Prebble Richard: Appointments — Deputy Controller and Auditor-General 
Prebble Richard: Appointments — Deputy Controller and Auditor-General 
[Volume:627;Page:21811] 
Hon RICHARD PREBBLE (ACT) 
: 
 We are debating the appointment of the Deputy Controller and Auditor General which is one of the Officers of Parliament. It is appropriate that such appointments be debated because it is one of the few occasions when Parliament is able to express a view about how those very important accountability offices are being exercised. 
As the House is probably aware I am critical of the way that those positions are being exercised. I am not criticising just the Auditor-General’s office; my concern goes wider than that. I include officers like the Ombudsmen. In my view these so-called independent officers are not holding the Government to account. They are far too weak and the Labour Government has been able to ride roughshod over previous conventions. Even though ACT members are not going to vote against the appointment of Phillippa Catherine Smith I am sceptical. I do not see anything in her CV to make me think she will give that office the sort of strength that is required in order to get some accountability back into the public accounts. 
Those are harsh words about the Auditor-General’s office but let me convince the House that I have actually done some research. Let me take just one of the most recent reports from the Auditor-General’s office which is on Government and parliamentary publicity and advertising. One can tell straight away from page 1 that this will be a gutless report. Let me quote from the report which is signed by Mr Brady: “The report is not intended to be critical of any government or party and tries to find a way forward.” Well why should it not be critical? It is part of the office’s job to be critical. How could it fail to be critical of this Labour Government’s use of taxpayers’ money for publicity just prior to an election? We have a campaign costing some $20 million of taxpayers’ money to promote the Government’s so-called family package or whatever it calls it— 
Darren Hughes 
: Rub Out the Crim! 
Hon RICHARD PREBBLE 
: Yes the Labour Government has a history of those sorts of campaigns. I know that well and I say it is time we had a strong Auditor-General’s office to do something about it. 
But let us just take this campaign at the moment. The Government has the nerve to go to the Auditor-General and say it has to advertise on television because there are some New Zealanders who need to apply in order to get this family support. The cost works out at about $100000 an application. There have been almost no applications. What the Government is actually doing is putting up TV advertisements to try to convince the voters as a whole that somehow or other its Budget is assisting large numbers of New Zealanders. Well that is a political campaign. I have to say it has been completely unsuccessful but that is not the point; $20 million of public money is being spent on a TV campaign that is to run right up until the election campaign. 
The Auditor-General’s report points out that in other OECD nations there are very tough rules on that sort of advertising that there are no rules in New Zealand and that this Government is taking expenditure to a whole new level. The question I ask is what is the point of having an Auditor-General’s office that is not prepared to put out a report and say what we all know which is that this Government is spending taxpayers’ money on party political purposes. 
We had another example when Labour used its parliamentary money to put advertisements in all the bus stops up and down New Zealand. It was completely illegal and completely against the rules. Has there been any public statement by the Auditor-General? No there has not. Why is that? Because this Auditor General does not have the strength of character I guess—or whatever it is—to be prepared to say what he knows to be true which is that this Government is abusing the public purse and is illegally spending taxpayers’ money for party political purposes. I do not believe that the appointment today will make any difference to that. 
Then I look at another type of report which is called  
Civil Aviation Authority: Certification and surveillance functions 
. I am a former Minister of Civil Aviation and as the Auditor-General points out—and I am sure the Minister will know—this sort of report about civil aviation is written by the Auditor-General about every 3 years. All the reports taken together are not worth anything. They have not helped civil aviation and they have not been of any great assistance. Ages and ages are spent looking at certification rules about which I do not think the Auditor-General really has much knowledge when all MPs know that elsewhere hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are being wasted and a lot of it is being taken fraudulently. 
We have a debate at the moment as to whether tax cuts are affordable. We all know that if the Government of the day was prepared to target real fraud that is going on in New Zealand—real abuse of taxpayers’ money—there would be enough money to finance virtually any party’s tax packages. Of course I am referring to the fact that our Social Development vote is now $7 billion. At a time of record employment 70000 New Zealanders who by law are not entitled to the unemployment benefit unless they are ready willing and able to work are still able to go along and get a benefit. 
 We then look at the sickness benefit and despite the fact that the Ministry of Health tells us that we have never been healthier the number of people on the sickness benefit keeps on going up year in year out. 
Then of course there is the domestic purposes benefit. We were told when it was introduced that there were never going to be more than 20000 parents on it; there are now over 100000. We all know there are outright fraudsters on that benefit. How do we know that? One reason is that Australia runs much tougher rules than us and when it does the checks it finds that dozens of New Zealanders who have been ripping off the system in this country in welfare abuse go across to Australia and get caught. Has the Auditor-General ever made a report on that? I estimate that there is actually $2 billion worth of fraud by people on the welfare system and if there was a proper system all those people would be back in the workforce. 
A courageous Auditor-General’s office would write a real report about welfare. Will it? Of course it will not because the Labour Government would hate to have that pointed out. It would especially hate to have it pointed out when we look at the position in other OECD countries. I take President Clinton a Democrat; if his Democrat reforms were implemented in New Zealand our welfare numbers—I am not talking about people on superannuation; I am talking about the 310000 people on welfare—would drop 100000 in 18 months. All we would have to do is firstly ask everybody to re-register. We would then find that at least 30000 of the 310000 are phantom enrolments if the Australian experience is anything to go by. If we then said to all the able-bodied that they have to front up and do 40 hours’ work we would find that another 60000 people would decide that if they have to do that they might as well go and work. 
Why does not the Auditor-General’s office do something about welfare fraud? If it did we would not be having this debate about whether tax cuts are affordable because that $2 billion could be spent on two things. Firstly we could be more generous to the people who really do need our help because they are being deprived by those bludgers. Secondly we could give back a lot of that $2 billion to the hard-working New Zealanders who are having to pay so much tax. If we had a decent Audit-General’s office that should be possible. It is about time someone held this Labour Government to account.