Hipkins Chris: Official Information (Parliamentary Under-Secretaries) Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Official Information (Parliamentary Under-Secretaries) Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 25 May 2016. Volume:714;Page:11304. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): This is quite possibly and quite probably the least transparent Government that New Zealand has had since the passage of the Official Information Act in the early 1980s. It does not comply with that legislation it treats parliamentary questions and processes with contempt—regularly avoiding answering parliamentary questions at all—and it is no wonder that New Zealanders do not have much trust in the mechanisms of Government any more when the current Government pays so little heed to them. This piece of legislation is a very welcome development and I congratulate my colleague Adrian Rurawhe on bringing this bill to the House.Brett Hudson the previous speaker asked what has changed in the last few years from when we previously had parliamentary under-secretaries to now. Well what has changed is that the Government has placed a parliamentary under-secretary in charge of a policy area where it has exempted the organisations receiving large sums of Government money from the Official Information Act. So the charter schools that David Seymour is responsible for the oversight of in his role as parliamentary under-secretary do not have to comply with the Official Information Act. That is what has changed. This is the only time in the history of the parliamentary under-secretary role that it has been placed in charge of a policy area that is exempt from the Official Information Act—so that is what has changed that is why this legislation is necessary and that is why I think it is great that this bill is going through the House.Under the law as it exists today partnership schools or charter schools—whatever you wish to call them—can communicate with the Parliamentary Under-Secretary to the Minister of Education David Seymour and none of those communications is covered by the Official Information Act because they are not communicating with the ministry nor are they communicating with the Minister. Therefore those communications are not covered. But they are communicating with the Government because the person in the Government who has that role is a parliamentary under-secretary. So it does create an anomaly that means that information about how significant amounts of Government money are being spent is being withheld from the public. This bill gets around that and it means that those communications will be covered by the Official Information Act and that is nothing to be afraid of unless the parliamentary under-secretary has something to be embarrassed about in those communications. And I certainly hope he does not because after all the Government has said that the organisations in question—the charter schools—are supposed to be more transparent and more accountable than any others within the education system and yet under the current law that is not the case.This bill here does not overturn the exemption from the Official Information Act that partnership schools or charter schools currently enjoy. I think that is a bill that Parliament maybe should consider in the future. In fact I would go much wider and consider that many many entities that receive millions of dollars in Government subsidies should be subject to the Official Information Act because one of the big things that is eroding the coverage of the Official Information Act at the moment is the constant contracting out of Government services including everything from policy development right the way down to service delivery. It is being contracted out to businesses and those businesses that are receiving Government funding to do the core business of Government are not subject to the Official Information Act. I think that is something that Parliament should address at some future point because I think that that circumvents the original intention of the Official Information Act which is that citizens should have the ability to scrutinise the actions of their executive. They should have the ability to scrutinise where public money is being spent and at the moment many many things since the passage of the Official Information Act in 1981 have certainly limited the ability of citizens to do that.So this is one small step but it is a very welcome one because it means that a member of the Government who at the moment can operate completely in secret is being brought to account in the same way that the rest of the Government is. I am glad that the National Party and the Act Party have finally seen the light and have seen that actually a little bit more transparency would be a welcome thing. I hope they embrace that spirit much more widely and start actually living up to their responsibilities to operate in a much more transparent manner. They are not above the law they are not above scrutiny and they should start acting a lot more like that so that the New Zealand public can judge them on their record and not judge them based on how much information they are hiding from the public which seems to be the modus operandi of this current Government.