Roche Denise: State Sector and Public Finance Reform Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: State Sector and Public Finance Reform Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 25 June 2013. Volume:691;Page:11216. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green):I rise to take the first call for the Greens on the State Sector and Public Finance Reform Bill. This is a complex piece of legislation. I do acknowledge that this bill makes changes to legislation that has been in place for about 25 years. Before I get into the detail of the bill I would like to thank the many submitters—and there were many—and particularly those members of the Public Service Association who came and submitted on this bill who came and provided a face to the Finance and Expenditure Committee the face of those people who will be affected by the changes in this bill. That helped to clarify some of the significant parts of the legislation. I want to acknowledge to those submitters that their actions were very brave. It is quite difficult to front up to a select committee of politicians when you work in the sector that is governed by those politicians.Too often people in the community think of public servants as faceless cardy-wearing bureaucrats or clerical staff. That could not be further from the truth. Public services and consequently implementation of the Government’s policies stand or fall on the skills and efforts of public servants. There are over 44000 individuals who work in the Public Service today. They work in Crown entities and they work in departments and ministries. They are frequently specialists in their fields. They are in hot demand and the Public Service is constantly facing the challenge of recruiting and keeping them in the Public Service.There are some parts of the bill that we think are very good. We certainly agree with providing more joined-up thinking and the ability to get departments and agencies to work together. To some extent that is happening now more and more. I think particularly of Gateway which combines wraparound services and assessments for young people based on their health needs their education needs and their social development needs—three different departments working together for the benefit of their clients. There is no doubt that reducing the silo mentality of departments is a good way to promote Better Public Services. The term “better public services” has been bandied around a lot actually co-opted by the Government to mean anything frombudget restrictions to the discontinuation of services and the removal of State housing. Although we can agree that we all do want better public services we do not really agree with the method that this Government is trialling here or the twisting of the term.There is little doubt that the State Sector Act particularly does need to be overhauled. I recently attended a public meeting addressed by the Rt Hon Sir Geoffrey Palmer and Stan Rodger. Stan Rodger talked about the original intention of the State Sector Act and Sir Geoffrey talked about the impact of the State Sector Act in shaping the way our public services have worked. I acknowledge that there are other members in the Chamber who attended that meeting. Sir Geoffrey’s points in particular highlighted a lot of the problems that we do see in the Public Service today. He included as problems the cult of management; the loss of institutional memory which is tied to talented staff migrating from the public sector; the lack of rewards for top staff; and the lack of training and professional development for staff. He talked about quality issues. He talked about the Crown’s legal risk being not adequately protected and he suggested that Crown Law often came in too late on legislation and issues. He talked about the fact that some public servants were no longer providing free and frank advice and he referred specifically to Ministers’ offices. Despite this quite damning criticism Sir Geoffrey also described this current bill the one we are talking about today as a dog’s breakfast. His advice for ensuring better public services in New Zealand was to stop this tinkering and have a royal commission of inquiry into how the Public Service could be improved.The week before last I was also present at the Government Administration Committee during the discussion on the vote where the Minister of State Services Jonathan Coleman and the State Services Commissioner Iain Rennie were present and were answering questions—some good questions too. I agree with the commissioner’s view that there does need to be the ability to deploy good people across the organisations and to utilise the best of them. Well we believe that this bill as it is currently written even with the amendment and the good work that has gone into it as it comes back to the House will hinder that.The purpose statement proposed by the bill includes promoting and upholding “a State sector system that … (e) is supported by effective workforce and personnel arrangements;” and there are amendments to introduce obligations of stewardship of the system and yet the bill actually removes the one provision in the current Act that gives Public Service chief executives the ability to actively manage skills and capability across the system. It removes the power to transport employees between agencies and to do the deployment work at the beginning of a process rather than at the end. It replaces this with a seemingly simple restriction on public servants’ right to redundancy compensation which does not have the same effect.We note that the bill takes a more sensible approach with Public Service chief executives. They get far more opportunity to be deployed and they have that in the bill. Notwithstanding the softening of some of the clauses from the original bill we believe that as it is now it will have a significant effect on public servants’ conditions of employment. It will remove some entitlements that have been freely contracted for for 25 years of the life of the original Act. To a large extent the provisions around redundancy technical redundancy and transferable functions and people seem to ignore the fact that Public Service employees are not employed by the Crown. They are not employed by just one agency. They are employed in many different agencies and yet they are treated like that.As has been the case throughout the 25 years since its passing the Act gives public servants none of the benefits that would come from working for a single Public Service provider. There is no redeployment process. Redundant public servants find work solelythrough their own efforts. This bill seeks to let the Government both have its cake and eat it too by withholding those same benefits and at the same time extracting what could be a cost of working for a single employer—a restriction on access to redundancy compensation. I know that the Labour Party members on the select committee worked very hard on that and it has been softened but there are still major changes to the working conditions that public servants have currently.On balance we believe that this bill leaves workers worse off. I will be introducing a Supplementary Order Paper which I hope will be supported about reintroducing relocation protection but in the meantime we will not be supporting this bill. We are not convinced that the changes in the bill in any parts about the Public Finance Act or the Crown Entities Act actually deliver better public services. I do not think that the process used to get the bill into its current state was either terribly transparent or democratic and I would welcome the opportunity to have a bigger discussion about that. That is why I would support what Sir Geoffrey Palmer said which was to have an inquiry that looks at the entire Public Service and stop tinkering with it because otherwise we will as he said be left with a dog’s breakfast.