Williams Poto: Arts Centre of Christchurch Trust Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliams Poto: Arts Centre of Christchurch Trust Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 01 April 2015. Volume:704;Page:2835. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]POTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): Meitaki maata Mr Assistant Speaker and thank you for the opportunity to speak on the Arts Centre of Christchurch Trust Bill. Firstly my acknowledgments go to the Hon Nicky Wagner for guiding this bill in its passage through the House. There is widespread support for what this bill aims to do. I also need to acknowledge Jen Crawford and André Lovatt from the trust board itself. Further I want to acknowledge the Hon Margaret Austin who is a former Labour member and someone whom the Christchurch community owes a great debt of gratitude for her desire to ensure that our city and our province recovers well.The trust board has worked tirelessly and it is an extraordinary piece of legislation in that the board’s trust deeds and objects the powers under which it will work and all the provisions that provide for the trust board are enshrined in legislation. It is not the normal way you would do things but it is a very significant and important step to ensure that the work that is done to restore the buildings on that site goes ahead. So I acknowledge and support the aims of the trust board.This legislation has three main aims: to create the legal framework in which the work can be conducted to amend the governance structure to ensure that the right people with the right skills at the right time are in a position to ensure that this work is carried out and—the last aim—to enable and to respond to the recovery work that is required post the earthquakes. The legislation is significant. We have heard other members in this House speak this evening about what the centre means to them and not just the centre but the general precinct and the area that suffered significant damage. We are talking not just about buildings and land; we are talking about areas where people and families congregated and shared time together. Each one of those stones within the Arts Centre building each piece of wood each window and each area of courtyard and pavement has a memory. The memories are of times that were spent there by students—happy times; perhaps stressful times too if you were a student and trying to get through exams. There is more to this precinct than just the bricks and the stone. It is significant that we acknowledge that that is part of the recovery and restoration process.Other members have talked about the trust being set up in 1978 and my colleague Dr Megan Woods talked about how that came to pass in the early 1970s. I want to talk a little bit about the objects of the trust because this piece of legislation enshrines those. The objects really are ensuring that we hold and develop the Arts Centre—the site the buildings—in trust as a unique and outstanding cultural centre for use by the people of Christchurch and its visitors. I know that before moving to Christchurch to live when I was visiting family in Christchurch it would always be one of the places we went to because it always had the best coffee and the market at the weekend was a great place to pick up knick-knacks. It was extraordinary to be able to watch the artisans at work there using crafts from a past time.One of the other objects is fostering promoting and facilitating interest and involvement in art culture creativity the creative industries and education. There was no cooler place to go than the Arts Centre if you were going to see a play to hear music or to really just generally share in culture.This bill also enshrines the powers of the trust which include having the capacity to ensure that any activity that the trust board deems necessary is able to be carried out and that at any time that it needs to acquire property even to demolish buildings or make changes or employ staff all of those activities are within this legislation. The legislation is unable to be changed except so that the work of the trust board can go on as it needs to through the period—through to 2019.Further there are two main parts to the bill. The first sets out its purpose and its definitions around the committee and the trust deed. Those provisions describe the schedules which provide the detail of the land and the buildings within the bill. Part 2 sets out the objects of the trust and the bill concludes with the schedules which describe the land and the constitution of the trust board.Any discussion regarding heritage buildings in Christchurch cannot be held without thinking about section 38 of the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Act 2011 and the loss of heritage to the city. The reason I refer to that in the context of other comments is that I know that over the last few summers as the fences have started to come down in the central city as people have been able to go back into the city and as some of the rebuilding work has been carried out many people were reluctant to return because they did not want to see the devastation that was there. It has been a re-traumatising of our population I guess in a sense to go back into the city and see just what needs to be done and just what has been lost. I ask the Government to think long and hard about whether we properly used section 38 when we were considering the demolition of many of those heritage buildings.My colleague Eugenie Sage also referred to the cathedral. When I talk about the cathedral and when I talk about the significant heritage buildings in Christchurch I liken them to when we discuss our whakapapa and our pepeha. The maunga within it—for those of us who do not have a connection to that part of the world in terms of our cultural heritage—that we can refer to are those buildings the cathedral and the Arts Centre and the significant beauty that our heritage buildings brought to the area.Many of my colleagues have talked about the number of buildings that were lost within the four avenues area. Twenty percent were our heritage buildings. That is significant. In order for recovery to occur to the fullest extent we must acknowledge what we have lost and what has passed and ensure that we do not lose any more. So I commend this bill to the House and I encourage the Government to consider carefully the recovery of Christchurch. The recovery has not been completed. There are still many areas where people are wanting this Government to step up. I cannot go past the eastern suburbs in that comment of course where we are still to have our horizontal infrastructure completed so we can be fully recovered. So thank you to the Hon Nicky Wagner. It is a great bill. Thank you.