Bishop ChrisCHRIS BISHOP (National—Hutt South): The House was witness this afternoon to an extraordinary event where the Minister of Internal Affairs Tracey Martin came to the House and claimed that she had just been informed that Pauline Kingi had resigned from the position of chair of the independent inquiry into the appointment process of Mr Wally Haumaha as Deputy Commissioner of Police. I want to set out for the House the process—frankly the debacle of a process—that has led to the point where members it appears we may need an independent inquiry into the appointment of Pauline Kingi who was herself meant to be conducting an independent inquiry into the appointment process—Nicola Willis: What a shambles.CHRIS BISHOP: —behind Mr Wally Haumaha. My colleague Nicola Willis says What a shambles." and indeed that is the case.Mr Haumaha was appointed on 28 May this year. The interesting thing about that appointment process was that the vacancy for deputy commissioner was advertised on 7 May and closed on 15 May—just eight days—and then a very quick appointment process was done. After that later on the news broke in the New Zealand Herald by Phil Kitchin and Jared Savage about comments made by Mr Haumaha to the Operation Austin inquiry in 2004. Many members in the House expressed some disturbance with these remarks. Immediately—the next day 29 June—the Acting Prime Minister Winston Peters ordered that an inquiry be undertaken and a few days later at the post-Cabinet press conference Tracey Martin was announced as being the Minister responsible for that inquiry as per the Inquiries Act.Here we come to the first problem which is that it is inappropriate for Tracey Martin as a New Zealand First Minister to be the lead Minister on an inquiry into someone who has ties to New Zealand First. I specifically do not say that he was a candidate because Winston Peters has taken strenuous objection to the idea that he was the candidate for Rotorua in 2005 but I think it is fair to say that Mr Haumaha has ties to New Zealand First because he was certainly announced as the candidate in the Rotorua Daily Post.Then finally after 3½ weeks we had the terms of reference into the inquiry released. It is interesting that it took 3½ weeks to find someone to conduct the inquiry and 3½ weeks to finalise the terms of reference. Here we come to problem two. The terms of reference are manifestly inadequate. They do not deal with the question of what Mike Bush knew about Mr Haumaha's remarks. Did he in fact know about the remarks that Mr Haumaha made to the Operation Austin inquiry? Secondly what did Stuart Nash know? Did Mike Bush tell Stuart Nash about those remarks? More importantly did he tell the Prime Minister about those remarks because this is a statutory appointment? It's the Prime Minister and Stuart Nash and Cabinet that sign off on this. Most importantly—and this question hangs over things still to this day—would Cabinet have made a different decision had they known about those remarks that Mr Haumaha made? So that's the second problem.Then we come to the independent inquiry and the news that broke earlier this week about Pauline Kingi and her connection to Wally Haumaha. I want to make it clear that this is not to besmirch the integrity of Pauline Kingi. I have never met Pauline Kingi but it is manifestly clear from the public record that she has endorsed him 23 times. All of Wally Haumaha's characteristics and attributes listed on LinkedIn—every single one of them—have been endorsed by Pauline Kingi. In return Wally Haumaha has endorsed Pauline Kingi. There is a relationship and that makes her inappropriate to lead an inquiry. It is odd that Tracey Martin defended her so robustly in the Parliament yesterday and it is right and proper that Pauline Kingi realises that her appointment is inappropriate.The Government must start again realise the significance of this appointment and the inappropriateness of their previous appointee start again and find someone genuinely independent and it must also ask itself how it got itself into a situation where after 3½ weeks Department of Internal Affairs staffers are seemingly unable to use Google to find the connections between the subject of the inquiry and the inquirer herself."