Curran Clare: Standards and Accreditation Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCurran Clare: Standards and Accreditation Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 13 October 2015. Volume:709;Page:7190. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): Well from this side of the House you will hear a completely different perspective on this bill. Labour tried very very hard during the progress of this bill through the select committee process listening to submitters—we tried very hard to support this bill because on the face of it it did not seem hugely controversial. It seemed as if there was a problem that had been defined.There were some differences around the process that had been undertaken. The previous Labour Government had undertaken a process that had come up with a way of dealing with the problem. When the National Government got elected it ditched that process and undertook its own. But we were open our ears were open and our eyes were open when this bill went through its first reading which we supported and it felt like it was not going to be hugely controversial.How disappointed we are—how disappointed we are with the outcome. And listening to the member Melissa Lee just speaking on this bill as if somehow it was all terribly straightforward and we are entering some bright new world is a completely different perspective on what we have ended up with. What we have ended up with is a downgraded standards system in this country. I think that is really disappointing for a nation that is trying to pitch itself to the world as a modern trading nation that has high standards and that takes its role seriously in the world as a small innovative country.Unfortunately the standards system that we have ended up with is open to concerns about conflicts of interest regulated capture and a lack of independence. The bill does not address the problem that it was set up to attempt to address which was to establish a financially sustainable model going into the future for the development of independent standards that are fit for a nation of our calibre. Unfortunately it does not reach that calibre. Instead it actually opens up questions of New Zealand’s international reputation.It is our belief that the approach that the Government has taken to this has been an approach that is based on the wrong premise which was a premise of cost saving—how do we save some money? Therefore we will absorb the standards function the standards body into a great big monolithic department called the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment and we will make a few token gestures towards providing some statutory independence around that.This is not just the Labour Party making it up because we had numerous submitters. As I said we went into this process with our eyes open. We did not have preconceived ideas about it. We sat at the select committee and looked at each other and said “Hang on a minute. There’s a problem here.” and the problem became bigger. Unfortunately the Government never addressed the problem—never substantially addressed it. It threw as I said a few token measures around it. So I think the people listening at home tonight should be a bit worried about this.When listening to the Minister’s third reading speech one of the telling phrases was “establishing an independent officer within the department”—within the department. An officer within the department is somehow going to provide independence for the standards function. The other critical phrase that was used by the Minister was that this was around “achieving efficiencies and scalability”. Well that is ultimately the guts of this bill and what it is intended to do is achieve efficiencies.The Minister also referenced the alignment of standards—and I am paraphrasing here—with the determination of Government priorities. This is the crux of the problem with the bill: aligning standards with Government priorities takes away its intrinsic independence and the importance of that independent function. Unfortunately this will not build our reputation. We believe that it will undermine it and I would like to actually draw a little bit of a contrast between the New Zealand approach in this bill and Standards Australia which is the organisation in Australia. It is “the nation’s peak non-government”—non-government—“Standards organisation. It is charged by the Commonwealth Government to meet Australia’s need for contemporary internationally aligned Standards and related services.” That is about enhancing “the nation’s economic efficiency international competitiveness and [contributing] to community demand for a safe and sustainable environment.”Within this bill we have the establishment of a New Zealand Standards Approval Board which consists of five to seven members appointed by the Minister and we have a Standards Executive which is where “The chief executive must appoint a suitable employee of the Ministry to be the NZ Standards Executive.” If that is not a downgrading of the functions of the independent standards body—and that is not discounting that there was a problem that needed to be solved around the financial sustainability—then I do not know what is.We had submitters of high calibre who came before the Commerce Committee and spoke with eloquence and power to their deep concerns about the lack of independence about the possibility of regulatory capture and about the downgrading of the international reputation. Those are the things that moved the Labour members sitting on the committee to dig deeper to ask more questions of the officials and to not feel as if those issues were truly addressed in the final bill that came before the House.Instead what came back to the select committee and the changes that were made through the select committee process were in the nature of tinkering around the edges. It got to the point where we could not support the way forward because we feel that the lack of independence and the lack of representation as my colleague Kris Faafoi said of stakeholders—particularly stakeholders representing workers—on the overall committee was not dealt with and not listened to. The important concerns of submitters who talked about the lack of independence the conflicts of interest and the impact on our international reputation were of a magnitude to make us feel that this issue has not been properly dealt with that it will have to be dealt with in the future and that it will have to be relooked at in the future. That is a great shame because there has been a lot of time and energy wasted in this process. Labour cannot support this bill.