annually to around 3000 that is still far too many. At the end of this month the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment will be producing a report on the plight of New Zealand's native birds. When we have got 80 percent of our native bird species staring extinction in the face I am looking forward to that report because the commissioner always makes a number of sound recommendations about how we can tackle the challenges that the officer's reports address. I think one of the landmark reports from her office was in 2011 looking at the use of 1080 and concluding after an independent evaluation that it should be used over a much wider area. So we hope that there are similarly important recommendations in the upcoming report.I would like to comment briefly too on the Office of the Ombudsmen. It has got a $16.7 million budget and as the Hon Trevor Mallard noted extra funding was made available for the office to tackle the backlog of Official Information Act complaints. There has been remarkable progress and that backlog is likely to be cleared a year earlier than anticipated. So yes the office then offered up I think over $900000 back. That money has effectively been reallocated with additional funding provided so that there is going to be a fully resourced team to inspect prisons and detention centres around New Zealand. That is really valuable work that the Office of the Ombudsmen does. It will also help it retain skilled and experienced staff so that their salaries are competitive and there is quite a significant capital injection of $1.2 million in the upcoming Budget to enable increased investment in ICT which again should help the office stay on top of all of the complaints that are made in terms of the way in which Government agencies deal with Official Information Act requests.I think it was really commendable earlier this year that the State Services Commission and the Office of the Ombudsmen released for the first time the first set of official statistics on the implementation of the Official Information Act. That showed that in a year 2015-16 there were over 40000 requests for official information and 23 percent of the complaints to the Office of the Ombudsmen needed a full investigation and some 10 percent of those were upheld. So that confirms the value of the office and the importance of it doing that work in terms of investigating complaints into Government agencies delaying the provision of information or not providing full information. Thank you.