Wood MichaelMICHAEL WOOD (Labour—Mt Roskill): I am very pleased to stand up to speak expressing the Labour Party's opposition to this bill. I do so as until recently an elected member of the Auckland Council and I especially acknowledge other former elected members in the Chamber.This is a strange dislocated netherworld bill. It started off with a raft of ambitious proposals from the Government that would have gutted local government democracy and created an incredible degree of centralisation within our system. When faced with a tidal wave of opposition at the select committee stage the Government has pulled back from some of the most egregious changes but none the less left us with a bill that no one is asking for and no one is happy with. It still has that noxious element of removing elements of local democracy within our system.Before moving on to a couple of substantive points I just want to address a couple of the speeches that we have heard earlier. My Bayly in his comments earlier on tried to give some reassurance to the House that people do not need to worry too much. People do not need to worry too much about the amalgamation possibilities arising out of this bill and that the local government commission had to have regard to the degree and distribution of community support for reorganisation. Well that is simply laughable to anyone in this Chamber who remembers what happened in 2010 when this Government overrode every single protection and every single aspect of the democratic system to ram through the forced reorganisation of Auckland Council. It overrode the Local Government Act. It took away the right of Auckland citizens to vote upon that reorganisation proposal and it imposed aspects such as council-controlled organisation (CCOs) which covered core services in the legislation against the will of the people of Auckland. So it is laughable to suggest that anyone could have a degree of trust in this Government not to force through reorganisation proposals if that is its wish.Of course we have seen that again and again and again. It has been a litany of failure—the reorganisation proposals for the Hawke's Bay Wellington and Northland. Mr Doocey let it slip in his comments when he made it very very clear that he favours small councils in our country being taken over by bigger partners and reducing the number of territorial local authorities in our country. There is a silly sort of macho bigger is better" mindset that sits in behind all of this legislation and his belief that Mr Doocey expressed in his comments was that somehow if we amalgamate things are going to get cheaper and rates are going to go down. Mr Doocey may I welcome you to Auckland one day to come to talk to some of our ratepayers. It is an absolute nonsense that amalgamation automatically makes things cheaper or more efficient. It is absolutely established in fact in the academic literature that the massive transition costs of forced amalgamations or voluntary amalgamations for that matter very often outweigh any of the efficiency gains that you get.Let us talk about CCOs which really are the Trojan horse in this piece of legislation for a more corporatised less democratic form of local government in our country. Let us talk about the efficiency gains supposedly that CCOs get. Well do you realise that within the Auckland Council's structure—and I say this to the member's opposite—that we now have eight vertically integrated silo CCOs within the Auckland Council structure? Each has its own communications team. Each has its own senior management team. Each has its own CEO. Each has its own board for goodness' sake! And each has all of the structures around that you need to support that. Thank goodness we have got Mayor Phil Goff who is trying to make some sense of that now. But that CCO structure that was imposed upon Auckland has actually led to less efficiency and less democratic engagement between people and their council than we would otherwise have and this bill seeks to impose that by stealth on other councils as well.The reason that many members on this side of the House feel very strongly about this is it is actually a soft constitutional issue. In our country we do not have a written constitution that sets out the separation of powers between different arms of Government but we are dealing with a democratic system here. Local government is about local people having a say electing local representatives to make local decisions to levy local ratepayers through rates and then to spend that money. That is actually a part of our constitutional structure. We have one of the most centralised forms of Government in the entire world. More is done centrally in New Zealand than virtually anywhere else in the world. Yet this bill seeks to hug more and more powers into the bosom of central government.This bill actually misses an opportunity. If the Government had have actually sat down with local government—as we have heard from other speakers who actually know something about local government today—and said "How can we work on collaboration better?" then I absolutely know for a fact that people from local government would have said "Yep we've got some good ideas about how we could do that to be more efficient and to deliver services better for our people." Instead we have got a typical National Government power-hugging piece of legislation before us and I will certainly be voting against it later on this afternoon. Thank you."