Jones Shane: Ombudsmen (Cost Recovery) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Jones Shane: Ombudsmen (Cost Recovery) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 19 September 2012. Volume:684;Page:5426. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon SHANE JONES (Labour) 
: 
 I understand that 5 illustrious minutes remain available to ensure that all the concerns associated with this bill the Ombudsmen (Cost Recovery) Amendment Bill will be amplified. You may recall that I said that the gauge of sentience will be informed by the quality and the quantity of the votes. I have a fear that sentience ebbs as it goes to that side of the House based on some of the sort of indiscriminate rhetoric thrown around in the House this evening. 
I just want to remind the House that one no less illustrious than David McGee who I understand is standing down from the role is the current senior steward along with Dame Beverley Wakem of this Office of the Ombudsmen and let me say constitutional institution. 
It might be said that the funding of such an institution is not just a matter for the Labour members. It is a matter for members of the House. But the reality as we have seen in the course of this debate is that the majority of the members of the House certainly those occupying that side are obviously screwing the scrum. They are not interested in dealing with these genuine concerns about the adequacy of the resource base. They might think that this is a way of better conserving resources but you cannot run the institutions that report to Parliament as some sorts of narrow commercial partly privatised entities. They are organs of democracy and their costs cannot be measured purely in a day-to-day year-to-year monetary form. Their costs should be associated with the value that the institution generates by improving people’s confidence in the behaviour of the executive. 
So I want to remind that side of the House—just to show I am willing to talk about mistakes that happened in an earlier administration—that a former Ombudsman Mr Belgrave looked into what was perhaps one of the nastiest incidents that I watched befall a family as a consequence of lapses of professionalism and diligence from the bureaucracy. I am thinking here of the young 17-year-old Liam Ashley who suffered the worst possible fate. It took the Ombudsmen to intrude and to investigate that. Those are the sorts of cases we should not shy away from funding. I then go on to an example that I might describe as an unwanted intrusion where the Ombudsmen decided to have a go at quantifying or getting our side of the House when we held the benches of Treasury to quantify the costs of that brilliant policy otherwise known as interest-free loans. 
Both sides of the House from time to time will govern. Both sides of the House realise that the advisers they trust in the recesses of the bureaucracy do not always deliver goods that enable us to shine in the best fashion in the House. They should be held accountable for their actions and that is why the Office of the Ombudsmen ought to be adequately funded. This is a device that enables them—not unlike Crown Law not unlike the Audit Office which I unfortunately know a bit about at the moment but that is another matter. Both of those have the ability to recover costs and what I am promoting in this bill is a modest contribution that will enable this august institution to cause the bureaucracy—where it is evident it has been sluggish and it has not complied with the law or it has been as Mel Smith said so circuitous that it appears to have broken the law. 
That is why I am promoting this particular bill. It is not designed to create a problem with conflict of interest perceptions. It is an avenue to improve the financial robustness of the office and I am very disappointed to hear from that side of the House that they have taken such a short-term superficial very shallow sort of an approach. But such shallowness I accept on this particular day has extended into this very well-thought-out and well-conceived piece of legislation because it is shallowness that has characterised question time today. But I will continue as is my duty as a parliamentarian to promote this bill to the House.