Court SimonSIMON COURT (ACT): Thank you Madam Speaker. The ACT Party supported this piece of legislation to select committee and until it got to the committee of the whole House we had hoped that the Government would respond to some concerns that people had which essentially said Look if there's a loss of trust in local government is this the way to address it or are there other ways?" What is the fundamental reason for a loss of trust in a local government? What ACT says is that despite the fact that this member has chosen to bring this bill to the House supported by the Government majority it doesn't actually solve the problem of loss of trust in local government.A pecuniary interest register where you ask people who want to stand for office to list all of their assets and interests is actually not going to deliver what it says it will. I had proposed a Supplementary Order Paper to amend the bill to extend the requirements for disclosure if there were going to be any to people that actually made decisions about procurement and were responsible for awarding contracts because if there's anything that undermines trust and confidence in local government it's when local government wastes money and allows employees and senior managers to get away with fraud. But the Government majority voted down my Supplementary Order Paper.So what we'll move on to is the loss of trust. There's been a loss of local voice with central government taking actions that actually belong with local government. There's been messing with voter representation. The Labour Party has introduced bills to this House messing with representation like the Rotorua representation proposal which allocates an unfair number of seats to people based on their ethnicity. There's one thing that's going to undermine trust and confidence in local government and democracy; it's giving people different rights by virtue of their ethnicity. ACT opposes that and we'll continue to oppose it. In fact the Attorney-General David Parker opposes it. So for once the Labour Party are getting schooled from one of their own on what's good.Another reason that people have lost trust and confidence in local government which the member Tangi Utikere has failed to consider when bringing this bill to the House is that they failed to deliver infrastructure—insufficient serviced land for housing. And we know that because we have local government organisations appealing developers like those in South Auckland who are proposing to build tens of thousands of new homes. They've opposed it and now they're considering whether to appeal developments at Drury for example because of the infrastructure funding requirement. Well ACT has a solution to that. What we'd say is that local government should share 50 percent of the GST on all new house building. That would cash flow the infrastructure take the problem away from local government and actually give local government trust and confidence that they can deliver stuff because they'd get the money that would otherwise be kept by central government.There's another problem for local government that's caused a loss of trust and confidence: it's getting off track with stuff that central government should be dealing with. I'll give you an example: climate change. Climate change has driven Auckland Council and Auckland Transport to make some absolutely ridiculous commitments they can't meet about reducing emissions from transport. And the reason they can't meet and will never meet those commitments and the reason they'll spend tens of millions of dollars chasing this unicorn is because this Government has set completely unrealistic targets and they are now cascading down so that rather than focusing on relieving congestion rather than focusing on building the roading connections that they should they already zoned hundreds of thousands of people to live in new suburbs and failed to build the roading connections. What they're doing is they're wasting money. They're wasting money on projects like enormously expensive cycleways at $8 million per kilometre in order to reduce emissions. It is a complete waste of time. They're off the rails. That's another reason why voters and local communities have lost trust in local government.And then there's the abuse of the Resource Management Act (RMA) perpetrated by local government. Just yesterday I opened the Dominion Post—what used to be a newspaper of record now struggles to come up with good stories but they had a good one yesterday. That was that the Greater Wellington Regional Council had wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars pursuing another council and landowners for disturbing a wetland that turned out not to be a wetland. It was such an egregious abuse of their powers under the Resource Management Act of property owners seeking to develop their own property that the Environment Court awarded half a million dollars of costs against the Greater Wellington Regional Council. And in fact the Environment Court was so aggrieved by this abuse of the RMA process by a council they're considering whether the Environment Court should also send an invoice to the Greater Wellington Regional Council for wasting the court's time. So if there's anything that would undermine trust and confidence there are some examples and this bill goes nowhere towards addressing any of those fundamental issues.So the member Jamie Strange made some interesting observations. He described the bipartisan approach potentially as building more trust and confidence. There's another name for that. The engineers at NASA who sent the Challenger up knowing that tiles would fall off and it could catch fire and explode—they had a bipartisan approach to the problem. That's called groupthink. And that's why ACT MPs stand here in the House and we offer better public policy than any other political party in this House. We do not share in groupthink around climate change. We do not share in groupthink around electric vehicles. We have better policies.The member Jamie Strange also talked about the candidates in this upcoming local government election and the 200 words that they get to describe what kind of candidate they are. Well I can offer some advice to voters and viewers today. This is what you should be looking for in that 200-word blurb: a commitment to upholding private property rights. That means people should be able to use their property as they see fit without undue interference or control from central or local government—without having mad councils like the Greater Wellington Regional Council launch an appeal against building new houses in a paddock; what they called a wetland.The other thing is local government should stop competing with the private sector in business activities that the private sector already executes very very well and makes a profit at. I'll give you some examples: waste management. Dunedin Council's about to spend tens of millions of dollars investing in building a new landfill. Well there are technologies that would put landfills out of business. Why on earth is Dunedin City Council pursuing this opportunity? And in fact if you wanted to build and operate a landfill you could simple allow the private sector to do it for you. There is no reason for Dunedin to be investing public money in such a thing.You've got Auckland Council teamed up with the Government with the Minister Megan Woods to pursue a climate agenda which is funding electric ferries to compete against Fullers in Auckland. If there's anything that damages trust and confidence in local government it's central government and local government competing with the private sector to deliver services that private sector is already employing people to do. That's what voters should be looking for when they're looking at the candidate blurb. Stay out of business.The other thing they should be looking for is: will this candidate support taking out car-parking in my local business district and damaging local business interests? If we want to talk about the history of local government actually it was founded in New Zealand by local businesses—small- and medium-business people who got together to raise money for things like town halls and to organise a street cleaning operation and they paid for it from local business profits and that's something that's absolutely lost on this Government.That's why ACT will reject this bill. We won't be voting to support it because it doesn't solve the underlying problem of how to restore trust and confidence in local government. Mr Tangi Utikere the member was a former deputy mayor of Palmerston North City Council so he of all people should know that what I'm saying is absolutely correct. But of course having to have a member's bill you can bring to the House and say you've done something—well Mr Utikere this is not the thing that you should be doing. So ACT will reject it and what we'll be doing is proposing better ways to deliver infrastructure—sharing 50 percent of the GST with local government so that local government can cash flow the delivery of infrastructure to get more houses built. That's what Kiwis are asking for."