Hudson BrettBRETT HUDSON (National): Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. I rise in opposition to this the Local Government (Community Well-being) Amendment Bill in its third reading. We have opposed it all the way through.A real fundamental point of difference between the two sides of the House here: National has always believed and undertook reforms when we were in Government to ensure fiscal discipline within local government. We have a fundamental view that like central government local government should be required to deliver high-quality services to New Zealanders and ratepayers have a right to know and should be able to see whether or not their councils are spending money wisely and on services that matter to them.The implication of putting back and codifying these well-being items into law for local governments will simply have the effect of permitting very broad justifications for any manner of spending that local bodies might care to do. That tight fiscal discipline that was demanded of them will be relaxed. Now that's not surprising for this Government. We've seen it in a number of instances. We've seen it in Auckland with a cost blowout on a central rail loop because the Minister of Transport Phil Twyford took his eye off the ball and didn't keep the reins of control over what the contractors and managers of that programme were doing.We've seen other decisions that this Government has made which are raising costs of living for New Zealanders—and more so for beneficiaries than for the well off. We're seeing increased fuel excise charges and a regional fuel tax which increase the cost of living again—a regressive form of taxation which hurts the lower-income New Zealanders far more than the well off. This bill is going to be no different. It enables councils to have a far greater remit to spend on anything they might like with the most flimsy of justifications against some community well-beings. It will undo the good work that National put in place to demand and require fiscal discipline and the spending on necessary services so that the costs to ratepayers both residential and commercial can be kept at appropriate levels and that increases when they do happen are as small as they can be.Without question one of the impacts if this passes into law is that rates are going to rise for residents and for businesses across the country. Already here in Wellington we were facing residential rates rises of 7 percent for the latest one-year plan of council. Fortunately some of our councillors—sensible people—are rebelling. I have great faith that councillor Diane Calvert councillor Simon Woolf and a couple of others will make sure that those heinous levels of increases are not seen within Wellington.We had the regional council—they were going to increase rates to an average for Wellington City dwellers of 16 percent in the upcoming year. Again it was a rebellion not only of ratepayers but again our city councillors. Local city councillors came to the fore and helped to argue that for us to get it back down there. My contention is that this bill will make it easier for councils and councillors to do that in the future. Businesses and our local residential ratepayers will end up paying for that: simply increasing their cost of living making life tougher making it harder for them to make ends meet. We should instead be going the other way. We should be making sure that the fiscal disciplines that we have put in place are going to remain and be well monitored.On top of that this bill also makes changes to development contributions. It not only allows for other things which aren't inherently related to that development to be charged within the development contributions such as swimming pools and libraries but also it permits the development contributions to be levied on commercial enterprises that have no connection at all to the facilities that those contributions will then be used to pay for. So it will happen. And what happens when businesses have their costs increased—whether by local government or central government—what happens?Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi: Passed on.BRETT HUDSON: That's right. The costs of their services or goods will rise and ultimately it will be New Zealand ratepayers New Zealand households that wear those costs. That is what this bill will deliver. On the face it talks about niceties and well-beings but at the heart of it what it delivers is higher costs for New Zealand households in an environment where the economy's already softening where job growth has all but stalled where the cost of living is rising—and as I've said is rising faster for beneficiaries than for the well off—and where people are already getting hit with higher tax increases which again disadvantage lower-income New Zealanders. This is a bad idea and we do not support the bill.