SpeechIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Well where would you start after the last three speeches talking about the great places they live? I could start by saying Palmerston North the sunshine capital of New Zealand." but I won't. Ha ha! I thought that would draw a bit of a—but we are without a doubt the wind capital of New Zealand.Anyway back to the important issue of the bill. The bill of course spent a little bit of time in the Governance and Administration Committee and was pretty much passed with very minimal change. So I think one of the observations I'll make before I start to talk about some of the other factors about this bill is that we have a lot of these sorts of bills come through the House and I think there must be a better way of dealing with these issues than spending time in the Parliament on what effectively are very local issues. Of course we've got other bills coming through on this very day that concern single families and I think there must be better ways of dealing with this than putting them through the onerous select committee processes and running through a significant time in this House. I think that it's time we had a look at those opportunities and of course we've got one or two other bills in the Governance and Administration Committee at the moment where there are some questions as to whether they should have come to the House or not and those will be resolved in the next few weeks. So I think there is an issue with the number of bills we bring through here.Of course this fund is effectively the product of a bill. It wasn't initially but it was put there. I want to speak about how these funds came about because I remember at the time New Plymouth had a very very—well I suppose he was an outgoing mayor Peter Tennent and he had the foresight which a lot of councils don't have to actually retain the investment that the New Plymouth District Council—or city council I suppose at the time—had had in Powerco. Some of the other councils in my area disbursed those shares to the shareholders who effectively were the ratepayers who promptly sold them. I think I go back to my time in local government where the councils were busy selling off rubbish dumps and what were called rubbish dumps in those days which have graduated to be landfills to recycling centres to whatever. Those are all now privately owned and I think that's a great shame. I think this fund here is a great example of what can be achieved by a community having the foresight to retain an asset that then can be paid out. I know that there are other councils around New Zealand at the moment having significant debates about the I guess strategic assets that they hold and what should happen to those and there's a great rush to sell them. I'm very opposed to selling those assets because I think they've got much more good for the collective community than they have by being dispersed and in our case for the Powerco shares hocked off for about 1200 bucks a household.Imagine the good—and I know there has been a bit of talk today about the loss that this fund suffered but actually it's not really a loss because all that money was dispersed to the city council who then subsidised the rates. Now you could argue that's a dumb process and I think probably proved in hindsight that it was a dumb process but none the less that money is still in that community so it isn't going anywhere; it just didn't still exist in this fund. So I think there are some questions you can ask about the way these things operate and we'll never get it right. I don't think as I said earlier it necessarily needs to be the prerogative of Parliament to put these Acts in place. I think local communities should be able to manage these things themselves without them becoming Acts of Parliament. This will probably no doubt come back and the very issue that has been raised by all of our speakers around the submitter who lived outside the boundary and wasn't so much concerned about a merger as a boundary change. In the Manawatū of course we went through a boundary change between Manawatū District and Palmerston North City not that long ago and if a bill like this had been in place the piece of land that went to the Palmerston North City from the Manawatū District would not be eligible for the funds to be applied to it even though it's part of the Palmerston City. Rachel Boyack outlined the reasons for that and they were pretty good reasons really for the same reason that we dispersed the shares and were sold off individually those people effectively didn't get the benefit of those shares in their hands; the city council or district council chose to keep them put them into an investment fund and invest it for the future of that region.It is quite a parochial area Taranaki and I've got no claim to it other than my wife comes from South Taranaki and of course we saw some members of the South Taranaki community in here earlier making quite a lot of noise; she's much quieter than that. But I think that they also have a fund like this and when you go to Hāwera and see the facilities that they've managed to put together in a small community like Hāwera as a result of effectively that investment fund that they created out of the same sale as this one we're talking about it's quite significant. I think it just proves the value of those things to a district. Anyone who went to Chester Borrows' funeral would have seen that massive asset where that funeral was held which was exactly the result of an investment from a fund like this.Just to go back in history and I talked about Peter Tennent earlier. It seems ironic that when this fund was set up the first thing it did in the land of milk and honey—or milk and oil—was to go to Tasmania and invest in a dairy farm. Ha ha! Quite extraordinary when you think about it. They had all the dairy farms in the world in Taranaki so they go off to Tasmania and shove a whole lot of money into Tasmania. Luckily for them they got out of that but only by the skin of their teeth. So I think that's what actually led to the formation of this Act to some extent because I think the investments were seen as being pretty odd for a place that's entirely—well almost entirely—reliant on the oil industry and dairy cows to a large extent anyway to suddenly—and a bit of think-big stuff—invest in a whole lot of dairy farms in Tasmania.I guess that's the sort of thing that these kind of laws or Acts effectively endeavour to protect. But you can't protect everyone from humans and humans do strange things at times. So that was a bit of the background to this investment fund. I do think that these things—as I've said a couple of times—are of great value to communities like Taranaki and I congratulate them on bringing this bill to the House and getting it passed and hopefully enabling it to protect this investment for the future of that district. We had four submitters I think it was that submitted in the course of this bill. It was pretty well put together by the New Plymouth District Council and there was plenty of precedent for it. There are other investment funds around the country that are controlled by bills like this so it was a pretty straightforward decision for the council to support the formation of it. So I think that the future of investment funds like this is probably to provide facilities and amenities for those communities that probably should never be funded out of rates. So if you think about the drive to get I suppose councils to concentrate on their core—what some people would call their core—activities around water roads and libraries and one or two things like that the facilities that get provided in these communities from funds other than council funds have great value to those communities. They have that value for two reasons. One is because they don't put a whole lot more demand on the ratepayers and it enables those communities to have those amazing facilities that I talked about with respect to Hāwera actually but New Plymouth's obviously got plenty of them as well and some of them will serve the community for many years to come.So I think as I said earlier that these bills would be better if they didn't have to come to Parliament. I accept the reason this had to come to Parliament because they wanted to change what effectively was an Act of Parliament anyway. So I wish the New Plymouth District Council all the best in the future with this. I think one other thing I really need to point out as well is that effectively the management of this fund is totally independent from the district councils or the—I'd better be careful what I say about elected members hadn't I but from the fingers of elected members. I think that's very important as well from that perspective. I don't think we get elected to Parliament or to councils for that matter to end up running investment funds. That's not why we're there. So I think it was a very wise decision of the New Plymouth District Council to make sure that that fund is managed in a professional manner. We've seen with other big funds in New Zealand that when they're managed well and there's no reason why they shouldn't be managed well and managed for the long term they become very sustainable and very valuable to those communities.So I think this bill is a good one and I know it will support New Plymouth well and I look forward to it making its way through the House or the rest of its way through the House. Thank you Mr Speaker."