Sio William: Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSio William: Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading[Sitting date: 17 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8263. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Su’a WILLIAM SIO (Labour—Māngere): Given that this is an Auckland issues bill can I firstly with your indulgence Mr Assistant Speaker take this opportunity to acknowledge the death of Jonah Lomu and convey to his wife and extended family our condolences and just acknowledge the fact that Jonah was a great friend of Pacific youth particularly in South Auckland. He will be sorely missed by many not just in New Zealand but throughout the world.I now want to come to the Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill. Because we are amending the Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Act 2010 I want to just reflect on that for the sake of the House and particularly for those who were not involved in the initial debates in 2010. Members may recall that when we debated the Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Bill in 2010 that debate included two other major and significant pieces of legislation arising from the Local Government (Auckland Law Reform) Bill: the Local Government (Tamaki Makaurau Reorganisation) Amendment Bill and the Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill. In fact what happened was I think that the House concentrated on the two significant pieces of legislation and we paid little attention to the Auckland transition legislation. It almost appears that a pattern has emerged where when this Government is intending to hide things it will include it with other significant bills so that nobody pays attention. People may recall that when public consultation went out on that legislation it was during the Christmas period and people did not have a lot of time to make submissions on it.Today I have to say I think Aucklanders will be equally sad that again we are debating issues that affect them without the privilege or without the benefit of having their experience their expertise and in fact their criticism of what this Government is doing. I want to say that members on the Government side paint it as if they are doing Aucklanders a favour. They are saying that this bill will allow Aucklanders to have a say. Well Aucklanders will have a say. What this bill is about is it is going to fix some mistakes that the Government has made mistakes that it has failed to fix as a result of the pattern that it has created for itself of rushing through things when it does not want the general public to have a view or to share a view in terms of what the Government is doing. And again you may recall that during that whole Auckland super-city debate Aucklanders were outraged at the way that this Government collapsed the whole process and was determined to corporatise that whole Auckland super-city and that is what we have seen.In fact the 2010 Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Act enabled the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel to be appointed by the Minister for the Environment and the Minister of Conservation rather than what existed at that particular time where councils appointed hearings commissioners. If we had councils continuing to appoint hearings commissioners we would not be in this situation now of again trying to fix the mistake that the Government made. The Government made those mistakes and it is amazing that despite the views of the people of Auckland this Government continues to think that it is doing OK that it is smart and that it knows what it is doing. The reality is we have a unique select committee process and all legislation ought to go through that particular process because that gives us the benefit of enabling the public enabling those with deep experiences and enabling those with expertise in these particular matters to have their say and for us to have the benefit of that experience and of that knowledge. Sadly again this Government just does not seem to have learnt from its mistakes and that rushing things through will inevitably end up with mistakes being made.Here is the mistake—and I want to point out what we are clarifying. We are clarifying that the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel can hold hearings sessions concurrently. And so here is the hearings panel which has been holding hearings for the public since September this year and this bill is now saying: “You can actually do that legally.” Here is another mistake the bill is fixing—it allows the hearings panel to appoint an additional chairperson who can chair concurrent hearings when the chairperson is not available because they are chairing the other concurrent hearing. I suspect that the panel is already doing that and it would not have this mistake if the Government had not rushed through the original 2010 legislation determined to corporatise the whole Auckland region for the sake of trying to control those assets and had allowed the council to appoint the hearings commissioners. Here is another mistake that this bill is designed to fix. It will validate any hearings sessions that were held concurrently prior to this clarification—another mistake. It validates 28 February 2014 as the closing date for submissions on the unitary plan and it validates that any submission received between 14 January 2014 and 28 February 2014 is acceptable as if it had been received within the statutory time frame for submissions. Another important mistake that we are having to fix in this bill is the error in the drafting of the principal Act relating to procedural requirements for the filing of appeals on questions on law with the High Court.I do not have any problems with appointing additional hearings panel members because if we consider the work that they are having to undertake they are having to consider over 9000 submissions. I understand based on what is on the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel website those 9000 submissions are raising around 100000 points concerning possible changes to the plan. There is no doubt in my mind and in the minds of many of my colleagues that the unitary plan for Auckland city is an important plan but we said right at the outset that it was flawed in many ways. It was flawed because although this Government would talk the rhetoric about the principal subsidiarity in actual fact after some years of experience of the Auckland Council now we now know that the structure is designed exactly as we predicted in those earlier debates of 2010. The public will have difficulty being involved in the decision making because this hearings panel is a professional hearings panel of people who are well versed in the areas of unitary planning—and so it is a professional panel. When this Government says that this will give the public the opportunity of a hearing they already have those rights. This is predominantly about fixing the mistakes that this Government made in the original legislation.I want to say that when we went through the 2010 debate many many people in Auckland all said that the way that the Auckland super-city was structured with its independent council-controlled organisations would ultimately divide the community from fully participating in our democratic processes that we have become accustomed to and that we in New Zealand value. I would have hoped that this Government had learnt its lesson from the consistent mistakes it has made with the various amendments to the principal Acts of that period but it has not. I think—and I hope—that Aucklanders listening to this particular debate will recognise once and for all that that super-city structure was not set up to allow more democracy; it was set up predominantly for this Government to control that city and control its direction and control its assets in the same way it now appoints the hearings panel. I am hopeful that come the next local body election in 2016 we can get some good people on that council who can stand up and tell this Government where to go.