Sage Eugenie: Official Information (Parliamentary Under-Secretaries) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Official Information (Parliamentary Under-Secretaries) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 14 October 2015. Volume:709;Page:7256. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green): E te Māngai o te Whare tēnā koe. Tuarua ki ngā mema o tō tātou Whare tēnā koutou katoa.[Thank you Mr Deputy Speaker. Secondly I acknowledge you all the members of our House.]We are proud to support this bill and congratulate the sponsoring member Adrian Rurawhe on the Official Information (Parliamentary Under-Secretaries) Amendment Bill. It is astonishing the criticisms that Mr Seymour has made. His complaint is that the bill is all about proportionality—that there would be no extra benefit and the harm would be that the parliamentary under-secretary’s office might have to provide some additional funding in order to answer Official Information Act requests. I think that reflects the attitude of this Government to our democracy. It is not about open government and transparency under National; it is much more about secrecy. This bill is a good bill because it goes to close a small loophole—the fact that parliamentary under-secretaries are not subject to the Official Information Act.It is really ironic that we are debating this bill today after the afternoon’s debate on Phil Goff’s member’s bill which would have ensured that all students including those in charter schools have access to a broad balanced curriculum because although National speakers have said that parliamentary under-secretaries do not make decisions they sure have a lot of influence on policy. It has been this particular parliamentary under-secretary Mr Seymour in his role in education and regulatory reform who has developed a lot of the policy on charter schools. They are such an ideological nonsense in terms of their failings and the large amount of public money they have attracted at the expense of public schools and the Opposition has not been able to call the parliamentary under-secretary to account on this policy development because he has not been open to the Official Information Act. So this bill is a good one because it closes that small loophole.It is very disappointing that the Government is voting against it because it shows just how cynical members opposite are in relation to the Official Information Act to democracy and to open government. Where you have openness in government you build trust among citizens. Where you have secrecy as this Government promotes in its endless denials of requests for official information in its delays and in its redactions then you promote distrust. This bill is about promoting openness and transparency and that is why the Green Party is voting for it.We only have to look at the record of this Government. Under the law the requests are supposed to be answered within 20 working days yet the Prime Minister himself has admitted to the Government’s use of delaying tactics pushing it out to the 20-day maximum because as the Prime Minister said the “Government might take the view that’s in our best interests to do that.” So this Government regularly uses the Act to drag the chain on releasing information because it is in its political interests to do so.If we are to build public participation and if we are to build trust in our political system we need to be promoting openness and transparency. We need to be reforming the Official Information Act to make it incumbent on Ministers and departments to release information much more proactively on to the web. We need to make sure that parliamentary under-secretaries who may not be part of the Executive Council—but these parliamentary under-secretaries are generating policies that this Government implements so they should be part of the schema of the Act. The Office of the Ombudsmen is reviewing the way in which the Act is applied. The report from that review is due at the end of the year and I think it will show some of the very poor practice we have seen under National—some of the ways in which information requests to departments are routed through to Ministers’ offices so that the Ministers can delay the release or can take out anything that might be embarrassing for the Government.This bill is a very tiny step toward redressing that imbalance that we have at the moment and toward making a step towards openness and transparency. It is cynical of the Government to oppose it and to take a position that is based on secrecy encouraging more suspicion of policy development and decision making by the Government rather than more trust by the public—the people whom we represent.