O'Rourke DenisDENIS O'ROURKE (NZ First): I want to respond to a couple of things in relation to what Minister Smith has said in his recent comments. The first one is that he says to us: Trust the councils. Look at what is in the bill especially in relation to the net-benefit clause and trust them." Well I do not trust them. I will say that here and now and I say that with the benefit of having been a city councillor for 15 years. I do not trust them to be able to properly administer a piece of legislation like this. There are two reasons for that. One is that I think they too often make mistakes—quite simply that. They make mistakes far too often. I could give you a dozen examples if you want me to but I am sure everybody in this room knows that they actually do make mistakes.Chris Bishop: No they don't.DENIS O'ROURKE: They do in fact. The Government does as well and I could talk about Redcliffs School and how the Government is going to take a park but I am not going to Mr Chairman.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): I am pleased.DENIS O'ROURKE: I said I could but the point I am making is this: you cannot trust councils to always do the right thing because they simply do not. And that is very important because the purpose of a Reserves Act is to prevent councils and others from making those mistakes. The Reserves Act is a long-term piece of legislation that is there as the bottom line to prevent all of that from happening yet this Government is willing to compromise it. That is point No. 1.Another point is this concerning the net-benefit clause. The Minister tried to get us to believe that it is OK if you take some land for housing as long as you actually exchange it for a reserve somewhere else and there is some kind of net benefit. I have already talked about the difficulty of defining that but what I want to talk about next is this and that is the strategic distribution of reserves. If you think about the long-term effect of this provision what it could mean is that open space reserves get pushed further and further out of urban areas towards the urban fringe. So you have got a reserve inside an urban area. Somebody says: "Let's take that for housing. We'll get a lot of housing out of that. We'll create another reserve but it will be a lot further away"—almost certainly a lot further away—"towards the urban fringe because that will be cheaper and easier land to acquire." They will concoct some story about net benefit that will persuade a council and there you go.So the net effect of this provision I say to the Minister—and I want his specific response to this—will be that urban green space will be constantly pushed further and further out of urban areas towards the urban fringe. So what you are going to get in effect is a doughnut effect. You will get this urban area in the centre with virtually no reserves in it and the exchanged urban reserves will all be dotted around the urban fringe. In strategic terms that is an extremely serious adverse effect of this provision. The Minister just shook his head so I am going to wait with interest to hear why he does not think that will happen. It will not be enough just to give an opinion because it is perfectly clear to me and I am sure to others that what I have said is almost inevitably going to be the effect of this. It compromises the Reserves Act in yet another way in that respect. I am waiting to hear the response."