Duties of Statutory Officers (Census and Other Remedial Provisions) Bill

Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON Link to this

Yes. Yes, I understand that. Part 2 changes the Statutes Drafting and Compilation Act 1920 to enable the Chief Parliamentary Counsel to delegate his or her functions, responsibilities, duties, and powers. Both of these matters need to be attended to in a timely fashion.

Part 1 of the bill amends the Statistics Act 1975. Section 23(1) of the Statistics Act 1975 currently requires a census to be undertaken “in the year 1976 and in every fifth year thereafter.” The amendment contained in the bill to omit the year “1976” and substitute “2013” removes the requirement that a census be undertaken this year, and it puts everything back on to a new time frame. The bill needs to be enacted and enforced before the end of the year if the Government Statistician is not to be in breach of the statutory obligation to have undertaken a census in this year of 2011.

The bill also obviates the need for the current proclamation process whereby the Governor-General appoints the day and timing of the census. The amendment enables the Government Statistician to appoint the day and timing of the census by notice in the Gazette as soon as practicable after the legislation comes into force. This streamlined process is for the 2013 census only, and is made in the light of public announcements already issued about the next census. It will allow notification of the actual day to be given in a more timely manner than the proclamation process allows.

Some members may raise questions about the nature and frequency of future censuses—or censi, I guess. Is it censuses? I think it is censuses. I think it is, actually. We will have to get a definition later—censuses or censi? I have asked the same question: in this modern day of information technology and information processing, is a 5-year cycle the right way to stay? It is a question I have asked; we do not know the answer. So I make it clear to members that this bill does nothing to preclude further considerations of how often and how we might undertake a census after 2013. This bill is just for 2013 and to get us back on to a 5-year track. Statistics New Zealand is currently completing its stage 2 business case Tomorrow’s Official Population and Social Statistics, to provide Cabinet with a range of longer-term options, and they will be considered.

Part 2 of this bill amends the Statutes Drafting and Compilation Act 1920. The proposal to modernise the delegation powers of the Chief Parliamentary Counsel is in line with the recommendations of the Law Commission, and it is consistent with the general position of chief executives under the State Sector Act 1988. Members will note that the amendment is achieved by inserting three new sections after section 8A of the Statutes Drafting and Compilation Act 1920: new section 8B, “Delegation of functions, responsibilities, duties, or powers”; new section 8C, “Absence or incapacity of Chief Parliamentary Counsel or vacancy”; and new section 8D, “Revocation of delegations”.

This bill meets two well-established needs. Legislation is needed to change the requirement to hold a census in 2011 to 2013. The Chief Parliamentary Counsel needs an express power of delegation to enable the Parliamentary Counsel Office to be effectively managed during the period of his secondment in the United Kingdom. It is appropriate that this bill be considered under urgency and through all stages. I recommend this bill to the House.

JOHN HAYES Link to this

—or maybe just dumb, probably like the last speaker—because it is just astonishing. We had an earthquake in Christchurch and we have a legal obligation to conduct a census every 5 years, and that last speaker, Raymond Huo, said that Labour would not support the Duties of Statutory Officers (Census and Other Remedial Provisions) Bill. It is absolutely astonishing. That member is an accountant, and he is locked up in the figure of $17.685 million of whatever. That is irrelevant. The core issue is this. It is very simple. We made a decision to postpone the census following the 22 February earthquake in Canterbury. The census collects vital information. We cannot do it at the moment because of the problems in Canterbury. That is why this legislation is before the House. This evening I have been using—and I just show my colleagues—a diagram I have discussed with the Prime Minister based on the 2010 statistics. They show how people from Masterton and provincial New Zealand are moving into our cities and we have a waist in the demographic of missing 20 to 50-year-olds in our workforce in the Wairarapa. This is very important information, and this is why we need to have a census. As I said, because of the legal obligation, we must pass this legislation through the House tonight. Thank you.

I seek leave to table this original piece of work on the floor of the Chamber.

JOHN HAYES Link to this

Me, based on Statistics New Zealand data.

Hon TREVOR MALLARD Link to this

OK, it was cancelled. But the decision to take this process was made in May, I understand. The question I have for the Minister is a relatively simple one, because this bill is not complex. I think it is fair to say that when we get to the Committee stage, there will be some holding of the Minister to account for what might be described as sloppy drafting. But we will work our way through that, and that is one of the reasons, of course, why bills should go to select committees. The Minister is aware that I offered a process whereby the bill went to a select committee for the period of the adjournment and then went through its stages without much debate at all, and quicker than we will do it today and tomorrow. There was an offer to do that, because it meant that we could have had the statistician in, and we could have had parliamentary counsel—

Hon TREVOR MALLARD Link to this

Not at all. I have been around this place for a while, and I have respect for the institution. There has to be a very good reason for a bill not to go to a select committee. The fact that the member was late getting himself organised in this way is not a good enough excuse.

Hon TREVOR MALLARD Link to this

Well, the member is now pleading a lack of influence. The member is now pleading the fact that the Minister of Finance will not listen to him.

Hon TREVOR MALLARD Link to this

I want to be a little bit fair to that Minister. If I was putting together a National Cabinet, I would stick him in it, because he has had experience and he knows practical stuff. If he was in there, he would have been able to sort out the Minister of Finance, and the bill would have been able to proceed. It could have been referred to a select committee for 2 weeks, we could have had 2 or 3 hours of hearings, and people could have been satisfied. The drafting could have been made slightly more fashionable than it is, and we could have heard from the people who are interested in it. That would not have been hard. And, as I said, it would have taken less time than pushing it through this way, under urgency. In fact, we probably could have had one speech from either side in the first reading. It could have been off to the select committee by now if the Minister had decided to take that approach.

I had one specific question, which the Minister has answered privately, that I would like to get on to the record as part of the exercise, and that was to seek an assurance that section 77 of the Electoral Act is not offended by this bill. There is a requirement in there for 5-yearly censuses—and the word is “censuses”; I have looked it up.

Hon TREVOR MALLARD Link to this

Yes. It is Latin, not Greek, and it means an assessment. The first thing it used to be was a traffic count. It was used to count the traffic. That was the first census. Then it was used for taxation in Roman times—[ Interruption]—and, no, like the member, I cannot remember. I had to do some research in the Collins English Dictionary in order to find that out.

There is another question that I think is important, and I am obliged to my colleague Charles Chauvel for highlighting the issue to me. Why, when we have a Statutes Amendment Bill that has been through the select committee—and I think we also have the Legislation Bill somewhere in the process—are we amending—

Hon TREVOR MALLARD Link to this

They are both back from the select committee, waiting for their second readings. Why are we taking a process to put through, under urgency, an amendment to the Statues Drafting and Compilation Act? I want to seek an assurance from the Minister that this is not legislation in order to make arrangements for a particular individual. I think it is very important that the House gets an assurance that this is a general piece of legislation, and that we are not faced with the immediate situation of someone who wants to do another job for a period of time and come back.

If that is the case, that would be an outrageous abuse of Parliament, because in the briefings we were given, there was no such reference. There was no such reference, at all. In the past, chief executives have gone overseas to do other jobs—sometimes they are very important jobs—and have come back. They do not necessarily come back to the same job—they took their chances when they returned to the country. I think it is important to get that assurance, and I think the time taken on the legislation will depend on the Minister being able to give that assurance during the select committee process.

Hon TREVOR MALLARD Link to this

No. Frankly, if that Minister gave his word, then I would take it. Of course, inside this House we are obliged to. Behind the chair, there would be one or two of his colleagues whom I would not be quite as trusting of, including the Minister who has responsibility for parliamentary counsel. But within this House—

Hon TREVOR MALLARD Link to this

Never me, either. I think there is never a danger of my being Attorney-General. I think there is a certain amount of shuddering to my right at the very prospect of that.

I compliment my colleague Raymond Huo, who is leading the Labour debate on this issue, for his work, both on this legislation and generally as the Opposition spokesperson on statistics. I think it is fair to say that it is not normally a position that has a lot of profile, but the member has made a lot of it. He has looked at a lot of the statements that have come out. He has inquired into the positions and workings of Statistics New Zealand, and he has developed an understanding of statistics, the way it works, and the importance of the Government Statistician. I think the last person who had that level of understanding—I do not want to be too rude to Darren Hughes—was Michael Cullen. As well as being the Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance, he was, at least early in his career, the Minister of Statistics. He thought it was an important role, and he wanted to guard the independence of it.

Hon TREVOR MALLARD Link to this

Oh, was Clayton the Minister as well? I will plead guilty to my friend and colleague Chris Hipkins for that one passing me by. It did not quite—

Hon TREVOR MALLARD Link to this

Oh dear! I do not care about that member; he will not be voting for the next Cabinet in November, so I do not really care! But I say to Clayton that I am very sorry. The point I want to make is that Dr Cullen regarded the independence of the Government Statistician as vitally important. Frankly, on occasions we used to get quite grumpy with him. There were some arrangements that we thought could have been much better from a taxpayer’s point of view. We thought we could have got better-quality information, but over a period of time we had some statisticians who just would not be told.

CHARLES CHAUVEL Link to this

The Minister says, as he said in his speech, that this change is only for 1 year. We have all seen in this House how precedents can be made through drafting like this. The proclamation process is done away with because there is said to be an emergency on one occasion. Then guess what? When the Minister has his way and defers the census from every 5 years to every 10 years, as he is on record saying he wants to do, when we get such legislation in the future, lo and behold, will it be a surprise to anybody if the proclamation process, which is a careful check and balance that has been thought out over years, suddenly disappears? Well, again, we will never know, because there is not the opportunity to hear from, for example, the Legislation Advisory Committee on that sort of question. We would have that opportunity, no doubt, if the Minister had acceded to Mr Mallard’s very modest request that there be a 2-week submission period so that the public and experts could tell us a little bit about the true ramifications of this proposal.

The second part of the legislation is of equal concern. Happily, we will not be able to have grandstanding from members about Labour not caring about Canterbury, on this question at least, as we have had from them so far on the first question. It is true that the Statutes Drafting and Compilation Act 1920 is unusual. It does not contain any of the provisions we would expect to see in modern legislation relating to the administration of a Government department. We know this because the Regulations Review Committee considered the Legislation Bill pretty extensively. I see the hard-working deputy chair, Tim Macindoe, on the other side of the House; I hope he will take many calls in this debate, because I know he will have a great contribution to make on the question. We had the Attorney-General in, we had past Chief Parliamentary Counsel in, and we had the current Chief Parliamentary Counsel address us on the problems that that office currently faces because of the antiquated provisions in the Act. We have reported back to the House a revised Legislation Bill that would fix many of those problems.

So why has one part of that Legislation Bill been plucked out and put into urgency, and why are we being asked to pass it tonight? I want to know whether the Minister actually knows the answer to that question. Are we doing something here, as Mr Mallard asked him, that is to the peculiar benefit of an individual? What is the urgency for this piece of the Legislation Bill being taken out of its context and passed through all its stages in Parliament? Is the Chief Parliamentary Counsel, for example, still in the country, or is there already a delegated arrangement de facto in place, which we are effectively being asked to validate without a true and accurate picture of the position—which, again, we would have if this legislation were sent to a brief select committee process?

What ought to be a relatively straightforward process, by virtue of the Minister’s refusal to agree to a truncated select committee process becomes more complicated and, unfortunately, more controversial. Unless we can get some answers during the Committee stage to the sorts of issues I have raised, then the Opposition will remain disquieted by this legislation.

Hon PETE HODGSON Link to this

It may be that I was captured by the Government Statistician of the day. It is absolutely true that when one is a Minister of Statistics, other Ministers want the Minister of Statistics to beat up a little on the Government Statistician, and when one is a member of the executive other than as the Minister of Statistics, one joins the other 19 in trying to beat up on the Minister of Statistics in order to try to usurp the independence of the Government Statistician.

This, however, does not work, and it is important that it does not work. It may be that there are some processes relating to release, timing, and the use of adjectives when improvement or reasonableness could prevail a little more from time to time—I am sure that people would argue that. But the underlying fact is that a Government that has an independent set of statistics is a believable Government. Conversely, a Government that has a constrained or politicised set of statistics is not believable. We can all list nations on both sides of that.

Hon PETE HODGSON Link to this

There is an intervention of some sort from a humanoid opposite. A vaguely humanoid personage wishes to make an intervention. Let us hear from him.

Hon PETE HODGSON Link to this

It is politicised by screwing around with the numbers—screwing around with the numbers—I say to the member opposite. That is what “politicised” means.

When China says that its CPI is this, that its population census has changed by that, or that its GDP has altered by the other, some people are unkind enough to say that that may be wrong, because the statistics, in the view of some commentators, are not sufficiently independent in the People’s Republic of China. They do not say that about New Zealand, however. The statistics in New Zealand, even if they are subject to ongoing correction—and they are—are regarded as being free of political influence. Why does this matter in this debate? Because it is important—I think; we think—to have legislation like this referred to a select committee in order that the Government Statistician and people who work for that department can be taken into the select committee, and their advice on the legislation can be received.

We assume that this is what the Government Statistician wants. We assume that the Minister of Statistics is merely allowing a sensible decision to be given legal effect. That is what we assume. But the independence of statistics is sufficiently important that we ought to test it openly, and a select committee process is how that happens. This select committee process is being denied the Government Statistician, is being denied the New Zealand public, and is being denied this House. Do members think the Opposition should roll over and let that happen? I do not think so.

There will be opposition to this legislation only on the basis of process. It seems sensible to delay a census by 2 years, or perhaps 1 year or 3 years; I am not sure. It seems sensible to do that because of the earthquake. If it is sensible, it is certainly the case that we need to do it by statutory amendment. It cannot be done otherwise. We accept that. We can read black-letter law like anyone else. But it is not OK—

Hon PETE HODGSON Link to this

It is not OK, I say to the “Orange Roughy”, for an earthquake that is 6 months old next week to be the cause of something that only now comes to the House. It is not OK. It is 5 months since we were told that we would have to delay the census—5 months. What has the Minister of Statistics been doing? Is this a big piece of legislation? It is not. Is it difficult legislation? It is not. Does it involve some expense? Yes, a little. Did he have trouble getting money from the Minister of Finance? Apparently—

Hon PETE HODGSON Link to this

It is $94 million. OK, now we are going to quibble. So because it is so costly—here is the logic now. The logic, as offered by way of interjection, goes like this: there is a delay, the delay is caused by the cost, and the delay is absolutely unavoidable because of the cost. On the other hand, delaying the census itself is unavoidable because we cannot make any sense out of a census when we have a bombed-out second city of the nation. Therefore, the one conclusion we can draw is that the Minister of Statistics failed to properly make that argument to the Minister of Finance, and took 5 months to fail—5 months to achieve no progress on this. All he needed to do was say: “Bill, what about the idea that you’ve got no choice? What about that, Bill? Has there been a rattle down in Christchurch? Verily, there has. Do we need to delay the census? Verily, we do. Will it cost money? It does; it does. Therefore, cough. There ain’t no option.” That is the end of the debate.

The Minister of Finance may have asked for the cost to be brought down a bit. I would have if I were the Minister of Finance. But, you see, can I just say to the Minister of Statistics that he does not need 5 months to bring his costs down; he needs 5 weeks or 5 days. It is not a major exercise. There has been diddly-squat going on here. The Minister of Statistics has been sitting on his hands. The Government Statistician has perhaps been sitting on his hands. Everything has happened too late. It has been brought to the House in a bit of a hurry. Everyone is in a bit of a blind panic about it. We have been asked to roll over, and our answer is no, thank you.

If the Government wants to govern badly, it should wear it. If the Government wants to govern slackly, it is the Government’s problem. If the Government wants to govern without the disinfectant of daylight, then it is on the Government’s head, but the Government should not invite the Opposition to roll over and say that it does not matter, because it does. It does matter if the Government wants to play fast and loose with the processes of the House. It does matter if the Government wants to cut public viewpoint out of this legislation. It does matter if there will be no hearings in front of the media. It does matter that we are debating this bill at this hour of the night, under urgency. It matters. It is not OK. We are not putting up with it.

Is there any part of that that the Government does not understand? Let us see. I will pause. There is silence from members on the Government benches. They have now understood that the Opposition’s job is to make sure that process is followed properly. That is what we are paid to do. One of the many jobs of Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition is to ensure that good process is followed and that urgency is used when urgency must be used—not when it is convenient to use it; not when it is a cover-up for slackness in earlier months; not when it is due to dilatory behaviour by officials, by the Minister, by the Cabinet committee in question, or by whomever; and not when there has been a bit of debate over $94 million. Not for any of those reasons; we do not roll over for any of those reasons. If there is a good reason for urgency, we will be very happy to support it, but this legislation is not such a reason.