Robertson Grant: State Sector Management Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Robertson Grant: State Sector Management Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Sitting date: 09 December 2010. Volume:669;Page:16294. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central) 
: 
 Thank you very much Mr Chair. 
Hon John Boscawen 
: I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. I am sorry to interrupt; I was waiting for the end of the voting. I seek leave to amend a vote from last night on the Smoke-free Environments (Controls and Enforcement) Amendment Bill vote. We cast two votes in favour— 
The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch) 
: The member will have to do that in the House and not in the Committee because that was a decision of the House and not of the Committee. You will have to do that in the House. I have called Grant Robertson. 
GRANT ROBERTSON 
: I am quite interested to know how the vote is going to change actually because it was an interesting vote by the ACT Party. 
We now move on to Part 3 of this State Sector Management Bill which deals with Archives New Zealand’s merger into the Department of Internal Affairs. This is a very significant change. I am not belittling the change in relation to the National Library; as speakers on this side of the Chamber have argued we regard the reduction in the independence and the amount of information and knowledge we will have about the National Library to be a significant matter. But the role of Archives New Zealand constitutionally in New Zealand is a very important matter. I will take a little bit of time in this first call— 
Chris Hipkins 
: The first of many! 
GRANT ROBERTSON 
: —the first of many that is correct—to talk about the overall significance of Archives New Zealand. 
Archives in any country provide the ultimate accountability for Government because we know that records will be retained and records will be maintained and protected. Not only that but under our system Archives New Zealand has the role of ensuring that departments deposit documents and do not destroy them. In fact that is the key reason the Chief Archivist needs independence because the Chief Archivist is the person who can go to another Government department and demand its records be deposited. He or she has that ability; he or she has that statutory role. The question can very quickly be raised once one makes the Chief Archivist a third-tier manager at the Department of Internal Affairs as to what happens when he or she has to go to the Chief Executive of the Department of Internal Affairs—his or her boss—to say: “You have to deposit that document. That document must be deposited.”? Immediately we run into the problem of this part of the bill because the role of Archives New Zealand is core in ensuring that our democracy is open and transparent. 
In the Education and Science Committee the Human Rights Commission came to us and its officials wrote a submission for us in which they talked about the important constitutional role of preserving Crown records. That is not done just for historians; as they said it is done actually for the accountability of our Government over the full term of those Governments. If people want practical examples of why that is important or significant I give the examples of every single Treaty claim and every time we dig in a street in Aro Valley in Wellington and need to know where the power cables might be. Actually that example was an interesting case when some privatisation took place; it was interesting to learn just how much information there was. If we have that information we have it because we have good records and we have good archives. 
We have had a bit of discussion during this debate about what happened in the 1990s when Archives New Zealand was part of the Department of Internal Affairs. I will read out to members a letter sent to somebody on 13 June 2001 by the Hon Matt Robson. He was writing to somebody who was looking for some information with regard to a ministerial inquiry. I will read the second paragraph in which Mr Robson states: “I have caused inquiries to be made of the tribunal’s division of the Department for Courts. Unfortunately I have discovered that apart from the committee’s report all documents relating to the inquiry including the submissions were destroyed in 1999. It appears that the destruction of these documents was inadvertent.” That is the kind of thing people are concerned about. That is the kind of thing that drove former Chief Archivists to come to us at the select committee and say: “This is not some theoretical exercise. This happened in the 1990s in New Zealand and it was an unmitigated disaster.” 
As my colleague Jacinda Ardern said before one submitter noted that important historical records were lost to “vermin and indifference”. There is the apocryphal story about what happened to the copy of the Treaty of Waitangi when that was involved in Archives New Zealand becoming part of the Department of Internal Affairs’ “important historical records”. These things are simply not right in a good-quality democracy. In 1997 Sir Geoffrey Palmer said: “it is a core responsibility of the State to maintain a proper and impartial record of the decisions and activities of the New Zealand Government. Not only are such records essential nourishment to the intellectual life of New Zealand they are an important instrument in the accountability of governments.” He went on to say that “the existence of a public record on every government exerts a salutary and beneficial effect on Ministers and that effect could be undermined if the strength and integrity of the archive system in New Zealand is diminished”. My colleague Trevor Mallard from his experience certainly knows about that. The Minister in the chair Nathan Guy—with his twink bottle—might deserve to bear that in mind as well. 
The Human Rights Commission commented on this bill: “By integrating Archives New Zealand into the DIA and subjugating the agency to officials superior to a downgraded CA the Bill risks undermining the independence of the CA and severely impinges on New Zealand’s constitutional and democratic protections.” That is it. That is what we are debating today: the undermining of our constitutional and democratic protections through this merger. It has been so glibly done I might add. We have heard so little from the Government about what really justifies these changes. 
Labour again has a number of amendments that we have put up on Part 3 to try to mitigate some of the worst aspects of this bill. We make it absolutely clear that when Labour is returned to Government we will be seeking to give Archives New Zealand and the Chief Archivist the independence that they need for reasons of democratic and constitutional infrastructure as we have said before. It may be that consideration could be given to a model beyond a department such as a Crown entity model or an Officer of Parliament model. We are open to those suggestions but we underline our view that the critical role of an independent Chief Archivist must be protected. 
Quite simply this bill does not do that. The Chief Archivist will become an employee of the Chief Executive of the Department of Internal Affairs. The Chief Archivist will have no right of access to the Minister and no independent reporting right to the Parliament. This bill diminishes the rights independence and influence of the Chief Archivist. The Crown Law opinion which Mr Guy had to have torn from his hands emphasises that point in many ways. It has looked at the legal aspects of the merger and did that completely without the context of the Department of Internal’s Affairs structure which is actually the practical way that the merger will work. 
No doubt if Mr Guy chooses to take a call he will tell us that the provisions in Part 3 do enough to ensure the independence of the Chief Archivist. However as David Shearer said earlier every submitter who came to the Education and Science Committee told us that they did not believe that that was possible. The two former Chief Archivists who came before the committee gave incredibly persuasive submissions about their experiences under a regime where they were part of the Department of Internal Affairs. They said their influence was limited their time was taken up with other matters and their ability to have archives given some kind of importance was severely diminished alongside the other priorities of the Department of Internal Affairs. Some people do not think these issues are important but having archives having good-quality material and systems that hold Governments accountable is what holds our democracy together. Part 3 undermines that because the reasoning behind this merger has nothing to do with good-quality archives; it has to do with the Minister’s belief—influenced by officials no doubt—that digitalisation is all that matters. He believes that that project is all that matters and that there will be fewer departments. 
When the merger was announced on 18 March I began a process to request information under the Official Information Act to see the justification for it. It is quite ironic that I had to go to the Ombudsman on appeal—twice—to get the information. Until today I had not seen the Crown Law opinion that was referred to earlier because the Minister of State Services—more than the Minister responsible for Archives New Zealand who is also the Minister responsible for National Library and did provide some information—made sure that that information was withheld. The information was withheld because officials in the National Library Archives New Zealand and elsewhere knew that this merger was not the right thing to do. They knew that this was wrong because in the 1990s they seen the experience. They had been there and done that. Two former Chief Archivists also told the select committee that in the 1990s some Chief Executives of the Department of Internal Affairs were very helpful and had tried their best; others had had not. There were others—and one in particular—who had a different agenda which was actually about whether the Archives could in fact be run privately. I am sure that that agenda could come back one day. When Chief Archivists and Archives New Zealand staff get in a situation where the Chief Executive of the Department of Internal Affairs has a completely different agenda then that is a very unfortunate thing. Part 3 is a very very bad part of the bill.