Hudson BrettBRETT HUDSON (Chairperson of the Governance and Administration Committee): Thank you Madam Chair. It's a pleasure to rise and speak to principally the second of those questions: those annual reviews related to the Governance and Administration Committee a very hard-working committee—very capable members—and one which I feel absolutely privileged to chair. Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi: And well chaired. BRETT HUDSON: Thank you very much Mr Bakshi—very kind of you to say that; I was going to say it myself and in fact did. So in keeping with the spirit and more importantly the Standing Orders this will be a very non-controversial contribution from me. I do know that members from this side of the Chamber will have some comments to make on some of the reviews that we undertook but there are some factual elements which can and will be raised in this contribution. I'd like to begin with the State Services Commission. The State Services Commission is one of the best reviews to conduct principally because sometimes members have commented that officials—chief executives presenters—will take up quite a bit of time summarising the year before the committee. I wouldn't call them cynical but some people feel that that is sometimes to chew up time. The State Services Commissioner has a unique approach to dealing with these annual reviews. We say By all means give us a summary of last year's performance and then we'll have some questions." and he just says "Thank you; I'll take your questions." So the summary is as short as it can possibly be and we get plenty of time to quiz the commissioner about the things they've been doing. One element which members on this side might choose to raise and I'd welcome Government members also raising is that we did notice in the expenditure that in communications—and we think about the entity in State services and their core role—communications expense for them rose over $400000 in the annual year in question and so members probed the commissioner as to why that was. The response we received of course was that as they are trying to take more of a leadership role in developing the State sector they believe that it is appropriate and necessary for them to spend more money on communications and on communications specialists—what in the private sector might be called "public relations". Some members questioned the true justification for that but that was certainly the view of the commissioner and something that I think we'll likely keep a very watching brief on as we move through into the next financial year for review. I'd like to talk briefly about the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA). We acknowledged some of the longstanding challenges from a review perspective of this particular department. It is effectively from an accounting or an accounts perspective siloed into several areas and those areas cannot be cross-subsidised. A surplus in one area—particularly in an area such as passports—cannot be used to address one-off cost challenges elsewhere. That tends to make for a challenging entity to review because the obvious performance of the entity is just not that obvious but we were reminded again by DIA that they have a future issue in passports where at the moment there is a surplus in that account but with the legislative—CHAIRPERSON (Poto Williams): I apologise to the member but the time has come for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break. Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m. CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): Tēnā rā tātau katoa. Prior to the dinner break the committee was debating the Appropriation (2017/18 Confirmation and Validation) Bill. We had reached the Finance and Government Administration sector. Brett Hudson has the call and has one minute 20 seconds remaining. BRETT HUDSON: Thank you Mr Chair. I'm looking forward to this last little while. I finished as we rose for the dinner break talking about passports within the Department of Internal Affairs and how there's a surplus on that account but there's a forward looking expense as we transition more people from five-year passports to 10 given the legislative change in the last Parliament. I just want to round out my contribution talking about statistics. I do know that some members on this side are going to have quite a bit to say I think about this particular annual review particularly census 2018 for which there was a large sum of money in the annual year appropriated to complete the census. The first point I would make is that despite all of the public talk about the census and the responses the department of statistics confirmed to us that they did not spend all of the money appropriated to the census which is a really interesting position. But more importantly the committee found it very difficult to get questions answered by the chief statistician. It's worth reflecting for us all at this time that when Parliament convenes in select committees we have an absolute expectation in annual reviews that questions will be answered and it was a stain upon this year's annual reviews that it was so hard for the committee to get an answer to its question."