Mackey Moana: Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Mackey Moana: Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 27 November 2012. Volume:686;Page:6818. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
MOANA MACKEY (Labour) 
: 
 I think nowhere is it more clear than in Part 2 of the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill how rotten and how inadequate this piece of legislation is. Part 2 deals with the transitional provisions relating to reorganisation proposals. As other members have pointed out it is how we carry out the reorganisation of local government that is critically important yet Part 2 is about five or six sentences long. That is all that is in Part 2 of this bill. The Local Government and Environment Committee wanted to know some of the detail about what actually would be required when the transitional provisions were released. We were given a little bit of information. It is extraordinary that Local Government New Zealand was not even consulted on this particular aspect of the legislation until the select committee demanded that its input be taken into account. 
In the debate on Part 1 I thought a couple of the interjections from the Hon Dr Nick Smith who is soon to return to the portfolio of Minister of Local Government were interesting. When someone was making comments about Local Government New Zealand he called out that they were self-serving and nothing more than a union. Of course coming from the National Party calling someone a union is the ultimate kind of denigration that you could possibly come up with. We do not think it is quite the insult that obviously the Hon Dr Nick Smith thinks that it is but the reality is that Local Government New Zealand is not a union. It is not self-serving. It is the mayors and councillors around this country who are democratically elected to represent their communities. They know far better what is needed on the ground in terms of local government legislation than the Hon Dr Nick Smith does or indeed any member of this House. They come together as a group to discuss issues of importance to local government. They are there as a resource for parliamentarians to use when considering changes to local government legislation. They are not self-serving; they know what they are talking about. They are the people at the coalface everyday doing the stuff that the Hon Dr Nick Smith only talks about. We do not think they are self-serving on this side of the House; we think they should be listened to. It is interesting that a number of them are National Party members particularly in the provinces. 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: The good ones. 
MOANA MACKEY 
: Nick Smith says “The good ones.” Well whether they are good bad or indifferent they are not happy with you Dr Smith—not happy at all. In fact I have a number of provincial mayors in the area I live in who I know are National Party supporters and who are furious with this legislation. They are furious that the Minister is refusing to listen especially on issues around reorganisation and how those are transitioned through because there are no guidelines. You do not even have to show that there is going to be a positive benefit for the communities involved for reorganisation to go ahead. 
We know that the Hon Dr Nick Smith does not like local government democracy. He said that he stopped the elections for Environment Canterbury the regional council in Christchurch because he was worried about the outcome such is the nature of democracy such is the nature of having a democratic process where the people instead of the Minister of Local Government get to choose who represents them on their local council. It might be annoying for a Government sometimes that it does not get the people it had hoped the good people of Canterbury would elect but that is just the reality of democracy unfortunately and it should not be undermined in the way that it is being undermined in Part 2 of this legislation. As my colleague Annette King pointed out when she discussed her proposed amendment to clause 27 surely it is not too much to ask that when local government reform is happening it must comply with a few basic principles one being that it must be evidence-based. We have now had three Ministers in the chair who have all sat there like dried arrangements and not even looked up from their papers. I do not know whether they even know what bill we are discussing but it would be nice to actually have some input from a Minister on this very important piece of legislation. Why is it too much to ask that local government reform be evidence-based have a clear and robust rationale and be derived following consideration of key options and what each would achieve? All we are saying is that there are many ways you could reform local government and many different ways you could do it. There are different councils you could combine together and there are different structures you could come up with. 
I note that the Wellington City Council has put up its own proposal for a one-tier structure of a Wellington super-city which differs from the other proposal so there are many numerous and different ways that you could do it. Why is it unreasonable that the legislation should say firstly that you do not go in with no evidence and make these changes? You have to be able to explain clearly why this is a good change for the communities that are involved. But probably most important is that you have actually considered all the options available not just one single option that might be being pushed by a certain group or a certain person and there have been references to people whom Dr Nick Smith has met with who have their own preferences around what a Wellington reorganisation might look like. Surely we should be saying that if you are going to take this major step of reorganisation which is going to be costly and which is going to be disruptive on the other side there are clear benefits and they are evidence-based. But you would have considered every possible option that would be available in that reorganisation. You did not just go with the preferred option of the Minister of the day who has probably his own preferences and his own ideological bents that he wants to see come through in that or a proposal from the Opposition which is going to have different priorities and different focuses or a proposal from Federated Farmers Business New Zealand different community organisations or organisations that represent different ethnic groups. There are so many different ways it could be done yet this legislation is silent on it. 
It basically says that the Government can do what it did in Auckland. It can come up with the one structure that it wants regardless of whether the people in that district want it and say that that is the only option they are going to get that it does not have to consider anything else and does not have to have any evidence and that there does not even have to be any benefit to it and that is OK. That is what Part 2 of the bill currently says. I want to know from the Minister in the chair the Minister of Commerce why as I am assuming he will he is going to vote down such a common-sense approach which provides protections for the ratepayers. We have heard a lot of talk about ratepayers from the National Party here tonight and yet the National Party is denying ratepayers around the country one of their most fundamental rights—the right to make their own decisions about the future of their local government organisations and not have anything imposed on them from above. 
Currently in order for a reorganisation to happen or an amalgamation to happen it has to have the approval by referendum of all the different communities involved. Each council that is going to be amalgamated has its own referendum. If one of them says no it does not happen which is what happened in Dr Nick Smith’s own patch. So if you look in an area like the Bay of Plenty the bulk of the voting strength is in Tauranga in the Western Bay of Plenty and a number of the social issues that local government has been really active in engaging with and working on are in the Eastern Bay of Plenty which does not have the same population base. But we are not saying to Kawerau or to Opotiki or to Whakatane or to Rotorua for that matter that if the Western Bay of Plenty votes for it sorry they are just going to have to suck it up and live with it. Currently it does not say that. It says that you have to convince all these communities that it is in their best interests. Otherwise it does not go ahead. What that means is that the work does get done on the ground beforehand. All those negotiations happen because they know that if any one of those communities says no then it is not going to go ahead. So they make sure that the protections are in place for those communities that have concerns. It provides an incentive for that work to be done early for it to be done genuinely and for it to be done comprehensively before it gets near a referendum. Well that is going in this legislation. 
So now again the will of the majority will be imposed on the minority and that is very concerning for communities that have high levels of poverty where the local mayors are active in highlighting those issues and where they are active initiatives like the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs which will no longer be under the mandate of local government once this piece of legislation passes. It says to those communities that actually what they care about does not really matter. Provided the majority push it through we do not think that there needs to be any kind of guidance around how these reorganisations happen. What the National Government knows is that if it actually went through a robust process along the lines of the Supplementary Order Paper that my colleague Annette King has put together it would slow it down and it would highlight the flaws in what the Government is trying to push through because there would actually be time to consider all the issues and time to engage with all the stakeholders. Annette King’s Supplementary Order Paper requires that all relevant stakeholders be consulted and worked with and that those negotiations happen in good faith. We know that when these processes are subjected to the scrutiny that they should be subjected to a lot of what the Government wants to push through simply will not fly. When there is time to give proper consideration the flaws will be highlighted. That is why the Government wants to rush it through. That is why there is provision earlier on in this bill for the Minister to actually be able to cancel elections—cancel local government elections. Instead of having a process that goes over maybe 3 years and is informative the Government wants to ram it through so that we can get this in place and if we have to delay Wellington’s elections by a year who cares we will just push them out for a year because we need to get this done right now because if we allow—