Seymour David: Official Information (Parliamentary Under-Secretaries) Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is subject to correctionSeymour David: Official Information (Parliamentary Under-Secretaries) Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 08 June 2016. Volume:714;Page:11844. Text is subject to correction.]DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): There is no tardiness here. I would like to address this bill with particular regard to the amendments on my Supplementary Order Paper 181.Hon David Parker: We wouldn’t notice anyway.DAVID SEYMOUR: Ha ha! That was quite good.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): I am going to interrupt the member straight away and say that he is aware—because it has been reported as such—that his amendments are out of scope and although he may make a passing reference to them he cannot build a speech on it.DAVID SEYMOUR: Thank you Mr Chair. Let me address the bill a bit more widely before making a passing reference to my Supplementary Order Paper andyou will see that my speech is roughly built upon the amendment that has been ruled out of order but it does actually form an interesting piece of backdrop to how the Committee came to be debating the bill tonight.As has been discussed at length through earlier stages clause 4 of this bill—really the only clause that has a huge amount of influence—extends the powers of the Official Information Act from members of the Privy Council and from Ministers and Associate Ministers to parliamentary under-secretaries. This was not the intention as Mr Foster-Bell has said of the Official Information Act.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): The Executive Council I think the member means.DAVID SEYMOUR: The Executive Council—very sorry. You are right Mr Chair and thank you for that correction. It also was not the intention when such matters were revisited by the Constitution Act by the fourth Labour Government in 1986. So it is a significant change. As Mr Foster-Bell has said although I am not so worried about which perks come with the bill I do not think that there should be a balance between obligations and perks because we are all honoured to serve here in Parliament in whatever capacity. What is important is that clause 4 will make no material difference to the way that parliamentary under-secretaries operate and the transparency in the way that they operate.I might venture that as the only current member of Parliament who has served as a parliamentary under-secretary I am in a unique position to say this. I think you will find that is true—the last one was actually Dover Samuels. I have already made a point of tabling or proactively releasing all official information that I have held in my capacity as a parliamentary under-secretary. In an earlier reading I made a point of piling it up on this desk and showing members quite what a volume of information has already been made proactively available. But more importantly—Hon Ruth Dyson: When did you start releasing it? Before or after this bill was drawn?DAVID SEYMOUR: The member is asking did I begin those releases before or after this bill was drawn. I suspect that what she will find if she looks back through the records is that the notion of proactive release began in December 2014 when I signed a letter with Minister Parata which was a guide to how Official Information Act requests to my particular duties as parliamentary under-secretary would be dealt with. I am not aware of when the bill was drawn but I think the member will find that actually the bill was drawn after that time—so a good question but as is often the case with the member not a particularly relevant one.Hon Ruth Dyson: A good but incorrect answer.DAVID SEYMOUR: If I can return to the substance of the bill rather than the heckling that I am encountering from the far corner the second reason why clause 4 will make no substantial difference is that according to the Constitution Act a parliamentary under-secretary derives all of their powers from the Minister. So to the extent that the parliamentary under-secretary is exercising any power how they are exercising it and what it is being used for can be discovered by sending an Official Information Act request to the Minister’s office. That is why Minister Parata and I given that we thought we might get a lot of Official Information Act requests actually moved to have a procedure for dealing with such requests and funnily enough as parliamentary under-secretary I have been signing up the ones that were not already proactively released which it turns out most of them were.It is a clause that will have no material impact on the operation of parliamentary under-secretaries. It will not give the people watching or listening at home an additional insight into how parliamentary under-secretaries such as myself operate. I am more than happy for this bill to go through on that basis but I would say that once we have breached the distinction between the Executive Council—