Sage Eugenie: Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Sage Eugenie: Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 15 November 2012. Volume:685;Page:6742. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
EUGENIE SAGE (Green) 
: 
 National does not understand respect or trust local government. That is obvious with this eccentric bill the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill. It is obvious in the lack of any robust analysis supporting the changes to the substantive Act and it is obvious in what the Government has done in Canterbury. The Local Government and Environment Committee was hearing submissions in Christchurch this morning. We got a palpable demonstration of the frustration and sense of disempowerment that Canterbury residents feel through the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Act 2010 and the new Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Amendment Bill. It is the same sense of disempowerment of Wellington coming in and trampling on local communities that is at the heart of this local government amendment bill. 
 Local government should be accountable primarily to its communities through the consultation it does through its councillors and board members representing their constituencies and through a right to vote every 3 years. It is this bill the removal from the purpose of local government of the promotion of the four well-beings and the increased powers of ministerial interference that fundamentally change the relationship that local communities have with their councils. It puts those councils under Wellington’s thumb and it will certainly have councils and their staff looking over their shoulders to what the Minister thinks in Wellington. That is one of the reasons why the Green Party is opposing this bill. 
As a new member of Parliament I had understood that select committees were the workhorses of Parliament and that they were the one place where you could get some sensible constructive debate rather than the sometimes purely oppositional debate that we get in this Chamber. There were more than 510 submissions from individuals and organisations on the bill. People took a lot of time to write thoughtful constructive submissions and many people appeared before the Local Government and Environment Committee’s hearings. 
The vast majority of submitters opposed the bill yet have there been any significant changes to the bill? No. This failure to respond to community views undermines trust in democracy and undermines trust in Parliament when the Government is so unresponsive to public opinion. But it was certainly a privilege to hear those submissions from councils community organisations residents’ groups and local board members outlining the scope of activities that councils were involved in and the way in which small amounts of council funds could often leverage work that community organisations early childhood centres and artistic organisations were doing in the community to promote our well-being. It was all about creating attractive safe and healthy places to live and that is what the promotion of well-being is all about. 
I want on behalf of the Green Party to pay tribute to all of the work that councils councillors and their staff are doing throughout New Zealand to create good places to live. That is the benefit of having a purpose that is focused on the promotion of community well-being. 
Hurunui District Council was one of the many councils that came along to describe the breadth of its services the way in which it responded to community needs and the way in which that is imperilled by the change of purpose. As Mr Twyford mentioned Ashburton runs health centres. So does Hurunui—it has four health centres. How can these be described as core services or core infrastructure? Yet they are providing for a fundamental community need because they attract general practitioners and health professionals to a large rural district and they make sure by being there that residents have easy access to those health services. That sort of service—and the housing for elderly that Hurunui and other councils provide—is potentially jeopardised by the change in purpose and by commercial organisations being able to challenge the direction of council funds to things such as health centres. 
Hurunui has another example. It owns and manages the Hanmer Springs Thermal Pools and Spa. It is the revenue from that business which again is not a core piece of infrastructure—it is not a core service—that significantly offsets rates. If a commercial provider wants to buy up that complex can it use the change in the purpose that this bill is promoting to push the council to sell up? 
The Green Party opposes the bill also because of the substantially increased powers for the Minister to meddle in local government as the Government has done in Canterbury and to undermine democracy by doing that. Just as this National Government is selling off our State assets—our energy companies—there is a real risk that a National and ACT Government would use the increased ministerial intervention powers in the bill combined with the financial performance benchmarks to pressure councils particularly the Christchurch City Council to sell off their assets to avoid any increase in rates. 
The Minister of Local Government David Carter in around May in an interview on  
Q+A  
talked about the ability of central government to interfere with local government decisions around rates as “very very limited” and that “we wanted more ability for central government to work more closely” so we could manage some of these things. He went on to promote the sale of shares in airport and port companies. That is the ideological agenda behind the bill to put pressure on councils through the ministerial powers of intervention and through the performance benchmarks to actually sell a lot of their assets. One of the reasons for that is the very loose way in which “significant problem” which is the trigger for ministerial interference is defined. It is very very broad. 
One of the other reasons the Green Party opposes this bill is the agenda of super-sizing councils and the provisions in the bill for reorganisation. Again those deny democracy because they deny communities the automatic right to vote in any reorganisation or amalgamation proposal. They put the burden on the community to have a petition signed by 10 percent of electors before there can be a poll and when there is a poll it has to be across all of the area affected by the amalgamation not each individual area. As we saw in Nelson and Tasman where individual residents were able to vote they sent their opinion loud and clear and they did not support amalgamation. 
It is this agenda for streamlining proposals that actually cuts the voices of local communities and their ability to have an automatic right to decide their governance structures for their communities. This Government has a think-big agenda in local government. It has an agenda to take the “local” out of local government and to have it dominated by Wellington and the Wellington agenda. It is an agenda that we oppose. 
As other members have said the bill is back to front with the changes it is making because we have not seen the Productivity Commission review. And when the majority of public submissions were against the bill it is a breach of trust for the Government to continue with the bill without making any substantive changes to it without reinstating the well-beings reducing the ministerial powers and allowing an automatic right to vote on any amalgamation proposal.