Delahunty CatherineCATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. Tēnā koutou e Te Whare ko tēnei pō. I am very pleased to say a few things right now. One of them is: would it not be great if we actually lived up to the expectations that the public has of us? Actually what the public wants are people who make speeches in the House that do not denigrate others that do not attack other people that do not try to undermine the reputations of other people and that actually stick to the issues of the day. That would be pleasant. That would be what democracy was about. That would inspire people and then maybe we would not have to use the Official Information Act (OIA) so much to try to find out what on earth is going on because actually this place would be a place of genuine dialogue and genuinely constructed debate instead of nasty unpleasant behaviour from people who should know better.David Seymour: Oh because Catherine Delahunty would never do that.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: I myself am not always perfect in these matters but I am very disappointed to be talking about an issue like the OIA in this manner.The issue tonight is that we have this wonderful unanimity for Mr Adrian Rurawhe's bill. I am pleased to acknowledge Adrian Rurawhe's effort to make sure that parliamentary under-secretaries are under the OIA. Why am I so pleased about that? Because when the National Government did a deal with the ACT Party over charter schools that was not taken to electorates prior to the election—a whole lot of public money and public time has been spent trying to find out what is really going on with a secret contract between the charter schools and the Government. Because the parliamentary under-secretary's work is not subject to the OIA we have not been able to find out those things by sending an OIA request to the Minister of Education because the Minister of Education would just say: Well this is not what I'm doing. This is not part of it."The whole secrecy around charter schools has been very very deleterious to good scrutiny of what was supposed to be a pilot. It was supposed to be this new model that we would be able to scrutinise and that there would be proper evaluation of. There has not been transparent evaluation of charter schools and so this bill is very pertinent to something very current very contemporary.Apart from that the OIA has also been an instrument of citizens' rights. It has been eroded and it is pleasing to see a bill that will help extend and strengthen the OIA instead of endless battles to get information. All of these battles all of these struggles that we have in order to find out what is behind policies what is meant by actual words—all of these attempts to get information at both local government level I have to say and at national Government level are gradually getting harder and harder. We really need to be challenged in this House. We really need citizens to have the right to use the OIA in all aspects of Government business; otherwise what is the point? We may as well forget question time we may as well forget the OIA system if we cannot ask questions of people who are in charge of policies. David Seymour is in charge of the charter school policy—David Seymour: Um I'm actually not.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: —and we need to ask him questions. If we cannot ask him questions—we cannot even ask him whether he is in charge of charter school policy or not because he is not under the OIA yet—it is not helpful to the coherent dialogue about what the nature of education is and what the point is of having a failed model from overseas imposed upon our country at great expense in order to experiment on children some of whom have already experienced great losses.That is what this bill is about. It is about the OIA for parliamentary under-secretaries. Parliamentary under-secretaries should be subject to the OIA; it is good that we all agree about that. It is an excellent thing.Hon Christopher Finlayson: Sit down and shut up.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: But there are reasons why this is a problem—and no I will not sit down and shut up because that is not my job Mr Finlayson. My job is to hold the Government to account. It is to hold the Government to account and that is why I support this bill because it is about that. If anybody thinks that some of us are voting for it because of what happened with the charter schools—we are voting for it for that reason but also because it is a good example of everything that is wrong with imposed policy that is not open to scrutiny. We are very pleased that there will be greater scrutiny and the Green Party is happy that it will apply broadly and it is happy that it will apply to the particular issue which has inspired us to support this bill. I commend the bill to the House."