Franks Stephen: Offices of Parliament—Address to Governor-General 
Franks Stephen: Offices of Parliament—Address to Governor-General 
[Volume:608;Page:5128] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT NZ) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of the ACT party to speak on the appropriations for the three Offices of Parliament: the Audit Office the Office of the Ombudsmen and the Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. These offices of course are constitutional anomalies in a sense. They are offices that report directly to Parliament. They are intended to be watchdogs on the executive the Crown in theory for Parliament. It is the time of year when we should be reviewing to see whether we are getting value for money from those people employed by Parliament directly to allow Parliament to know that the Crown the executive the people who report to Cabinet Ministers are doing what the law says they should do and no more and that power is not being abused. 
I look at the offices that I know most about. I was an officer of the Office of the Ombudsmen for 2 years so there is a certain sentimental regard when I look at the appropriations for the Office of the Ombudsmen. I have to say I was a low-level investigating officer. I had no regard for its budget—I do not know what it was. But I always look at the work of the ombudsmen and the people who work in that office with a great degree of interest. I was intrigued to notice that $100000 extra is recommended for allocation by Parliament to enable the Office of the Ombudsmen to defend proceedings brought by the Crown Law Office against the decision that the Ministry of Social Development must release tenant address information to the Department for Courts so that tenancy judgment orders can be enforced. It seems so absolutely obvious that the Crown should be acting in what the Government is pleased to call—what is the term? It is “whole-of Government”. That is the funny term for it—a whole-of-Government approach. In other words the left hand should at least be supporting what the right hand is doing. People should be expecting the Government to be consistent. 
Here we have a situation where the Office of the Ombudsmen’s time energy and money appropriated by this Parliament will be used to defend a decision of the ombudsman that would seem to be so bleedingly obvious to use a recently sanctified phrase that it defies belief. That the Department for Courts has to get the Ombudsman to ask the Ministry of Social Development for tenant address information to enforce tenancy judgment orders is just unbelievable. How can anyone in the social policy area expect landlords of any kind to be willing to provide tenant accommodation if the Government colludes in looking after the tenancy bludgers—the ones who let all the others down the ones who put up the cost the ones who add to the risk of being a landlord the ones who create the environment where excessive rentals can be justified on the grounds of risk? Here we have the Office of the Ombudsmen making a sensible decision—that of course the Department for Courts should have access to the information the Government has. How many tenants would not expect the Government to work in that way? 
When I was in the Office of the Ombudsmen I dealt with complaints against the Inland Revenue Department. There was a very clear recognition that the Inland Revenue Department was different from all other departments that the information one gave to the Inland Revenue Department was held sacrosanct and that one could be a prostitute or a bookie or engaged in all kinds of activity that the rest of the State did not approve of but the Inland Revenue Department would keep it sacrosanct. Conversely I think citizens expected that if the Government got information in any other capacity it used it for proper Government purposes—and here we have to give the Office of the Ombudsmen $100000 to defend itself against the Crown Law Office on behalf of the social welfare Minister Mr Maharey. 
I am also fascinated by the appropriations for the Commissioner for the Environment. That is not because I know a great deal about what the commissioner has been up to but because I do not know a great deal about what he has been up to. Here I am a member of Parliament and I expected that our Commissioner for the Environment would be a guiding light and that he would have thrown a great deal of sunlight on some of the really hard issues. For example a Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment I would have thought would have an active interest in the “corngate” affair. This is an issue where Parliament needs objective information. Instead a parliamentary select committee is embroiled in a political stoush over what is the reality or truth in the “corngate” affair. Was the Prime Minister involved in some sort of collusive activity with the Minister for the Environment to suppress information about the release of a genetically modified organism? I am surprised that we did not hear the Green speaker who has just finished asking why the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment was not deep into this in order to make sure that Parliament really knew what had happened. 
I look at others. We are importing Indonesian coal to run our power stations—Indonesian coal from the people raping Indonesia as we hear. We are importing Indonesian coal to burn and to inject into the environment we all have to share. I have not heard a peep from the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment on the consistency and whole-of-Government approach that has the Department of Conservation blocking coalmining on the West Coast. In another of my earlier existences I was on the board of Coal Corporation of New Zealand. [ 
Interruption 
] The United Future member is mentioning hydro schemes. The fact is that we should expect this commissioner to be the one who says: “Hey there’s an anomaly here. Parliament has three or four different kinds of legislation. It is getting various reports. Different departments are doing different things but it’s not hanging together.” The commissioner should be asking the Department of Conservation why it is blocking the mining of coal in New Zealand when we have what someone said in the House today was 800 years’ worth of coal. Instead of allowing New Zealand coal to be mined we are importing 600000 tonnes of coal into Auckland from Australia and Indonesia and we could have been providing that ourselves. 
If the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment was using his $2 million in the way I had expected we would benefit for genuine environmentalism we might have had some idea of the value of time spent in traffic jams and about the emissions from time spent in traffic jams. We might have had an audit of the spurious claims about deaths from exhaust emissions based on overseas models and not properly applied to New Zealand conditions. We might have had a review of the claims about people dying of cold because power is not available to them. Again it may be that the commissioner has put out something clear and objective on this and I just have not come across it but he is our commissioner and I still do not know whether it is true that anyone in New Zealand dies of cold because they do not have enough electricity when they could have put a jersey on or put a hot water bottle in their bed. It is possible. I saw a claim very recently that New Zealand houses had to have a whole lot of fibreglass batts in them because we were dying in our homes because they were too cold. That seems to me eminently something that the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment should have got into. 
The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment should have been looking at the new local government bill the Resource Management Act. He should have been looking at the restraints on transmission and at the problem of the national grid not having enough capacity to move power between Auckland and Wellington or between the South Island and Auckland in a way that would allow more hydro and less gas and diesel generation. Probably we will see all over the country in the next few months inefficient diesel generation at an individual level. I believe that the $2 million the Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment is being paid should have been put under strict scrutiny. I see no reason in this report for continuing with this office. Though it is a godmother and apple pie thing it is time it was reviewed.