Hipkins ChrisPARLIAMENTARY AGENCIES DELEGATIONS LEGISLATION BILLFirst ReadingHon CHRIS HIPKINS (Leader of the House): I move That the Parliamentary Agencies Delegations Legislation Bill be now read a first time. Can I begin Madam Speaker by congratulating you on your ascendancy to the Chair. This is the first time I have spoken in the House since you took up the role and I want to congratulate you on that.I nominate the Governance and Administration Committee to consider the bill. The bill makes a small but significant amendment to the law around how the two organisations that this House depends upon operate the Parliamentary Service and the Office of the Clerk of the House of Representatives to allow them to work more closely together. A lot of work has been done in recent times around getting those two agencies to work more closely together and one of the anomalies in the law means it actually creates a barrier to them working closely together and I'll talk more about that. But before getting into the details of the bill I will give people just a little bit of background about the organisations. The current configuration we have dates from the 1980s when the Office of the Clerk and the Parliamentary Service were created. Until then everything to do with the administration of Parliament was managed by the Legislative Department with the Prime Minister being the responsible Minister for it.Kieran McAnulty: Really?Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: Yeah it's actually quite interesting. So the Prime Minister actually had total control over Parliament and I think that one of lessons from the early 1980s in fact was that they needed to change and Parliament needed to assert a little bit more control over its own affairs. Hence in the late 1980s the Office of the Clerk and the Parliamentary Service were created to address that constitutional imbalance. Those two agencies report to the Speaker of the House and not to a member of the executive. The development of the Clerk's Office was intended to provide more effective scrutiny by Parliament of the executive—again something that in the 1980s when it was created was a point of tension and it was felt that the Clerk's leadership role should be focused on developing an independent office without the distraction of also leading a fairly disparate administrative organisation hence the Parliamentary Service was established alongside of it. These were enshrined in two separate pieces of legislation. The Clerk of the House of Representatives Act of 1988—under that the leadership of the Clerk of the House developed I think a reputation for excellence and integrity that led it to be respected and it is actually respected across Westminster parliamentary systems. New Zealand's Parliament is held in high regard. I do want to reflect on some words about Dave McGee from his successor Mary Harris in 2014 when she reflected on the establishment of the Office of the Clerk where she said As we started out as a new office we had the advantage of the focus that the new structure provided. We were able to develop procedural and substantive advisory services to support the House and its committees without the distraction of having to worry about matters such as administration of members' remuneration and services the maintenance of a historic building. This was of great advantage in building a strong and resilient Clerk's Office."The Parliamentary Service—created in 1985 by the Parliamentary Service Act of 1985 superseded by the Parliamentary Service Act of 2000—has the task of running the parliamentary precincts and acting as the employer of all of the staff who support members of Parliament here in the complex and around the country. It would be fair to say that if there has been controversy around those two organisations it tends to have been around the Parliamentary Service rather than the Office of the Clerk. I think that's probably a reflection of the complexity of the tasks that it has been given and the somewhat unique nature of the parliamentary environment in which it operates. But the principle at the heart of this—and it is actually an important principle we consider in the legislative change that we're making—is the preservation of the independence of the Office of the Clerk. The parliamentary scrutiny function is so vitally important particularly in a unicameral Parliament as we have in New Zealand where there really isn't anybody else to scrutinise the decisions of the executive. The independence of the Office of the Clerk is something that is incredibly important. Again to quote from Mary Harris' words: "They must give free and frank advice fearlessly". Therefore the guardianship role the Office of the Clerk has shouldn't be constrained by any conflicting responsibilities or considerations. Mary Harris has argued that it would be difficult to maintain that independence if the Office of the Clerk was located within the Parliamentary Service. I think that's important because what we're doing is we are bringing the two agencies closer together with this legislation but we are not amalgamating them. The Office of the Clerk will remain independent and that is something that is incredibly important. The organisations have been working more closely together. They've been doing things like sharing IT systems. They have been doing things like sharing some staff functions where it is appropriate to do so and they have come up with a list of other areas where they want to be able to work together more closely and to share things together. So there are two parts of this bill: one makes changes to the Clerk of the House of Representatives Act of 1988 the other makes changes to the Parliamentary Service Act of 2000. It does a very simple thing—it allows members of those two organisations to delegate some of their responsibilities or their functions to a member of the other organisation. Obviously they can do that in a way that does not impinge on the Office of the Clerk's independence. So first and foremost it's proposed that a single consolidated human resource service could cover both organisations being provided by the Parliamentary Service to the Office of the Clerk. At the moment that's not possible; under this law change that would be possible. The Clerk can't delegate a personnel function to the Parliamentary Service at the moment; this law change will allow them to do so. There is a lot of focus on the HR practices around the parliamentary complex at the moment. Therefore this is one of the prerequisite legislative requirements for us to be able to deal with the findings around the Debbie Francis report for example.There is also a single parliamentary engagement team being established by the Office of the Clerk and the Parliamentary Service to manage public education and public engagement into parliamentary relations school visits website management and so on. Those are administrative jobs which—it does make sense to draw them together because whilst we might see that there's an important distinction between the two functions to the public it's all just Parliament. Bringing those two things together does allow that to happen.The deputy chief executive customer service is a Parliamentary Service employee; some of his staff are employees of the Office of the Clerk. If the General Manager and the Clerk have the ability to delegate to staff from each organisation that person would be able to exercise personnel and financial delegations on a more lasting and robust basis and this bill allows for those things to happen. So this is not a bill that's going to set the world on fire. It is not a bill that many people outside of the parliamentary complex will be particularly excited about but it is actually quite an important streamlining of the way the parliamentary complex operates. It does safeguard as I said the independence of the Office of the Clerk which is something that I think is really important—particularly important for the Opposition because as we know from the 1980s experience scrutiny of the Government of the day relies on good robust parliamentary procedure and processes and the Office of the Clerk plays a really important role in that. So I think this is a minor change it's a sensible change and I commend the bill to the House."