Goff Phil: State Sector and Public Finance Reform Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: State Sector and Public Finance Reform Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 02 July 2013. Volume:691;Page:11615. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill):As the Committee knows the purpose of the Committee stage—if David Bennett wants to cease his inane interjections across the Chamber I will continue—of a bill is to get the Minister in the chair to answer questions about what the bill will actually do. We had a series of very laid-back Ministers in the chair and this one the Minister for Courts is no exception. I would like to see the Minister take the call because I think there are a lot of serious questions about this bill that need answers.In particular Minister I want to ask you about the utility of this bill in achieving the objectives of Better Public Services. The Minister in the report-back stage of the bill the second reading said: “The changes are designed to enable the delivery of Better Public Services and more effective and efficient achievement of results.” He went on to say that the Better Public Services programme was one of the four key priorities of the Government. Well I have in my hand a document that I have received under the Official Information Act. It is the Ernst and Young report and it is entitled:FINAL DRAFT: Better Public Services Programme: Independent Quality Assurance . It is dated December last year. It is 6 months old. The summary of Ernst and Young—Hon Trevor Mallard: Is this another leak?Hon PHIL GOFF: Well it is officially leaked this one because the Government had to give it out when it was requested.This is a document that is designed to see whether the Public Service the State sector is delivering better public services and the Government is achieving the goal of its programme. What does it say? I want to quote this one sentence: “Our assessment is that the programme has yet to develop critical elements that are fundamental and necessary to achieve its aims …”. You know what that means: it means that the Better Public Services programme Minister—one of the flagships of the National Government—has so far failed. It gives the reasons for this. I want to summarise the reasons—there are three. It lacks ownership leadership formal accountability and prioritisation. Well that is a responsibility surely Minister of the Minister of State Services and his chief executive.Secondly it says: “The programme does not yet have an explicit and widely agreed model or strategy for achieving change.” You have got a key goal of a Government department and there is no strategy to achieve it. This is what the Government pays hundreds of thousands of dollars to Ernst and Young to tell it. Well Minister why is it that you do not have a strategy to achieve it and will this bill actually help to deliver that outcome?The third thing—the third thing is important too—is that it says that the programme does not have sufficient resources allocated. Well that is a budgetary function of Government. So we have an official analysis of the Better Public Services that the Minister said this bill is designed to achieve and the Government is committed to achieving and it is not achieving them because it lacks leadership it lacks strategy and it lacks resources.I would like the Minister to tell the Committee how this bill will turn that round. This is a key goal of the Government. It is not being achieved. That is what the report says. I am happy to give the Minister a copy. I will table it for you if you like Minister. I presume you have read it. It says that you are not succeeding on those goals. Firstly how are you going to turn round those factors? I do not believe that the legislation before us addresses any of those factors in terms of making sure that we achieve the Better Public Services goals that the Government uses rhetoric about but fails to deliver on in terms of leadership strategy or resources.I want to look at the amendments to the State Sector Act that we are examining right now. The first change says that it will strengthen the role of the State Services Commissioner in leading the State services. I would like to ask the Minister whether strengthening the role of the State Services Commissioner will help overcome what the ministerial inquiry into the Novopay debacle found. What did the inquiry find? It found first of all that it was a debacle that teachers were not getting their salaries paid correctly 6 months after it was introduced. It said that the cost of the programme had doubled—another $23 million. It said that all of this was avoidable and it said that the Government had ignored the lessons of the past. In 1996 the education payroll had similar difficulties. Here 16 years later we have got the same thing again.The INCIS experience which cost $100 million of money put into the police was a parallel case. Steven Joyce said that this was the result of failure of leadership of the State Services Commission. I would like to ask the Minister how the provisions put in this bill might have turned round the Novopay debacle. Could that have been prevented with the provisions in this bill; if not what is the Government doing to make sure that we do have an efficient Public Service and not one that results in a debacle such as we saw with Novopay? Secondly of the changes made the bill said “Broadening the Commissioner’s functions to include the ability to transfer chief executives”.Well Minister I want to stay with education and use another example and ask you how the Act would have applied in this case. Lesley Longstone left after a year in the job of chief executive officer at the expense of $425000 in costs to the taxpayer and she left essentially if you read between the lines because she could not get on with her Minister. So would that have been the case under this bill if this bill had been enacted before that event? Hekia Parata is apparently a very hard Minister to work for. Nobody was saying that Lesley Longstone was incompetent in the job. In fact the Minister of State Services refused to say that. Would you be able when you have an incompetent Minister who is hard to work with to transfer the chief executive to another department so that the taxpayer is not paying over $400000 to get rid of somebody whom you have just put in the job?Hon Trevor Mallard: We have done that in the past.Hon PHIL GOFF: Well it has been done in the past but this gives an explicit power to the chief executive to transfer.The next one is extending the responsibilities of chief executives to their Ministers. That is what the bill says. It is the third change. If there is a responsibility on the part of the chief executive to the Minister—I hope you are listening Minister—is there a counter-responsibility of the Minister to the chief executive? As long as I was a Minister there was always a strong convention that Ministers did not go out and bag their chief executives and yet we saw Murray McCully bag John Allen. We know that Murray McCully was behind the change programme. It got unpopular so he bagged John Allen and said “You got it wrong.” even though John Allen was carrying out all of his responsibilities.So if this bill creates a responsibility of the chief executive to the Minister what responsibility does it create of the Minister back to the chief executive? Is it permissible under this bill for a Minister to go out and bag his chief executive who cannot reply who is defenceless and who can be slandered by his Minister and forced to take the responsibility? If that was an isolated example I would feel more comfortable Minister but clearly it is not because Nathan Guy—the Committee will recall—did exactly the same thing. Nathan Guy was responsible for meat exports sitting on the wharves in China for 3 weeks at a loss of millions and millions of dollars because the Government got it wrong. The Government restructured the Ministry for Primary Industries it did away with the Food Safety Authority which worked very effectively and we jeopardised our trade in meat with China which has doubled in the last year.I want to know why it is that a Minister can go out again and bag his department but not take responsibility himself. So is this bill one-sided in creating a responsibility on the part of the chief executive to the Minister but taking away the responsibility of the Minister to the chief executive or in fact is it taking away the responsibility of the Minister to be responsible and to actually earn the quarter of a million dollars that he or she earns each year by actually doing their job and not sitting back and waiting for the Civil Service to do it and then blaming them when they do not? So that is the third question Minister and if you are having trouble following these they are all set out in the bill one by one—the changes that are being made.One of the other changes is about creating a new organisational arrangement called a departmental agency as a way of providing public services. This sits in a host department and would administer the appropriations used by the departmental agency but it would have its own chief executive. Can the Minister give the Committee—