McAnulty KieranHon EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Thank you Madam Chair. Just sticking with regional representative groups. The primary legislation provides for 50000 people and there's a share in the entity based on that. ACT—Simon Court—is putting up Supplementary Order Paper 400 which provides for every territorial authority (TA) owner to appoint one representative for every 50000 people.Minister the select committee amended the bill to ensure—I think in clause 10—that every entity's regional representative group must include at least 1 representative from each territorial authority owner in the entity's service area." providing that flexibility to better represent the populations particularly in the metropolitan councils by having more than one representative on the regional representative group.I totally agree with the Minister that members of local authorities are competent and representative of their communities so certainly TAs can have the discussion about how many representatives they should have. But there would be some value I think in making it explicit that the representation should be proportionate to the population because that would really underline the democratic representation. So why is the Minister so opposed to having an explicit provision in the bill that relates representation back to the population of each TA area? First question.The other issue is around the establishment dates in new section 6A in clause 5 which are being done by Orders in Council. When the Governance and Administration Committee considered submissions we had some benefit of having representatives from the transition unit provide a bit of the operational context. But I did not get a clear impression or clear information about the whole issue of stormwater.We all know that the transfer of the green spaces in cities which provide opportunities for stormwater to seep into aquifers to slow the run-off of stormwater after rain—those are managed by councils. They're a key part of place-making in our cities and towns. The transfer of those assets—which have got a mixed function for recreation often as well as for being part of the stormwater system—will be quite complex.Could the Minister provide some advice in terms of the Order in Council in setting the start date for the entities of how this process of identifying the stormwater assets which will be transferred and those which will stay with councils is going? Because of the complexity of legal title and the like there is that a key factor in determining what the go-live dates will be that will be making use of those provisions in new section 6A in clause 5 of the bill?Hon KIERAN McANULTY (Minister of Local Government): I thank the member for her questions. To answer the final question: yes and that's why it's allowed for a range of dates for these entities to go live and why we haven't set a firm date in the legislation leaving it up to Orders in Council. We have an indicative date for each entity at the moment; that's as a result of consultation with each council within the proposed entities to get a gauge to whether they want to go early. Some councils in the entities do for their own reasons in part because of the debt that they've got sitting on their books that would be removed and taken on by the entity. But obviously we need to be convinced and satisfied that they are in a position to be able to do that and that includes stormwater. We've already recognised when we discussed this previously around the complexity of stormwater—we certainly do recognise that.In regards to the member's comments around proportionality the reason why I am not able to support that proposal is because we've had advice that if it gets to the point where one single council has the majority over the other councils by itself in the regional representative group we won't have balance sheet separation.So if we went to a true proportional model then the Auckland-Northland entity won't be able to reach balance sheet separation and will miss those gains. But what entities are able to do through their constitutions is to look at the number of reps per council and decide whether some councils might warrant an additional rep. We can all think of regions where there's one dominant urban council surrounded by smaller rural councils. The flip side of that is true too; we don't want to make sure that the opportunity for finally these small rural councils—large in geography small in population—facing massive liabilities miss out on the opportunity to ensure that the rural voice is heard. Because there is a real concern under the original proposal that the needs of the large urban centres would always be met over those of rural areas.So if an employer might be looking to employ 50 people going to a rural area that's massive; going to a large city it wouldn't even bat an eyelid. But if all the investment for development was only going to the cities they would miss out on a good opportunity there. So we've got to get that balance and we believe we've got it."