Shaw JamesHon JAMES SHAW (Minister of Climate Change): Thank you Madam Speaker. The Green Party supports this motion. The Ombudsmen the Auditor-General and the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment all provide very valuable services not just to this Parliament but to our democracy and to Aotearoa more broadly. It is obviously clear looking at these appropriations that COVID-19 has affected their work programmes as obviously it's affected everybody's work programmes in the country so I just want to recognise the public servants who work for those officers who have continued to work for New Zealand during this time—and actually not just for New Zealand because they do play a role in the Pacific as well supporting democracy in our Pacific region. So the Auditor-General is the auditor for the Governments of Niue and Tokelau and the secretary-general of the Pacific Association of Supreme Audit Institutions. The Auditor-General also seconds a staff member to the Solomon Islands. I think given how disruptive COVID-19 has been to the Pacific as well that support is important and necessary and I thank them for continuing to do it.It is clear in our view that actually the Officers of Parliament don't have the kind of resources that they need to do their job as effectively as they could if they were properly resourced. So for example when Governments and their agencies misuse the Official Information Act the Ombudsman needs the resources to be able to take action on behalf of the public and their right to that information. The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment under several commissioners over many years has built a strong bipartisan support as a champion of the environment. The Parliamentary Commissioners for the Environment (PCEs) never pull their punches—no PCE has—and they've provided us with very valuable information and analysis to move environmental policy forward. Their work around pest control really helped to settle the debate around what it is that we need to do there around fracking and of course they were instrumental in helping lay the groundwork for the zero carbon Act and for the support right across the House for the zero carbon Act. So they have assisted all of us in this House and in previous Parliaments to do our job better. Therefore as we think about future appropriations I think we need to really interrogate whether they have the resources to do that job as effectively as they might otherwise. Because I mean their appropriations in the grand scheme of things are pretty tiny and I think that we could look at that.We are building up some pretty good environmental law here in Aotearoa. I would like to say that if we were to fund the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment more I would like to see them be empowered to take stronger action on behalf of the environment. Environmental legal aid is tiny and clearly isn't enough to support those kinds of actions on behalf of community groups who have to really beg and borrow and hold bake sales to take on huge and well-funded corporate polluters. I would argue that we should consider giving the PCE the power to fight for nature in the courts so actually to take actions on behalf of the environment themselves and I think that we need more powerful and more independent voices in our democracy in that sense.I also want to raise something that is a bit of a hold-over from the last term which is around whether we should have more Officers of Parliament. You may remember there were some discussions in the last term around creating an independent parliamentary budget office. Many countries have parliamentary budget offices of one form or another to support Parliament to better scrutinise the Government's fiscal management which is something that I think is in the interests of the Opposition but also in terms of improving the performance of the Government itself. I'd like to see that work picked up again and I think that those kind of programmes ought to be debated on their merits. I think one of the issues that we have here is that we get sidetracked into arguments about whether an $11.7 billion fiscal hole may or may not exist when if you had an institution like an independent parliamentary budget office they could clear that right up and I think that would be in kind of everybody's interests. I'm sure I'm not the only one who saw the irony when the National Party first misunderstood the Green Party's tax policy and then put out statements with incorrect maths. It would be helpful I think to the functioning of our democracy to have an independent parliamentary budget office so that we're all operating off the same balance sheet so to speak.So I do hope that we are maybe able to make some progress on that but I am pleased that this House today will continue to fund the Officers of Parliament that we do already have and I just want to close by again suggesting that we do look at those future appropriations and question whether or not we are funding our democracy to the extent that it deserves.