Williams ArenaARENA WILLIAMS (Labour—Manurewa): Thank you Mr Speaker. Well here we are at the third reading of this bill which is quite a use of the House's time. In Budget urgency we are discussing savings of about $400000 that this bill enables. It's a penny-pinching bill to implement a parking fine tax and the poor old Minister of Local Government had to shepherd it through. I mean come on! Here we go with the Minister of Local Government who has stood on the stump and told mayors and councils around the country that he will be on their side that he will sort out their infrastructure woes that he will sort out Local Water Done Well and that he will localise policy and not have central government telling them what to do.But we've caught him out. We've caught him with his hand in their pockets using Budget urgency and telling them on the day that he will change a 10 percent charge that is genuine cost recovery of the Crown to 14 percent but with no justification of that actually being a cost recovery. He's not out there telling mayors and councils that the actual costs have gone up and that the Crown needs to levy this for a good reason and that the rationale for this is that the Crown's cost is increasing. No—no no no. In fact his actual documents that he introduced alongside this bill paint this as a tax grab. So if we're calling it a tax grab let's call it the parking fine tax. Let's see it for what it is. This is a tax on local government that is designed to remove the funding that local ratepayers put towards their locally elected councils and put it back in the Government's coffers.This kind of legislation is poor legislation. It's poor legislation at the best of times but this is a situation where we have not had a select committee stage we have not had local councils consulted and we do not understand the regulatory impact of this on local ratepayers. This is the very worst kind of legislation. It's taxation with very little cause and it's suspiciously exactly the same amount in the forecast period as that Minister cost with a muck-up at select committee. He has cost his finance Minister $1.5 million in the forecast period and he's gone away and penny-pinched that out of his other budgets his Minister of Local Government budgets which he is responsible for and he did not take the opportunity to challenge any of that in the committee of the whole House. I put those questions to him twice and he has not told this House that that is wrong so we can only assume that this is a very clear message to the mayors and the councils of New Zealand that this Minister will do anything to move money around the budgets which he is responsible for. He will take from mayors he will take from councils he will take from local boards and he will take from parks from playgrounds from libraries. He will take from the services that people rely on in their local communities to pay for a muck-up in the Transport and Infrastructure Committee.Former mayor Andy Foster is sitting here loving this contribution because he knows exactly what happened in that select committee. It was a muck-up that cost the Minister suspiciously exactly what this bill saves him. So here we are—here we are—using the House's time not only using central government resources that cost probably more than $400000 which is saved in this financial year but not only that we're asking every council around the country to tell their legal departments Quickly work out whether we can comply with this. It's a very short time frame; we have to comply with it by 1 July. Please quickly go and give me some advice."Shout-out to all those lawyers around the country who are watching this because they need their governing bodies to be able to make decisions which are required under this change. I hope you know that this is to save $400000 for the central government. That's not $400000 of money that we're taking from some big corporate entity and that's not $400000 we're taking from another pot of money that we are levying to change behaviour; that is $400000 that is coming directly from local ratepayers straight into the central government coffers. Thanks to everyone who has made an effort today to understand this bill that has cost far more than the amount it has saved. This is the worst kind of legislation.Now I can get to my actual points. I've got five minutes left and I intend to use them all because the opposite members are so keen on this speech so I will start that. The first point that I have to make is that given that there were no answers at the committee stage I think it's still important for not only this House but for local government to understand what the real cost of the Crown administrating these fines is because if it was a full proportion 100 percent of the 10 percent levied by the Crown on top of these fines then we'd be in a situation in New Zealand where the taxpayer was subsidising local government to do this. We haven't had an answer to that but that is a situation that we should properly understand because it's not appropriate for central government to subsidise local government to levy fines in that way. It creates a perverse incentive for local governments to set fines in a way which doesn't result in the kind of policy outcomes we want.So we then need to understand that. Is the fines regime working for local government if that has been the case for a long time? What kind of perverse incentives has it created to levy or not levy parking fines and do we have a situation in our cities where parking fines are not being administrated in the way they should?Ingrid Leary: Invercargill.ARENA WILLIAMS: Well exactly—exactly. My colleague the honourable—not the honourable; I've given you a promotion. My colleague Ingrid Leary—Ingrid Leary: Dishonourable.ARENA WILLIAMS: —who is an excellent local MP—she's not dishonourable as she says—gave us a really good example about how when parking fines are levied ultra vires to the law because the law hasn't been used in the correct way we then have a real problem that affects real consumers in their everyday lives. These regulations need to be applied accurately and everyone needs to understand how they work.So we may need to better understand this and I'm sure members from around the House especially those Green members who have made contributions tonight would be interested in a select committee inquiry at the Transport and Infrastructure Committee about whether parking fines are being levied appropriately in our cities and whether they are creating the kinds of policy responses and the kinds of incentives and disincentives for people that we would want. But the Minister wasn't able to provide us with that information. We don't know. A useful conversation starter would be at the select committee stage.The next point I have is about the secondary legislation which sets these fines because at no point in the committee stage were we able to actually engage with the values of that. Is secondary legislation the appropriate way to set parking fines? Should councils have their parking fines set in primary legislation so that ordinary people like you and me can have our say because as they are currently set it's simply a technocratic exercise of being able to set them and really the reality there is that people don't review these things often. They're not something which is regularly kept up with and so the appropriateness of parking fines is not something which is subject to the democratically elected process.Perhaps they should be in the primary legislation. Perhaps you know—imagine that we had a local government Minister who was committed to localisation and actually was allowing councils to set their own fines. We have one very large council Auckland Council that is now the size of some Australian states that would be able to set its own fines and has the internal capacity to do that. Why hasn't the Minister come to this House and suggested an amendment like that which would actually make a difference and would actually be worth this House's time because we would be able to set the kinds of incentives that were useful for cities to decide where parking was appropriate and where it was not.This is a bill—and I've said it before: it's a penny-pinching bill that sets a parking fine tax but it was introduced in the context of a Budget which did nothing for local government. The Budget has no commitment for additional funding and financing tools for local government—nothing—and with only $40 million committed to the water reforms that money sits at central government. We have a Prime Minister who comes to this House almost every week telling us that he has succeeded in delivering local water with Auckland Council where Auckland Council set the agenda and came up with the solution themselves. Great work but how does that commitment allow local councils to lead that work around the country when it's sitting with central government? There is nothing for local government to actually empower local decision making here. There is no commitment from the local government Minister to actually resource the work that needs to be done and that is a missed opportunity.There is no national resilience plan in this Budget—it has been scrapped. There is no climate resilience funding—that has been scrapped. Those are initiatives which resulted in local programmes which otherwise funded local councils' work. That is the kind of Budget investment we need not $400k taken out of local councils and put straight back into the Government coffers because of an administrative error."