Sage Eugenie: Offices of Parliament — Address to Governor-GeneralYear 2015/16Text is subject to correctionSage Eugenie: Offices of Parliament — Address to Governor-GeneralYear 2015/16[Sitting date: 30 April 2015. Volume:704;Page:3081. Text is subject to correction.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Deputy Speaker. I am pleased to take a call for the Green Party on the alterations to the 2014-15 appropriations for the three Offices of Parliament and the budgets for 2015-16. Similarly to the previous speaker Chris Hipkins I would like to comment on the Office of the Ombudsmen and in particular the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. I pay tribute to the extraordinary work of the Chief Ombudsman Dame Beverley Wakem and the work that she has done in defending our democracy and in defending open government in very trying circumstances given the ongoing under-resourcing of the Office of the Ombudsmen. It is that office which is a defence against the excessive use of executive power and as the Chief Ombudsman herself has said it is the last line of defence against costly maladministration in the State sector and potentially corrupt practices. It has been recognised by the courts as having constitutional importance and it is important because it is a check on the power of the executive.Mr Hipkins has explained some of the frustrations that Opposition members experience in trying to get information out of the Government. I have always found that when the Office of the Ombudsmen is asked to review a complaint we get regular reporting on the progress of the investigation. Office staff try their utmost to get the information out in a timely manner. It is Government agencies and Ministers in particular that stall and undermine our democracy and open government. The Office of the Ombudsmen asked for significantly more funding and it is very disappointing that the Officers of Parliament Committee and the Government did not agree to make that available because in March the office had 107 complaints for investigation that it could not yet allocate and it advised that it was not keeping up with complaints despite a very considerable effort to reduce the backlog and to keep current complaints moving.Certainly there have been improvements there but when you have a Government that goes ahead with policies that ignore public opinion you create waves of applications for official information. We are seeing that in decisions like the Minister of Education’s decisions to close Christchurch schools. The most recent one is Redcliffs School where the school community wants to go back to their site where they are ready to go back where it can be saved and yet the Minister is ignoring that. So we then get a raft of Official Information Act requests. David Fisher in a very seminal article in the New Zealand Herald highlighted the change over the last two decades or so the blocks that Ministers now put on the release of information and the difficulty in getting public servants just to answer simple questions on the end of the phone—the fact that requests are pushed out to the maximum 20-working-day period before any information is provided and it is often months after that. There should have been more funding provided. The importance of the Office of the Ombudsmen and the need for it to have good resources to actually provide one of the foundations of our democracy and open government should be recognised.I would also like to comment on the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment—the public’s and Parliament’s independent environmental watchdog. It does an amazing amount of work in terms of the substantial investigations that it undertakes and the reports that it provides to Parliament—the update reports one of which was tabled today. They are very high-quality investigations. They provide good quality independent advice on a range of matters that affect the quality of the environment. The major problem there is that the Government is not listening to a lot of the recommendations because of course the office does not have the power to command the implementation of its recommendations; it leaves that up to Ministers and agencies to take those on board.Today we tabled in the House an update to a substantial report on the future of conservation in particular of stewardship land. That has been a much-neglected problem in the Department of Conservation since it was established which successive Governments have failed to respond to adequately. Of course stewardship land makes up a third of the Department of Conservation estate. It has got the weakest form of legal protection and the Parliamentary Commissioner recommended that it be reviewed. Certainly the Minister has set in train a review but there has been very little progress in actually changing the status of stewardship land—only one area a small area of 12000 hectares on Great Barrier. So we have stupid situations arising like the dinosaur proposal for a Haast-Hollyford road in South Westland. That area is part of the South West New Zealand World Heritage Area. It has been recognised internationally as having outstanding biological ecological geological and evolutionary value and yet it is only stewardship land. The Haast-Hollyford road proposal threatens to become a formal proposal because the status of the land has not been reviewed. Part of it deserves to be national park and yet the Government has not taken any significant action to have the New Zealand Conservation Authority undertake a national park investigation there.Another one of the significant investigations that the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment is doing is around sea-level rise. There will be a report later this year—and this appropriation will help fund the work for that—looking at the potential extent of sea-level rise. It is ridiculous that an office like that of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment with a staff of only 20 and a budget of only $3.2 million—the smallest of the Offices of Parliament—is having to do the first nationwide mapping of the potential extent of sea-level rise. We have got a Ministry for the Environment that has failed since 2008 to update its advice to local authorities on sea-level rise. So the small office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment is having to do the work that the ministry should be doing.One of the other major investigations that the office has done is into land use and water quality to try to get MPs the Parliament and the public to understand better the science of land use and water quality and the impacts of nutrient losses. What is the Government doing? That report showed that no matter how good the management practice was in terms of land use we would have significantly declining water quality because of the scale of intensification. The Government has certainly responded with a national policy statement but that is too weak to make a difference. When Federated Farmers in the Waikato called for a moratorium on intensification that was just poo-pooed by the Minister.If we have Offices of Parliament that take all of this time to do these substantive investigations and that come out with cogent recommendations then the Government needs to listen. It is the same with long-finned eel. The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment’s investigation there highlighted that long-fins were on a slow pathway to extinction. There is now only 20 percent of the breeding population of long-fins that there was in the 1930s. International best practice is that as a breeding population there should be at least 30 percent of the original biomass. Yet has the Minister implemented the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment’s recommendation to impose a moratorium on commercial fishing? No. The recommendations in the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment’s reports need to be listened to and read with a lot more thoroughness than they have been to date.Finally just on the Office of the Auditor-General we thank it for its work—for its commentaries and analysis of the estimates and of the annual reviews that the select committees do which provides very much-appreciated assistance. Its reviews of public sector agencies like local councils its identification of potential challenges—like the big infrastructure gap that it has identified in local authorities with the difference between what local authorities’ budgets are providing for the renewal of Three Waters infrastructure and roading infrastructure and the gap that potentially exists there—assist in providing the baseline information for some of these major funding challenges to be addressed.We are grateful that the select committee has decided to increase the funding for the Office of the Auditor-General and for the small increase for the Office of the Ombudsmen but if we are going to have a strong democracy our Office of the Ombudsmen needs to have many more resources so that it can follow up on those Official Information Act investigations. Thank you.