Falloon AndrewANDREW FALLOON (National—Rangitata): Thank you very much Madam Speaker. I rise to speak on the second reading of the Public Service Legislation Bill. I'd like to start actually where Minister Chris Hipkins left off and that was to thank our public servants for the work that they did during the recent COVID-19 situation. I think I'll echo all members on this side of the House at least. Sam and Alma who worked out of the National Crisis Management Centre did a tremendous job in supporting all MPs and I was certainly in their debt every single day of the level 4 lockdown contacting them asking them for advice asking them for assistance and I just want to thank them very much for their work. That to me sums up what public service is. It's that when we do have a crisis like that everyone gets in pulls together and does the very best for New Zealand. I say that as someone who's married to a former public servant and they do a tremendous job on behalf of their country. Now I do want to run through some of the reasons we do oppose this bill though. There are several but my primary concern is more that this is such a wasted opportunity and I'll come to that in a moment. The bill repeals two longstanding pieces of legislation the State Sector Act 1998 and the Public Finance Act 1989. Not only have they been on our statute book for more than 30 years they also represent some of the finest traditions of our democracy. I will with the House's indulgence just touch on one of those for a brief moment which is the Public Finance Act which establishes parliamentary control over public finances including for example the appropriations that we debate so regularly in this House. And importantly it also outlines the principles of responsible fiscal management which has for several decades—along with the Fiscal Responsibility Act 1994 working in tandem with that Act—put us in very good stead. Since the passage of both of those pieces of legislation but certainly the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1994 successive Governments have stuck broadly within a framework of fiscal responsibility—some Governments obviously exercising more fiscal responsibility than others. But even in the circumstances of for example the Canterbury earthquakes where large-scale borrowing was required there was always a path back to some sense of normality in terms of our debt position. So although today our debt is obviously growing at a pretty paid rate of knots and as I said in the House late this afternoon a lot of that is for a very good reason with things like the wage subsidy. And with the projections I think out to about 2023 being 50 percent as a percentage of GDP that all might sound quite scary to us because we're used to numbers far lower than that—something usually with a 2 in front of it—occasionally a 3. But just bearing in mind that for about 70 years of New Zealand's history the Government and we New Zealanders owed more than 100 percent of GDP and in fact it lifted to over 200 percent—in excess of 200 percent—at one point. That's still the case actually for many countries around the world. That unfortunately puts them in quite a negative position when it comes to responding to issues like COVID-19 also if they have any natural shocks in the way that we do with the Canterbury earthquakes as well. So those two pieces of legislation the Public Finance Act which this bill repeals but also the Fiscal Responsibility Act which was passed by the Bolger Government have set an important framework for responsible fiscal management. So with that context I do want to speak to this bill and particularly to the fact that we had in this Parliament a real opportunity to build on some of the tremendous work—work on what needed to be worked on but also to bed in the things that do work well and that is where this bill unfortunately does fall down. As my colleague Jian Yang has already pointed out in quite excruciating detail actually—not excruciating because it took a long time to do so but just the levels that National MPs went to to try and persuade Government to actually bring in a better process I found very disappointing. So this process has been rushed despite Mr Hipkins' comments earlier Particularly in what should be a considered and deliberative undertaking unfortunately this has been one that has been pushed through with unnecessary haste. So the bill was debated at select committee during the lockdown and that was during a period where in my view no non-COVID legislation should have been progressed. I understand there were some discussions across the House whether or not it was appropriate that non-COVID legislation should have been progressed during that time. So I was disappointed that this bill was progressed despite that. Certainly in my case MPs' minds were elsewhere. They were on our communities. Brett Hudson: That's right where they should have been. ANDREW FALLOON: They were working with our constituents certainly in my case and I know in Brett Hudson's case who does a fantastic job up in Ōhāriu and I'm sure actually members across the House whether they be electorate MPs or list MPs. But it wasn't just MPs of course. It was also potential submitters and they were in an even worse position than us because as we know New Zealanders up and down the country were losing their jobs. They had in often cases children at home or an enormous amount of other pressures on them. So to ask them to submit during that period is frankly pretty disappointing. Yet we had the select committee pressing on despite all that. And as Jian Yang has pointed out we tried numerous times to try and persuade the Government to extend that period. We also tried to get the bill returned back to select committee so that more time could be taken on what is a very important piece of legislation and yet Labour members pushed on despite those valid concerns about the state of the bill and the changes that have been proposed. Now I will say there are some good things about this bill and I do just want to touch on a few of those. For a period of my life I was a public servant and worked here in fact for a number of years both for the Parliamentary Service and for Ministerial Services. I always found it strange when I worked here that the two organisations never seemed to align very well. They didn't talk to each other all that much and they didn't almost seem to recognise one another. So as we know in this place Governments do come and go. They might last nine years or six years or as it was in 1975 and perhaps later this year just three years. And during all that it's not just the MPs and Ministers who are affected; it's also the staff who are affected. They often move from Government to Opposition. Yet despite that there wasn't a recognition that they should be joined up that there should be a single approach between Ministerial Services and the Parliamentary Service. The same is even more true actually for the wider Public Service—the people who often live in Wellington and move between Government departments for their entire careers. They might move from the Ministry of Health to the Ministry of Education to the Ministry of Social Development and there hasn't been a lot of recognition across the Public Service that that is their core role. They may be employed by a different agency from time to time but actually their core role is to be a public servant regardless of the ministry department or agency that they work in. So this bill I think improves that situation quite a lot. What it allows for is the portability of annual leave entitlements and to me that seems entirely reasonable. But I do have some criticisms and Jian Yang again has pointed out some of those and I'm sure my colleagues will point out some others. But the main one is that this bill is a lost opportunity to improve the connectedness between local government and central government because despite what I've seen about the portability between central government agencies that portability is also true for local and central government. We often have people moving from for example the Wellington City Council to a core Government agency here in Wellington or between the Auckland Council moving down to Wellington to take on a role here as well. This bill doesn't address that. It doesn't address that there's portability between central government and local government in the same way that there is between central government agencies. We also see that this bill is wrongly focused. It dwells far too much on issues like changing the names or changing the form of departments and actually nowhere near enough on what should be the Public Service's core role and in my view is their core role and—I think if you asked most public servants—is their core role which is the delivery of public services. So for those reasons and for others that will be canvassed I'm sure by my colleagues as we head into the night and well traversed by them I can't support this bill. It's a wasted opportunity and we won't be supporting it.