Bakshi Kanwaljit SinghKANWALJIT SINGH BAKSHI (National): Thank you Madam Speaker. First of all I would also like to acknowledge all the public servants who really worked hard during this difficult time and the challenging times which New Zealand has faced. I would also like to acknowledge the chair of the Governance and Administration Committee Dr Jian Yang who really worked very hard to ensure that we came out of this process of select committee with this bill with a very good piece of work but we are very disappointed that the Government members and the Business Committee did not give us the opportunity to follow the work. The process which we followed was that we heard the submissions and we heard the revision-tracked version where there were so many recommendations by the officials but we did not get a chance to report back all those changes to this House which would have improved this bill a long way. The State Sector Act 1988 is being redone after 30 years. This is the real opportunity to modernise the New Zealand Public Service. It is the missed opportunity for substantive reform and rushed process during the lockdown that does a disservice to its importance. The select committee should have been working on COVID-related emergency legislation during the emergency when the MPs were confined to their homes but the Government opportunistically used this to push through this large complex and important legislation. Madam Assistant Speaker Dyson I know you have been the chair of this select committee for a long time and I have worked with you. I have seen that the intention of this select committee is always to bring the best out of the select committee process for any complex bill and that was the intention in this process when we were going through the select committee process for this bill. Some good points in this bill which I would like to share with this House are that it is going to bring the real connection between the Crown entities and the public sector which is very important. The chief executives will be responsible to promote diversity and bring more inclusion into the workforce. They will be expected to build an inclusive workplace culture that attracts and promotes diversity. As we have seen in this country it is becoming more and more diverse and we want that the workforce and the public sector should be representative of the true population. This will need to include the removal of the barriers to current recruitment and development practices to ensure all people have fair and equal access to employment opportunities and career progression which is a very important thing. We have seen that some of the areas where we don't have that are particularly the Māori the Pacific and the ethnics who don't have that progression which they should have and which they deserve. This will also be able to deliver more innovative and meaningful programmes that have a greater impact. We want that New Zealanders should have the best out of every public servant and this bill could have done that provided we had that process of the select committee. A strong system of focused Public Service leadership is needed to improve outcomes for all New Zealanders. As we have seen the public servants are required to give frank and free opinion to the Ministers and to the ministries while the policies are being formulated. That is a very important thing which we need to understand—that the frank and free opinion can help have better policies for New Zealanders. The system leads will be also available to appoint based on functional experience and expertise instead of needing to be an agency chief executive. A chief executive will be responsible for employing their day-to-day staff but as a collective they have to work together to have the better outcome for the betterment of New Zealanders. If we talk about the culture and the behaviour then this system will get rid of rigid systems and processes. We need to understand that there should be flexible things available. Chief executives have already started to lead together for the system. This will be formalised as a new Public Service leadership team and it will help public servants to build on the collective way of working which again is an emphasis of this Act. I hope that during the committee of the whole House we will be able to put forward some Supplementary Order Papers where we could make this bill more workable and better so that it can help the public servants. With these words I oppose the bill at this stage.