Hughes Gareth: State Sector Management Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hughes Gareth: State Sector Management Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Sitting date: 09 December 2010. Volume:669;Page:16248. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
GARETH HUGHES (Green) 
: 
 Kia ora Mr Assistant Speaker Barker. Kia ora everybody. Nga mihi nui a koutou. Kia ora. This is my first day back in Parliament after 3 weeks on parental leave. It is great to be here on a Saturday. Three weeks ago my wife gave birth to a healthy little baby Zoe Elizabeth Hughes. I wonder what impact the State Sector Management Bill will have on the records and archives we are producing now in Parliament and around our communities. What access will she have when she is 18 and when she is 30? That is the key question we are asking today with this bill. 
I was privileged to join the other members on the Education and Science Committee hearing the submissions. I heard one clear message from all of the submitters. There was a clear message that the merging or the takeover as it was described of the National Library and Archives New Zealand will be bad. It will be bad for Archives New Zealand it will be bad for the National Library and it will be bad for Kiwis accessing those services. 
I was fortunate enough to have a tour of Archives New Zealand with some of the staff. Boy what a fantastic institution it is. I got to see maps of New Zealand from the 1950s with potential nuclear strikes. I got to see handwritten deeds of sale signed with moko. Truly they are national taonga deserving of our utmost respect and utmost care and the risk with this bill we are debating today under urgency on a Saturday is a lack of care and a lack of due diligence and prudence. There is a lack of reasons why we are even addressing these issues today. 
I will briefly touch on some of the impacts of this bill because there will be some and touch on some of the reasons—or slogans as I put it—given for why this bill has been introduced and reasons why I am opposed to it. To begin with the submitters to the select committee presented a great number of risks and reasons why we should not proceed with this bill. We heard that the National Library of New Zealand and Archives New Zealand have different roles: one is a library and one is responsible for archiving. We heard that their independence is at risk. We are putting the Chief Archivist and the National Librarian within a bureaucracy and down three or four tiers from their current position which will reduce their impact and their access to Ministers. It will reduce their ability to have mana to proactively argue and to actually hold the chief executives of Government departments to account and tell them when they are doing a bad job when it comes to archiving. 
We heard that it will impact their budgets although one good thing that I will give to the Government is that separate votes will continue. But we will see budget pressures faced and the risk is that the Department of Internal Affairs one financial year will say that we will just have fewer books that year. We also heard from submitters that this change is impacting on the morale of the staff. These guys do fantastic work day in day out for the country’s sake to protect these taonga and having 15 staff at risk is damaging morale. 
We also heard on the select committee why we are doing this. The reasons that I heard and that I read in the Cabinet papers simply amount to slogans. We heard slogans: future-proofing financial savings efficiencies and digitisation. These are simply slogans without argument or solid facts to back them up. Throughout the select committee process there were no facts and figures and no robust arguments were presented. In that case there remains simply slogans. 
When it comes to the finance we are talking about maybe $165000 a year. It seems crazy that we are doing this for literally $165000 a year. It is as if the Government looking for inspiration for its legislative programme for the year went back and looked at the Shipley-Bolger playbook from the 1990s. When it comes to worker relations it has gone back to the Shipley-Bolger playbook and when it comes to these wonderful Government departments it has gone back to the Shipley-Bolger playbook. We have returned to the 1990s. In the select committee we once again heard that there were compelling reasons why these departments were separated by the Labour Government. 
In summary we oppose this bill for a considerable number of reasons. We have simply heard slogans as arguments for it and it essentially amounts to an ideological solution in search of a problem. Kia ora.