Sage Eugenie: Christchurch City Council (Rates Validation) Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Christchurch City Council (Rates Validation) Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 03 June 2015. Volume:706;Page:4301. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green): I am pleased to take a short call on the Christchurch City Council (Rates Validation) Bill and it will be short given that it costs over $21000 an hour for the running of Parliament and that there is wide support across the House for this technical bill. Yes it is retrospective but I would agree with Mr Foster-Bell that it is curative and tolerable while retrospective. The Green Party is supporting this bill because the mistakes that the Christchurch City Council made in its rates-setting resolutions were not deliberate. They were simply in the wording of the resolutions. They did not affect the amount of rates that Christchurch folk had to pay nor the penalties that ratepayers were liable to pay for delayed payment or non-payment.I think we should be very careful in this House not to throw stones. It is a wooden House rather than glass House but tomorrow we will be debating legislation that corrects a mistake made in the exclusive economic zone legislation. So this Parliament often has to reconsider legislation that was not fully considered during select committee consideration and during the House debates so it is not unknown for errors to be made.The mistakes that the Christchurch City Council made in its resolutions were in relation to the payment dates for rates and the authority to impose penalties on unpaid rates. That raised issues with the validity of collecting the rates and the penalties for non-payment. So the bill validates the payment dates and it validates any penalties that have been added to the rates. It ensures that all the money the council has received in respect of the rates is lawful and always has been lawful. As Mr Foster-Bell noted it relates to some of the uniform annual charges and some of the targeted rates and loans for Church Bay and Governors Bay for wastewater and water supply schemes.One of the issues this bill did not go through is that there is a $683000 hole in the council’s revenue stream. If the bill was not passed the council would be liable to legal challenge and it would not be able to chase up the 38 ratepayers who have not paid their rates and who are liable for penalties without the risk of a legal challenge. That would impose quite significant extra costs on the council which has already got funding problems so we have no substantive issue with supporting the bill because the mistakes were not deliberate—they were procedural—and we are resolving an issue that should be resolved and that the council has brought to the attention of the public and of Parliament at the first opportunity after those mistakes were discovered.But although the council has been able to come to Parliament to get those issues resolved it will not be able to come to Parliament as easily if it proceeds with its very short-sighted decision to sell off major council assets like the port company the airport and Orion which have been major contributors through the dividends that those companies provide to keeping the council’s rates low. The $43 million in dividends that are coming to the council in the 2015-16 year means that rates are 13 percent lower than they would otherwise be. The Green Party considers that it is incredibly short-sighted to be pushed—as the city council is being pushed by the National Government’s failure to renegotiate the cost-sharing agreement to meet the $400 million shortfall in the costs of preparing the horizontal infrastructure—to consider selling these revenue-generating assets in order to fund a potential white elephant like the stadium which is likely to lose revenue. So we support the bill but we oppose the proposals in the city council’s long-term plan to sell vital revenue-generating assets. Thank you.