Chadwick Steve: Appointments — Controller and Auditor-General 
Chadwick Steve: Appointments — Controller and Auditor-General 
[Volume:656;Page:5764] 
Hon STEVE CHADWICK (Labour) 
: 
 I am pleased to take a call today as a member of the Officers of Parliament Committee which is one of those committees of Parliament that a lot of people around New Zealand do not know a lot about. It considers matters as significant as the appointment of the Controller and Auditor-General which has been a very interesting process for us to be part of in a bipartisan way. As a committee we extend our sincere congratulations to Lyn Provost on her appointment particularly as she has had a wonderful career as has been mentioned as a deputy police commissioner working in Archives New Zealand and just recently as the Assistant Controller in the Office of the Controller and Auditor-General. 
Lyn Provost is very deserving of this role and she joins a wonderful group of women in New Zealand ranked in top positions in this country. We can think of people like Dame Silvia Cartwright our first woman Governor-General; Dame Sian Elias our first woman Chief Justice; former Prime Ministers Jenny Shipley and Helen Clark; and Margaret Wilson our first woman Speaker of the House. We have some women functioning at a very high level in the Public Service and it is aspirational for women across New Zealand to see that we now have a Controller and Auditor-General who is a woman. We in Labour are really proud of that and we see that this gives a wonderful message to all women in New Zealand that if they aim high train well and are well educated they too can make such a position. I am sure Lyn Provost never imagined that one day she would reach such a position in this country. 
We wish Lyn well in her role which is a very important role. It is a role that requires the trust of all parties in the House and a great deal of confidence that she is carrying out the role of Controller and Auditor-General fairly equitably and with a professional hand in terms of managing the work programme for the Office of the Controller and Auditor-General which we are involved with on a day-to-day basis at various select committees. 
I have just a sad note though: here is Lyn Provost who has achieved this wonderful appointment that we will be confirming next week in the House at the same time as the Government has received a report from the Human Rights Commission that confirms that chief executives of Government departments must work to overcome pay equity issues in their organisations. I congratulate our spokesperson on women’s affairs Sue Moroney who for the Opposition benches is fighting the good fight with a Government that says “Women can make it. We don’t believe in pay equity. We don’t believe in pay equity investigations for school support workers social workers and Child Youth and Family workers.” I think that is really very sad when 120000 women in New Zealand are at the moment undertaking pay equity reviews to see whether we can close that gender pay gap. It may be an item that we put on the Department of Labour work programme for the Office of the Controller and Auditor-General for that office to look at the outcome of scrapping those pay reviews. I am sure that with Lyn Provost now in such an important role through her framework and lenses she will be looking at the work programme of the Office of the Controller and Auditor-General in a different way. 
We congratulate Lyn Provost. I thoroughly enjoyed working on this committee and it was great to see the confidence that all members of the committee had in the process which was very fairly followed with due diligence. I am very confident that Lyn will undertake this role to the very best of her ability; that can be nothing but good for the people of New Zealand.