Twyford Phil: Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTwyford Phil: Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading[Sitting date: 17 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8254. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): I thought the contribution from Minister of Corrections was a very lacklustre pitch for the local government portfolio. But you know local government is a great portfolio and I can understand why Sam Lotu-Iiga would like to have a crack at it. With Alfred Ngaro sniffing around the corrections portfolio after the Minister’s rather underwhelming performance I can understand why he would want to have a look around and see what else might be available. But on that performance—on the performance of that Minister in this debate—I do not think he has got much of a shot of picking up local government off Paula Bennett.The theme of my contribution tonight is a message to the members on the National benches: what took you so long? After 7 years in Government with 2 years spent brutally and undemocratically imposing the Auckland super-city on a very reluctant and unwilling Auckland community and the last 5 long years spent fighting and quibbling and bullying the Auckland Council and being a block on the progress and prosperity of our country’s biggest city finally we see the National Government bring to this House a bill that shows that it is cooperating with Auckland. It is actually doing with this bill what Auckland has been asking for. It is the first sign of any kind of real cooperation that we have seen in these 5 long years. I want to talk about that period a little bit in this first reading contribution.For the folks at home wondering what a unitary plan is I think it is worth just touching on a little bit of the recent history. In 2010 after a process of designing what the new amalgamated super-city would look like in Auckland there were the first elections of the Auckland council electing representatives to the structure that Rodney Hide had put in place at the behest of the National Party in Auckland—the highly centralised over-corporatised Auckland Council. We then saw the council acting really on the vision that the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance had set out for it to develop the Auckland Plan and as my colleague Phil Goff said the intention was the pulling together of all the threads in an integrated unified plan that would set out the vision for the city.In 2013 there were the second elections and then the development of the draft unitary plan to replace 13 different district and regional plans and to give effect to that vision of one unified spatial plan for the city. It is bigger than Ben-Huras I think anyone who has looked at it will know. It is a huge huge undertaking. As many have said before it is really kind of the rule book for the future development of Auckland.What we are seeing here tonight is a kind of a fix job by the National Government and not only for poor drafting and errors in the original legislation. National decided to design a bespoke planning process for the unitary plan because it had rejected Auckland Council’s request to give early legal effect to the draft unitary plan which would have been a much simpler and cleaner process by the way and would have saved everybody a lot of trouble.But no the National Government knew better. It insisted on designing a whole new bespoke process for this. It had not really thought it through. It had not thought through the quantity of public submissions and hearings that would be involved in an undertaking of this size. So what we are seeing tonight really is a bill that attempts to fix up some of those problems.To really understand the context of this bill we have to talk about two things. The first is the National Government’s tortured relationship with Auckland over the last 5 years and the second is the deeply problematic handling or mishandling of the Auckland housing crisis. As the Minister Nick Smith has said his main motivation for pushing through this bill is to ensure that the draft unitary plan completes its process before the housing accord and special housing areas legislation—aptly named the HASH legislation—expires later next year. So it is about those two things: the endless fighting and quibbling that has been going on between this Government and Auckland over the last 5 years and the housing crisis.It started in the 2010 election when from the point of view of the National Government the wrong guy won the mayoral election. National members spent the 2 years prior to the election trying to design a super-city structure that would allow the National Government and its cronies to dispose of the assets and run Auckland as their personal fiefdom and then Len Brown—the wrong guy from their point of view—won the election. That is why they have not been able to get over themselves ever since. It has been 5 years where the culture of entitlement and born-to-rule attitudes have been held in check by the fact that someone else has been running Auckland and they have been bitter and twisted about it ever since—in contrast to this bill.This bill is cooperative. It is about moving Auckland forward and it is about making decisions. For years we saw Steven Joyce and Gerry Brownlee pouring scorn on Auckland’s No. 1 transport project the City Rail Link. I cannot even repeat this House the words that Steven Joyce routinely used when describing the City Rail Link to business audiences in Auckland. Nick Smith rampaged around Auckland like a sort of a rogue bull elephant blaming Auckland Council for—let me remember what the quote was—killing the dreams of Aucklanders. That was what Nick Smith said. That was kind of the beginning of a whole pattern of several years of this National Government blaming and scapegoating Auckland Council for the housing crisis. And now Nick Smith wants to pass this bill because he is worried that if he does not there will be nothing to replace his special housing area records which have been a spectacular flop when it comes to actually making a difference to the supply of houses in Auckland.Part of the problem I think is that the National Government simply has not had anybody in its Cabinet who really understands Auckland. Auckland has had to put up with a string of mostly South Island and small-town Ministers who have travelled to visit Auckland to tell Auckland what it should do. Steven Joyce is I think from Palmerston North Nick Smith is from Nelson Gerry Brownlee is from Canterbury Amy Adams is from Selwyn and none of them understands Auckland or has any kind of feeling for how a big city or an urban economy works.Bill English is the other one who has spent much of the last 5 years railing against the Auckland Council for having this vision for a compact city which this bill is designed to address by actually reforming some of the planning rules and getting a better balance between the city growing up and growing out. But Bill English from Dipton the great urbanist of the National Government spent much of the last 5 years railing—Chris Hipkins: He’s from Karori.PHIL TWYFORD: Oh yeah. He is not from Dipton. He is from Karori—sorry. He spent much of the last 5 years railing against the compact city as if was some great conspiracy. But what we have seen is that over these 5 years the National Government has been dragged kicking and screaming towards this moment—this moment of cooperation and a kind of a sensible pragmatic working with Auckland Council to try to get a response and deliver the unitary plan within the desired time frame.First we saw it when they got rolled on the City Rail Link basically. They gave up. After 3 years of opposing the City Rail Link they realised they were hurting in the polls. They realised they were losing support in Auckland because they were seen as a brake on the prosperity of the city. People like the Employers and Manufacturers Association and the chamber of commerce were saying to John Key “You are a roadblock to Auckland’s prosperity and Auckland’s development.” and that is what finally shifted them.So it is not a good look for this Government. It has been dragged kicking and screaming to this moment. At least this bill is a good pragmatic response to the unitary plan and that is why Labour is supporting it.