O'Connor Damien: Inquiries Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeO'Connor Damien: Inquiries Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 20 August 2013. Volume:692;Page:12645. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Labour—West Coast - Tasman):I too rise as a Labour member to support the Inquiries Bill. I must acknowledge our former colleague—“Bring Back Rick”. The Hon Rick Barker was indeed the Minister to introduce this legislation. As a former great leader of the Labour Party has often said it is no good being too right too early. That was indeed the case with the Hon Rick Barker. As Minister of Internal Affairs he had identified via an inquiry initiated by the Hon Annette King that we did need to update the laws and the legislation around inquiries. It is somewhat sad that the incidents referred to in Supplementary Order Paper 330 here put on the Table by the Minister of Internal Affairs are ones relating to deregulation across this country. Pike River Coal the inquiry into building failure and now of course the dairy industry—all those three incidents were effectively caused by deregulation ineffective regulation and oversight in key areas of our economy. We hope that this new legislation will provide the ability to have inquiries that do look into the causes the reasons that we indeed changed the legislation what the basis was for it in the first place and why we did not see the need to update it prior to incidents occurring. The latest one of course is with the dairy industry.I do have some concerns though and the explanatory note to the Minister’s Supplementary Order Paper 330 says that in improving the legislation tabled by the Hon Rick Barker we have now got changes that allow the ability to set the parameters of an inquiry tightly. That may be useful but it may also limit the ability of the inquiry to identify the real causes. This is after all—or the one we are talking about in reference to the dairy industry is—a ministerial inquiry. Although people have welcomed that it is not an independent inquiry. Indeed we have to acknowledge that. The explanatory note goes on to say here that in new clause 7(3) “The Minister may consult the chairperson of the inquiry before notifying the terms of reference.” I guess it is seen as allowing some flexibility and scope. On the other side of the equation it could be saying that theMinisters want the chairperson to know very clearly what they want to find out. If indeed there is adverse ministerial intervention in what we are passing here then I do not think we would have the kind of support that Labour is offering to the bill at this point. So we offer our support in good faith that Ministers will not limit the scope of an inquiry. Although it cannot of course be total and wide ranging the scope must cover the possibilities.In particular the concern I have here regarding the dairy industry and I have asked the Minister publicly about it is whether they would consider widening the scope to assess whether restrictions to resourcing in the Ministry for Primary Industries contributed in any way to the inability of staff to actually carry out their jobs. I suspect that the Ministers in having a conversation with the chair may not want that kind of outcome. So we will be looking at this inquiry. We will support the passage of this legislation but on the basis of good faith that the inquiries will be truly open and transparent. One suggestion made to me at one point was that maybe we should have some Chinese representatives on the inquiry into the dairy industry. I think that is going one step too far but I know that those customers over there will be looking at the outcome of the inquiry to see whether it has been open it has been transparent it identifies the problems and indeed it comes up with some recommendations to improve the industry and prevent the situation happening again.So Labour in supporting the legislation and the Supplementary Order Paper that the Minister has put up will be stating that it will watch this first inquiry with great interest and that it wants to make sure that there is no adverse ministerial intervention in the outcome of it.