Twyford Phil: Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
Twyford Phil: Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
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PHIL TWYFORD (Labour) 
: 
 Labour members oppose the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill with every bone in our bodies. The bill claims that it will increase the transparency and accountability of local government. In fact it will do the opposite. Like all of the local government bills the Minister of Local Government has brought to the House in the last 2 years it will undermine our public institutions and undermine our democratic process. 
We have talked about water privatisation a lot and no matter how much screeching we hear from the Government backbenchers about whether this bill allows in fact water privatisation New Zealanders will not be fooled by the blatant lack of transparency that the Minister of Local Government has displayed in bringing the bill to the House. The bill will allow long-term contracts of up to 35 years for private sector operations to control our water supply. Section 137(4)(d) in clause 32 explicitly allows the sale of pre-existing water infrastructure as part of those long-term contracts. It is not as the Associate Minister tried to argue this morning simply something that will give more options to cash-strapped small rural councils. This bill will allow the billion-dollar water monopoly set up under Rodney Hide’s super-city in Auckland to be contracted out to United Water for periods of up to 35 years including the private ownership of pre-existing water infrastructure. 
The ratepayers and the citizens of Auckland could be given no say under this bill. At the same time as it allows water infrastructure to be sold to private sector interests it also does away with the provisions in our local government law that would guarantee citizens the right to be consulted before their assets and their services are either corporatised or contracted out. The combination of those two things will imperil our public ownership or ratepayer-owned assets and resources. We are talking about water specifically but the same principle applies to all sorts of other strategic assets. Does anybody other than the deluded members opposite— 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Eric Roy) 
: Order! 
PHIL TWYFORD 
: —believe seriously that the privatisation of our water supply will not result in the inevitable price hikes that people have seen that have accompanied other botched privatisation initiatives that we have seen over the last few years? We know that if we hand over to the private sector a natural monopoly like water supply it will almost inevitably end up in foreign hands. The guaranteed profits that will flow from private ownership of a natural monopoly will flow overseas. That money will go out of the pockets of New Zealand ratepayers and householders and straight into the pockets of overseas-owned companies. Does anybody believe that if we hand over resources of this scale—a billion-dollar water monopoly in Auckland—to the private sector it will not result in huge corporate salaries further gouging the pockets of the ratepayer? This is not a good idea. 
I remind members opposite that the most recent independent opinion polls on this issue have shown that 80 percent of New Zealanders are opposed to any privatisation of our water system. It is a matter of choice as the Minister pointed out. When New Zealanders go to the polls next year they will be mindful of what the Minister did to Auckland local government they will be mindful of what the Hon Nick Smith did to democracy in Canterbury and they will be mindful of this bill opening up their municipal water supply to privatisation and they will make a choice at the polls. This Government is gutting our local government public institutions and the democratic process and those two things go hand in hand. They are taking the voice away from ordinary people and they are opening the door to private control and ownership of assets and resources that New Zealanders have built up over generations through their rates. New Zealanders will not forget that. 
There are other obnoxious aspects to this bill that Labour members have opposed steadfastly throughout this whole process. One of them is the idea of core services that this Minister whose party currently commands about 2 percent in the polls is able to impose— 
Hon Clayton Cosgrove 
: Not that much. 
PHIL TWYFORD 
: Is it not 2 percent? He is able to impose an ideological and arbitrary list of core services that he defines as core services. Nobody else does. Hardly a soul turned up at the Local Government and Environment Committee to say that it is a good idea; 98 percent of the submitters who came along said it is a lousy idea. They said that we should either put their issues and services in the list or not have it at all. The implications of what that list could mean is that a rural community for example that wants to provide free premises for a general practitioner service so that it can have a doctor in its rural community could be vulnerable to claims through either the annual planning process or normal political debate that it is not a core service— 
Moana Mackey 
: Or a legal challenge. 
PHIL TWYFORD 
: —or in fact a legal challenge—and therefore it should not be engaging in it. This idea tilts the playing field away from the democratic process that allows citizens to decide in conjunction with their elected representatives what constitutes a core service. 
This bill also makes a number of cuts to the obligations currently on the councils to consult their citizens. It allows the councils to contract out public services to the private sector. It allows them to corporatise their assets and operations by shifting them to council-owned companies without consulting their citizens. That is a breach of people’s fundamental democratic rights. It constrains the whole process of setting community outcomes setting the high-level goals that go into our councils’ long-term plans. Under Rodney Hide’s bill a council could make up the community outcomes out of thin air or out of the last thing someone said to one of its members on the street or in the supermarket. The councils are not required to consult the community in setting those outcomes. 
The bill also restricts the community outcomes unduly by requiring that they can only be things that the council itself can deliver on. Many of the most pressing issues for local communities such as crime safety alcohol and pokies—any number of those issues—cannot be made a community outcome because the councils do not have access to all the levers to solve those problems. That is yet another example of this Government and this Minister taking democratic rights away from New Zealanders. 
They have gutted the consultation process for decision making about many of the important things that go into the annual plan. Currently there is a four-stage process that we have admitted was overdue for streamlining and could have easily been reduced down but this Government has thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Now there is no principle-based mechanism that requires consultation on these important decisions. I predict that many of the Government’s natural supporters and voters in leafy suburbs up and down this country who are the people who are most demanding of their local authorities will blame the National Government for taking away their democratic rights. 
We have seen three bits of legislation that imposed an unpopular Rodney Hide - inspired super-city on our country’s biggest city. Most of that legislation was pushed through this House under urgency. We saw the sacking of Environment Canterbury by the Hon Nick Smith which was again done under urgency. This bill is the third leg of the treble. It guts our local government legislation and it hands over our resources to privatisation and corporatisation. That is the legacy of the Minister of Local Government who set out with such grand aspirations to be the “Minister of Ratepayers”. This is what he has done: he has weakened and undermined our public institutions and taken away the voice of New Zealanders over things that they justifiably have a right to a say on and to be consulted on. He comes to this House trumpeting transparency and accountability but everything about the way that he has implemented this legislation and implemented his policies speaks of the opposite. It is not transparency and accountability; it is the opposite. The public of New Zealand will hold him and this Government accountable for it.