SpeechJAMI-LEE ROSS (Botany): Thank you Madam Speaker. I've been wanting to give this speech about the Auckland Regional Amenities Funding Board and the Act for about 10 years. I saw this was on when I was a sitting in my office so I thought I'd come down and have a small speech on it. I'm going to swim against the tide. I know that that's not like me to not conform with what others in the House are doing but I'm going to do this on this particular speech. See I listened to the speech from Michael Wood. He gave a good one. He gave good background around the Act. It has its genesis back in the mid-2000s when these amenities used to front up at every city council and every district council around Auckland and beg cap in hand for money from the councils. I was on the Manukau City Council for the six years prior to amalgamation and it's fair to say we were pretty stingy. We all thought Well the Auckland City Council's going to fund the bulk of it. They always have; they always will." So we were pretty careful with how much we would give the particular amenities. In the dying days of the Helen Clark Labour Government—you may remember it Madam Speaker—Judith Tizard came up with the idea of having a piece of legislation to force all the other councils in Auckland to fund these amenities. It was probably a good idea at the time because these amenities were struggling for funding. The Auckland City Council and Auckland ratepayers were having to front up and fund the bulk of them when actually these amenities serviced the whole of Auckland. So 2008 comes along. The Auckland Regional Amenities Funding Act is put in place. The other councils of which I was a member we kicked and screamed and we hated it because we didn't like Parliament telling us that we had to fund something that we didn't want to. And there were all these mechanisms put in place. There was a funding board and there was an electoral college and the councils had no choice about how much they would fund. They would just be told what the funding was going to be and if there was an issue there was arbitration but we never went through that because what was the point? In fact no actually I remember Peter Salmon acted as an arbitrator once because we did disagree as an electoral college on how much the amenities should be funded. Even though we had this legislation we were still too stingy with how much we wanted to fund and so it ended up going to arbitration. We probably spent you know many many tens of thousands of dollars on the arbitrator only to end up in exactly the same position. But then 2010 came along and the Auckland Council was formed and it removed all of the city and district councils that sat in Auckland. I thought to myself at the time that it was going to remove the need for this Regional Amenities Funding Board because rather than having multiple layers between the council and the amenities there's not going to be those multiple layers needed any more because the amenities could simply front up straight to the Auckland Council. But what did Parliament do? It was a change of Government by that point. Rodney Hide—I would have thought the man who is against red tape and against bureaucracy would have proposed that this funding board be abolished but he didn't. The Auckland Council was created. The amenities had the ability to speak directly to the funder but Parliament decided to keep the funding board in place. The funding board does nothing except move money from the council through to the amenities. All it does is meet a couple of times a year to hear how much the amenities want and then it decides to tell the council how much they have to fund. There's still the arbitration process if the council disagrees but the people who make the decisions about how much Aucklanders should be rated don't get to decide how much money goes to these amenities because Parliament still says there has to be a law in place because Parliament doesn't trust the Auckland Council on how much it should fund these important amenities. Now the Auckland festival the Philharmonia the rescue helicopter the theatre company—they're important for Auckland but we should be trusting the council to fund them directly. We don't need this board any more. There is no need for the board to be in place. There's no need for Parliament to say: Auckland Council you must fund an amount of money.Now I'm sure this amendment bill we have right now is going to make it easy. It's going to remove some of the funding requirements—no make it easier for the amenities by removing some of the red tape that's in place. They don't have to prepare two sets of statements in line with two different accounting practices. But the easier solution to solve their problem would have been just to repeal the Act entirely and get rid of the funding board. Those members there there's 10 of them—there's district councils around the country with far bigger budgets with fewer members. There's 10 members on this funding board. They get paid between $16000 and $30000 a year to do nothing but tell the council how much money the council should fund the amenities. It's ridiculous and it's unnecessary. So I say to the House yes this legislation does do something good and I suppose I should praise in obligatory fashion Parmjeet Parmar for bringing this bill to the House—good on you Parmjeet Parmar—but there's no need for this legislation. We should be abolishing the funding board and saying "Thanks for your service for 10 years or 12 years. You didn't really need to do much for the last 10." but Parliament does still have this piece of legislation in place. The previous councils weren't funding them properly and good on Parliament for doing the right thing at the time but there's no need any more for this funding bill. There's no need any more for the board to sit there and do nothing but shuffle money and drag out $350000 in admin costs just for the privilege of sitting there.I know there'll be passionate people I know they will care deeply about the amenities but the Auckland councillors that fund them will care about those amenities too. So I suggest these amenities which could quite easily front up directly to the council and ask for the money could do so without having the middleman of the funding board in place. The nice idea of Judith Tizard was a nice idea at the time but it's now unnecessary. I will support the bill because it does do something good to make it easier for the amenities but we don't need this bureaucracy. As a former city councillor who didn't entirely like the fact that we were forced through this funding board to pay money to the amenities when we could have made our own decisions I still harbour some of those grievances and I wanted to express them here in this House. They're no longer necessary and we should just be repealing the Act in its entirety."