Martin Tracey: Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Martin Tracey: Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 27 November 2012. Volume:686;Page:6830. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
TRACEY MARTIN (NZ First) 
: 
 Kia ora Mr Chair. I rise to take a call on the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill in the Committee stage. Before I launch into my address about the title of the bill and the other areas that this stage addresses I will just pick up on a comment that Maggie Barry made—thankfully finally—in her speech in the Committee. It is nice to actually finally get Ms Barry doing her work for her money. That is great. We really appreciate that. It is around the comments around Michael Barnett and the chamber of commerce. Again I mentioned in my first address on this bill that the Government needs to be careful what it wishes for and probably so does Mr Barnett. 
Mr Barnett is working very hard and continues to lobby the Auckland Council for continued support for bids for commerce in the area of Auckland and Greater Auckland. He spends a lot of time lobbying Auckland Tourism Events and Economic Development (ATEED) for finance and for support for commerce inside Auckland. What will happen to ATEED if economic development is one of the four well-beings that is actually going to be removed? Let us not forget that the reason why Auckland picked up economic development as one of those four well-beings is that central government has failed small and medium sized businesses. For businesses in rural communities it has failed to assist them. The businesses in my communities that want to grow into the export businesses that this Government says that it wants to lift New Zealand out of the doldrums of unemployment and grow the pie cannot get any traction with central government so they go to local government and seek that support. 
But I also wonder whether perhaps another title for this bill that might be suitable is: “We’re Going to Change it Because Len Brown Became the Mayor of Auckland”. When Len Brown became the Mayor of Auckland he picked up on those well-beings. He moved into South Auckland and west Auckland made a focus of the lower socio-economic groups in that area and said: “We’re going to make a commitment to advocate to central government to do something about this.” If one looks at the Auckland Plan the comments around the well-beings with regard to South Auckland and west Auckland are the comments that say “We will work with central government to bring in the resources that should have been there. We should not have to fight central government for it to recognise that we have communities of need here.” Although I personally would like to see an extension of this into areas like Helensville and Wellsford that also have social deprivation scores of 8 and can get no traction from this Government—no traction from this Government which continues to hire and give contracts to people based in the city who know nothing about those communities—we will have to do it through the lobbying through local government. 
 So perhaps this is actually about Len Brown. Perhaps this is because John Banks did not get the mayoralty and did not take Auckland in the direction that this Government would want so this is really about trying to curtail the Mayor of Auckland because it did not go the way the Government wanted it to. 
I would suggest that one of the other things that the Government has done and is continuing to do—and it should set off alarm bells for other areas for which it is suggesting amalgamations through this bill—is that the central government came in. If you have a look at the economic development plan for Auckland it has central government written all over it. It has two main legs. The first one is to import 1 million more people into Auckland. The second one is to leverage off them to sell back to their communities of origin. That is the single plan that this Government has I believe to save New Zealand and it comes out of Auckland. To do that it requires the control of Auckland. To do that it is going to duplicate it up and down the country so that it can have more control. I would also suggest that rural communities should be contacting their National Party MPs before this bill comes to its third reading. 
One of the other side effects of amalgamations like this is that local employment drops like a rock. These contracts which have lowered nobody’s rates have taken all the local contract work out of Rodney under the guise of economies of scale. We have people driving from the south of Auckland right all the way up to Wellsford to do a job because a single company—