Hipkins Chris: Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 17 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8306. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): I appreciate this opportunity to make a contribution to this debate. I want to turn my attention to clause 5 in Part 1 which amends section 144 of the principal Act. I want to talk to subsection (5) of that particular new section 144 because it deals with the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel and the recommendations that it can make. The issue that I want to canvass which has not been canvassed by any of the other speakers so far is the power that the hearings panel is being given to make recommendations outside of the scope of the submissions that it has received.The conventional wisdom if you read the rest of the section would be that the purpose of a hearings panel is to put forward a plan get the feedback on the plan and then make amendments as to how the plan may be changed based on those submissions. But this particular section gives the hearings panel a much wider remit than that. It says that the hearings panel can basically do what it likes regardless of what the submissions are actually saying. So the hearings panel could actually go through and say: “There’s some issues that we feel are important that weren’t raised by any submitters at all and we’re going to make recommendations based on that just because we feel like it.” It gives the hearings panel quite a significant scope.I think that that stands in a bit of conflict if you look at subsection (8)(c) which specifies what the reports of the hearings panel must include. A report of the hearings panel must include “the reasons for accepting or rejecting submissions and for this purpose may address the submissions by grouping them according to—” etc. etc. So basically it says that the hearings panel has to go through the submissions and say whether they are going to be accepted or rejected. But then it can throw a whole lot of other things on the table that it does not have to go through a similar kind of process for because the panel can just make recommendations in its own right without reference to submissions.It seems to me that if the purpose of the hearings panel is to get public feedback on the plan why would we give it this much much wider power to make whatever recommendations it feels like? Bear in mind that the recommendations that the panel makes that are not related to the submissions could well be things that the submitters would have had a view on and would have wanted to make submissions on had they known that those were the items being discussed. Potentially what this does is it means that the recommendations that come out of the report of the panel can recommend quite significant changes to the plans without bearing on the submissions. It seems to me that that cuts against the whole purpose of what this is all about.The other point that I want to deal with is section 144(1) in clause 5 which says that “The Hearings Panel must make recommendations on the proposed plan”. The question that I have got is: why is it necessarily a “must”? What if having heard all of the submissions the hearings panel decides it does not want to make any recommendations and is actually quite happy with the plan as it stands? Why the word “must”? I think again that cuts against the grain. When you consider that in light of section 144(5) in clause 5 which says that the panel’s recommendation-making powers are not limited to the matters on which people have been submitting it basically says that if panel members go through all of the hearings and they do not want to pick up any matters that were covered in the submissions they must make some up. They must actually come up with something because they are not given the option of not making recommendations. They are told that they have to make recommendations.So I think that I would like to hear a justification from the Minister on both of those points—first of all as to why they are given this wider power to make recommendations that fall outside of the hearings process. This is a hearings panel so why is it that the hearings panel has the ability to make recommendations on issues that it has not had hearings on and it has not received submissions on? The second point is why it is that it must make recommendations. And of course coming back to some other contributions to the debate I think that that raises issues around the constitution of the panel. What happens if the panel is unable to reach an agreement? It has been told that it must make recommendations but it might not necessarily be able to reach an agreement on what those recommendations should actually be.So there are a whole lot of questions here that have not been answered by the Government because aside from a very brief aside from the Minister that clarified one issue and actually probably raised more questions than answers we have not heard from Ministers around these quite detailed and specific questions members have been raising.