Smith NickPart 1 Preliminary provisionsHon Dr NICK SMITH (National—Nelson): It would be hard to find a more important statute on the books of New Zealand than our legislation that governs our public sector. The very job of this institution of Parliament is to deliver public services to provide public advice and to provide the electoral accountability between the 5 million New Zealanders and the tens of thousands of people who work in our respective Public Service and the extraordinary part that we have this morning in Parliament is the House in urgency writing legislation that sets the framework for our New Zealand Public Service and the Government this week tabling over 500 clauses—200 pages—of law changes to this legislation. It is intending effectively to table in this Parliament 500 clauses of law that define how our public services work and to effectively say to the Parliament and we're going to pass it today." I have heard the Minister in the chair over the last 10 years give numerous speeches about the importance of parliamentary scrutiny and proper legislative process. I ask the Minister in the chair: how can he possibly pretend that Parliament is giving proper scrutiny to his legislation 200 pages in Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 549 which the Opposition got access to only two days ago and say that it is a good lawmaking process? Now I'd say to Minister Chris Hipkins in respect of the emergencies that our country has confronted around the earthquake and around COVID-19 that you can justify such speed of process but this is nothing to do with that. This is one of our foundation Acts. It has almost a constitutional status as we well know with the powers of the State Services Commission. This is the most significant legislative change since the State Services Act was passed in 1988. How shambolic and awful have our parliamentary processes become and how arrogant the Government has become that somehow it thinks it's satisfactory process for an Act of this sort to be changed. Now in Part 1 of this bill we set out the framework and we have called it the broader principles for the management of our Public Service and we have tabled amendments because we have concerns about some of those principles. One of the most important is respect for this institution of Parliament and I say to the Minister of State Services: how can you possibly expect that the culture that you're trying to establish within the Public Service of one of respect for our parliamentary democracy—how is that being delivered when this Parliament of 120 members receives a 200-page SOP with the expectation that Government members will have given due reference to those provisions and they're going to be whacked through the Parliament under urgency in less than 48 hours? I ask the question: is there any member in this House who's read the 200 pages and 500 clauses of amendments? Hon Chris Hipkins: Yes. Hon Dr NICK SMITH: Well that's very good—the Minister says he has. I will ask him a very specific question then: why is the Government changing from the bill that was before the Governance and Administration Committee to the amendments? The issue around appropriate medical tests that can be done in this bill is changing. There was no opportunity for submissions and no opportunity for any member of the public to be able to test whether the legal requirements for requiring a public servant to take medical examinations is appropriate. I don't know—I only heard about it 24 hours ago. It's a pretty significant issue."