Moroney Sue: Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 17 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8296. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour): Thank you. That was a very excellent choice indeed. I am pleased to take a call on Part 1 of the Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill and I want to focus my contribution on clause 4. But I just want to preface that a little by making sure that people know what my general concern is about this. And it is this point: I am based in Hamilton and when things go wrong in Auckland it has a direct impact on Hamilton. And at the moment we are seeing that come marching over the Bombay Hills in the form of Auckland’s housing crisis landing in Hamilton.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): No. Order! I did warn members earlier that they are to speak to the detail of the bill—Part 1.SUE MORONEY: Sure. So for those reasons clause 4 really bothers me because what we are being told in clause 4 is that in respect of the decisions being made that affect 1.3 million people—because as of 2011 that was roughly the population of Auckland; my guess is that it is an awful lot larger than that now—just two people in a room are adequate to make decisions that will impact on 1.3 million people. My colleague Grant Robertson was doing the maths on what that means in terms of the number of people on a hearings panel and he came up with 20 percent. I cannot even do the maths because it is so tiny—the proportion of two people out of 1.3 million.I particularly want to address this issue while the Minister who is in the chair Louise Upston is there because I know in a different capacity she is the Minister for Women. And one of the things that really bothers me about a quorum being just two members of a hearings panel is whether we can be assured that there is going to be diversity of representation and opinion between those two people. If that is all a quorum requires then where is the diversity of opinion? Some people may be listening to this debate and think “Look these are environmental hearings by and large what on earth has that got to do with gender representation?”. Well here is the point: what all the research and evidence tells us is that we get this right when we have diversity of opinion in the room. We know that when there was one woman—or more—on boards of American companies they survived the global financial crisis better. Why is that? Not necessarily because the women are smarter but because they ask the questions at the table and they make sure therefore that the right decisions are made. So in clause 4 I want some assurance from the Minister in the chair that there will be that diversity of opinion in the room. And I query whether we can get that diversity of opinion in the room for those hearings panels if the quorum is reduced to just two.The other question I would like answered because this legislation—and it is very very bad form—is being done retrospectively is that I want to know whether this is being done retrospectively because in fact there have been hearings held by the Auckland Council where it has failed to be able to get a quorum of three. If that is the reason why we are doing this then I think that brings into some serious question the amount of scrutiny and the legality of decisions that have been made in the past—if the reason for this change is that the Auckland Council has struggled to get three people in the room at any given time. I am pleased to see that in Part 1 the Government is increasing the possible number of appointed Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel members from seven to 10 and that excludes the chairperson.I will come back to my original point because I think that when you increase the pool of people who can participate in these hearings and who have the expertise to participate in these hearings then we increase the opportunity to get diversity of opinion in the room. Again I will reiterate that that is important because when we get people—I think my colleague Grant Robertson described it as a collusion rather than a quorum—who are of the same mind then we stop questioning the outcome. That in my view leads to poor decision-making. That leads to the sort of poor decision-making that has ended up not only impacting on Auckland and the 1.3 million people there and the ratepayer base there but as I said at the outset now impacting on the city that I live in down the road. When they get it wrong in Auckland that ends up being a problem for Hamilton. Actually as many other speakers have said that ends up being a problem for New Zealand. Without a select committee process we have not heard why we are reducing that.