McAnulty KieranHon KIERAN McANULTY (Labour): Thank you very much Mr Chair. I appreciate that guidance as I'm sure so too does the House and whilst my intention was to respond to some of the Minister's comments which in my view didn't adequately answer the questions posed I will take that guidance and touch on a new area.Now this bill in this part touches obviously on referendum. It's been discussed in various details tonight but what we haven't touched on yet is the impact on councils. Now I'm sure the Minister has heard as many members in this House would have heard local governments say that they can no longer absorb additional requirements without assistance and funding. And that's exactly what is proposed in this part and indeed the bill more broadly. That is that the requirement on councils to hold referenda is a financial implication on those councils.Now with the reversal of the water reforms the advice is really clear that the financial impact on each council is significant and we're seeing that playing out already. There's also been a recent decision by the Minister to totally disregard as a block the recommendations from the Future for Local Government review. So in that context which is important for people's understanding as to how significant the financial cost on to councils could be they have no option but to increase rates now. There was the possibility that the Government would explore alternatives as the previous Government had committed to but that's been gone now pretty much a couple of weeks.So councils are sitting there with no other option but to increase rates. Now councils are financially strapped and they are facing a situation where this Government—the Prime Minister the finance Minister and the local government Minister himself—has basically said They need to sort themselves out; we're not going to help them." The Prime Minister is quoted as saying that local councils just need to stop doing dumb things and the Minister during scrutiny week agreed with him. How about the Government stops doing dumb things? That's going to help local government because this requirement as outlined in Part 1 is going to require councils to pay for the referenda that they don't want. Councils have made it incredibly clear there are more councils opposed to this than there are councils that support the Government's alternative water reform because they know it's not going to work and they know that this isn't needed because councils know that this isn't compulsory. Councils know they have the choice and indeed councils have made the choice that's right for them. But what they don't want and the choice that they haven't made is to hold these referendums.The cost to this is actually quite significant. To provide context there is a district council in the South Island that has had to employ an additional cleaner to cover the public toilets such is the large number of tourists that their district attracts. Now that additional cleaner has meant an entire percent increase in rates—just to cover the cleaner. Now that's one person's salary and it's a 1 percent increase. So these are the margins that we're talking about with local councils. Now it's quite clear to anybody that a referendum is going to cost more than a cleaner. So we're talking in some instances a significant rates increase for something councils haven't asked for which is actually an important question I think perhaps someone else might want to ask as to which councils—actually bugger it I'll just ask you now. Which councils have asked for this? Because I don't think it'll be any—not when it's not compulsory. I think it's some small segment of National Party voters that don't like the idea of Māori wards that have asked for this. I don't think it's councils but certainly the financial implications are this. Does the Minister accept that this is going to cost particularly small rural councils quite a bit and if so why hasn't he agreed to support them financially?"