Roche Denise: Local Government (Council-Controlled Organisations) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Roche Denise: Local Government (Council-Controlled Organisations) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 19 September 2012. Volume:684;Page:5432. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DENISE ROCHE (Green) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Speaker. I think I would like to start my speech in support of this bill the Local Government (Council-Controlled Organisations) Amendment Bill by paying tribute to the fact that today is Women’s Suffrage Day. I want to acknowledge the tupuna kuia the women who went before us from whose work all the women in this House are entitled to be here and to be able to participate fully in our democracy—people like Kate Sheppard.  
So it is fitting from my point of view that this bill should be in the House today because it is about improving our democracy. It is a welcome attempt at creating accountability and transparency for organisations that are publicly owned—our ports. It is quite a straightforward and sensible bill. If you look at the explanation at the front of the bill it says that it applies the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act to ports that are owned by councils that there is a requirement for ports to act as a good employer and that there is a requirement for ports to exhibit a sense of social and environmental responsibility by having regard to the interests of the community in which they operate. It makes sense. If we expect accountability for how public money is spent then we should expect some accountability from these ports which are profit-making businesses of our councils for how that money is earned. We are not talking about anything earth-shattering or anything different from normal practice. The bill simply says that the provisions of the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act apply. Ports can still have commercially sensitive discussions table commercially sensitive documents and do it in committee as long as they have a good reason to do that. 
It is a darn shame that we need to do this at all but we may as well acknowledge that this is the result of ports acting disagreeably. The most disagreeable of all was the Ports of Auckland dispute which happened earlier this year. There were nine strikes there were two lockouts in the dispute with the Maritime Union the company breached the good-faith bargaining provisions of the Employment Relations Act it threatened to contract the jobs it advertised those jobs elsewhere it released private details te mea te mea te mea. Darien Fenton has already listed a lot of them. Clearly these were not the actions of a good or even a reasonable employer and during this time the council that owns the port through its holding company Auckland Council Investments Ltd was unable to intervene and it was dependent on information that was filtered through the company—information that was frankly being withheld. 
Just last week in the Auckland Council the councillors—who by the way were democratically elected by the people of Auckland—were still struggling to get answers from the council-controlled organisation about how much the Ports of Auckland dispute had cost. We can make some good guesses about that but it has never been confirmed. My former colleague Councillor Cathy Casey got her hands on one of the emails that came from the chief executive officer of Auckland Council Investments Ltd which said that the last thing it wants is political interference. The email said that if politicians sense that Auckland Council Investments Ltd is not on top of what is happening they might interfere and the decision might not go the way it wants. It is outrageous that a council-controlled organisation chief can so clearly dismiss democratically elected people who are charged with the governance of Auckland and that includes the governance of infrastructure like our ports. I am a ratepayer and I still do not know what that dispute in Auckland cost me. 
It is not just about Auckland; Lyttelton would be advantaged by this as well. In Lyttelton they have no idea what is happening with the expansion plans there. They have been overruled by the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority in terms of being rushed through an expansion of I think about 10 hectares of reclamation using demolition material. They do not know where their ferries will be. They do not know what the transport links will be. They do not know whether the container trucks will be off their roads or going through their towns. They do not know what public space amenity there will be for them. This is of major concern to the communities in Lyttelton. My colleagues tell me that this bill will help people who live near ports everywhere.