Dyson Ruth: Environment Canterbury (Democracy Restoration) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Dyson Ruth: Environment Canterbury (Democracy Restoration) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 04 April 2012. Volume:679;Page:1715. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills) 
: 
 Can I first of all acknowledge and thank all the members who have contributed and obviously those who have indicated their party’s support for my bill the Environment Canterbury (Democracy Restoration) Amendment Bill which calls for the restoration of democracy in Canterbury. As I said at the beginning it is not a big ask. It is what every other person every other citizen in the rest of our country has and that is the ability to vote in an open election for the candidate of their choice to run their local authority—in this case Environment Canterbury our regional council. We lost that right to vote in March 2010. 
My colleague Lianne Dalziel explained the deception that had been brought into this House very clearly. The report that was presented to the Government by the Hon Wyatt Creech was clearly a report of two halves. One half was written by Wyatt Creech and had a very open style about it. It contained the concerns the recommendations and his response to the recommendations. He indicated his high level of satisfaction with the undertakings and work that Environment Canterbury had done in order to address some of the report’s concerns. The second part was a predetermined section written to achieve what the Government wanted and that was to get rid of Environment Canterbury which was blocking what the Prime Minister wanted and that was wholesale irrigation in parts of Canterbury where that irrigation is very contentious. 
I deeply regret the fact that people like John Hayes who is from Wairarapa thought it was OK to come into this House and say what Canterbury needs. He is not from Canterbury and it is not up to him to determine what we need. It is not up to the rest of the members of the Government to determine what we need. We have the right to vote for whom we want whether people like it or not. That is what happens in a democracy. Some people win. Some people lose.  
Hon Christopher Finlayson 
: She’s not from Canterbury. She’s from Kilbirnie. 
Hon RUTH DYSON 
: We do not always like the outcomes; we just like the process of democracy. Mr Finlayson can chip away but I am sure that he as Attorney-General would value more than anyone the precious gift we have in New Zealand of democracy. The National Government intervened just over 2 years ago to take away that right to vote. That is all that my bill does; it asks Parliament to restore Cantabrians’ right to vote for their regional council. 
I want to acknowledge the member for Christchurch Central at the time Brendon Burns my former colleague and long-time friend and future friend who introduced this bill originally. He put it in the ballot and he was fortunate enough to have it drawn out but he did not win the election so the bill has been transferred to my name. 
I want to acknowledge the councillors who worked so hard as elected representatives despite the political differences I had with some of them and the political affiliations I shared with others. They actually prepared the Canterbury Water Management Strategy which the National members were praising Margaret Bazley for introducing. Actually I went to several briefings about the Canterbury Water Management Strategy and the structure and the process for a shared view on water management in Canterbury long before Nick Smith decided to sack the council. Margaret Bazley has more integrity than to claim credit for that. If she was in this House she would say that what John Hayes Jacqui Dean and Nicky Wagner said was not correct. I know her to be a woman of very high integrity. She would have corrected them because she was not responsible for that. That work was undertaken by elected representatives and the chief executive and staff at the time. 
When this outrageous breach of our democratic right was undertaken thousands and thousands of Cantabrians protested on the streets. We erected the cairn of stones from the Waimakariri River that my colleague Rino Tirakatene referred to earlier. It is just in front of the cathedral. Not much else has survived around that neck of the woods. Most of it is in rubble. But we put there a cairn of rocks and we said at the time that those rocks will stay in that place until Cantabrians have their right to a democratic vote restored. Through our 10000 or more earthquakes that cairn of rocks has stood strong. That should be a bit of a message to this House: even mother Nature cannot destroy our passion and desire to have our democratic right to vote for our regional councillors restored. We now know that Gerry Brownlee’s next plot is to strip some core functions from the Christchurch City Council and again I say that is not what we need in Canterbury. What we need is the support of Parliament to get on with the job which we try to do to our best ability but do not always achieve. Certainly at the very minimum we need to have our right to have our vote for our regional council restored.