Sage Eugenie: Environment Canterbury (Transitional Governance Arrangements) Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Environment Canterbury (Transitional Governance Arrangements) Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 05 April 2016. Volume:712;Page:10159. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Chair. This bill the Environment Canterbury (Transitional Governance Arrangements) Bill is an abominable bill and the Green Party will continue to strongly oppose it. One of the first things that a Green Party in Government next year would do is repeal the bill and restore a fully elected regional council to Canterbury.When the Minister in the chair the Hon Nick Smith stands up to speak on the bill I am sure we will hear a lot of cant and misinformation about the state of Environment Canterbury prior to his axing the regional councillors. He did it again in question time today. He talked about there being no red zones. Well Minister there were red zones and the elected regional council was in the process of reviewing the resource consents—the allocation of water takes from groundwater in those zones. Minister there was already a Canterbury Water Management Strategy because it had been developed by elected councillors and the strategy finalised before you axed them. There was already a natural resources regional plan which although not operative was in a proposed state and was picked up by the appointed commissioners a couple of months after they were appointed.I would like to explore in Part 1 the relationship between the Local Government Act and the bill because clause 7 talks about the relationship between the Local Electoral Act and the Resource Management Act and this bill. The purpose of the Local Government Act is to provide for democratic and effective local government. Democratic local government is an important check on the power of the executive. It is a legitimate expectation in our society that we should be able to elect people at the local and regional levels to represent us to make decisions about the rates that we pay and how those rates are spent. There is $80 million - odd of rates in Environment Canterbury. But the second-class model that this bill provides with seven elected councillors and six appointed members means that nearly half of the people around the table will not be accountable to Cantabrians for the decisions they are making about the spending of taxes in the form of rates. That is not democratic.The purpose in this bill is not about improving democracy; it is mechanistic. It continues to deprive Cantabrians of a fully elected council. As one submitter John Summers said it substitutes and provides a cheap fairground consolation prize with this notion of being able to elect only seven councillors. As Mr Summers said history shows that power is addictive not readily relinquished. The only bill we should be talking about today should be complete democracy not this watered-down version that the Government is bringing to us because by removing that fully elected council we are removing a check on the power of central government.Many submitters commented on this. The Law Society noted that it removed that underlying relationship between the citizen and the State at the local level by removing that accountability to ratepayers. Associate Professor Bronwyn Hayward the head of the department of political science and international relations at the University of Canterbury commented in her submission that this bill was implementing a form of governance that Canterbury University teaches students about in regard to developing economies where governance is at risk of corruption gerrymandering and undue influence on the democratic process.This National Government should be ashamed that it is putting in place a regime in Canterbury that applies absolutely nowhere else in New Zealand. Even in Kaipara where you had a $50 million to $60 million blowout in spending by the Kaipara District Council and commissioners being appointed—this year citizens in Kaipara will get the chance to elect their local council. Why do we have this mixed model the second-class democracy that the Government is imposing on the region? Well it is because of water—the fact that 60 percent of the water allocated for irrigation in New Zealand is used in Canterbury. This very partisan bill is enabling the Government to keep its fingers in the till and ensure that water management plans in Canterbury are amenable to irrigators because of course it was Irrigation New Zealand that went crying to Government in 2010 when an elected council sought to improve the flow.