Robertson GrantHon GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour): Thank you Madam Speaker for the opportunity to speak to as has been indicated what is a very odd bill that has come forward. Mr Seymour described it as simple; I think it's silly and sad. Mr Patterson who just sat down said that the ACT Party now believed the Productivity Commission was superfluous. Actually that's not what Mr Seymour said at all. There's total confusion across the House as to why the Government has decided to bring a bill to the House to get rid of an organisation that was the brainchild of the ACT Party.Unfortunately I've been here long enough that I spoke in the first reading debate on the establishment. Mr Shaw is correct that his colleague—David Clendon I believe it was—spoke quite eruditely in opposition to it. We supported it at the time on the grounds that we thought we could make it better while it was in operation—we probably had some idea that we were going to be in Government a bit quicker than what turned out to be the case. And so it survived as it did—in the words of Mr Shaw as a neo-liberal stalking horse"—for somewhat longer than we had thought it would.But in all seriousness the Productivity Commission has produced some important and useful reports. Mr Seymour himself began listing them off—again a somewhat odd thing to do when you're about to disestablish the very organisation that produced them. I know in my time when I was the Minister overseeing its work the frontier firms report that it did is an excellent piece of work around how New Zealand can establish stronger export businesses how we can make sure that we have a stronger role for Māori in our exporting and trade area. It did some really good work around innovation policy. In fact the follow-up work it then did on that has led and influenced the last Government's innovation policy. Similarly around immigration the report that the Productivity Commission did on immigration provided significant challenges to all sides of that debate and that's exactly the kind of thing the Productivity Commission was useful for.We don't have many organisations in our government system who have the specific mandate to step back to look at the bigger picture to ask the big questions. Day to day most of our public servants spend their time on the short term on the things that need to be done now. So actually having an organisation albeit established in circumstances that might have been different from what I would have done was really important. Now was it perfect? No. I agree with Mr Shaw; I don't think that the way it was set up helped in terms of the way recommendations were adopted. There is a lot that could be done.I've heard Mr Seymour in the media say that he thinks the Productivity Commission had been politically hijacked. I obviously reject that. But if that's what Mr Seymour thinks there's a really simple way of dealing with that: change the commissioners and then carry on with the Productivity Commission. It's an utterly bizarre position for Mr Seymour to take—that something established by his own political party that has produced reports that he himself has just told us were valuable he now comes and says "Oh no—actually just going to kill it off." Now he himself has said "Well this is all so that the money can be used for the ministry of regulation." which in itself if I want to add another layer of irony to this debate is one of the great acts of centralisation in the history of Government: to try and bring all of the work on regulation that's done across all of the ministries into one place. And we can come back to that as Mr Shaw indicates when that work is actually done.So it is for me—you know I said it was silly and it was also sad. I do feel sad for the people who do the work at the Productivity Commission. There are some extremely bright and talented people there. I heard what Mr Seymour said about wanting to give them every opportunity to find their way into other parts of the public sector but I also note the comments that Dr Duncan Webb has made about the fact that the bill brutally cancels their employment contracts without any say-so back. So on this side of the House we continue to support the work that the Productivity Commission has done. This is the direction that the Government wants to go in but it seems to be a particularly bizarre act from David Seymour and I just wonder whether Rodney Hide has followed in the line of Roger Douglas of disowning Mr Seymour. Perhaps this is Mr Seymour's attempt to get back not only at Roger Douglas but also Rodney Hide. It's a very strange bill. I look forward to debating it across the rest of the evening but I simply don't understand what the Government thinks it's achieving here."