Woods Megan: Greater Christchurch Regeneration Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoods Megan: Greater Christchurch Regeneration Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 17 March 2016. Volume:712;Page:9880. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): It is my pleasure to take a call on this. I would like to acknowledge the Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Gerry Brownlee who has just taken his seat who has taken this opportunity to come down to the House and give a speech in the second reading. Thank you because I think this has been quite a unique process in that we have been able to sit down and we have been able to thrash out what is a much-improved piece of legislation—once we have the Supplementary Order Paper that will be tabled at the Committee stage as the Minister has intimated. The Minister also took the somewhat unique action of outlining Labour’s position on this—thank you Minister for that—and I would like to confirm the Minister’s statement on that. Labour is supporting this legislation on the proviso of the Supplementary Order Paper that the Minister has outlined in his speech being tabled. He described those changes that will be delivered through that Supplementary Order Paper which will be tabled the next time we come back into this House to debate this bill at the Committee stage. We can offer back our support on this bill and I am very happy that that is the case.The Minister talked about the need to have cross-party agreement on the issues that relate to the recovery the regeneration and the governance of Canterbury around this. I think that this is important for Cantabrians. I think that we do need to have certainty as we enter the next phase of our history and Cantabrians can be sure that when the Government changes next year that there will not be major upheaval. So I thank the Minister for thinking ahead to that and for the work he put into that. The reason why we withdrew our support after the select committee consideration was that the bill simply was not good enough for Cantabrians. The bill did not give Cantabrians the locally led recovery that they desired and the locally led recovery that they deserved and needed. I would like to thank the Minister for recognising that. I think it is a pity that some of the Government members of the Local Government and Environment Committee had not listened a little bit more closely at the select committee and made that case a little earlier. But I am very grateful that the Minister did that and that we are seeing much better legislation.We are 5 years on from the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority legislation. I was not a member of Parliament when the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority legislation was introduced into this House in the immediate aftermath of the February quakes. I was in fact campaigning for the Wigram seat at the time. Those were emergency powers for extraordinary times. I think we can all think back to 5 years ago in Christchurch and what it was like. We no longer see what look like tanks in supermarket car-parks which is something that I think we are all very pleased to have moved past. We no longer have the military manning a cordon around our central business district. Sometimes it is very hard to think that it was only 5 years ago—or that that was even 5 years ago—that we were seeing these sights on the streets of Christchurch. And for the Labour Party the bill that emerged which is actually the bill that is sitting on the Table here today had not moved sufficiently past this phase of our recovery.The bill that the majority of the select committee reported back to this House was still too entrenched in that immediate aftermath and the emergency powers phase of our regeneration. We know that there is a difficult balance that needs to be struck in Christchurch. We in the Labour Party have never advocated that now is the time to return to business as usual—to go back and pretend that the earthquakes had never happened and completely put everything back as if it were. The Minister alluded to the report of the transitional board led by Dame Jenny Shipley and the report that it produced made it very clear that there was an intermediate step that was required before that return to business as usual. And that balance did need to be struck.We are never quiet on this side of the House when talking about the need for speed in the Canterbury recovery. We do recognise that there do need to be some bespoke provisions in order to have the speed that we desire in the Canterbury recovery and that is why we can support this bill. We also know that the Crown is making a significant investment and that when the Crown is making a significant investment of taxpayer money it needs to have good oversight of that money. It needs to have responsible and prudent oversight of that money and I think that what we are seeing here gives the Crown the oversight and the responsibility that it should take for taxpayer money without having to have overreaching ministerial powers that were only ever going to serve as a roadblock to the recovery of Christchurch. So I think that we have come a long way in terms of getting that balance right. I think one of the things that we can see is that the Minister has said that the Supplementary Order Paper that we have all worked on which he is going to table in the Committee stage—and it has actually been quite an enjoyable process working on that I have to say. I have enjoyed every moment of it Minister and I thank you for it.We will strengthen the position of Regenerate Christchurch. Regenerate Christchurch is an agency that is made up of both Crown appointments and council appointments and I think this reflects very well that balance. It does preserve public input into decisions and regeneration plans that can be made and as the Minister put it it more closely proscribes the power of the Minister which I think is a nice way of saying that it transitions quite a bit of power back into the hands of Cantabrians and that is something that I think is a positive thing. The submissions made it very clear—and there were two very strong themes that came through from the submissions that the select committee heard. Local leadership was something that came through time and time again—80 of the submitters focused on this as an issue that was something that needed to be given strength.I think that those of us from Christchurch and Canterbury can all recognise the energy the innovation and the vitality that has happened in our city in the last 5 years. For us it is in that energy it is in that innovation and it is in that creativity that we want the next 5 years to lie. We think Cantabrians are going to make good decisions about their future.I celebrate a lot of things that are happening in our city that never would have happened before the earthquakes. Just last weekend I spent time on an intersection in Riccarton painting the road. We made a painted intersection in Shand Crescent. The idea around this which is taken from Portland Oregon is about bringing communities together and having the ability of communities to think: “Just because it’s not usually done doesn’t mean we can’t do it.” That is the kind of spirit that has got to define the next 5 years in Christchurch—people taking charge of their lives.I would not like everyone to think I have got too carried away talking about how much I have enjoyed this process. Of course there are questions that we still have around provisions of this bill and they are questions that will be fully discussed in the Committee stage—as is appropriate—of this bill. There are questions that we need to ask about how the agencies are going to work and the Minister alluded to that. We are replacing one agency the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority with several agencies some of them Crown and some of them council. How are they going to work together? What are going to be the limits and the transparencies around those agencies? How is it that we are going to ensure that all that is made very clear? What are the letters of intent going to say—because the letters of intent are a very important instrument that lies beneath this legislation both with the Christchurch City Council and with the Crown entity of Ōtākaro Ltd which is given a very large function in our regeneration. What are that organisation’s responsibilities back in terms of reporting?These are all discussions that we can have at the Committee stage but I am very happy to be able to say that the Minister has been able to win back our support on this bill. It was not with any pleasure that we withdrew our support at the select committee and had to write a minority report. We voted for this bill in its first reading because we thought that it was important that we listen to the submissions. We listened and we are very pleased that the Minister also listened to the very able submissions that were made on this bill. Thank you very much.