Walker Holly: Ombudsmen (Cost Recovery) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Walker Holly: Ombudsmen (Cost Recovery) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 19 September 2012. Volume:684;Page:5420. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
HOLLY WALKER (Green) 
: 
 I am pleased to rise on behalf of the Green Party to support the Ombudsmen (Cost Recovery) Amendment Bill. Unlike many of the speakers so far in this debate with the exception of Mr Auchinvole I was part of the Government Administration Committee that conducted the financial review into the Office of the Ombudsmen that prompted the need for this legislation. I am pleased to say that there can be no doubt that that office is in crisis and that intervention is required. I thought it would be helpful first of all to reflect upon the importance of the Office of the Ombudsmen in the vital— 
Rt Hon Winston Peters 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I suspect I just saw something that is thoroughly untoward in a democracy particularly on a very important matter and that is the whip of a party going to tell other members not to take their call. That is serious. 
Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER 
: That has got nothing to do with the order of the House. 
HOLLY WALKER 
: I was reflecting on the vital role of the Ombudsmen and the democratic and constitutional purpose that they play. The Ombudsmen provide an independent impartial check on the quality fairness and integrity of the administration and decision making in the wider State sector. That includes investigating complaints about the administrative conduct of central and local government agencies and complaints about the decisions of Ministers of the Crown; providing information and guidance to employees wishing to report serious wrongdoing in their workplace including whistleblowing; and examining and monitoring the treatment of persons detained in prisons premises approved and agreed under the Immigration Act health and disability places of detention and youth justice residences. We often think of the Ombudsmen in relation only to the Official Information Act and complaints placed about that but in fact they have a far wider role that also includes protecting and monitoring the implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. All of those functions are very critical to both our constitution and our democracy and to the public’s right to honesty integrity and transparency in those processes. So it is a very important role indeed and it is very important that it is an office that is adequately resourced. 
What we heard at the select committee during the financial review that has prompted this legislation is that the office is in crisis. For example the office’s budget is established for a workload of 800 to 1000 cases at any given time but it now routinely deals with between 1600 to 1800 cases at any one time with no corresponding increase in funding. At the time of the review the office had 1854 live cases and of those over 300 were unassigned to an investigator. They were sitting unassigned because all the investigators were at their maximum tolerable workload—“tolerable” being a very important word there. These are people who are under a great deal of stress in this office. That meant that the office was consistently failing to meet deadlines and it was predicted that it would continue to do so because of the lack of resources. The effect on staff well-being in the office we heard at the committee was very serious indeed. Because it was currently understaffed by four investigators and there had been no movement in staff salaries since 2007 it had a very high staff turnover and it also had issues of staff sickness and stress leave because of high rates of serious illness and the stresses placed on staff working under the conditions that we have described with the growing complexity and volume of cases and the lack of funding to deal with them. So it is not a pretty picture to be a staff member in the Office of the Ombudsmen at the moment. This bill from the Hon Shane Jones helps I think to partially resolve these issues by allowing the Ombudsmen the ability to recover costs as well as promoting greater compliance from the Government departments and agencies being investigated. 
If I may at this point give a personal example I have a complaint with the Ombudsman that has now been sitting undealt with for almost a year. I do not hold any animus to the Office of the Ombudsmen for that state of affairs but it is an important case where the police a Government agency cited a legal opinion in the media to say that they had decided to stop having sniffer dogs doing drug tests in schools because they had had a legal opinion telling them that they should no longer do that. We requested that legal opinion under the Official Information Act. It was not forthcoming so we made a complaint to the Ombudsman. It transpired that no such legal opinion actually existed yet the agency—the police—had gone on record publicly claiming that this opinion was the reason for no longer doing something. In fact it did not exist. The Ombudsmen should be able to give a remedy in this case and because they are under-resourced they are not able to do so. That is one example of why we need this bill. I commend this bill to the House.