Wood MichaelMICHAEL WOOD (Labour—Mt Roskill): Thank you Madam Chair. Life is like a box of chocolates. I want to thank members of the committee for what I think has been a good and constructive and collegial debate during this committee stage and that really does carry on the engagement that was had on the select committee. I acknowledge the chair of the Finance and Expenditure Committee Deborah Russell. I had the enjoyable experience of chairing the committee prior to Ms Russell at the time when the committee was hearing submitters on this bill.There were many submissions that related to Part 2 of the bill. In my comments today I just want to focus on two issues. One is the issues that have been raised by Mr Bayly and the Opposition that are reflected in his Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 362. I acknowledge this is a good faith attempt to respond to an issue that Mr Bayly has been thinking about but I do actually think that in the course of the select committee considerations these issues were pretty thoroughly canvassed. They were canvassed in two ways. The first was that in discussions with officials members of the committee brought forward a range of ideas about the sort of more specific functions that we thought could have been identified in the bill and this was one of the ones that was mentioned. There was also reference to consideration of infrastructure in respect of the Treaty of Waitangi and other matters as well. The committee actually got very clear advice from officials that the way in which the bill has been written is actually largely quite permissive in that the Infrastructure Commission has pretty broad powers to assess matters in respect of infrastructure and to give views on them. So the views of officials that were provided to the committee were that adding in additional specific functions isn't actually particularly necessary. I hope to some degree that might assist Mr Bayly in terms of this issue. The other point that I would make is that submitter after submitter said to us that they didn't want duplication across the sector. I would say very clearly to Mr Bayly that if one is to read his SOP which essentially requests that The Commission may undertake a review of the procurement processes used by an entity listed in section 23(5)" that is exactly what the Office of the Auditor-General does and reports to us at this Parliament regularly on. In fact one of the current theme topics that the Office of the Auditor-General is focused on is the matter of procurement across central and local government and the select committee has received considerable advice—very very helpful advice—to the committee and to the Parliament from the Office of the Auditor-General. So I do believe that while the SOP is really well intentioned while I believe that it is appropriate that we have a good oversight of procurement practice because we're dealing with a lot of money—we need to make sure that the spend is good and there are a whole lot of issues associated with probity that go to procurement—we do already have a highly competent body with a very specific skill set that does this work. And (a) I don't think that duplicating that function is good practice and (b) quite frankly I think it would result in the Infrastructure Commission having to sort of grow a whole other big arm and bring in a whole lot of other specialist expertise that may not actually be available because it's highly specialist and wouldn't actually add anything to what we know given the work of the Office of Auditor-General. The second thing I just want to note in respect of Part 2 is the important change that did occur and is recommended in the select committee report and that is the bringing into the bill of the power to request information from local government. I think this is really important. I come out of local government as a number of other members in the House do and often the role of local government is overlooked by this House in my view. Local government in New Zealand oversees I think around about $150 billion to $160 billion of capital assets and it wouldn't have made any sense in my view for the commission to have not had the ability to request information about those assets in order to form a long-term view about how we plan out our infrastructure in New Zealand. We need much greater coordination between central government and local government if we're going to get the kind of long-term infrastructure that we need. And fundamentally that's what this bill is about. It's about planning for the long term not just the coming electoral cycle but the next 30 to 50 years. That's certainly the approach that this Government wants to take in the purpose of the commission that has been set up here.So I finish on those two points. I think that the Supplementary Order Paper is superfluous. I think it's very good that the select committee has recommended bringing in the ability to request information of local government in Part 2 of this bill. Thank you Madam Chair."