Prebble Richard: Offices of Parliament—Address to Governor-General 
Prebble Richard: Offices of Parliament—Address to Governor-General 
[Volume:625;Page:20183] 
Hon RICHARD PREBBLE (ACT) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of the ACT party to speak to the debate on Vote Audit Vote Ombudsmen and Vote Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. Those are all Offices of Parliament and I think it is appropriate we debate those matters. In the Officers of Parliament Committee I actually moved a number of reductions in these votes some of which were accepted by the committee. But in relation to others I was unsuccessful. 
Hon Dr Michael Cullen 
: Shame. 
Hon RICHARD PREBBLE 
: Thank you. As the Minister of Finance has said it is a shame. It was possibly as a former Minister of Finance that I did move those reductions because the motion still concerns substantial amounts of money and we should look at it just as hard as we look at the vote of any other Government department. These Officers of Parliament perform what I would like to think is an important role but I am concerned about whether they are doing so. 
I will start first with the ombudsmen. New Zealand was one of the earlier countries to have the position of an ombudsman. When we analyse what the ombudsmen do today we see that over half the work is about dealing with prisoners’ complaints. Now here is an Office of Parliament set up to look after complaints by members of the public in dealing with the civil service yet what are the ombudsmen doing? They are dealing with complaints from citizens who are in jail. One may say that citizens in jail are entitled to make complaints if they have not been dealt with properly. That is true but within our prison service and under our—I think namby-pamby—Corrections Act there are a whole string of ways in which prisoners are entitled to make complaints if they have not been treated properly. But that is not enough for prisoners. They are entitled to pick up their freephone and ring the Office of the Ombudsmen. So many prisoners ring that office that we are being asked by the ombudsmen to put in what is really a call centre so that New Zealanders who are in jail can ring them. Well naturally they do that. One of the penalties of being in jail is that there is nothing to do so prisoners who have nothing to do decide to complain. 
What do prisoners complain about? Apparently one of the terrible complaints which the ombudsmen get a lot of is that there is a lot of thieving in prison. Well why are we not surprised at that? We have put the crims in jail and they pinch from one another so they ring the ombudsmen. What are we doing? We as a Parliament are voting the ombudsmen more money. Now I said to the Chief Ombudsman at the committee and I will say it here that that is not what his office was set up for. The ombudsmen should not be taking complaints from prisoners; the ombudsmen ought to be saying to prisoners that they should complain through the procedure this House has put in place for them. We did not set up the Office of the Ombudsmen for that reason and that is one of the reasons why I will vote against this motion today. I am opposed to it and I say that the ombudsmen need to send a signal to prisoners. 
The second thing that worries me about the Office of the Ombudsmen is that one of the things the ombudsmen are supposed to do is to enable law-abiding citizens to have their official information requests actioned. The ombudsmen are supposed to keep an eye on the Government. Does the Chief Ombudsman do that? No he does not. The Chief Ombudsman is the most gutless one that we have had. 
We have Ministers—Mr Maharey in particular but also the Minister of Education—who now say when MPs ask for information under the Official Information Act that they think it will cost a huge figure to be able to provide the information. That may even be true as they are so incompetent! Those Ministers say that if members of Parliament pass over a great part of their salary then they may make the information available. Now that is contrary to the spirit of the Official Information Act and we would expect the Chief Ombudsman to be on television every night severely criticising Mr Maharey and Mr Mallard for saying that. But does he criticise them? No he does not. He is too busy taking telephone calls from people who are in jail. That is what he thinks his job is. Well it is not. His job is a much tougher one than answering the complaints of rapists and the like who are concerned they can no longer get a good view from their prison cell. The Chief Ombudsman’s job is actually to hold Ministers accountable. That may be uncomfortable but it is what he ought to be doing. 
Then of course we come to the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment who wants us—and unfortunately I persuaded the committee of this—to chop down more trees in order to print more copies of his reports which he tells us no one will actually buy but which people want. 
Well the demand for free services is infinite and if we are prepared to let the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment send his free report to anybody he can think of of course he can justify his position. Then when he has sent them all out—and as I say the demand for free copies is infinite—he will then say that there are a lot of people who want to hear his views on various things. Maybe they do and maybe they do not. But if people at least had to pay a nominal amount for the reports—perhaps just pay for the cost of the paper—I predict that we would find that the demand for the commissioner’s reports was much lower than he would have us believe. 
I believe that if each one of these departments which grow in number every year was to come in front of us it would tell us that the demand for its services was such that it should have more staff office space and money. However I would also draw the attention of the House to the fact that a lot of the work that the Officers of Parliament do is actually the work of MPs. When I first arrived in this House there were 87 MPs and now there are 120. I would like to think that the extra 30 members of Parliament are doing some work. If they are it would follow that we would probably need fewer of these various parliamentary officers. It seems to me that at some point someone has to get up and ask when the whole process comes to a halt because we could put up an argument for any amount of expenditure on things like the ombudsmen and suchlike. 
I know I must sound like a Minister of Finance again but I was extremely unimpressed by the Audit Office coming along and saying to us that although there have been superannuation requirements that have been met for the whole of the civil service the Auditor-General has decided that they are not adequate for his department. That is a very very serious matter for a head of a department to do because he is actually saying the superannuation requirements that have been given to the rest of the civil service are unfair. If he thinks that he ought to make that case properly. But what the Auditor-General has done is to take money we have given him to audit the Government accounts and he has decided to give it to some of his staff. I think that is absolutely wrong. It has been my experience as an MP that no one is trustworthy with his or her own superannuation. MPs have been through that lesson and the Audit Office is no better than us. 
Who guards the guardians? Well in this case the Auditor-General is our guardian and I express to him my strong disapproval of that move. The committee did not agree to approve that extra funding. The Auditor-General can still provide it but what is outrageous is the way that he will do so which is by not doing the job that he is actually employed to do because one cannot spend money twice. I am very critical of a very important senior Government servant like the Auditor-General—I think that he cannot have thought the issue through—deciding to reach a different sort of superannuation arrangement for his staff from the arrangements we have for the rest of the civil service. If the whole civil service system is unfair—I do not think that it is although anyone could make an argument for better superannuation—then that matter ought to be taken up on behalf of the whole of the civil service. It should not be done in this cavalier way. I think that it was an abuse of the Auditor-General’s position. 
Accordingly we will vote against the whole report in order to indicate that view to the Officers of Parliament. They should set a high standard and should not be the first to jump over for extra money.