Walker Holly:Inquiries Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWalker Holly:Inquiries Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 21 August 2013. Volume:692;Page:12720. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]HOLLY WALKER (Green):I am pleased to take a call on Part 1 of the Inquiries Bill. Part 1 of course as has been noted by my colleagues sets out the purpose of this bill which is essentially to reform and modernise the law relating to inquiries. We absolutely support this in the Green Party because the existing legislation governing the conduct of inquiries is over 100 years old and well in need of modernisation and updating.I think that what this bill reflects is the fact that we need the ability to have different types of inquiries for differing situations. There are essentially two different kinds of inquiries that routinely get carried out. The first is an inquiry that seeks to get to the bottom of a particular issue or incident and find out what happened what went wrong who was responsible and so on—the most topical example of course being the Henry inquiry into the leak of theKitteridge report. That has provided much fodder for consideration in this debate and I will talk about that a little bit more in subsequent calls on other parts of the bill. Another example would be the Fonterra botulism crisis which has prompted the resurrection of this bill from the bottom of the Order Paper in a sudden burst of enthusiasm from the Government to pass this legislation because it realised it would have been quite useful to have it in place for that particular inquiry. There are many similar inquiries that are undertaken to determine what has caused a particular event.The other type of inquiry is a broader kind of inquiry and that is an inquiry that examines particular issues of national significance makes recommendations and often results in cross-party adoption of those recommendations and major change and steps forward in public policy. Some examples of those would be the Royal Commission on Nuclear Power Generation in New Zealand which was set up in 1976; the Royal Commission on the Electoral System in the early 1990s which resulted in the adoption of our MMP electoral system; and of course the Royal Commission on Genetic Modification about a decade ago. Those kinds of broad public inquiries are very important as well.So this bill provides in Part 1 in the purpose clause for two kinds of inquiries both of which could be established to inquire into any matter of public importance. Itprovides for Government inquiries which are established and led by Ministers and it provides for public inquiries which are established by the Governor-General and are independent of the Government and within the scope of public inquiries can exist royal commissions of inquiry. In practice it is likely that the first type of inquiry the ones that try to get to the bottom of something some particular incident or issue will be largely Government inquiries—those initiated by Ministers and with the terms of reference essentially driven by Ministers. The latter the general inquiries will be the public inquiries. But of course it does depend on the context on the seriousness of the inquiry and on the gravity of the situation. So there is flexibility within the bill for those to be applied flexibly and either could apply in either situation.Part 1 outlines how the remainder of the bill provides for basically the establishment and powers of those inquiries. So it talks about how the inquiries are set up the membership of those inquiries and the powers duties and privileges that the inquiry will hold. It talks about the protection for witnesses and the principles that will govern the inquiry and it talks about the sanctions that the inquiry has available to it if people do not cooperate. All of these powers will be extended identically to both the public inquiries and the Government inquiries that are established under this bill. That is a key difference between this bill and the existing rules. At the moment the equivalent of the Government inquiries that will be enabled under this legislation are ministerial inquiries—those inquiries driven by Ministers. But at present ministerial inquiries have no power to compel witnesses to appear or to provide evidence before the inquiry as we have indeed seen with the example of the Henry inquiry which was before the Privileges Committee this morning.Because of that this is quite a fundamental change that this Government is making—to extend in the future to Government inquiries which will be driven by Ministers the power to compel witnesses to disclose evidence. It is a big change and it is an important one which the Committee should take seriously. It is a big difference between what has existed under the existing legislation and what will exist in the future. As we have seen from the very topical example of the Henry inquiry it is a very salient point as to whether a ministerial inquiry has the ability to compel witnesses to disclose information particularly if it is the source of a journalist’s story if it is a private communication between an MP and another person or if it is indeed privileged information under parliamentary privilege.In my contribution to the second reading debate last night I raised a number of questions about these concerns and I outlined the fact that the Green Party was abstaining on this legislation at the second reading because of concerns about these protections and whether they were adequately protected under the legislation. I am pleased to say that upon closer inspection we are largely reassured here on the Green Party benches that the appropriate protections are in place in the bill. They are not outlined here in Part 1; they are found in Part 3. So when we get up to Part 3 I will speak more about the particular provisions that I think provide the adequate protection that will allow us to support the bill because we are very much in favour of modernising the law governing inquiries.But I want in this contribution on Part 1 to emphasise the importance of the Committee taking seriously the fact that we are now extending to Minister-led Government inquiries the power to compel witnesses to provide evidence. That is a big change and it does have a material impact on the very example that we have all been thinking about today—the Henry inquiry—because if that inquiry was held under the new legislation David Henry would have had more powers to compel evidence from those appearing before him. So then a question of parliamentary privilege arises and that question is whether things like Peter Dunne’s email records Andrea Vance’s swipecard records and the phone records between the two of them are covered by parliamentary privilege. Parliamentary privilege is still protected under this legislation along with all other kinds of legal and professional privilege.If the Privileges Committee rules that those things are privileged information then they will be protected in future inquiries but it is not yet clear that that is the case because it is a live issue before the Privileges Committee. So I think it behoves the Committee of the whole House to have in mind when considering Part 1 and subsequent parts of this bill that we take very seriously the fact that we are giving more power to Government-driven ministerial-led inquiries—which one would like to think would be apolitical but which in reality often are not entirely apolitical. So it is very important that we have that in mind as we consider Part 1 and subsequent parts.In my future calls on subsequent parts of the bill I will outline in more detail why we think the protections are in place to address some of the concerns I raised last night and why we are comfortable now to support this legislation going forward. But I would like the Committee to have in its mind as it continues with the Committee stage the fact that we are making quite a substantial change to the powers of ministerial-led inquiries so that we think carefully about the appropriateness of that.