Wong Pansy: Public Finance (State Sector Management) Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Wong Pansy: Public Finance (State Sector Management) Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Sitting date: 14 December 2004. Volume:622;Page:17856. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
PANSY WONG (National) 
: 
 It is really sad to hear that the Minister of Finance could not find anybody even on his own side of the House to go out and celebrate with him whatever he wants to celebrate. He is so desperate that I cannot resist taking a call to say to him that I am struggling to see how I can go out and celebrate Christmas when he refuses to answer the call from my colleague John Key to put some turkey on the table. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: Turkey’s on the table! 
PANSY WONG 
: I say to the Minister that if he does not want to put the turkey out maybe some Peking duck might do the job! Well that got the Labour members excited; they have not felt like that for a while. 
I really would encourage the Minister to take a few more calls. It is very encouraging to see that he is taking calls at such an early stage but he has still not answered my question that I posted in the second reading. Was the inclusion of the cock-ups in Part 1 that were picked up by the Clerk of the House a deliberate move by the executive or was it incompetence in drafting? That is a very simple question and I feel that the Minister of Finance owes it to the public to say what happened.The select committee process is not an invitation for submissioners to rewrite legislation; it is a chance for them to say whether they have any actual concerns. However the submission of the Clerk of the House led to a major rewrite of Part 1. 
I would like the Minister to take a call on a very thoughtful submission made by Dr Graham Scott the former Secretary to the Treasury. He raised good points and I am looking forward to the Minister answering them. Dr Scott said that the changes proposed in Part 1 were meant to lead to more accountability in the way that information might link output to outcome. But he reckoned that would not be achieved by the attempts in this bill to aggregate the outputs. Indeed a better outcome can arise only if a department started to express its outcome statement in more practical and assessable terms. That is so true. Sometimes we pick up the copy of a Government department’s statement of intent and find a statement that it will improve the well-being of New Zealanders. I think that is a very admirable outcome but to translate it into output certainly would be very difficult. 
If a department wants to demonstrate that it could have a set of good outputs that lead to the outcomes specified by the Government then it should have a management plan that truly reflects the Government’s intention. We are not too sure that what is expressed in Part 1 about aggregating outputs etc. would lead to that. Dr Scott also pointed out that if we really wanted a major improvement in a Government department’s output statement and in the outcome-oriented approach Ministers themselves have to show a lot more interest in their Government departments and be prepared to take responsibility for expressing those goals and those high-level outcomes in terms whereby the Government departments can translate them into outcomes that are practical and measurable. 
As well as questioning the rewriting of this legislation we question whether there will be investment in research and in the training of those Government departments. One example I encountered just recently was during the financial review of the Takeovers Panel when the Chairman Mr John King expressed dismay to the Commerce Committee that although the Government had promised it money for research into how the Takeovers Code could be made more effective that funding had not been forthcoming.