Locke Keith: Protected Disclosures Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Locke Keith: Protected Disclosures Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:653;Page:2797] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party will be supporting the Protected Disclosures Amendment Bill. It is a step towards making the public sector more accountable and it is a part of good governance. I do not want to just go over the points that the Green Party made in earlier speeches on this bill. I thought it would be good to put my speech in a broader context of why the public sector should provide an example of good governance for the community and the private sector. It seems to me that there are three aspects to good governance in public sector organisations. The first is that we have good and well-oiled procedures particularly to prevent financial mismanagement and wrongdoing. The second is that we need transparency and thirdly we need the provision provided in this bill for whistleblowing. 
It is interesting to read the annual report of the Office of the Ombudsmen—there is a nice picture in there of David McGee one of the Ombudsmen who is our previous Clerk of the House. On transparency it says “In recent years we have observed an increasing tendency on the part of some agencies and some Ministerial offices to ignore the provisions of the Official Information Act 1982 (OIA) in terms of the timing of their responses to requesters.” It says later that it has been “observed that in certain sectors a regrettable tendency to ‘game’ the system seems to be emerging in order to delay responses until the currency of the complainant’s interest has passed.” So there is work to do regarding transparency. 
I take the point the Minister made in introducing the third reading: the private sector is not required to comply with this whistleblowers’ legislation but will be encouraged to do so. When I was thinking of the private sector I thought particularly of the world financial crisis that is upon us. A lot of that is a result of a lack of good governance in terms of a lack of proper procedures a lack of proper transparency and no whistleblower provisions of any consequence. 
It was interesting that on 3 April the OECD said there was $11 trillion parked in tax havens which is more than 10 times the total amount committed by the G-20 leaders to revive the global economy. When we are looking at the lack of good governance and proper whistleblowing we see that the financial system of the world is very much uppermost in our minds. In this list of 39 countries that are not fully compliant with international tax standards there are two places that are part of New Zealand: Niue and the Cook Islands. In the Pacific more generally there are Vanuatu and Nauru. So we have a little way to go in bringing the rest of the Pacific into line with international tax standards. When we look at rectifying the world financial crisis and see about $11 trillion parked in tax havens we see that the annual tax being dodged would solve a lot of the problems of the developing countries. They are dodging probably $200 billion or $300 billion in tax. 
I think this is important when we look at bringing the world economic crisis down to our own financial collapses particularly those of the finance companies. At the present time Rod Petricevic and four others from Bridgecorp are before the courts for making false statements. What was the problem there? Clearly there was a problem with the proper procedures being followed there was a problem with transparency and to relate to this bill directly there were no proper provisions or openings for whistleblowing. Bridgecorp had quite a lot of employees. It must be the case that many of those employees knew what was going on but they did not blow any whistles probably because they were concerned about what would happen to them their employment and their careers. 
I think this bill is important for the Public Service though it applies as previous speakers have said not only to people employed directly by the Government but also to people on boards and volunteers in the public sector. It is important for us to provide a model for the private sector to follow. I think it is also an indication to those who think that privatisation is the way to go and that private companies are more efficient and more transparent etc. that in fact society is moving in the opposite direction. It is the public sector that is providing the example in respect of this whistleblowing legislation and other measures; we have to drag the private sector along behind us. 
We have seen what has happened in previous privatisations—for instance New Zealand Rail where the people who took over that company in 1993 virtually stripped it by not putting in any money to repair the tracks and by taking out as much money as they could in dividends. We are still trying to recover from that situation. The Government has quite a big task to put the required money—and it is needed—into redeveloping the rail system. 
The Green Party does support this whistleblowing legislation. It is good that the Ombudsmen are going to be involved and working alongside people who perhaps do not quite know where to go and are a bit intimidated by the people immediately above them. In terms of the procedures in the original Act those people are supposed to report through the line of command but their grievance might be in relation to someone immediately above them and they may want to go around that person. The Ombudsmen will help them to do that. The Green Party is fully in support of this important legislation. Thank you.