King Annette: Mount Maunganui Borough Reclamation and Empowering Act Repeal Bill — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
King Annette: Mount Maunganui Borough Reclamation and Empowering Act Repeal Bill — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 07 November 2012. Volume:685;Page:6378. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon ANNETTE KING (Labour—Rongotai) 
: 
 Labour has supported and will continue to support the Mount Maunganui Borough Reclamation and Empowering Act Repeal Bill in the name of Te Ururoa Flavell. We too once again want to congratulate him on bringing this bill to the House and on supporting the people in his area in advocating for them for the repeal of an out-of-date and unnecessary Act. I know that he has put a lot of work into it and has a lot of support from his area to bring the bill to the House and to see its passage. It is not very often unless you are a Minister in a Government that you do get to see a bill in your name that then goes onto the statute book and you are there hopefully for many years to come. 
This bill is about repealing the Mount Maunganui Borough Reclamation and Empowering Act of 1975. It was an Act that gave the Bay of Plenty Harbour Board the authority to transfer part of the seabed of Tauranga Harbour to the Mount Maunganui Borough Council and authorise the council to undertake reclamation of that part of the harbour for sewerage and other municipal purposes. We are told that the council reclaimed less than half of the area and the authority to undertake the reclamation of the balance was repealed by the enactment of the Foreshore and Seabed Endowment Revesting Act. 
So what it actually means now is that the Mount Maunganui Borough Reclamation and Empowering Act has no substantive legal effect. In other words we do not need it. I agree with the comments made by Nick Smith. I do not often agree with him but I do agree that we ought to get rid of unnecessary Acts that do not serve any purpose. If Sir Geoffrey Palmer was here he would be applauding because one of the things that he firmly believed in was going through many of our old statutes tidying them up rewriting them and getting rid of out-of-date statutes. 
I was interested to hear of the history that surrounded this particular piece of legislation. I realised when I listened to Te Ururoa Flavell—who gave us a very comprehensive history of what had happened in this Tauranga area—and also to Nanaia Mahuta and Shane Jones that what had happened in the harbour of Tauranga is of great importance to Maori and has had great effect on Maori. They have long advocated for there to be a change in what was going on within the harbour. This is a very very sacred area for them. 
I thought it was interesting to hear Shane Jones’ speech at the time. He did say that it is very important to acknowledge the place of iwi in this and the importance to Maori but he said there are two things to be borne in mind: you need to be sensitive to the claims and concerns for ancestral land but you had to bear in mind that no city no country and no nation can advance itself in the absence of an evolving improving civil infrastructure which is what will arise out of what is going on between Tauranga and iwi. 
So that collaboration that Te Ururoa Flavell talked about between iwi and local government is I think really important. I would like to see more of this sort of collaboration around New Zealand with local governments. I know there are many very very good local governments that are prepared to work collaboratively and closely with Maori and they have benefited from that. They get to make good decisions. They get to examine decisions where if they had not consulted with iwi it could have led to greater problems for them and greater cost. But when they have involved iwi and they have collaborated and worked through issues—often issues that they were not necessarily aware of; they may not have been aware of the history of an area—they have found that it has been to the benefit not only of iwi but their whole local government area and the people who live in it. 
We do not wish to prolong this bill. We support it we congratulate the member who has brought it here and we wish for its speedy passage.