Hipkins Chris: Offices of Parliament — Address to Governor-General 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hipkins Chris: Offices of Parliament — Address to Governor-General 
[Sitting date: 05 April 2012. Volume:679;Page:1750. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka) 
: 
 I am happy to take a call on Government motion No. 3 which deals with the financial appropriations for Vote Audit Vote Ombudsmen and Vote Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. I want to talk about each of those agencies respectively. 
I want to start with the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. I begin by noting some of the really important work that the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment has been engaged with and is engaged with and the growing importance of many of the issues that she has been working on. If we look over just the last little while—the last couple of years—we have seen very useful and valuable reports from the commissioner on issues like 1080 biofuels and water quality and of course we have now got some work being undertaken in that area around fracking. 
I think that increasingly issues that the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment is working on monitoring and investigating are coming more and more to the fore in terms of the public’s consciousness and in terms of the range of political debate we are having. So I think that the role of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment is potentially going to become a more and more prominent one in this institution and I think that is something we welcome on this side of the House very much. It is important that we ensure the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment is adequately resourced and this resolution before the House is one of the ways we can do that. 
The next agency I want to talk about is the Office of the Auditor-General whose funding is dealt with by this resolution before the House because the Office of the Auditor-General is a vital and very very important check on the use and potential abuse of power by the Government. I think we have seen some really good examples in recent weeks of why the independence of the Office of the Auditor-General is vitally important. It does provide the public of New Zealand with that vital check on the use of power. 
We have seen the Auditor-General announcing that she is investigating ACC. That is going to be a very very interesting investigation because it does cut to the heart of the use and potential abuse of power within this Parliament. Here we have a situation which will be investigated by the Auditor-General where we have a Minister of the Crown and the allegations are that he was potentially misusing his position as a Minister to procure some benefit for an acquaintance of his. That was very inappropriate. It ultimately cost the Minister his job but we have now got an ongoing saga within the Government that seems to be tearing the Government to pieces actually. It is an ongoing saga as to who was involved and who knew what when and that is something that I hope the Auditor-General will at least be able to shine a little more light on in her investigation. 
There are other areas where I would argue the Auditor-General should be involved and should be conducting some further investigations. The funding processes of New Zealand On Air and the management of conflicts of interest at New Zealand On Air is another really good example of where the Auditor-General could rightly be asking some very pointed questions. There are significant amounts of money being allocated by New Zealand On Air with significant involvement of the Prime Minister’s electorate chairperson in those funding decisions. That is something that the Auditor-General should be looking at and should be concerned about. These are not insubstantial amounts of money and it was in a highly political time—for example in the run-up to an election period. The appropriateness of somebody holding such a high political office being involved in decisions around which political documentaries are and are not screened in the weeks before an election raises real concerns and that is something that we on this side of the House think the Auditor-General may well want to look into. 
There is another contemporary issue before the House today—it was before the House during question time today—and that is the appropriateness of the Government’s actions with regard to the Skycity Casino. That is something that we could ask the Auditor-General at some future point to look into—whether in fact Ministers have acted appropriately at all times in that investigation and whether or not all of the decision making around that has met the thresholds of transparency and accountability that this Parliament should be demanding of its Ministers. Those are issues that could be investigated by the Auditor-General. It is all the more important that the Auditor-General is adequately resourced to do that and to be independent in its operations so it is the responsibility of this Parliament to make sure that happens. 
I want to turn now to the Office of the Ombudsmen and I have some real concerns that this resolution that we are debating now does not provide the Office of the Ombudsmen with sufficient resourcing to do the job that it is requiring. I know from the comments made by the Speaker in the debate that the Office of the Ombudsmen has been given all that it has asked for. I do not think it asked for enough and I am really surprised because the financial review of the Office of the Ombudsmen presented by the Government Administration Committee was actually very specific around this stuff. 
It was quite alarming when we read what the financial review said. It talked about the office considering itself to be in crisis. It has a budget that was established for a workload of between 800 and 1000 cases at any one time and it is now telling us that it is dealing with between 1600 and 1800 cases at any given time. That is significantly more than what its budget is established to deal with. It is so bad in fact that it has 300 cases that have not even been assigned to a case officer. In other words they are sitting in a drawer. No one is even looking at them because the office simply does not have enough resources to deal with that. That is something that this Parliament should be incredibly concerned about and we should be taking more action to deal with that. 
The Office of the Ombudsmen has 1854 live cases on hand as at the date of this report being presented by the select committee. It is failing to meet some of its deadlines. It is talking about a lack of resources. It has noted to the committee that cases are becoming increasingly complex and require longer investigation. So not only is the Ombudsmen’s office dealing with more cases but it is dealing with more complex cases and the Ombudsmen’s office has rightly argued that complainants would rather the office were right in its judgments than swift in its judgments. But that requires us as a Parliament to ensure that the office has sufficient resources to get it right and to be thorough in its investigations and it would appear from what the select committee is telling us that this Parliament is not living up to its obligation to do that. 
The Office of the Ombudsmen is also struggling to communicate what it is doing. The Government Administration Committee’s report notes that the Office of the Ombudsmen because of a lack of resources is not able at the moment to publish case notes or the  
Ombudsmen Quarterly Review 
. These are really important things that the Office of the Ombudsmen does. The case notes and quarterly review deal with a wide array of issues and provide really important guidance to Government departments Government agencies those dealing with official information and those dealing with really important processes. They provide very important guidance to them. 
The fact that the Ombudsmen’s office is unable to deal with these issues at the moment is something that we on this side of the House are very very concerned about. The increase in funding that is being allocated deals only with salary increases and administrative cost pressure. It does not deal sufficiently with this huge increase in case work that the Office of the Ombudsmen is facing. There has been no movement in staff salaries since 2007. I am glad that the request for extra money will help them to deal with that but it is not going to resolve the wider issue. 
The Office of the Ombudsmen is likely to face significant increases in its workload as a result of public sector reform currently being undertaken by the Government. With rhetoric coming from the Government about moving resources from the back office to the front line many complaints processes and quality assurance processes are what this Government would deem to be back-office services. So we are going to see more complaints coming through to the Ombudsmen as the resources to provide those vital quality assurance and complaints processes are being choked off from the Government sector. 
The Government Administration Committee’s report—and bear in mind that this is a unanimous report from a cross-party select committee which included National members—reports: “The office believes that reductions in agency complaint service staffing will reduce agencies’ ability to handle complaints and may adversely affect quality assurance in practice and process leading to errors or misjudgements maladministration and potentially corruption.” These are pretty strong words to be coming from the Office of the Ombudsmen. These are very strong words to be coming from the Office of the Ombudsmen and we are not resourcing it sufficiently to act as a safeguard to act as that check on the use and abuse of power as it was set up to do. 
So at the moment our rhetoric around the importance of the Ombudsmen looks very hollow unless we are willing to actually stump up and provide them with the funding that they need. We are not doing so at the moment. We are not resourcing the Office of the Ombudsmen sufficiently. That needs to be addressed.