Brownlee Gerry: General Debate 
Brownlee Gerry: General Debate 
[Volume:647;Page:15940] 
GERRY BROWNLEE (National—Ilam) 
: 
 It was sad to observe in the House this afternoon the Hon Dr Michael Cullen on behalf of the Minister of State Services defending what has to be the indefensible. The circumstances surrounding the resignation of Dr Mary Anne Thompson from the Immigration Service are backgrounded by not only the Government’s knowledge of what was going wrong in that department but its deliberate attempts to cover it up and to keep it from the people of New Zealand. Let us just go back for a minute and look at what happened. 
Firstly the allegations that Dr Thompson had been putting pressure on staff inside her department to give approvals to her relatives and friends to gain residence in this country date back to late 2005. The then head of the Department of Labour which is the over-body for the Immigration Service called in those people who were making the allegations and concluded that there had to be some further investigation. He instructed Mr David Oughton to conduct that investigation and received an interim report on the matter in May of 2007. He received the final report on that matter in July of 2007. We are told through the press and through comments made by other Ministers that the Minister of Immigration saw that report in July of 2007. The Minister at the time was the Hon David Cunliffe and he chose to do nothing. When he was replaced moved on the Hon Clayton Cosgrove picked up that report in December. Still there was nothing done. 
It was not until the Television New Zealand journalists started getting the information themselves from people who had been affected by these activities and did the investigations both here and in Kiribati that the full extent of what had been going on and more important what had been covered up by the Government were laid as the bare facts before the public. At that point the Prime Minister going into panic mode almost decided that it probably was a good idea to have a further investigation. She noted that the Hon Clayton Cosgrove was making investigations in that regard and that he was keeping his colleagues informed. She very skilfully also said that she was “simply an onlooker”. 
Let us just step back a little bit to work out how this all should come together. Firstly when a chief of a department comes to a Minister and says “I am getting an investigation conducted on a senior civil servant in my department.” what would we expect that Minister to do? We would expect that Minister at least to notify the State Services Commission. But apparently we are supposed to believe that that never happened. When the final report is received we would expect that the Minister on being told that the investigations had been concluded that there were some problems and that there was some action being taken might then want to have a closer look at the entire division in which those activities had been taking place that Cabinet might have been informed that the Minister of State Services might have been informed and that the State Services Commissioner might have been informed. But apparently that did not happen because all the time the Minister was wanting us to accept that this was an operational matter not a matter of policy. 
I would like to recall for the House the fact that this is the department that not so long ago offered the advice to its various employees that if they were all to lie in unison then they would never be caught. 
The Government knows this and the flags should have been up. It would appear we now have a number of people in the country who are here quite illegally yet no further action has been taken by the Government. The worst of it is that the Hon Clayton Cosgrove came into the House today and tried to make out that there had been total transparency in this all the way through. Here is the question for him and the next Labour speaker: if this Government has handled this all so well and in a way that is totally honest then why did it take an appeal to the Ombudsman to get the Oughton report released in the first place?