O'Rourke Denis: Ombudsmen (Cost Recovery) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
O'Rourke Denis: Ombudsmen (Cost Recovery) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 19 September 2012. Volume:684;Page:5422. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DENIS O’ROURKE (NZ First) 
: 
 I would like to begin by congratulating Shane Jones on bringing this bill the Ombudsmen (Cost Recovery) Amendment Bill to the House because it is a common-sense bill. People out there in the community know common sense when they see it. Obviously that does not include members on the other side of the House but it does include the vast majority of New Zealanders. They will see it as a common-sense bill because it has three major advantages. First of all it adds a new income stream to the Office of the Ombudsmen to help meet demand and we all know that that demand is not being met currently. Why would anyone wish to stop that? You would have to have no common sense at all. Some of those members over there of course fall into that category. The bill will suppress demand when Government agencies realise that they need to avoid the Ombudsman because with this legislation there would be associated costs. So it will help to suppress demand and that is something that common sense also dictates. Thirdly it will mean that agencies are more willing to satisfy applicants for official information without having to go to the Ombudsman and that is the way it should be too. That is a third common-sense reason that the members on the other side of the House will not be able to grasp but the people out there in the community will. 
Like many other members here I have some personal experience in dealing with Government agencies and city councils and trying to get basic information out of them. The fact that there is legislation that says they must actually do this in practice is not enough. I would like to give you this example. After my 15 years with the city council where I did a lot of work to assist the development of recycling I with some others set up a company that would do commercial and industrial recycling—something that had never been done properly in New Zealand before. In order to do that I needed the cooperation of the Christchurch City Council. I particularly needed some information from it. The council’s obstruction was absolutely disgraceful. You would have thought that a city council would fall over backwards to help people who were trying to promote commercial and industrial recycling in this country but no the council’s imperatives were that it wanted to protect its own operations so it would not give that information. Replies to requests that were designed to avoid giving important parts of the information were what I got. There were spurious reasons for not supplying the information. There was a legalistic approach by that particular agency to defer further applications using legal gobbledegook that meant nothing but created delay. There was obvious obfuscation. There was a need for repeated applications to get basic information that should have been volunteered in the first place. The release of self-serving versions of information with the use of large sections of blanking out of documents was also employed by that city council and is commonly employed by other agencies and councils as well. 
In addition to that there were and are often deliberate delays beyond statutory limits because councils and agencies know they can get away with it and they should not. Mostly the expectation that failing to assist people with valid applications for information will result only in an appeal to the Ombudsman with no cost or other serious ramifications is what we see on a daily basis with applications for official information in this country. This bill will help to change that. It will provide guidelines regarding the amount of the costs and guidelines about the circumstances—so there you have the safeguards. 
The bill does extend to local government and so it should. When you look at the behaviour of the Christchurch City Council which I am now deeply ashamed of you will see that this bill is absolutely necessary to create some balance in the situation. Councils and agencies can charge for information. Here we get something back in the other direction—some balance in the situation—where they will be charged if they do not do what they should have done in the first place. 
So for all those reasons—for all those reasons—this bill deserves the support of this House and the House should do so with enthusiasm. I am deeply disappointed that the National members obviously do not care about the seriousness of this problem. Their lack of common sense—