Cunliffe DavidHon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn): I am going to take only a brief call and I will direct it to the matter at hand which is Andrew Little's Supplementary Order Paper 270. It was my privilege for a short time to sit on the Intelligence and Security Committee as a party leader and I have a high level of respect for its function. I commend the fact that in this bill the role of the committee has been further strengthened. It has been strengthened by the range and level of oversight activities that it undertakes and it has been strengthened by its crucial consultation role prior to the vital inspector-general being elected by the whole House. The committee is the place where that is going to be thrashed out. There can in this system as it is designed at the moment be few more important appointments than that. It is the place where cross-party understandings would primarily be reached and reflected in the votes of this House.I respectfully therefore do differ with the Minister on this point because representation is an essential component. Expertise is also useful. But it would be hoped that by ensuring a large enough committee there would be a better chance that both representation and expertise could be given effect to. Let me offer up two benchmarks. The first is the intelligence committees of the US House of Representatives and the US Senate—committees" plural because they each have one. Those are bipartisan and august bodies that are given the most confidential operational briefings and play a vital oversight role in the American system as I recall from having served there. And I can see with this legislation this bill providing for the New Zealand committee to evolve practice in that direction. I would—to coin a phrase—warrant that over time the briefings given to this committee will become more substantive more important and perhaps more operational in nature as they should be from time to time.The second analogy is the Regulations Review Committee. It is obviously a very different beast—buried in the minutiae of regulatory practice—but there is a tradition here that the Minister may wish to take account of if he is considering that he wants a smaller committee than the nine proposed by the Leader of the Opposition. Historically although not at present that committee has had an Opposition majority because it is by definition a watchdog on executive practice. So is the Intelligence and Security Committee. So the easy way to reach agreement on this is to allow enough Opposition members to provide reasonable proportionality across the Opposition. And as my colleague has said four is the minimum. And if the Government wishes to have fewer than that well that might be a different matter.But I do not think that is what the Government does want because I think the Government does see the importance of a range of parties on the Government side being represented. It is just a factor of the mathematics of an MMP Parliament and I think it is absolutely in keeping with the multipartisan way that this bill has been crafted and is being passed that all parties—perhaps bar the smallest—from time to time should be represented on that committee. That is the way the committee will have the enduring confidence of the House. It will improve the scrutiny and the buy-in by Parliament into the operation of these vital agencies and it will in my view improve the quality of the committee's work. It will truly function if representative as well as expert as a standing committee of the House.The Minister himself has said it is a standing committee not a select committee. That is absolutely right but I would advocate Minister—I would submit—that if it is a standing committee then it is more not less important that its representative as well as its expert functions be upheld. I recognise that this would be a matter that he would need to consult on perhaps and it may be that it is a finely balanced judgment on the Government benches but I would ask him to consider further in the spirit with which he has approached this whole bill. The Opposition is not playing politics with this. We do not need a headline; we are supporting the bill. It is the dying hours of a Thursday session and we want to get the bill through but we want to set up a process that has enduring parliamentary legitimacy. There is no better way than ensuring that everybody is inside the room. That puts an obligation on anyone inside the room to maintain the confidence of the process."