Williams Andrew: Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 2) — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliams Andrew: Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading[Sitting date: 02 July 2013. Volume:691;Page:11487. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]ANDREW WILLIAMS (NZ First):I will take a call on behalf of New Zealand First on the Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 2). Following on from my fellow Local Government and Environment Committee member Jacqui Dean I am a little bit confused after hearing what Mrs Dean has just commented. I think she perhaps is a little confused. She made the comment that this bill would allow the local boards to delegate powers and that this was an improvement in local democracy under the National Government. In actual fact all this is doing is allowing a continuation of the status quo that was provided for under the transitional powers of the Auckland Council set up by the Auckland Transition Agency. Really this is just rolling over something that otherwise on 31 October would lose its powers. It would lose its right to delegate those powers to other entities or to council staff or to a subcommittee of its own board or indeed to a member of its own board. So basically this is just a technical bill to ensure that what it is currently doing it will be able to do after 31 October 2013.But moving on from that fact one thing that we do want to ensure out of all this with local governance in Auckland having gone through a huge amount of upheaval in recent years—having merged the seven former local authorities plus the Auckland Regional Council into one entity and then having created these local boards and also at the same time created some seven or eight council-controlled organisations which are at arm’s length to the council and which are effectively boards with appointed directors who are not elected and who are not accountable to the general public. In many cases they are outside the arm of the Official Information Act in many respects. Their meetings can be held in private and are confidential and that is where much of the dealings of these council-controlled organisations go completely under the radar for most Aucklanders. Where 75 percent of the business of Auckland now comes under these council-controlled organisations and where effectively they are controlling a huge amount of what is going on in Auckland it is most important at this local board level that when they are delegating to these council-controlled organisations or to any of these other entities they still have the governance power to have control over them.One thing that we do not want to see is the situation that we have seen in the last year or two where even the councillors of the Auckland Council have been denied access to minutes to records and to official information of those council-controlled organisations. Indeed the likes of even the Deputy Mayor of Auckland Penny Hulse was asked to leave a meeting of one council-controlled organisation. It did not want her in attendance when it moved into a confidential subject. This sort of thing has got to stop. We cannot have a situation where the largest city in this country with 1.5 million people—which is effectively the state of Auckland; it is the equivalent of a state of Australia—is controlled by a group of people behind closed doors with very little accountability and where its governors the councillors of that council are themselves in many respects denied the very information that is being discussed by those entities.In this respect when it comes to the local boards you have to remember that for instance with Auckland Transport every road and street and avenue in Auckland and every verge and every footpath and every grass strip that is publicly owned by the council all come under Auckland Transport. It goes through all the suburbs and areas of Auckland through all these—is it 21—21 local board areas and effectively those local boards have no control over Auckland Transport whatsoever. It can just go through whole suburbs and whole urban areas and decide what it will do as Auckland Transport—Tracey Martin: What they won’t do.ANDREW WILLIAMS: —or what it will not do; exactly—and the local board has very little control over it. It has very little power over it and is basically just told: “Well this is how it’s going to be.” This is the sort of thing that if there is delegation from these local boards under the Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 2) and if they are delegating some of their powers out to some of these entities and some of these various organisations they need to still ensure that they have the right to get the information back from those very entities so that they can scrutinise it because at the end of the day they are the elected local boards. They are elected local representatives and they have every right having delegated the authority to then in turn receive the appropriate reports advising them of what is going on in their particular patch.So in this respect New Zealand First will be monitoring this very closely. We do not want to give carte blanche another 3 years’ approval to just roll on over and then just entrench a situation where some of the smoke-and-mirrors organisations that say that they are acting in the best interests of Auckland and Aucklanders are in actual fact in some instances not necessarily doing the best by the local communities at all. In that respect we would not want to see a situation where these local boards are kneecapped and are basically neutered and left powerless to control the very entities that they have given the powers to.Similarly there is always a worry—and in the case of the Auckland staff of the Auckland Council I was advised in the last week or so that the staff numbers that were there prior to the merging of the councils some 8000 to 8500 staff were significantly reduced by the Auckland Transition Agency down to 7000-odd or whatever it is. It was about a 1500 to 2000 staff reduction with the merger of the councils. I am advised that the Auckland Council is now back up to the same number of staff as before the merger. It is now back up to the same level. It has over 8000 staff again. This is incredible for the fact that we were promised savings and we were promised reductions and we were promised that the ratepayers would have reductions out of all this. The council bureaucracy is now ballooning. What you do not want to see out of this bill is a situation where council staff are also delegated powers and are given authority to do things outside of these local boards and then those very bureaucrats who are swelling in number as we speak take advantage of that situation to use those powers to their own advantage to simply swell the bureaucracy even further.We will support this bill because we do trust the local boards of the Auckland Council to have sufficient wisdom and governance abilities to determine how they will delegate their authorities but at the same time we will be keeping a very watchful eye on it.