Shearer David: State Sector Management Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Shearer David: State Sector Management Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Sitting date: 09 December 2010. Volume:669;Page:16290. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert) 
: 
 I will follow on from where Chris Hipkins just left off and I will comment particularly on the contribution made by the Minister in the chair the Hon Nathan Guy. When the Minister spoke earlier I anticipated a solid reasoning of why this amalgamation would make a real difference and that did not happen. What I did hear was that he was unable to provide any assurance to us that attending or visiting fire stations around the country would be able to happen freely but he certainly did not give a good interpretation of why this legislation is important. Why we are sitting here under urgency on a Saturday to listen to that? Members talked about whether it would be a topic of conversations around barbecues over the next few weeks; I think it actually will be. I think it will be used as an example of what this Government proposes to do and what it is actually doing. 
I will go back to one thing that the Minister raised which was the issue of new technology. When we were listening in the Education and Science Committee this issue came up over and over again as a vindication of why this legislation had to go through. It is an information technology - driven rationale. There is no other rationale that we could come to to understand why on earth this is being done except for the fact that there might be some sort of ideological reason why this might happen. We could pick on librarians and they are unlikely to fight back. Librarians can be bullied and they are not likely to march on Parliament. 
Independence as Chris Hipkins was talking about before he sat down is indeed compromised by this legislation. It could not not be compromised. I want to look at the part of the bill that covers independence in reporting. The bill changes the status of the National Librarian from chief executive to employee. There is a feeling that by making this person the head of the National Library a third-tier employee of the Department of Internal Affairs a department that as we have heard has massive amounts of other responsibilities—it is a grab bag of just about everything in Government that does not fit into a particular ministry—somehow this employee will have exactly the same ability to influence and maintain the independence of the National Library as happened before. It is simply not the case. There were 31 submitters who appeared before the select committee and 100 percent of those submissions—and Colin King knows this for a fact because he was sitting there and listening as well; he is nodding his head—opposed this change. They basically centred their objections on the fact that the chief executive has been relegated to being an employee and the role will be diluted by organisational layers the National Librarian will lose the right to the Minister and the National Librarian’s influence and independence will be adversely affected. 
Mr Nathan Guy has put before us the Crown Law report which we had not seen previously along with a bottle of white-out—talk about a lack of ability—and he read selectively from that report. But the bottom line is that if we submerge the head of a department into the third level of a hierarchy and then expect that person to operate with the same independence as he or she did beforehand we are dreaming; we are completely dreaming. There is no way that bureaucracies operate like that; anybody who has been in a bureaucracy knows that. The National Librarian of course will have to report up the chain of command. Of course the National Librarian will not have the same ability to exercise independence as he or she did previously. Of course the National Librarian will not be able to assure New Zealanders that that is the case.