Newman Muriel: Families Commission Bill — Instruction to CommitteeCWH In Committee Procedure 
Newman Muriel: Families Commission Bill — Instruction to CommitteeCWH In Committee Procedure 
[Volume:614;Page:10319] 
Dr MURIEL NEWMAN (ACT) 
: 
 I would like to spend a bit of time looking at schedule 2 of this bill because that is the schedule that talks about how the commissioners will be appointed. In particular clause 1(2)(b) states that the Minister: “may only appoint a person who in the Minister’s opinion has appropriate skills and experience to assist the Commission to perform its functions;”. That is “in the Minister’s opinion”—a Minister who told us just a few minutes ago in this debate that marriage was a recent phenomenon. In fact history shows that it goes back between 2000 and 4000 years to the beginning of time. 
I really worry about this Minister. The other day at a conference he stated: “I know of no social science that says a nuclear family is more successful than other kinds.” He claims to have been a sociologist in his past academic career before he came into Parliament but I would like to quote now from a piece that appeared in the  
New York Times 
 from a professor of sociology who stated: “Yet in three decades of work as a social scientist I know of few other bodies of data in which the weight of evidence is so decisively on the side of the issue. On the whole for children two-parent families are preferable.” 
This is a Minister who will be the judge of who can be a commissioner. United Future members might have one set of ideas about what the commissioners will do but this Minister has another. This is a Government that funded research some time ago that was meant to prove why teenage pregnancy is good for girls. I remember questioning it at the time. Clause 1(2)(d) of schedule 2 provides that when the Minister appoints a person as commissioner he or she must take into account “the desirability of promoting diversity in the membership of Crown entities.” In other words it will not be the best people for the job; it will be the politically correct view of who should be appointed as commissioners. It will be whether they match in with the Labour Government’s agenda of making sure that it has diversity in the public service when what most New Zealanders want to see in any role in Government or the bureaucracy is people appointed because they are the best for the job. 
I would like to look at clause 8 which talks about how commissioners can be removed. I have to tell any potential commissioners out there to be very cautious because clause 8(1) provides that: “The Minister may at any time and for any reason that in the Minister’s opinion justifies the removal remove a member from office by written notice to the member.” It can be done with as little formality as possible. If the Minister does not like what the commissioner is saying doing or writing then he or she can remove the commissioner without any recompense or comeback at all. There is no compensation for removal from office. In other words the commissioners are appointed by the Minister at the Minister’s behest and they can be removed at any time by the Minister. 
One of the core reasons why our party would not be supporting this bill even if we did think it was a good idea is that the commissioners will be appointed solely by the Minister. They will be the type of people who will do what the Minister wants them to do and who will go along with his agenda. If at any time they start to stray and get into issues that most New Zealanders would think that they should be looking at and working on and the Minister does not like it because it is not part of his politically correct agenda he can just remove them. They will not have any recompense at all. It would be very good for the Minister to take a call right now just to tell members about those two things. It sounds pretty much like a dictatorship with the Minister Mr Maharey as the complete and utter controller of this commission. 
Maybe there are more checks and balances in there. I know that when the select committee looked at this bill we did not go into this part of it in a great deal of detail. Are there rights that the commissioners have so that the Minister cannot come out of the blue and say: “I do not like what you are doing or what you are saying. You have got to go.”? I would like to know whether there are safeguards in there for those commissioners.