Sage Eugenie: Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Sage Eugenie: Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 27 November 2012. Volume:686;Page:6814. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
EUGENIE SAGE (Green) 
: 
 I am pleased to take a short call on Part 2 of the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill not because we support it but because Supplementary Order Paper 159 in my name would delete the transitional arrangements for reorganisation provisions that are in clause 27. That was intended as a consequential amendment to the rest of the Supplementary Order Paper which sought to delete clause 23 and the corresponding schedule 1 which sets out these new reorganisation provisions. The reason for the Supplementary Order Paper and the retention of the current reorganisation provisions which are set out in schedule 3 of the principal Act is that there is no evidence that the current law is causing a problem. When there is an initiation and implementation of a reorganisation proposal it requires quite careful thought to minimise any adverse impacts and to ensure that it benefits residents and ratepayers. So the current criteria in the Local Government Act strike the right balance in our view between enabling such reorganisations and mergers to occur where their implications have been properly assessed where those proposals have community support and where they promote good government. 
But National wants the changes that are in this bill because the previous Minister of Local Government the Hon Dr Nick Smith was aggrieved that the amalgamation of Nelson and Tasman districts did not succeed. Why did it not succeed? Because Nelson residents voted down the proposal in overwhelming numbers. The previous Minister knew that they would vote it down from indications in the community. There were 24857 people against that proposed amalgamation. 
Under the current Act it is a democratic right for local residents and ratepayers to have their say about how they should be represented and how they should be governed through the mandatory requirement for a poll. But this bill extinguishes that right and requires electors to get up a petition before there is a poll. Certainly in the Minister’s Supplementary Order Paper there has been some tweaking around the edges. Now there are 60 days to get up the required number of signatures on the petition and the petition can be in each area rather than the whole of the area but the bill still extinguishes that fundamental right to have a mandatory poll and for people to have a say. That is because this Government does not like people voting. It does not trust democracy as we have seen in Environment Canterbury with the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Act in 2010 and the extension of the suspension of regional democracy there. 
So why is the Government so keen on reorganisation? It is because it wants to super-size councils. That makes it much easier to contract out the provision of council services yet the Local Government and Environment Committee heard a number of times in Auckland from local boards about the longer decision-making lines the less accountability and the more difficult access to decision makers that comes when you get big councils. 
The Supplementary Order Paper goes back to the provisions in the substantive Act. One of the other reasons that we are opposing the reorganisation provisions is that the bill puts a new section new section 31A into the body of the principal Act and that gives the Minister the power to “specify measures and expectations relating to the Commission’s performance … of its powers …” and duties. The bill specifically mentions time frames against which the commission must progress certain matters and which applications are to have the highest priority. So what we are seeing here is once again “control central” in operation. Local government is being directed from Wellington not only through the much-expanded powers of ministerial interference—so that councils are always looking over their shoulders to see what the Minister is thinking in relation to their fiscal performance because they are scared of being replaced by commissioners or having a Crown manager supervise what they are doing—but also because here instead of the Local Government Commission operating at arm’s length from the Minister in reorganisation proposals the Minister can prioritise which proposals are to get priority. As the Hon Annette King noted there are certain areas where the Government wants these reorganisation proposals to proceed. 
This bill is bad because I suspect we will get the same voting of 61 votes to 60 on this part that we had on Part 1. What does that mean? It means that we get zigzag policy-making because there is not reasonable consensus in this Chamber on something as important as local government and the reorganisation procedures that should apply to amalgamation. There is strong opposition to the bill. On something that is as important as local government which is such a strong sector of the economy and which is so important in providing for communities and promoting community well-being we have dramatically opposed views and the bill is going to only just scrape through. Zigzag policy-making is not good law. The process by which the bill is being rushed through without careful thought is not conducive to good lawmaking.