Hipkins Chris: Urgent Debates — Teachers and Support Staff Payroll—Ministerial Inquiry into Novopay SystemText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Urgent Debates — Teachers and Support Staff Payroll—Ministerial Inquiry into Novopay System[Sitting date: 04 June 2013. Volume:690;Page:10646. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): If ever New Zealanders needed a clear example of the fact that they have a hands-off Government that is not up to the task of running the country they got it today—yet another example today—in this theReport of the Ministerial Inquiry into the Novopay Project. I will quote from page 1 the foreword to the report which says: “This state of affairs and the wider disruptions that were caused were avoidable.” This all of this this entire shambles was avoidable. Steven Joyce talked about there being plenty of blame to go around and then proceeded to try to scatter it anywhere except with the Ministers who actually made the decisionsto sign off on the Novopay project. He blamed the officials and he blamed the past Government. And of course the Government has tried to blame the schools. It has tried to blame everyone except for the three people who actually signed—put their names on the piece of paper—to say to go ahead with Novopay. Bill English Hekia Parata and Craig Foss were the three people who signed off on the implementation of Novopay and ultimately they are the ones who are responsible.It is great that Steven Joyce has apologised to all the people who have been affected by this but why on earth did it take such a long time? Why did Hekia Parata not front up and apologise? Why did Hekia Parata the Minister of Education not front up and apologise for the massive turmoil that she caused within schools? I agree with another comment made by Steven Joyce. He said that Ministers should be able to trust the advice that they receive from officials. I absolutely agree with that. But Ministers get paid $250000 a year and one of the reasons they get paid that is to test the veracity of the advice they get and to ask some difficult questions. When officials give advice that is inconsistent as was clearly the case here it is up to the Ministers to say: “This advice is not good enough and I want better.” They did not do that.They got given advice that said in the same report that the milestones had been met and that the milestones had not been met. And that was signed off by three Ministers. I can tell you now that if that sort of advice were given to me as a Minister I would not sign it off. I would go back to the officials and the very first question I would ask them is: “Well which is it? Were the milestones met or were they not?”. Apparently that was too difficult for Bill English Hekia Parata and Craig Foss—three senior Government Ministers and not one of them was able to spot the inconsistency in that report from their officials. Not one of them turned round and said: “I’m not satisfied with this advice. I want more information.” Not one of them thought to ask: “Has this actually been tested? Have we actually got some results to show whether this is going to work or not?”. Not one of those three Ministers asked for that advice. Had they done so we would not be here having this debate because it was abundantly clear before Novopay went live that it was not going to work and any Minister doing their job properly could have established that in a very short order of time. They did not do so. They did not live up to the expectations that the public should rightly have of them.Did they ask whether schools were involved in the development and the design of the new payroll system? Had they asked that basic fundamental question the answer that would have come back was a resounding no and all of the alarm bells should have been ringing at that point. The people who had to use the system the people who had to make it work were not actually involved in the project. Had it been tested? Did they ask that question? No they did not.There are a whole lot of questions left unanswered by this report. The report talks about the removal of the contingencies the phased roll-out and the old system running in parallel. It talks about the fact that that was removed. Well who signed that off? Who signed off the removal of those contingencies? If any Minister signed off on the removal of those contingencies they should resign immediately because the responsibility is very very clear. The report is suspiciously silent on that. There is not one word on whether the Minister has signed off on the removal of the contingencies and why not? If they did they have to go. It is as simple as that. If they signed off on the removal of the contingencies then the Ministers are responsible for the chaos that followed and the blame for that rests squarely on their shoulders and nobody else’s. They can blame officials they can blame previous Governments they can blame the schools but the Ministers were the ones who signed off on the implementation. The Ministers are the ones who should accept the responsibility for that.There were known faults—multiple known faults—with the system. There was clear evidence that even if the system was ready the sector was not ready for the implementation of it and yet it was still signed off anyway. The report finds and I will quote directly that “levels of trust between the Ministry and the sector that were necessary to ensure the success of the project were not always evident.” Well goodness me! That is the understatement of the decade. There is very little trust between the Ministry of Education and the entire educational community. The responsibility for that rests with Ministers as well because the Ministry of Education is ultimately left with the task of implementing the policy agenda of this Government and it is the policy agenda of this Government that has resulted in the massive breakdown in relationships between the Ministry of Education and just about everybody who has to actually implement the policies that the Government is trying to ram through. Whether they be national standards charter schools performance pay for teachers and all of those other things that this Government talks about all of the time those things have contributed to this breakdown in relationship and clearly that has had an impact on this project as well.So what is the Government going to do next? What happens now? Well there are some interesting comments in the report. It talks about removing unnecessary practices—i.e. banking staffing. Is that not interesting? Basically what it is going to do is take away the ability of schools to keep and retain and use any underspend in their staffing allocations. Basically this is another Bill English clawback—ripping more resources out of schools ripping more money and more staffing away from schools. This is how it will make up for its failed experiment with bigger class sizes—by removing banking staffing. What does banking staffing do? It allows schools if they do not use up all of their staffing within the period that they have been allocated to roll it forward. The Government wants to take that away and it wants to use its Novopay shambles as the excuse for taking away banking staffing. It also talks about reducing the complexity of collective employment agreements.Hon Members: Ah!CHRIS HIPKINS: Ah now here we go. Performance pay is on the way. It is now going to reduce the complexity of the collective agreements and we can expect to see this Government trying to ram through major changes to the way teachers and those working in schools are paid. This report is all part of the Government’s plan to change—[Bell rung] Oh that is the second 2-minute bell Mr Assistant Speaker. That is very good; I am just getting warmed up. The Government is going to use this as an excuse to ram through changes not just to the payroll system but to the collective agreements and the very nature of teachers’ employment and that is so totally wrong.Ultimately what people wanted from Steven Joyce—an apology was good—was for him to stand up and say that he accepts that the Government made a mistake the Government should not have signed off the implementation of Novopay and yes this National Government accepts responsibility. And no nobody heard that from Steven Joyce today and they have not heard that all the way through this debacle which has been now going on since August of last year. It has been going on since August and still the Government tiptoes around the edges and tries to shed the blame elsewhere. Steven Joyce even had the audacity to try to shed the blame on to the previous Labour Government yet that was actually one of the few positive findings—that the original procurement of the payroll system was actually OK. That was the bit of it that was all right.It became a shambles when Hekia Parata and Bill English and Craig Foss got involved. They were the Ministers who signed off on the go-live decision. I am looking forward to Craig Foss’ contribution because I have seen him taking extensive notes during this debate. As he is the person responsible for signing it off I look forward tohim standing up and apologising to schools apologising to teachers and to support staff—because it is not just teachers it is all the other staff who work in schools who have been affected by this. In particular I want Craig Foss to stand up and say that he is sorry for trying to blame the schools because when the system first went live and all of those problems came up Craig Foss came to this House and tried to blame the schools. He needs to stand up now take a call in this debate and give them an unqualified unreserved apology because he was totally wrong. The responsibility for this fiasco rests with him.