Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's a pleasure to rise in the third readings of the Public Service Legislation Bill and the Public Finance Amendment Bill and offer the Green Party's support for this incredibly important legislation. It has been good to hear the importance of this acknowledged by all speakers across the House even those who have some issues with the legislation and may not be voting for it today. Actually I think some of the really key components of the legislation will help transform the effectiveness of the Public Service to deliver. Their ability to deliver for our community seems to have been universally acknowledged and I just want to acknowledge that today. I too would like to add my voice to those of other members in this House in thanking the public servants who have been working so incredibly hard this entire term of Government because there has been so much legislation going through but particularly in response to COVID-19 where everything changed and normal ways of working had to be adapted. What I saw happen was some amazing collaboration between community and Government and between Government agencies that had never happened before and it was all for the betterment of our community. I do want to acknowledge though that I suspect there are many public servants who are looking forward to a holiday and a slowing down in the pace because it has been really tough and relentless. But the standard of work that at least I have seen has not slipped at all and that is a huge credit to them.So in terms of the legislation and the reasons that the Greens are supporting this it is about I guess codifying what we may all have understood as some of those core principles in our Public Service and the principles of political neutrality and free and frank advice and merit-based appointments and open government and stewardship. I think they're principles that we all thought were in there and it's good to get them now on paper and to make sure that they are entrenched in the work of the Public Service—the creation of the sense of people working for different agencies that now actually rather than identification with the agency it's identification with the function of a public servant and that core role that I know many feel of actually working for the people of this country rather than one siloed agency or Minister. It's about the betterment of our country and it's great to see those changes being made here.I did hear some of the Opposition critiques around this being a missed opportunity and a point was raised that they'd wanted to have fiscal responsibility or some other phrasing of that in those principles. The Greens were happy not to support that suggestion because I think the way that that seemed to have been interpreted over the last nine years I would say has given us a sense that most people recognise it hasn't delivered for the country: a workforce crisis within teaching and health and social work and within our community sector hospitals which are virtually crumbling around the staff trying to care for patients within them; where courts haven't had their basic systems upgraded and they're still working with huge piles of paper and actually putting people's safety at risk; fire stations with portaloos that are falling over; aged-care facilities without basic staffing standards that are putting our parents' and grandparents' lives and everyday wellbeing at risk; a fundamental health crisis; where the previous Government's first view of fiscal responsibility meant that they thought the priority was Housing New Zealand returning a surplus to the Government rather than building State houses. That is not a view that we want entrenched in legislation. That is not a view that we believe serves our country or strengthens the ethos of public service. We want the values and the outcomes to be up front and centre and are pleased to see that that is the general approach within this legislation.I do want to spend too a few minutes talking about the different forms of Government arrangements that are enabled through this legislation which enables interdepartmental executive boards consisting of chief executives working towards a common outcome who will now become individually and collectively responsible for that board's work. That's about getting joined-up leadership. And I feel as if I can speak to this from personal experience as acknowledged by Grant Robertson around this Government's acknowledgement that domestic violence and sexual violence—when we looked at all of our efforts over decades as a country to try and address those entrenched forms of violence we saw that we'd struggled to sustain our efforts and we'd struggled to make a difference for people in our community.One of the key reasons for that was the organisation of Government that each agency was doing its own bit in isolation from each other. And quite often we had cases—I think it was Justice and Corrections who were funders for non-violence programmes and they came up with two entirely different programmes. It was the same community provider on the ground delivering the programmes to the same people but they were expected to provide two different models of intervention with people. And that just doesn't make sense and undermines people's efforts to change. As Government we need to line up our ducks. We need to actually create a coherent response to this form of violence that is centred around people's lived realities not just the priorities of any one agency. That is what we are in the process of doing with the joint venture. I want to acknowledge what a big change that is for all of our Government agencies where we know that we have teams within agencies who don't even know what each other is doing and now we're trying to create understanding and collaboration across all of Government. That's a massive job. We're not all the way there yet by any means but we're making real progress. And we saw that during COVID where the prevention responses around recognising that there was likely to be increased risk of family and sexual violence through lockdown—so Oranga Tamariki and ACC and the Ministry of Social Development came together to look at actually what kind of prevention messages could they each put out there that would make sense together how they could each ensure that the organisations that they were supporting were able to keep delivering and were supported to do that. They worked with Civil Defence and Emergency Management to help them check in on people and make sure they were safe. We had no mechanism to do that before. That kind of way of working is how we make a difference for people's lives in our community. It's so important for domestic and sexual violence. It's also critical for issues like climate change. That is fundamentally why the Greens are so pleased to be supporting this legislation. Even while we would like to see some iteration in the future the inclusion of national and international human rights as suggested by the Human Rights Commission and the pay equity principles included in the good employer section of the legislation—they are the steps that we think come next. But this is a really good start and we look forward to working constructively across Government and the entire Public Service for the betterment of our communities.