Salesa JennyLocal GovernmentCHAIRPERSON (Hon Jenny Salesa): Members our time now with the Minister for the Environment has ended. We now have the Minister of Local Government who is available for 45 minutes to respond to Minister's questions. IAN McKELVIE (Chairperson of the Governance and Administration Committee): Madam Chair thank you. It's a pleasure to take a short call as the chairman of the Governance and Administration Committee which of course deals with local government and almost all of the Minister's other interests as well including his racing interests—and there are of course races in the Far North today!Tāmati Coffey: Who's your pick?IAN McKELVIE: It's all over—it's all over.But I just want to very briefly talk about local government. Of course in my 20 years in local government and central government the relationship between Parliament and local government is somewhat fraught at times and somewhat tense. When you see the workload that local government's under at the moment and the reports that we have received as a select committee on some of these issues it's very significant. Of course we've got the three waters programme going at the moment and the Minister's budgeted I think some $200 million - odd in this respect but interestingly the budget that's been allocated to some of the projects that are applicable to local government is well in excess of $2 billion. So it's a very large funding area for the Government of the day this one right across the spectrum because there's also a whole lot of work going on in the post-structural reform. One of the interesting things for the select committee was the very large amounts of money spent on promoting some of these spends including the three waters programme and I guess trying to ensure people understood the potential for alteration in the local government area and the changes of the structure I suppose.So one of the things that interested us with respect to the service performance around the three waters programme was the establishment of the new water regulator in Taumata Arowai and of course that was an essential part of the whole structure of the three waters programme—or what's now whatever; it's got a new name now doesn't it? I guess we'll get another one before it's finished. But the interesting thing about that was that the regulator is a really solid—we agree with the formal regulator and I think it's very positive for the water management in New Zealand and certainly in the days before the regulator the Ministry of Health handled this and it certainly wasn't particularly well handled. So I think that's really interesting.I talked very briefly about the better-off support funding—$2.5 billion which has been allocated effectively to local government—I was going to say to do with likes but not quite—to manage its way through the programme with respect to the three waters implementation. It will be interesting to see where that gets to.I've talked very briefly about the review into the future of local government. There have been reviews going into the future of local government for all of my life and I suppose there will be for many years to come.The other issue that we've dealt with as well—at least with two bills—is improving Māori representation in local government. I think we worked our way through some interesting issues in that respect. I think it's resolved itself reasonably satisfactorily.The other issue I just very briefly want to raise with respect to the Minister of course is that we've done a lot of work with respect to the cyclone recovery programme and two bills have gone through recently. I realise I'm not part of this—but recently those two bills have gone through at select committee with respect to that and of course the Minister now has responsibility for that as well.So I think from the Governance and Administration Committee we had a really interesting time. I'm going to leave the rest of our comments to my spokesperson. But that's about all I need to say on this topic.