Scott AlastairALASTAIR SCOTT (National—Wairarapa): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's again a pathetic contribution from the Labour members. Kiritapu Allan: That's very harsh. ALASTAIR SCOTT: Well take it as you like Kiritapu Allan but I think that was pathetic. Kiritapu Allan: Oh wow doubling down. ALASTAIR SCOTT: I know you're hurt by my comments but you'll just have to take it on the chin as you always do. But I do want to commend the contributions from the New Zealand First member Mark Patterson a full call and also Jan Logie from the Greens. I ended up actually agreeing with much of what Jan Logie actually said. It surprises me completely. I stand to be corrected but she had a reasonable analogy when she said that the Public Service was the engine and we here—I think she was talking about MPs—were the petrol that kept the engine going. I wasn't sure if she said petrol or not. [Interruption] She did say petrol—great. So she's a petrol fan just like I am. This bill the Public Service Legislation Bill says some good things. You know there are some sort of sensible things that are written here. The thrust of a strong leadership at the top driving the culture or driving the entire Public Service as one—it seems to me it should have been done years ago. This is a review or a renewal and a refurb of a 30-year-old bill so I accept that some of these things are new. But what I would say is it seems as the Minister of State Services himself said the best was seen in the Public Service during this crisis where the service got together worked across silos—for want of a better word—and cooperated and really focused on the job that had to be done. Clearly without saying so they probably bent a few rules to do things that were actually done and achieved a lot of stuff. And that's great. So this sort of legislation it seems obvious—because it supports the Crown in its commitment in its relationship with Māori for example and a flexible set of options for organisational arrangement; sounds fantastic—but you can't write legislation and just have it turned on like a tap. It can't happen unless the people in the organisation want it to happen. And Chris Penk talked about the culture of a place before any actions can really be embedded into the organisation. We sort of saw that around the health and safety law reform. You know we had legislation that led the public to become more focused on health and safety and we dragged the public along with the legislation that was leading it. But it's finally taken a long time for the culture of health and safety to be embedded in our workplaces on a day-to-day basis. This will be the same. This will be the same where we will continue to have silos we will continue to have patch protection and we will continue to have scraps about funding and protecting their projects in various agencies. It will be a while before we have a situation described by Jan Logie where you know we have a multiple-agency cooperative resource available to the New Zealand public. So what I was pleased to hear though is that to me this legislation doesn't lead actually which is a good thing; this sort of follows what is already starting to happen out there in the Public Service already. For example Brett Hudson talked about integrated services response teams. He talked about ministerial-led clusters. These things are already happening. These things are already bringing in various agencies together to get a better result for all New Zealanders and that's a good thing. Of course the agencies are supporting the Crown in its commitment to its relationship with Māori already—that's already happening. But now we've got this piece of legislation which is following what is already happening out there and says that this legislation will support the Crown in its commitment to its relationship with Māori. But that's already happening. So this is in regard to the same sort of thing—flexible set of options for organisational arrangements. You'd think that was already happening and I'm sure it is already happening out there. So my point here is that while we should be careful when we lead with legislation and pull people in to follow—that takes time—we should also be careful when we try to prescribe too much which should be left to the natural evolution of the agency which should be left to the people in the agency to work out for themselves the best way to find a solution. And that comes from the leadership at the top across the Public Service—a leadership team comprising a bunch of senior leaders across various agencies—which sets the tone and the culture—and I come back to that word again that was used by Chris Penk which is not in the legislation but I think is really important to the way that the Public Service will behave. I was interested to also think about the missed opportunities that have been mentioned already. For example to me the Living Standards Framework—which this Government has set itself and measured and set goals and ambitions around the economy and community and individual people's health and the environment—I don't see that here for the Public Service to consider when they're making their arrangements or doing any of their actions or services for example. So that was an opportunity for me at least that the Living Standards Framework could have been imbedded in this legislation which will still be following the practices that are occurring already in the Living Standards Framework in the agencies across the country. As I say you know we're not supporting this. There were opportunities for other things to be included in this bill. We talked about the rushed process and the lack of opportunity for people to submit resulting in an unchanged bill being returned back to the House. That's really not acceptable. That's not desirable. We can do better than that. For those several reasons I cannot support this bill.