Robertson Grant: Urgent Debates — Teachers and Support Staff Payroll—Ministerial Inquiry into Novopay SystemText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRobertson Grant: Urgent Debates — Teachers and Support Staff Payroll—Ministerial Inquiry into Novopay System[Sitting date: 04 June 2013. Volume:690;Page:10655. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GRANT ROBERTSON (Deputy Leader—Labour): I think it is very important at the outset to say that this report on the Novopay system does scatter around the blame for what happened. We have had Ministers on their feet and they have talked about the problems with the Ministry of Education the problems with the State Services Commission the problems with PricewaterhouseCoopers and the problems—goodness only knows—probably inside the schools. And we have got a whole lot of blame in here about how complex it is to pay people who do not all work a 40-hour week in one place and how terribly terribly difficult all of that is. But there is something missing from this report and what is missing from this report is the acceptance of blame from the Ministers who got the 5 June report in 2012 and said “Go live”. That is what is missing from this report and that is fundamentally flawed.This report ought to share the blame across not only those officials who were working on this issue but also those Ministers who finally took the decision to go live on 5 June 2012. Those Ministers are Hekia Parata Craig Foss and Bill English. It is a fundamental principle of our Westminster system that Ministers will take responsibility for the actions of their agencies. It is unacceptable to have Ministers come down to this House and tell us that they are not going to take that responsibility. The speech that Craig Foss delivered in this House was disgraceful. He went out of his way to find quotes in the report that would mean that he did not have to take responsibility. He took a press release from Peter Hughes who says that yes the Ministry of Education is going to take its share of the responsibility and he used that so that he did not have to take responsibility. That is wrong. It is wrong for Ministers to stand up in this House and not take their share of the blame. We on this side of the House are not saying that it is just the Ministers. Of course it is not just the Ministers. But as Trevor Mallard pointed out what is the point of having a Minister or Ministers paid a quarter of a million dollars if they are not prepared to stand up in this House and say that they got this fundamentally wrong on 5 June 2012?It is important to look at the report. Mr Foss alerted us to page 88 of the report. It is actually important to look at the report and see that Ministers were briefed in May 2012 about what was happening. And in that paper that they were briefed on they were invited to consider arrangements for rapid decision-making if it became necessary to terminate Novopay. So Ministers were being told in May that things had got to such a point that it was possibly necessary to terminate the contract with Novopay. A matter of mere weeks later they received a briefing that gave contradictory advice about whether or not all the milestones for the project had been met—only weeks after being told that they might have to terminate the contract—and the Ministers said that it was all fine. They said that that was all fine and that they were going to sign it off. That is not adequate oversight by Ministers.Ministers are paid the big bucks to ask the hard questions. They are meant to ask those questions and they completely failed to do so in this case. They got a report in June that said that there were 150 software defects and 5913 payslip errors in the testing. That is just the testing—nearly 6000 errors in the testing and 150 software defects and that was just weeks after being given advice that they may need to terminate the contract. Yet all three Ministers—Hekia Parata Craig Foss and Bill English—signed it off. That is not the kind of ministerial oversight that New Zealanders would rightly expect.This was a complex process; there is no doubt about that. That should be all the more reason for Ministers to give it an even more thorough oversight than they might have but knowing these risks existed the Ministers signed it off. That is bad enough but what makes it so much worse is that the Ministers have failed to take responsibility today. We have had all kinds of faux apologies over the last few months. We have hadpeople apologising for the difficulties that have been caused and apologising for the extra work that has been put on staff. They are not real apologies. They are not apologies that say: “I am the Minister and I stuffed up. I made the wrong decision. I didn’t ask the right questions.” There has been no sign of that kind of apology up to today and no sign from Ministers who have spoken in the House today. They would much rather get the officials and throw them under the bus than actually admit their role. That is as I said a fundamental breakdown in what we call the Westminster system of Government.There is a chapter in this report called “Leadership” and it starts off by talking about the Secretary for Education. That is a flaw in this report because if we are talking about leadership then leadership comes from the Minister of Education. The Minister should be the person at the top of that section and instead what we see immediately is the term “The Secretary for Education”. There have been faults by officials in this process—quite clearly. Where is the acknowledgment of fault from the Ministers who said “Go live” in June 2012 when they were presented with contradictory evidence?I also want to pay tribute today to the school staff who have dealt with the problems that have come up from this. As most MPs in this House will have done I have been in schools in my electorate as they have tried to grapple with Novopay problems. I have seen school administrators with decades of experience reduced to tears because they could not make this system work and in the early days particularly they got the reaction from Government that it was basically their fault. That was the message. Craig Foss when he was the Associate Minister of Education was sending out the message that it was the fault of the school administrators. They deserve a proper and thorough apology from Craig Foss and the Ministers on the other side of the House because of the stress that they went through. School administrators have had to give up their jobs because of the stress—that is what has happened across New Zealand—and those staff deserve better.I also think that the teachers and the other school staff who have been affected by this deserve a tribute because they have shown up to work day in day out. It is not just the teachers; it is the support staff. It is the teacher aides who are often paid just above minimum wage who need that pay. They rely on that pay. They live week to week. They need the money. Ministers over there may not understand that but that is what was at stake here: people who need the money.When New Zealanders go to work they deserve to expect to be paid. When people go to work in New Zealand they should know two things: that they are going to come home safely after a day’s work and that they will actually get paid for their jobs. That did not happen here and that did not happen for far too long before this Government actually got up and said it was going to try to do something about it. That was the fault in leadership that should have been found in this report.It is not only in respect of 5 June that we need to look at this. I am interested by a line in the report that talks about the context in which this happened. I will quote from page 83 of the report: “The Ministry’s relationship with the schools sector has in recent times been uneasy and sometimes highly politicised.” That is what it says in the report. Where do the politics come from? The politics come from the National Government. It is the policies of the National Government that have been imposed on the sector which the sector knows are wrong and will damage educational outcomes. It is that environment of politics which has come from the Minister and this National Government that is mentioned in this report as the context in which the ministry was managing Novopay. I think that is a very interesting line and what that speaks to is that this Government should be shouldering its share of the blame for this debacle. It has failed to do that in the past and it has failed to do that today.I just want to finish—very briefly—on the point that Chris Hipkins raised about two of the recommendations. One of those is around the recommendation to modernise the collective agreements in this sector. We will be watching that like hawks because that sounds to me like more from this Government to undermine collective agreements. We will not accept this debacle being used as an excuse by this Government to undermine collective bargaining rights. There is also the idea of changing banking staffing arrangements which allows schools to accumulate hours.This Government has made a mess of this payroll system and this Government should apologise for what it has done but what it must not do is put pressure back on to schools. They have had enough from this Government they deserve better and they deserve a proper apology and some responsibility being taken for this debacle by these Ministers.