Newstalk ZB on demand transcript starts at 7:00.
Mike:
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is with us this Tuesday morning – a very good morning to you.
Jacinda:
Good morning.
Mike:
Have you got Father’s Day under control?
Jacinda:
No. (Laughs)
Mike:
What are you going to do about it?
Jacinda:
Well, Clarke’s away, so that lets me off the hook a little bit. I don’t think he even realised but he’s missing out this year so he’ll get a text message.
Mike:
Did you see his tweet about all your um… legislation you’ve passed or haven’t passed?
Jacinda:
I don’t actually spend time on twitter um…
Mike:
Good, nor should you.
Jacinda:
…as a general rule of thumb… very rarely do I go on there so…
Mike:
You’ve got a country to run, ah… well he’s been on there claiming you passed more legislation than any other government ever, and everyone’s saying it simply isn’t true.
Jacinda:
I heard about this after the fact. Um… so regardless of the fact that I was I… I… I played no part in his ah… tweet as an independent citizen. Ah… it actually is true… I’m happy to explain the difference though…
Mike:
Please don’t – I am so bored by it. I just couldn’t believe that you guys spend so much time wasting your time arguing over crap. It’s about the splitting of legislation, isn’t it?
Jacinda:
It is. You are exactly right.
Mike:
And… and you may be right if you do count it or don’t count it but you passed a lot of legislation. Do you regard the passing of legislation as being good government?
Jacinda:
Well, the National Party was claiming it was a proxy for saying that we weren’t busy. I disagree with that – I haven’t particularly engaged in the debate. In fact, you will see that it’s not something I’ve raised, commented on or got stuck into.
Mike:
No, fair enough.
Jacinda:
I don’t think it’s a… to claim that we hadn’t was wrong, but I actually don’t think it’s a good measure, so there you go.
Mike:
Okay. Government, I asked you about this last week and you defended them. Do you still defend all your government departments given we can now add to the Corrections stats, NZTA/CAA culture?
Jacinda:
Um, I do defend them. I think, you know by and large our government departments do hard work and good work. Um, CAA you will see obviously there that… ah… there’ve been issued raised around allegations of… of bullying and the… Minister Twyford… I don’t know whether or not you’ve managed to get on since we last spoke here…
Mike:
He doesn’t talk to me Jacinda, despite your recommendations he still refuses to come on.
Jacinda:
I will still give him…. I… I actually passed onto him that I’d encouraged him to go on the show…
Mike:
Well, you’ve got no cut through with him clearly, have you?
Jacinda:
If you’d want him to talk about CAA, perhaps I’ll give him a little nudge because…
Mike:
Nah, but then what would happen I’d get him in on the CAA and I’d sucker puncher him with a CRL question, and he’d hate me even more.
Jacinda:
Well… you’re … and you’re free to do both.
Mike:
Oh, good. Right.
Jacinda:
But CAA he has actually asked the chair… well, free to ask questions – not sucker punch people, Mike. But he has asked the CAA to… to… um CAA chair to step down. He does think that new leadership is required.
Mike:
How do you explain ministry of culture then, I mean, in this era in which you would have thought that security online was paramount, they didn’t seem to take it seriously?
Jacinda:
Yeah, well actually, keeping… keeping in mind here, and this is… this is not an excuse because this actually points again, actually highlights something that any business person will be sitting and listening to and having the same concerns. So, the Ministry of Arts, Culture and Heritage themselves, as you would expect – small department – doesn’t have IT capabilities to that extent within it.
So, when they were working on the Tui Commemorations they contracted someone to provide that service. Ah… and then in that ah… provision of that service is where we have seen that failing has occurred. They are going back now and looking, of course, at whether we correctly drafted the contract, what expectations were set around privacy. Of course, common sense should prevail here, an expectation that people when they are uploading data for applications, they should have been kept private and safe. Um… but that is something they are looking at – exactly how that has happened in that process. But again, how many companies out there are thinking well we contract to provide these services all the time?
Mike:
It’s not who you contract, it’s whether they do a good job or not. We all contract people, but do they do a good job or not?
Jacinda:
Indeed, and actually one of the… what we are now saying as a government – as of yesterday we put in an immediate interim step that people only use um… certified um… providers from a list of providers that we can have some certainty are putting the right protections in place. Um… that’s what we are doing for now and you know, again, there will be IT companies out there saying “Oh but the way you construct your list is a bit bureaucratic so we need to make sure that we fix that issue too. But ultimately, I’d say as a nation, um Mike, we move… have moved… we’re a digital age and I’m concerned that actually data security, as a nation, we need to prioritise.
Mike:
As regards what the Nats said yesterday, are you thinking of dropping the company tax rate or no?
Jacinda:
No, no we haven’t. You know, I will… I will say though that the progressive… so Australia has this differentiated um… company tax rate so if you are a small business you pay a bit less. We actually did ask the Tax Working Group to look at ideas like that. They came back and… and rejected it um… you know, they’ve endorsed the simplicity of our system um… as one reason and also you know, their view I think it encouraged gaming of the system but it was something we asked them to look at because I was interested in the way they treated small businesses in Australia.