Logie Jan: Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 17 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8316. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green): I just rise to take a quite short call on Part 2 “Validations and consequential amendments” which is seeking to fix up mistakes in the original legislation as I understand it. Because this bill is being rushed through under urgency we do not actually have the opportunity to hear from submitters about whether the mistakes that we are correcting were caused by a lack of clarity in the legislation or whether the situation was more complex leading to this misinterpretation as it might be.The Minister in the chair Hekia Parata has just stood up to clarify that the first point around the closure of submission dates is clarifying that there had been two dates as I understand it—14 January and then 28 February—and that this is to clarify and provide that clarity that those submissions that were received between 14 January and 28 February are indeed valid. So was that problem in the lack of clarity in the legislation or was that in the communication material that was sent out to people around closure dates? I am sorry if it is being obtuse but I am struggling to get the detail of that and that is because we have not had that select committee process.When I have been thinking about this issue and why the select committee is so valuable I have been realising that actually when we get the submissions around the details it helps us understand and fulfil our role as the Opposition in scrutinising legislation as well as helping the functioning of Government. We get to find out how legislation is operating at the community level through the submissions. Those submissions are often reported in the media which enables people in the community to then reflect on the impact of the legislation and the consideration of the implementation of that. Clearly that is not happening in this process and I really think that that particularly when it comes to fixing up mistakes and validations in consequential amendments is a significant point that we need to consider. It is about ensuring that we have a good lawmaking process and that people are able to consider what went wrong and properly interrogate that and that is missing from this process.There is the point about the closure of the submission dates and there is the point about new section 171 in clause 9 which validates any hearing session of the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel that was held concurrently with another session. We have heard previously in this debate that this has been happening for a while and that this is validating that but again we have not heard how long this has been happening for. Was this happening because the commissioners interpreted the legislation to think that that was appropriate or was this happening just because they were not looking at the legislation and they were getting on with business and trying to expedite the process? That actually creates two very different situations and we have not had the information to tell us what the problem was to find out whether this is the appropriate legislative response to the problem.That is not good lawmaking and our responsibility in this House is to have appropriate oversight and to do our best to make sure that the laws on the books serve the purpose that we want. There are of course more broadly than this principles of good delivery of principle and democracy. Whether the concurrent hearings are actually something that we want to be supporting—it seems from what we have picked up in the media and what people have said that maybe they are. But there has been no opportunity for somebody who may have had involvement in this process and may have had concerns to be able to come to this House and express those concerns. I think that really is doing a discredit to the communities of Auckland—to lock them out of this process—when I really do believe the first principle of decision making in this place—