Strange JamieJAMIE STRANGE (Labour): Thank you Mr Speaker. I appreciate the opportunity to take a call on this bill. I'd like to acknowledge Jacqui Dean for her good fortune in having it drawn from the ballot. I'd like to begin by just sort of outlining unfortunately some of the challenges that we have on this side with the bill. Now I'm sure no one in this House would argue that having good customer service is important from a local authority you know from a business from Parliament from members of Parliament. But one of the issues with this bill is it's fairly ambiguous. I mean what does customer service mean? Who is the customer? So let's look for example at the Dog Control Act. Who is the customer in terms of council staff interpreting that Act? Is it the dog owner? Is it the dog? Is it the cat? Is it the neighbour? Is it members of the public? Now I don't mean to sound facetious here but I do mean to raise the point that the bill is rather ambiguous. It is rather subjective because as the previous speaker mentioned in his speech people can have an experience in this case with a council—people can have what seems to be the same experience but interpret that in different ways. So this idea of what is customer service what is good customer service—now I used to work in retail. If I could put a little bit of a context on that I spent five years working in a music store while I was studying and some of the aspects we were taught about good customer service—and I'd like to make the point that I believe councils already do have good customer service. But let me just make this point. So the first one is focusing on customers' needs. This is fairly sort of well known particularly around the business community: the customer comes first. So you develop products and services for the customer's needs. Now I would argue that councils already do this. We heard from the Hon Nanaia Mahuta that this bill is a solution looking for a problem. So is there really a problem around customers' needs? The council have various mechanisms short-term plans long-term plans to look at the customers' needs across the city. There's opportunities within those mechanisms for those customers—in this effect those people who live in the city who pay rates—to engage. So it's already there. What about the second one—customer preferences viewing customers as individuals with different preferences? I would argue that councils already do that. The councils engage in a range of areas. You know they engage on social media targeted to certain groups already. Most councils have ethnic groups ethnic advisers who reach out to various groups to provide customer service. So I would argue that they already do that.What about another one that we learnt in the business sector the voice of the customer? So is the voice of the customer heard already through the way councils generally operate? I would argue yes and it happens every three years when there's a local body election. So at that time those customers have the opportunity to vote for people to represent them which moves on to point number four customer advocates.The customer advocates are the councils who are elected when the customers have their voice. So look if someone let's say in the city of Hamilton has an issue with the Hamilton City Council around customer service they need to go to their councillor and the councillor will then advocate for them to the council. I don't think this is the place for—I don't think there's any necessity for us to pass legislation around this when we already have those systems in place. I'm a little bit confused around this bill but that's OK. I would like to pick up on the building point because the Hon Nanaia Mahuta mentioned that sometimes there are views expressed to MPs around the timeliness of building consents around building and I'd also like to raise the same question to the member Jacqui Dean. So why does she not just focus on building consents? Maybe in her right of reply at the end of this speech she might want to talk about that. So my time has run out. Thank you for the opportunity to contribute.