Shaw JamesHon JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): Thank you very much Madam Speaker. I'm going to take the Hon David Seymour up on his challenge and make a couple of policy proposals based on what I heard in the first reading and in his debate contribution just now. He was extolling the virtues of changing one's mind. So I'm going to suggest that perhaps he might want to take that advice and change his mind about the bill that we have in front of us here tonight. Madam Speaker I also would make a request of you. There is a proposal from the Government to establish a ministry of regulation and do regulation or some such. That is not for debate tonight. It is outside the scope of this bill. We shouldn't be debating whether or not there should or should not be such a ministry. It is simply not on the Table here. So in terms of referring to the Standing Orders I'm also going to ask the Minister to constrain the debate and his points in the debate to the merits or otherwise of the disestablishment of the Productivity Commission because that is what this debate is about. That's all that this involves—DEPUTY SPEAKER: Can I just say to the member: that basis is fine if everyone across the House wants to constrain themselves to the points that are in this piece of legislation; both ways.Hon JAMES SHAW: Very well Madam Speaker—DEPUTY SPEAKER: I'm not pointing—Hon James Shaw: No no I understand.DEPUTY SPEAKER: I'm not pointing to that particular member because you're doing well.Hon JAMES SHAW: Thank you very much. Golly. Hon Grant Robertson: They only say that when you leave.Hon JAMES SHAW: Indeed indeed. My ears are burning. What I would like to say is there are a couple of points that were raised by the Minister for disestablishing the commission" one of which was perceived politicisation of the commission itself. There is quite an easy fix for that and it is not just to appoint people who you think agree with you. It's actually to change the governing legislation to establish an independent nominating committee such as that we have for the guardians of the super fund or frankly for the Treasury board or for the Climate Change Commission and so on. It just creates a sort of arm's length away from the Government in terms of those appointments.So I would suggest to the Minister that actually given that this House is it seems universally agreed that the commission is a good thing and does good work we should retain the commission. That's point number one; and two we should amend the governing legislation so that it has an independent nominating committee. The third proposal is one I floated earlier which is that we also require the Government and Government agencies to respond specifically to the recommendations of the commission. This is a proposal I made when I was a Minister in terms of the changes to the Environment Act where the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment finds themselves in a similar situation where they produce extremely good work some of which kind of gets legs and you know various Governments and parliaments run with it. But actually if there was a requirement upon the Government to have to respond within a reasonable time frame—say 12 months—to those reports then you would actually get a proper policy response from within the Government to that work. So that would be my third point—to require a response.Included in that if a Government or if a Government agency disagrees with the Productivity Commission's recommendation is that they not just to say they disagree or produce some kind of weasel words to kind of get out of it but that they have to find a justification to say why they disagree why they will not be adopting that or recommending to Ministers that they adopt that recommendation. I think if you were to take that package you know three or four simple reforms then actually we would get a great deal more from the Productivity Commission and that really good work would not go to waste.So I think those would be the proposals that I would take forward within the constraints of this debate on this bill which is whether or not to disestablish the Productivity Commission. Because as far as I can discern everyone who has spoken in this House has extolled the virtues of the Productivity Commission and thinks that it does good work. Whilst everyone seems to have expressed disappointment that some of their best work has fallen by the wayside because Governments essentially have ignored it that is not an argument for getting rid of it. That is an argument for improving it and making sure that Governments and parliaments have their feet held to the fire. We have very few independent think tanks in this Government which provide the sort of independent thorough research that really assists the quality of debate. Ministries provide you know kind of their views and so on and so forth. But there are very few places that you can look to that are like the Productivity Commission which will produce work which actually is inconvenient a lot of the time and does challenge Governments and the rest of the us to say "Well actually have we got this right?" To my earlier point from my first reading speech sometimes those recommendations are about fundamental shifts in the economy. That includes things like shifts in our tax system and so on which Governments don't want to do because it is inconvenient for their voter bases and so on. I think that's important that we can have that function as an important part of our democracy and actually there aren't very many other places in our governmental system where we can have that. So I do think actually on balance that I would implore the Minister to change his mind based on the fact that there is kind of universal support for the work of the Productivity Commission here and that we say "Actually we're going to continue that."I know that the response to all of this will be "Well actually none of those arguments matter because we needed the money to do this other thing". That is kind of a budgetary decision. But the amounts that we're talking about within the grand scheme of you know $120 billion - plus that the Government spends in any given year this is effectively a rounding error. I would say that we should be able to walk and chew gum. If the Minister also wants a ministry of regulation the effect of which he suggests will actually be to reduce Government spending then the savings in Government spending that the new ministry is able to do should pay for itself and shouldn't require the disestablishment of the Productivity Commission to get going. So those would be the main points I would say that we want to take into the rest of the debate because I do worry that we are slipping into an era of Government where we don't have facts and evidence available to us for debate. And I say "facts and evidence" quite specifically because that's a quote drawn from the coalition agreements that pull this Government together. Both of those coalition agreements include reference to basing decisions on facts and evidence. The Productivity Commission has been one of the chief sources of facts and evidence sometimes inconveniently so. If we weren't to have it it reduces the fact and evidence base for this Government to be able to do the work it says it wants to do in the coalition agreements that it has signed amongst the various parties that make it up. So I do think that we should reject the bill and retain the Productivity Commission but I do think we should do so with the intention to make those improvements. So when we do get to the next stage as the Minister has asked I'll just repeat those policy proposals: (1) that we retain the Productivity Commission; (2) that we create an independent nominating committee to de-politicise appointments; (3) that we require the Government to respond to each of the recommendations within a reasonable time frame including justifications for why the Government disagrees with any recommendations. That would enable us to have a high-quality institution which gets a great deal more traction than it has been able to over the course of the last 10 years or so."