Chauvel Charles: Offices of Parliament — Address to Governor-General 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Chauvel Charles: Offices of Parliament — Address to Governor-General 
[Sitting date: 05 April 2012. Volume:679;Page:1752. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CHARLES CHAUVEL (Labour) 
: 
 It is not often that we get the opportunity as ordinary members of the House to rise to speak about the work of the Offices of Parliament and I want to take a brief call in this debate in order to be able to do that. 
First of all I acknowledge the importance of their work because it is not acknowledged often enough. In New Zealand we have an important series of constitutional safeguards that are all about transparency. We do not have entrenched rights except in respect of a few provisions of the Electoral Act so everything depends as far as public confidence in our institutions is concerned on the institutions that we have set up that are designed to ensure that transparency is working appropriately. And if we allow them to fail if we allow them to become under-resourced if we allow public confidence in them to diminish then we will reap the whirlwind and we will have no one to blame but ourselves as parliamentarians for not making sure that they were able to do their job properly. 
I support the motion in the name of the Leader of the House because I do think that we have come to a situation where there are some real issues around the funding of the Offices of Parliament as has been acknowledged in this debate to date. The motion will go some way to alleviating the situation but it may not go all the way and this is an issue that does require our constant vigilance in the House. 
 Turning first to the Office of the Controller and Auditor-General I really just want to say two things about the importance of the work of the office. The first is that every member of the House who serves on a select committee will I think want to record their gratitude for the excellent work that is done by the staff of the office in helping us prepare for the financial review and estimates process. There is a lot of documentation to wade through when we have a look at the performance of organs and agencies of the executive and it is absolutely invaluable to be able to know that in most cases except where there is some sort of statutory exemption or a very unique scheme that applies to the agency of Government we will have a member of the staff of the Controller and Auditor-General on hand speaking to a written report prior to the commencement of the examination of the performance of the entity pointing out in particular technical issues around performance that sometimes might escape members when they are looking at the bigger picture around what the political issues of the day are which might have excited debate concerning the environment of the agency concerned. I think it is as I say worthwhile just to place on record how valuable that function is and to record the hope that with the appropriation that will be effected as a result of this motion we will all be able to have that uninterrupted service. 
The other thing that I wanted to say about the value of the work of the Office of the Controller and Auditor-General is the power which we should never underestimate in the ability to take investigations up on her own motion. My colleagues already mentioned some of the important issues that the Auditor-General herself has decided to take scrutiny of. That again is an incredibly important function. Everybody knows that it is a function that is exercised completely independently of politics and politicians and that it is solely motivated by the desire to ensure that public money is being appropriately spent and that procedures that sit in place to govern the accountability of public entities are being followed. So from that point of view the office does an invaluable job. I am very pleased to be able to put that on record in the context of this debate. 
The second entity that is dealt with in the report is obviously the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. I spent some time in the last Parliament working as the Labour Party spokesperson on the environment and I think what has to be said about the work of the parliamentary commissioner and her team is that they strive for and succeed in ensuring that their work is utterly independent and evidence based. So you get very valuable reports from the office. They are meticulously researched and they are also pragmatic as far as their outcomes and recommended courses of action are concerned. 
I think of the 1080 report in particular which made the point in the face of heated public debate that 1080 was simply the best option around to keep the dawn chorus going in our forests. If we wanted our forests to fall silent then sure we could stop using 1080 but unless and until a better solution comes along—and it is many years away—it is the only way that we can keep some biodiversity going in those areas that otherwise it would disappear from. 
I think an earlier speaker has mentioned the biofuels report the incredibly valuable forward-looking work that the parliamentary commissioner did in order to ask what the future of biofuels in New Zealand is in the long term. It is actually our wood resource. As soon as technology is available that will be something that we must not underestimate as far as the potential for renewables in the fuel sector is concerned. It is incredibly valuable forward-looking insight and research and is publicly funded and available to all members of Parliament and to the public. No one told the parliamentary commissioner to do that work; it simply came about because it was a piece of public-good research within her mandate. Again that is something we should all be very pleased about. 
Water quality was in the same position. We should also obviously remember that there was an announcement by the former Minister for the Environment last year that the Government had determined that the parliamentary commissioner should be responsible for environmental reporting. We are yet to see the legislation that would effect that change but at the time the Labour Party said that we would support it provided that taking on that new function did not involve compromising the existing ability of the parliamentary commissioner to process the important work that she does on a routine basis and to which I have already referred. It is very important to ensure that as the parliamentary commissioner looks forward to taking on that new mandate that the Government wishes to confer upon her—and that I think most Opposition parties are comfortable with—the office is adequately resourced. 
Finally on the Office of the Ombudsmen we have heard much talk in the debate already about the concerns around the funding of the office. I think it is conceded that much of the problem is created by the Canterbury earthquake situation and it is hoped that that will simply be a blip on the radar as far as the Ombudsman’s work is concerned. But there are real issues around what has had to give as a result of processing the problems that have been brought to the office by Canterbury and the terrible situation that is being managed there. One of those is the inability at the moment to process case notes which is very important for people who want to ensure that they can access official information in order to hold the Government to account. They need to know what the rules and what the precedents are. That cannot be allowed to give permanently nor can the existing number of unprocessed and unallocated cases be allowed to become a permanent feature of the system. 
 The problem that the Ombudsman has told the House about via the Officers of Parliament Committee is not unique to Offices of Parliament. We have a number of other watchdogs where there are crises either in funding or in powers. What we must not do is allow the Human Rights Commission the Judicial Conduct Commissioner or the Privacy Commissioner to be compromised either. So I commend this motion to the House but I do ask that we all bear in mind the importance of the work— 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch) 
: I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member.