Roy Eric: Local Government Law Reform Bill — In Committee 
Roy Eric: Local Government Law Reform Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:632;Page:3822] 
ERIC ROY (National—Invercargill) 
: 
 I will take a short call on Part 4. Some points have been made by our team and I pretty much concur with all of them. Mark Blumsky made the point that inside the bill are some things we will go for and some bits we will not go for. Those bits and some of the things we are for have been outlined by the previous three National speakers. I can look as a businessman at clause 32 regarding the removal of the prohibition on a local authority from borrowing foreign currency. An authority might be going to buy a container crane that comes from Germany or somewhere and want to take a forward position. It seems fine to me that we allow those sorts of provisions. So there are bits and pieces in this part that look OK. 
But I want to pick up a theme and I would like the Minister in the chair Mark Burton to respond to it. I want to explain to him the position I was put in last week when I met with my local mayors and chairs which I do on a reasonably regular basis. We talked about the long-term council community plans. Four local authorities were represented and some said that the plan gave them a bit of focus. They said that the plans were quite expensive and that they did not agree with some of the decisions made about the audit process but that the plans gave them some focus. I have to say that that was not the majority decision. There was a general view that the plans cost a lot and that some bits just do not make sense. For example the representatives asked how they could value stuff—they said they could not look forward and say where some of the costs would go so they got into trouble with the audit process. 
The Invercargill City Council said that its plan had cost one point something million dollars that it had still not got through the process and that the plan had not added anything. It said it did not hold assets and that it just wanted to get on and do the job. So there was a mixture of views. But I say to the Minister that the question put to me was why we in Parliament have a distinctly different system from that in local government. When we read Part 4 we see that the word that comes up all the way through is “consult”—“consult” here and “consult” there. There is a high level of consultation on a long-term council community plan. The questions directed to me were why we in Parliament do not have to consult like local authorities do and why we are using local authorities like guinea pigs when they have to do all this consulting and we just do what we want to do. They said that we have a system whereby when we get into Parliament we are the winners for 3 years and if people do not like it they can have a go in 3 years. But local authorities are not allowed to do that. Members of Parliament head off to Wellington for 4 days a week or whatever but local authority members cannot even buy bread or milk without facing people on a daily basis. So members of local authorities are accountable on a daily basis. They cannot get away with anything that would cause the public to lose understanding of where they are going. 
The question was why elected members of Parliament do not undertake the same consultation process. Local authority members made those very points. Why do members of Parliament not have a consultation process about the size of the surplus we have? Why do members of Parliament not have a consultation process about whether we should have tax cuts? Why do members of Parliament or the Government not have a consultation process about the Kyoto Protocol the free-trade agreement with China or any of those other things that they just go and do? Why are there two systems? Why does the Government have experiments on local government that it is not prepared to do itself? 
I thought that those were very pertinent questions and I look forward to the Minister’s response to explain why it is that the Government puts layer after layer of consultation requirements on to local government when essentially people are elected with the same motivation to do the right thing for their patch and to manage their affairs in the way that they are required to do. Yet we have loaded up an extraordinarily expensive process of consultation consultation consultation. I look forward to the Minister’s response. 
The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 43 in the name of the Hon Mark Burton to Part 4 be agreed to.