Hudson BrettBRETT HUDSON (National): I rise in opposition to this the Ombudsmen (Cost Recovery) Amendment Bill. There are three areas I will cover if time permits. The first is the issue of resourcing because of course the bill claims very clearly in its explanatory note despite what the previous speaker Eugenie Sage said that this is all about resourcing the Ombudsmen's office which it claims is under-resourced. But as the previous speaker did acknowledge since 2012 when this bill was first in the ballot funding has increased by over 67 percent from $9 million to just over $15 million. More importantly than simply the money it is acknowledged that the office is getting well on top of its workload and in fact was forecast to clear the backlog I think a year sooner than had been projected earlier.Another point I would like to make around that resourcing is that it is a typical failing I would argue with Labour members—and it dates back to the previous Labour administration—that they claim that simply throwing more money at something is going to fix the problem.Hon David Parker: It doesn't throw more money at it.BRETT HUDSON: Well it does because if you are recovering costs presumably you are going to use that money to do something. It is through another channel throwing more money at a problem. They do not map out what they will do with it. They do not map out what that additional resource will deliver. They just say: Give us more money; everything will be fine." We saw that when we took office in 2008. The Labour administration had just thrown money at the Public Service and actually it was more money for less delivery. So actually it does not give a lot of confidence: the way the bill claims to do something but not show how.That is further reinforced by the lack of policy detail something that is also endemic in Labour members' bills in this term. So let us see what this is going to do. It is not necessarily going to charge an agency if it is late—no. We have got no idea what it is going to do because what it says is that the Ombudsman will determine and specify what costs can be recovered and the conditions under which they can be recovered. So the member is asking Parliament to endorse something where we do not actually know what the conditions are and what costs could be recovered when where—and we do certainly know from whom. That is typical them. That is typical of the way they approach their members' bills.The potential risk from that is that if the Ombudsman sets the bar a bit low then we could quite frankly and I am certainly not going to accuse anyone of making spurious complaints to the Ombudsman find a lot of situations where—because presumably if they undertake the investigations they are going to want to recover the cost during the investigation not afterwards—costs are being recovered from agencies where ultimately the investigation finds that there were no fundamental grounds to the complaint. That risks the Ombudsman then deciding that in order to help protect a potential unfairness potentially where agencies are being charged unreasonably then they will actually toughen up the criteria for permitting those complaints to be investigated. Equally badly they could even set the bar too high for the grounds to initiate the investigation. Equally both of those risk in effect diminishing access to the services of the Ombudsmen and the power that the office can operate under.So I would argue that Parliament should be determining that policy or at least Parliament should have a very clear idea about what is in the scope really of what the Ombudsman might be determining or in fact maybe even Parliament should make the determination. But the detail is not there. It is simply not there. I do not believe that we in good conscience could support that.The third point that I would make—I think this is something that any member putting forward a member's bill is subject to—is how the public might perceive the motivations behind it. I watched and listened to the sponsoring member's speech to introduce this bill and with no pun intended he laboured the agri-hub situation repeatedly through that 10 minutes. I have to wonder whether the public viewing that speech and looking at this bill may well form an opinion of their own that perhaps the member is a little unhappy with the results of that investigation—the findings that fundamentally showed no deep wrongdoing or corruption. The member was unhappy with the findings of the investigation and believes that with just a little bit more money the Ombudsman could have uncovered the wrongdoing and corruption that he is so certain was there. All he needed was a bit more money to prove it. I reject this bill and call on other members to do likewise."