Mallard TrevorHon TREVOR MALLARD (Labour—Hutt South): I want to align the Labour Party with the comments that have been made by the Minister. I think it is probably worth doing a little bit more of a background for members as to what is actually going on here because I would bet a reasonable sum of money that the majority of the House has no idea around the processes that are involved with funding the Offices of Parliament.Dr David Clark: Oh that's unfair.Hon TREVOR MALLARD: Well no I do not think it is unfair at all Mr Rev. Dr Clark—just to make sure that we get it absolutely right.Because of the independence of the offices the Minister of Finance is not the person who proposes to the House as part of the Budget process what their budgets should be. The decision is one of a committee which is a cross-party committee chaired by the Speaker. It is a committee that first of all receives requests from the Offices of Parliament. It receives some advice on that and makes some decisions and recommendations as part of this report and that report is picked up and moved by the Government. That is what is happening now.I agree with the comments that the Deputy Leader of the House made around the new appointments. Martin Matthews is someone who in my opinion has a very high degree of integrity and a long history of public service. He was probably held back from being the Auditor-General by the fact that Helen Clark wanted to keep him as her chief executive when he possibly could have moved on at the time.Of course we look forward to welcoming in a more formal way the Rt Hon Simon Upton when he takes up his position.The last comment I want to make is that I was a Budget Minister. I worked the Budgets with Ministers over a period of 9 years. It was very very rare for an agency to come offering to give money back because it had been more efficient than had been predicted earlier. I just want to place on my record the thanks of Parliament to the Chief Ombudsman Peter Boshier and his team for their attack—their relentless attack—over the past 12 months on the backlog of Official Information Act requests. They are getting a degree of efficiency into that office. They are putting an amount of pressure on to people who have submitted complaints to make sure that they are still current. I have given up on a few complaints after some discussions with them. [Interruption] Some of them were 5 and 6 years old and even I was having trouble remembering what the hell I was complaining about and what I wanted the information for. The information was well past being relevant and that was clearly by design on the part of Ministers opposite.But having said that there have been a lot of complaints that have been satisfactorily resolved as well and information that members of the public have been waiting for for years has been freed up as a result of this attack. Because it is going so well the backlog attack which had been anticipated to take 3 years is now estimated to take only 2. What is also interesting is that there are fewer and fewer complaints going into the backlog because Ministers know and departments know that they cannot rely on the Ombudsman waiting a year or so to get on to them. They know that they will get a prompt hurry-up and that means that the Official Information Act is working in a way that is closer to what was intended.These are important independent offices and I support the changes recommended here.