Logie Jan: Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second Reading[Sitting date: 16 March 2016. Volume:712;Page:9861. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green): I too rise to take a reasonably short call on this the second reading of the Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 3) and of course to congratulate the member Alfred Ngaro on having a bill drawn from the ballot and making it through to the second stage with what seems like a high level of support in the House for it. The Greens too do support this bill. It is not a world-changing bill; what it does is it will prohibit membership of more than one local board. Out of the 149 elected members in the Auckland area five are currently on two boards. This bill will not change that for those elected members. This is for going forward and in the future to ensure that that practice does not continue and certainly does not extend. That is an idea that the Greens support and the arguments that were made by the submitters in favour of this bill on the grounds that if you are on two boards there is a really high chance that you are going to come into conflict with the needs of those two different communities when you are putting a case for a budget bid when you may be competing for shared resources.Also there is just the point that we know that local boards are that level of governance that is most connected to the people. What a difference it is when you are in your local community you run into your local board member and you get to have that conversation with them about the traffic lights that are down the street that are causing a problem the footpath outside the school or any number of the issues that are a concern to our local communities. If you are on two boards chances are you are not going to be as present in one of those communities; you will be more present in one than you are in the other. This helps to simplify that problem and make it clear that we ideally want our local representatives to be clearly committed to one community and not put into a situation of being in conflict.I do note that the Orākei Local Board made in its submission the recommendation that the candidates standing in local elections not be required to state on their candidate profile statement whether or not they live in the area for which they are seeking election. I think the board members were making the point that they saw the skills as more important than the embeddedness in the community. I think the reference was made to this House and the fact that there are members in this House who are electoral representatives who do not live in the electorate that they are representing. There was a question where they thought that maybe the intention of this bill and the fact that central government or this House was going to be making these decisions for a local community when it could be said that there is not the same degree of consistency at this level.I think it is worth canvassing some of the other points that they had which were that Auckland Council undertakes multi roles and for example two full-time councillors are also members of the Auckland Transport board and there are full-time councillors and full-time local board chairs who are also members of district health boards licensing trusts district licensing committees and a wide range of other sports community and business organisations. So they were arguing that that concept of the job being too big was not valid when people were serving on multiple boards as it is. I think though my understanding in the committee in discussions and for the Green Party is that there is a difference because if you are on the district health board that covers one area that your board sits within you are going to be arguing for that same community and you are not going to be in a situation of conflicting community needs where you may be pushed into representing one community over another in a particular process. Though the Orākei Local Board did also argue against what I am saying on the basis that they see in Auckland that there is an issue around the local boards not having a mechanism to connect them and actually quite often they saw that there would be value in having people sitting on multiple boards to be able to improve the discussion and sense of coherence between boards and communities.I think that is an interesting argument but not one that we believe is best solved by allowing members to represent multiple communities but rather by looking at the mechanisms of overall governance in Auckland and providing possibly some better bridging mechanisms between councils and continually reviewing the processes for input into Auckland Council itself. It does seem as if there certainly is still more work to be done in that area to get our democracy in Auckland functioning in the way that we would ideally like to see it happen.The committee has worked through some of the logistics of how this would happen. I think people may possibly be wondering how this would work. The idea that has been presented is that people can run for multiple boards but that they would be required to submit a form and say: “OK I am going to run for these boards and this is my order of preference for what board I would like to be on.” So if they got elected to all three boards that they were running for the one they chose as their preferred board would be the one they would take up the seat for. The other boards would then go to the next person. The candidate would be required to identify this priority ranking in any candidate profile so that the communities knew that they were running on multiple boards and what their listed preferences were. It does bring in I think a sensible degree of transparency. I do imagine that that would have an impact on how people voted in the communities if they saw that their community was the third preference for the board that you were going to be on. I cannot imagine it is much of an incentive to run in those three places but that I guess is part of the intent as well.One other small aspect of this is that it will prevent existing local board members from running in by-elections for another council—to prevent that possibility of people leaving one place going to another one and another position opening up and you have this cascading by-election situation as people move from one to another. It seems unlikely but is a good thing to guard against and that has been taken care of in this bill. So in summary the Green Party is happy to support this technical bill. It is not earth-shattering but something that we hope will help strengthen those principles of community embeddedness and good representation in Auckland. Thank you.