Official Information (Parliamentary Under-Secretaries) Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is subject to correctionOfficial Information (Parliamentary Under-Secretaries) Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 08 June 2016. Volume:714;Page:11846. Text is subject to correction.]As Mr Seymour said the substance of the bill is clause 4.It is around the redefinition of “Minister of the Crown”. My colleague Mr Foster-Bell pointed out that although the argument is clear that the redefinition applies only to this particular Act the Official Information Act the act of undertaking a redefinition of what is a Minister itself fills us with some concern. I think Mr Seymour was just touching on the point that I would make. I do not argue or make comment on his contributions that with all of the work that he has been doing and the process that he has in place in his office this will make no material difference to the actual information that is released. The part that does concern me although we will be supporting the bill tonight is that this change not only blurs but basically removes the distinction between what it means to be a member of the Executive Council and what it means to be a member of the executive.We had a number of submitters—not terribly many but we had several—and the point from the Law Commission for instance was that in the first reading of this bill a number of members and I was one of them used the term “executive” about the Official Information Act not applying to parliamentary under-secretaries because they are not members of the executive.They are so we were incorrect. The distinction lies in the difference between the Executive Council which all Ministers are members of whether they are Ministers inside Cabinet or Ministers outside Cabinet and the only members of the executive who are not on the Executive Council who are parliamentary under-secretaries.I asked as part of the select committee process for officials to go back and look at the 1980s at the time of the passing of the Official Information Act and in subsequent years for utterances in the House recorded in the Hansard or any other correspondence or commentary they could find from members of House that would indicate that around that time or in the subsequent years they thought: “Oops we made a mistake. It had been our intention that the Official Information Act would cover all members of the executive and we should really think about doing something so that these parliamentary under-secretaries are covered.” There were at least a couple of them in the 1980s—such as the Hon Annette King and the Hon Peter Dunne to mention two—who were parliamentary under-secretaries who were not covered under the Official Information Act which had been passed in the early 1980s. When they were parliamentary under-secretaries they were not covered under it.Officials reported back and reported that they could find no record at all that gave any indication that any members at least in the House had made any utterance that suggested that they thought they had made a mistake that the bill needed to be amended or that somehow because parliamentary under-secretaries were members of the executive they should have been captured under the Official Information Act. So from that lack of discourse we can all take I think great confidence that at the time of the passing of the Act and in subsequent years it has not been considered that parliamentary under-secretaries should be included under the Official Information Act.In taking the step that officials recommended—and admittedly they recommended it because given the Government Administration Committee agreed that we would recommend the extension to include parliamentary under-secretaries the most expedient way of doing that was simply to redefine what a “Minister of the Crown” includes under the Act. But the concern is that as I have said all Ministers are members of the Executive Council but parliamentary under-secretaries are not. We are concerned that the redefinition just destroys that distinction and we do feel—I certainly feel—that the distinction has always existed for a reason andit is quite arguable that we are just removing the reason which in itself is a little troubling.Having said that despite the concern that I do have about doing it that way we do believe on reflection through the select committee—particularly its members but also other members in the Government caucus—that the transparency and greater access that this will afford and the greater confidence this will give the public in the access to information including those actions that are delegated to parliamentary under-secretaries do outweigh a concern that we might have about the blurring through a redefinition. So we did support this bill in the second reading and we will be supporting this bill this evening as well but we do have some concerns.