Street Maryan: Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 2) — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeStreet Maryan: Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading[Sitting date: 05 June 2013. Volume:690;Page:10796. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour): It gives me pleasure to rise to speak to this Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 2). As the Minister of Local Government has traversed and the chairperson of the Local Government and Environment Committee who has just resumed her seat has traversed this is indeed a minor technical amendment but it is important. It is not a minor technical amendment of the sort that the State sector was in 1986. I am pleased that the chairperson of the Local Government and Environment Committee is in the House because there are a couple of things that I need to raise that are of relevance to that committee. I am very pleased that the Minister is here also.One of the things that has concerned me about this bill is not its function as it is stated because that is perfectly supportable—in fact not only is it supportable; it is the right thing to do. It is taking transitional arrangements transitional regulations and putting them into primary legislation which is where transitional regulations ought to be. They ought to be in primary legislation so that they can be brought before this House they can be referred to a select committee and they can then be debated and passed. But the concern I have—and I would like the Minister to address this at some point if he is able to—is that the explanatory note of the bill says that currently local boards are able to delegate their responsibilities to an individual a committee of the local board or an officer of the council. That is fine. That was under the transitional Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Delegations Development Contributions and Trade Wastes Regulations 2010. The point is that in front of the Local Government and Environment Committee at the moment is the Resource Management Reform Bill which has been vexed by the question of transitional regulations. The select committee has applied itself quite properly to the transitional regulations and I think the chairperson has seen that through in a very fair and admirable way. But I wonder whether there is something not matching here because in the Resource Management Reform Bill we have been considering the Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Act 2010.I want to know whether that is just a shorthand version of the long name that I read previously which is in the explanatory note of the bill we are reading tonight. If so why do we not do the whole thing? Why do we not put the correction of the regulations that were in the original Resource Management Reform Bill which gave the Minister extraordinary powers to make regulations that could have contradicted the primary legislation into the Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 2)? It seems to me that these two pieces of paper are trying to address the same piece oflegislation. So does that mean then that if we proceed to pass this bill and the—without breaching privilege—Local Government and Environment Committee’s report on the Resource Management Reform Bill gets presented to the House and we table it next Tuesday it will go forward to the deliberation in the select committee of the bill that is under consideration tonight? It would seem to me that that is the only way to tidy up something that at the present moment looks like the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.I am very concerned about that because we spend some time on regulations. It is not just because I am the chair of the Regulations Review Committee. It seems to me that there was a step missed here. Something does not quite fit together. It is simply because I sit on the Local Government and Environment Committee which I presume this bill will come to in due course. I missed the Minister’s opening comments in his speech but I presume that that is the committee this bill will be referred to. So in that respect then it would be good if we could have the Minister’s permission in advance to use the changes that we are going to make in the Resource Management Reform Bill to dovetail with the changes that he is seeking in this piece of legislation. Otherwise we are going to send the Auckland Council searching far and wide for the extent of its own powers and the limits of the Minister’s powers because what we have seen to date in ministerial behaviour towards the Auckland Council has been an overbearing overweening bullying—as my colleague Su’a William Sio said a moment ago—approach to the Auckland Council. Well if this is a divide and rule sort of approach where it is part of giving the Auckland Council busywork to find out which piece of legislation it is meant to be looking at then it has worked. Well it would have worked if I had not spotted it.What I need to know from the Minister is whether this was deliberate or whether it was simply an accident. If it was an accident it can be fixed at the Local Government and Environment Committee; if it was deliberate I would like him to own up and say: “We’d prefer to keep Auckland Council running around in tiny circles as much as possible because we’d really like to exercise as much power over it as we possibly can.” Whether it is resource management consents or whether it is the delegation of responsibilities duties and powers conferred to local boards this should all come under in my view the Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 2).I think that putting the transitional provisions into the primary legislation is the right thing to do. They were there as transitional until 31 October of this year. I have no problem with the delegated authority that exists because even if the authority to do certain things is delegated it is still the responsibility of the Auckland Council in law and still the responsibility of the local board in law. That means that what we should have is primary legislation that gets all the scrutiny of the House and all the scrutiny of a select committee. Transitional regulations are problematic. It is a favourite device of this Government and the fewer of them we have the better. Thank you.