McCully Murray: Privilege — Consideration of Reports of Privileges Committee New Zealand Post Limited Disclosure of Select Committee Proceedings 
McCully Murray: Privilege — Consideration of Reports of Privileges Committee New Zealand Post Limited Disclosure of Select Committee Proceedings 
[Volume:608;Page:5721] 
Hon MURRAY McCULLY (NZ National—East Coast Bays) 
: 
 I suppose as the member who laid the original complaint with you and saw this matter go to the Privileges Committee I should start by thanking yourself and the Privileges Committee for the thoroughness with which this matter seems to have been addressed given that it has taken over 15 months. I am sure Mr Speaker you will have spent 17 sleepless nights giving consideration to whether this matter should be referred to the Privileges Committee in the first place. As I said the Privileges Committee has spent 15 months attempting to get this report back to the Parliament. 
Mr Dunne made a fair point that we should try to look at some of the important issues raised in the report in terms of the future rather than simply adopting a political take on this occasion. I am a member who over the years has not been seen as a show pony on the front bench but as one of those grafters in the select committee process. As I reflect on this report I have to say that I feel badly let down. I feel that this Parliament has been let down by this report. The select committee process has been let down by this report. Today I hope to persuade members who are listening to this debate that we can and should do better with the privileges process in the future. I will not try to criticise individuals involved in the process. This is a unanimous report as other members have said. Mr Robson inherited the chair of the committee very late in the process. Dr Armstrong and Mr Toime have long gone. There is a futility about trying to look at the specifics in a sense but it is terribly important for the future that we should ensure that the Parliament is able to hold these organisations to account. That means that the Privileges Committee must do a better job on our behalf than it has done on this occasion. 
I want to make a few references to the particular parts of the report that concern me. First there is a saying that justice delayed is justice denied. I am not sure whether that is the analogy that should be used on this occasion but I do say that a report that comes back to this Parliament more than 15 months after the complaint was originally laid by a member is a report that is delivering no justice and will serve Parliament badly. Any hope of sending to State-owned enterprises Crown entities and Government departments the message that should have been sent to them was diminished when this matter was left to wait for so long by the previous chair of the committee Margaret Wilson. I say at the outset that the content of this report was always going to be inadequate because it comes too late to do any good. 
I move to the report itself and like the Leader of the Opposition I look at the finding which was that technically the company did not give false answers to any questions asked by the Finance and Expenditure Committee. I have listened to the comments made by members in this debate. I have listened to the Deputy Prime Minister on this matter. I guess the best I can say with regard to that finding is that it is a most generous finding on the part of the Privileges Committee in respect of New Zealand Post’s behaviour. I profoundly disagree with it. I believe that the finding in that matter is wrong. 
I want to tell the House why. As Mr Dunne has told the House this afternoon New Zealand Post was under sustained questioning over many meetings. It had gone through a process that it felt aggrieved about and uncomfortable with. There was substantial media interest in the matters that were before the select committee and that were bedevilling New Zealand Post. It had been asked to give a series of explanations. New Zealand Post knew that Mr Hide and I were in receipt of material from persons within that organisation who believed that we were entitled to facts that were not being given to the committee or to the public. It was in that light—and I suppose New Zealand Post did feel somewhat under siege—that these matters arose. 
In the previous year New Zealand Post had had to deal with aspects of the South African contract that had caused some ructions in the board room and PricewaterhouseCoopers the auditors for New Zealand Post had been called in to give a report. These were all matters of context that signalled the nervousness and sensitivity of New Zealand Post on this matter. 
In the first discussion in the select committee when New Zealand Post was asked for the Kroll report it orally answered that it did not have that report. The reason it was asked for the Kroll report by myself and Mr Hide was that people inside New Zealand Post had identified this report to us as a damning report that we should know about so we asked for it. Knowing that our informants were giving us information that was contrary to that being retailed to the committee we formally asked the committee to request of New Zealand Post that it give us this document. The chairman of the committee correctly read to the House today the nature of the request. It was a broad request and New Zealand Post came back with the answer that he again has faithfully retailed to the House. Had it not been for the fact that Mr Hide received anonymously in the mail a few days later a copy of that report then New Zealand Post would have profited from what I believe to be deceit on its part. 
The important question that was before the Privileges Committee and that is before the House today is whether New Zealand Post in the circumstances I have outlined to the House intended to deceive. Having been asked formally by the select committee and in the 3 or 4 days that New Zealand Post had to deliberate on the written responses it would deliver which Dr Ross Armstrong finally signed off did it make a decision to deceive the committee knowing that it had a document which could be called the Kroll report or did it simply not think carefully enough about it? 
I am absolutely in no doubt in my mind of the intention of New Zealand Post to deceive the Finance and Expenditure Committee; of Ross Armstrong as the person who signed that document to deceive the committee; and of Mr Elmar Toime to deceive the committee as well. I have not the slightest doubt in my mind as someone who was intimately familiar with the proceedings and with the paperwork that it was the absolute intention of those persons and of New Zealand Post accordingly to deceive the select committee. I say these things having reflected very carefully on the history of those events. 
One of the reasons I am persuaded to that conclusion is that if we look at the internal paperwork of New Zealand Post around that time and I do not know whether the Privileges Committee did this but if it had it would have seen that New Zealand Post’s internal documentation its internal communications referred to this document as the “Kroll report” not the “draft Kroll report” or any other name. The document we asked for was the Kroll report because we were told by people in New Zealand Post that it was called the Kroll report. It was referred to in New Zealand Post’s documentation internally as the Kroll report and New Zealand Post knew that that was the document we were asking for but it told us that it did not have it. 
I believe that that is more than a technicality. That was an act of deceit on the part of New Zealand Post and the Privileges Committee should have held accordingly. 
I will talk about two other points just briefly. Firstly I take exception to the references in the Privileges Committee report to the tension between some select committee members and New Zealand Post and the rather lofty reference on page 5 where the Privileges Committee emphasises that members should take their scrutiny role seriously and follow appropriate lines of questioning. 
 I do not know what caused the committee to put that comment in the report but I can say that against the background of this 80-page report of the Controller and Auditor-General which found absolutely in favour of the allegations made by Mr Hide and myself and which was utterly damning of New Zealand Post I find these words in the report of the Privileges Committee to be gratuitous and insulting. I say to the chairman of the committee that he should think much more carefully about allowing those words to be imported into this sort of document in the future. 
Finally the apology that Jim Bolger gave to the Privileges Committee—and it has been rightly observed that he was not a person who had any personal culpability in this process—was a Clayton’s apology. It was an utterly meaningless apology for the reasons that the Leader of the Opposition has spelt out this afternoon. I say to my colleagues and particularly to those who were on the Privileges Committee that if they are prepared to accept that sort of apology as being full and sufficient in these circumstances then I believe they are inviting every State-owned enterprise and Crown entity to lie to select committees in the future. Yesterday in the media I called this a licence to lie. I repeat that statement today because I sincerely believe that. I hope that in future the Privileges Committee will serve the interests of this Parliament and its select committees better than it has done on this occasion. 
Motion agreed to.