Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker. I rise to take a brief call on behalf of the Green Party in the second reading of the State Sector and Crown Entities Reform Bill and I'm going to do my best to restrict myself to the content of the bill rather than getting into any side discussions today.This is a relatively simple bill that amends two key pieces of legislation the State Sector Act and the Crown Entities Act. It's not going to change the world but it is an important signal to the country about some of the things that are important to this Government—namely addressing inequality trying to rebuild confidence in our public sector and making more connection between the core State sector and our Public Service in the wider State sector as well as ensuring that when there may be concerns and the need for an inquiry it is able to happen smoothly and appropriately.Within the bill a key change to deliver on those goals is that there will be the change to the Crown Entities Act to require Crown entities to obtain written consent from the State Services Commission on the terms and conditions of the chief executives (CEs) when they're employing them and the reason for this is probably quite well-known to most New Zealanders. We've seen quite a few stories in the media about salaries that were perceived to be out of step with wage increases and salaries for the rest of the country and they were going against the advice of the State Services Commissioner indeed. So this is just ensuring that that actually can't happen. We have a mechanism now in law to be able to keep that in step and the decisions and the guidance for the public sector CEs—the Crown entities can't be out of step with that. I think that's a really important signal. We do as a country absolutely want to ensure that people are properly rewarded for their work and that we're able to get great people into these important positions and we can do that without actually going a step too far in terms of increasing inequality.The bill also sets those appointments for a period of five years whereas at the moment the appointments are permanent. The reason for this—and when I first looked at this I didn't immediately understand why we would be doing that because typically when people apply for jobs they're permanent jobs and we support that but in this case it's when the boards who employ the CE turn over. They have a particular life and when there's a permanent appointment in the CE position that ends up as having quite an imbalance of power. When you've got a new board and a board who's turning over and who may reflect different political directions to have one CE who has 10 years' experience and knowledge of the organisation becomes quite imbalanced in terms of power and it actually reduces in effect the role and the oversight of the board because of that imbalance of power. From my experiences as a worker working to a board as well as having been on boards I understood it in that sense. So we do support reducing the term of appointment to five years.The other change is for the State Services Commissioner to set standards of integrity and conduct by applying a code of conduct. The intent of this I think is pretty obvious to everyone. It is to be able to help people have a sense of confidence. It is to have a joining together of our State sector in a uniform set of values so that we can have confidence that everyone no matter what their role is in our State sector has that sense of commitment to the public and will be abiding by a code of conduct.The bill also improves the investigation powers of the State Services Commissioner. In this area in particular there were quite a few changes made within the select committee and I too would like to acknowledge the Governance and Administration Committee for the work that they've done on this bill. It does indeed seem to have strengthened it helpfully. I understand that quite a few of the amendments that were made by the select committee at least in some part stemmed from the submission from the Law Society who detailed that the protections of the Inquiries Act should also apply in this area and said we needed to make sure that there was more consistency between this piece of legislation and the Inquiries Act—which of course makes sense—and it is a testament to the value of the select committee process.So aspects that have been added from the Inquiries Act through the select committee process are a duty to act independently impartially and fairly the ability to designate core participants in the inquiry and the ability to refer questions of law to the High Court when needed. Also an amendment is being made to ensure that a delegation under the Inquiries Act must be carried out in accordance with the State Sector Act. That is building the consistency between the two pieces of legislation which just seems terribly sensible to me. On that note I commend this bill.