Jones Shane: Local Government (Auckland Council) Bill — Second Reading Procedure In Committee 
Jones Shane: Local Government (Auckland Council) Bill — Second Reading Procedure In Committee 
[Volume:657;Page:6345] 
Hon SHANE JONES (Labour) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Assistant Speaker. Before we turn to the body of the Local Government (Auckland Council) Bill 2009 it is right and proper that we should acknowledge the officials who have worked on the preparation of advice and serviced the Auckland Governance Legislation Committee. In much of what a committee has to do in many regards it takes it on trust that the quality of the work will reflect not only the policy of the prevailing Government but also the officials bringing professional skills to the task. So let me say that first. 
I now turn to the very sad face that Auckland will show going into the future. In many respects that has been driven by the most unfortunate development of a sense of conceit by the Minister of Local Government. The Minister of Local Government has come to this task wanting to drive an agenda of regulatory reform. That is not in itself a bad thing; all politicians are entitled to bring their agendas to this House. But it does became a very tawdry affair when the rights of the people who in this case comprise the population of Auckland are being summarily dismissed and trampled upon. That is why although we support the reform of our largest city’s governance arrangements we do not support this bill. This bill has been driven in such a way that the interests of Aucklanders have been put in a subservient position to the agenda of this man Mr Hide. 
The Government members have sort of made the bill into a bit of drollery as they have gone along in the whimsical sense of Mr Carter who said they would get out there put their gumboots on and roll their sleeves up. But hold on a minute he said he had made up his mind when he was having his first cup of tea that the Rodney boundary would be over here. Then he said taihoa he had been up to Omaha with his mate the Prime Minister his boss and found out that everyone who lived in Omaha had a flash house and did not want the kumara gardeners of Kaipara to run their lives. Then he blamed the select committee as though its members were the authors of this misfortune and this bias. Fortunately the Prime Minister has corrected Mr Carter’s agenda of drawing a line in the sand. We are not entirely sure why the first line was drawn where it fell. We do know however that the very unprofessional outburst by the Associate Minister of Local Government Mr Carter who knows better than to do that—he is one of the longest-serving members of this House—and who has come up with such a made-up unprofessional result really reflects the way in which the entire process regarding Auckland’s governance has gone. 
This process was started when the previous Labour Government was in power. We recognised that there were deficiencies in the governance arrangements for Tamaki-makau-rau Auckland. We knew that so we went ahead and set up a royal commission costing $5 million $6 million or $7 million and appointed a notable jurist Judge Salmon to it. He is extremely disappointed that the constitutional importance that a royal commission has and the quality of its work have been slapped down in order to meet the petty short-term political imperatives of this Government. But unfortunately given the quality of the politics that surrounds this issue at the moment Aucklanders are left with that result. 
After an enormous amount of work had taken place within the royal commission the report arrived here and what happened then? Without the Minister of Local Government even opening the first page of the report he threw out first the notion of Maori seats—and we will have a bit to say about that during this debate. 
Hon Tau Henare 
: I bet you will. 
Phil Twyford 
: Will you Tau? 
Hon Tau Henare 
: Absolutely. 
Hon SHANE JONES 
: Secondly he then destroyed the model of five or six seats. Now I hear from my Ngati Hine kinsman there that he will have a lot to say about the Maori seats. I look forward to that. He is entitled as a list member who lives in Auckland to have a view on that. But the problem that Aucklanders have is that depending on the audience he changes his view. Tau Henare is a man who does not take wise counsel; he takes wide counsel. He uses a loud voice because when he speaks there is a density to be penetrated that is greater than the average MP’s powers of comprehension. So we look forward to hearing more from him. But let us come back to how the royal commission carried out its work with integrity good faith and goodwill and how its report was taken before the citizens of New Zealand’s largest city and basically destroyed as a consequence of the narrow agenda of Mr Hide. Anyhow let us carry on. 
After that took place we had the dreadful episode of the Local Government (Auckland Reorganisation) Bill being thrust upon the House and rushed through without any consultation with any neighbourhood suburb or anyone unless it was with the personal friends of those who were the architects of the ideas and text of that bill. The entirety of South Auckland and west Auckland were written out of the script. We soldiered on through that and took a great deal of credit from the great efforts that members on this side of the House made to make this Minister and his colleagues in the National Government accountable. Of course they lost their way during the debate on that bill until they were able to gain access to a constitutional expert at about 1 o’clock in the morning who pointed out to the Minister Mr Rodney Hide how he could overcome the difficulties that we were showing them as a consequence of doing our job as honourable parliamentarians. The National members tugged at some sort of constitutional expert who then consulted the son of the kumara growers of Kaipara Mr John Carter. Then they changed the name of that bill and gave it a Maori name—the Local Government (Tamaki Makaurau Reorganisation) Bill—despite the fact that it was an anti-Maori bill and they squeaked home changing very little in the bill. They were afraid to consult on that bill and to give an account of their stewardship in relation to the royal commission. 
After the Local Government (Auckland Council) Bill the second bill on Auckland’s governance was served on this House we hard-working toiling Labour parliamentarians in the spirit of goodwill toiled away and created a product that unfortunately shows the bias of the Government and not the goodwill of the House. As a part of doing that work we created a small subcommittee. It is important that we enter these episodes on the record of the House. We created a small subcommittee that comprised Simon Bridges Shane Jones Hone Harawira and Metiria Turei chaired by Tau Henare. The purpose of that subcommittee was to go on to the marae around Auckland and hear from the tangata whenua and the broader Maori community. Our well-proportioned but well-behaved subcommittee chair could not even deliver a report to his own caucus and back to the whanau who had made an attempt—a wasted attempt unfortunately—to come and address us about their concerns. Those concerns went from the hopes of rangatahi right through to the anxieties of senior citizens from the Maori community. We were glad to use our time in such a way that those people had their democratic right to state their piece. 
What those people did not know was that Mr Hide wanted to demonstrate to the Maori Party how impotent it is on matters of power and commerce in our largest city. He succeeded in doing that. Maori Party members came up with such a complicated model as to how they would reflect Maori representation in Tamaki-makau-rau that they gave Mr Hide who is a wily politician when it comes to matters of racial discord and the Prime Minister a brilliant opportunity to write Maori out of the script. The Maori Party members realise their egregious error in not backing the royal commission. Before they read even the executive summary of its report let alone the conclusions they had described the report as being timid and not empowering enough. They mistakenly thought that the power of their relationship with the major party of the Government would be ballast enough to create a better result than the royal commission had recommended. They failed and they tried to blame Tau Henare and they rightly blamed Rodney Hide. But Mr Hide knows that his constituency is anti-Maori. His constituency is made up of people who want to enlarge the size of the private stake in Auckland governance not the public civic stake. 
This issue really was an amazing lesson for the Maori Party on how not to push an agenda in politics. Of course the model that the Maori Party members pushed was so complicated and so favoured mana whenua that if it was used for the election of MPs the Minister of Maori Affairs Pita Sharples would never have been elected in the Tamaki Makaurau electorate. That is why this bill is a very tawdry affair. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Rick Barker) 
: I am now advised that the Green Party wishes to cut its 10 minutes of speaking time into two 5-minute slots.