Turei Metiria: Urgent Debates — Teachers and Support Staff Payroll—Ministerial Inquiry into Novopay SystemText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTurei Metiria: Urgent Debates — Teachers and Support Staff Payroll—Ministerial Inquiry into Novopay System[Sitting date: 04 June 2013. Volume:690;Page:10641. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green): I moveThat the House take note of a matter of urgent public importance. This Government has a habit of making its officials take the knocks for its decisions. We saw that when it apparently vindicated itself over Skycity blaming the officials for not giving it enough information and we are seeing exactly the same here: a Minister who has no idea what is going on in her own ministry who is prepared to rely on advice without questioning any of it reasonably when she makes her decisions and who is then found to have managed it so appallingly that she had to give it over to another Minister who also cannot handle it. And this is a deal—this Novopay deal—worth tens of millions of dollars.What do we find in this report theReport of the Ministerial Inquiry into the Novopay Project from Maarten Wevers? Well I can certainly say that the public are tired of Ministers pretending that they have no responsibility for asking the right questions over these enormous projects that not only cost millions and millions of New Zealand taxpayers’ dollars but have significant implications for families and for teachers and schools and that is what we have seen. It has been teachers and schools who have paid the cost of the failure of Minister Hekia Parata and the roll-out of Novopay. Although it has to be said the Novopay inquiry does highlight some of the failures from officials it certainly does not vindicate Ministers as they would like to say. If it did why then did Maarten Wevers find that the “creation of a dedicated ministerial portfolio for Novopay and the appointment of a new Acting Secretary gave the sharper focus for addressing the issues and improved the key relationships.”? He said that because the fact is that when Novopay was in the hands of Hekia Parata there was no sharp focus on the issues there was no interest in improving the key relationships and there certainly was not any commitment to making sure that when Novopay was brought in it would be a system that would work for families for schools and for teachers.When this fiasco was in full boil Hekia Parata was in charge along with a woman with whom we now know Hekia Parata had a pathological problem communicating and that was Lesley Longstone. Is it any wonder that Wevers found that key questions around the finance were not asked by the Minister by other Ministers related in that portfolio or by their officials and that the decisions were rushed through without proper oversight without listening to all the warnings from teachers and from payroll workers who said that they did not trust the system to work because they were having to deal with the consequences of it? The context was a ministry overseen by a Minister who we now know is incapable of listening. We know that this report shows how that kind of attitude can infect a whole workplace and how information just will not flow freely when you simply cannot trust a Minister to deal with that information effectively.Ministers can blame officials for not giving them good advice in the crucial 5 June report to Parata English and Foss but the inquiry found that there were concerns in that 5 June report that were so obvious that most of us are now left wondering why they were not picked up on by Ministers. Did they not bother to read that report? Although the officials reported that they were ready to go live and they did not think that there were any outstanding issues in that 5 June report they also pointed to two criteria that were not being met and they described elsewhere in the report that some criteria were only “close to being met.” With the stability of the entire education system at risk and with the fortnightly pay of hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders at risk why did these Ministers Parata English and Foss not just ask a few key questions? Why did they not say to officials: “Go and get these uncertain elements checked out first. Find out why the criteria have not been properly met.”? Wevers found that Ministers at the time were not even sure who was in charge of the project and that Ministers were having meetings with these great teams of people but were completely unclear as to who had responsibility for a multimillion-dollar IT project that affected thousands and thousands of New Zealanders and their fortnightly pay. How is that even possible? What kind of mickey mouse operation was Hekia Parata Bill English and Craig Foss—and effectively this entire National-ACT Government—running that they did not even know who was responsible for a multimillion-dollar IT project? It was like Novopay just did not exist. It was not on their radar even though it affected thousands of New Zealanders.Ministers were told back in July of 2009 of significant risks with the system and they should have been on heightened alert. We have to ask ourselves why they were so obsessed with pushing go before the system was ready to handle the problems. What kind of culture had infected the ministry that officials did not feel free to give Ministers good and honest information? What kind of culture did these Ministers create? The 5 June report—5 June was a key date according to Wevers. There was no turning back from the decisions that were made then. It was crucial that Ministers got that decision right. Ministers either did not read that 5 June report or did not read it properly. On one page the report stated that go-live was ready and there were no issues; on another page it said that there were a couple of criteria that had not been met and not a single question was asked about those criteria or about whether that advice was really accurate.We cannot blame Ministers for everything; I think that has to be said. But they do not work in a critical vacuum. They exist in this House to be accountable to the public. They exist to ask the questions of officials and to make sure when they make the final decisions they are making them with full information and with the concerns of the New Zealand public at heart particularly when you are talking about a multimillion-dollar project that affects thousands and thousands of New Zealand families. That was clearly not the case. These Ministers took their hands off the reins and left a vacuum of leadership. That is what we have seen here with Minister Hekia Parata.This project was given the go-ahead by this Government at a time when there were very serious concerns about its ability to go live. As a result we have had more than 12 months now of families not being paid and people being overpaid and chased by debt collectors. Schools have had to fork out their own money to make sure that their teachers and employees were being paid. We have had schools having to use the money that would otherwise be used for the education of our kids to fix up to patch up the mistakes made by this Government and by Ministers who did not bother to care enough to make sure that they looked at the papers properly. The families in this country are the ones who have borne the price of the neglect by these Ministers Parata English and Foss. They owe it to them.In fact even the money that this Government has allocated to schools to help cover the costs we know does not cover the costs. We know that schools have lost workers particularly payroll workers who were extremely important and long-time employees of those schools because of the harm that was caused by Parata English and Foss. Those Ministers led those schools to be existing in extreme stress for months and months on end just for the basics just because they wanted to make sure that their teachers and their workers were being paid their wages.This Government clearly has a problem with workers or it would not have put New Zealand workers at such risk with such neglect and such complete lack of consideration for the people who are being affected by their decision so much so that they did not even bother to read the papers and make sure that they had the right information to make the right decision.Hon Member: They don’t like teachers.METIRIA TUREI: They do not like teachers. I think that is right. I think we have seen that in the way this whole education portfolio has played out. The effect of that has been that for many many families many many teachers and their kids they have had real difficulty paying their bills and have borne real financial costs because of this debacle. These Ministers owe the country an explicit and very clear apology for their consistent and persistent failures over this issue. The Government has tried to make things easier and has been trying to improve the system but there is still no certainty for schools and for teachers as to when the system will work effectively and properly as it is supposed to. We know that more and more millions are being poured into the Novopay system to try to patch it up. That is millions of dollars that are not going to the education of our kids because it is going to patch up the IT mistakes that Novopay and Talent2 made in their process and that the Ministers allowed them to proceed with.This apology needs to be made explicitly and immediately to the teachers to the students and to the schools for the hugely destabilising effect that these decisions have had on them. They need to admit that it was a fiasco that prudent ministerial oversight could have been avoided and heads need to roll. We have previously called for the Minister Hekia Parata to be sacked for both this debacle over Novopay and the Christchurch schools debacle and the persistent failures in her management of her portfolio. This report is a clear example this report from Maarten Wevers and others that she can be held responsible for the decision to go live for the failure to get proper advice from officials to ask the important questions and to make the right decisions. The only genuinely respectable action that Hekia Parata can now make is to step down as Minister as part of her apology to schools to teachers and to families for the debacle that she has created. Thank you.