Boyack RachelRACHEL BOYACK (Labour—Nelson): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's a pleasure to take a call tonight on the Local Government (Pecuniary Interests Register) Amendment Bill. I just want to congratulate my colleague Tangi Utikere on his bill making its way through the House and also my thanks to you Mr Speaker as chair of the Governance and Administration Committee. As deputy chair I guess I get to make the first call tonight on behalf of the select committee. But I will note that the select committee went through a very robust and detailed process over this bill. We have made a very large number of changes that we believe will make the bill much more workable but also align it better with the requirements and responsibilities put on us as members of Parliament in declaring our interests.The comment I want to make at the beginning I guess is that we grappled a lot throughout our deliberations about the balance that is needed between transparency and ensuring that the public are aware of the interests of members who are making decisions at a local government level; the balance between those interests but also the need to ensure people aren't put off from standing for local government in the first place.One of the particular issues that occurs in local government—and I'll come to this a bit later when I talk about the change we made around employment—is that for many people who work and operate within local government roles as elected members it is actually not something they're able to do full time. In many of our smaller councils we have a number of people who may be working even full time in a role and having to undertake other employment while they are an elected councillor. One of the challenges we face with that is that by the very nature of that arrangement it means that people will often be involved in a lot of other activities which brings about with it a number of potential conflicts that occur. So we had a lot of conversations about that.I think I'll talk through some of the changes before I end up running out of time tonight. I think when you look at a lot of those changes you'll see that we've made some pragmatic decisions and we've struck the right balance in a number of those areas. So I'd encourage members to read through the select committee report. It does go into a lot of these changes in detail.As the previous speaker Mr Watts noted we made a change to include local and community board members. Given that people in those elected roles do make decisions around how money is going to be spent within a community the committee felt it was important that those members are covered.In terms of people who are appointed to roles the place where we landed on that is that it has become more common in local government for people to be appointed into roles. One of the councils in my electorate—Nelson City Council—has appointed people with significant financial responsibilities into roles particularly around the audit and risk area. We made a decision as a committee not to include them in the bill; however a council of its own decision making could still choose to require those people in appointed roles declare their interests. So that option is sitting there for councils to make that decision themselves.The next change that we made was around ensuring that there's reference in the bill to the purpose of the register. So we included a new section 54B inserted by clause 4 to clearly state the purpose of the register.We also made some decisions around including a summary of information as opposed to going right down into the detail. One of the discussions we had around that particular issue is for example someone who is working as a lawyer or as an accountant in a role in the community who's also a city councillor that person may have a large number of clients and actually it would be of concern to those people if they had to list potentially all of the clients they had. Whereas where we landed I think which is a pragmatic place to end up is very much around that summary. That's also consistent with the requirements of members of Parliament as well.We had a long discussion around time frames and some discussions around whether someone needed to declare their interests annually or just once in a term or on a particular date. Where we landed was similar to the requirements for members of Parliament which is for members to declare their interests 120 days after an election and therefore annually after that. So we did as much as we could to ensure some consistency with requirements for members of Parliament.We also inserted a new section around the reporting of errors so that if a member has a requirement to do their best to ensure accuracy in what they declare but that if they have made an error that there is an obligation on them to raise that and have that error corrected.As my colleague Tangi Utikere pointed out we lifted the percentage required for voting rights in a company from 5 percent up to 10 percent again to be consistent with members of Parliament's obligations.One of the changes we made was just around the disclosing of information around real property. This issue came up in regards to privacy of local members. I guess this is actually a topical issue at the moment in the sense that for many people in elected roles or public figures there have been times recently where we're seeing people being threatened in those roles potentially being unsafe in those roles. The committee was very clear that disclosing the actual address of an elected member would be extremely inappropriate. It would cause particular concern around safety for that individual. So we made the decision which is again comparable with members of Parliament's interest to disclose the general location—so for example the city or the town or the suburb.So I want to make a particular note here around noting a member's remuneration. This is a particular issue where as the bill was originally drafted it may have been read to require someone to disclose their actual earnings from employment. The committee was quite clear that that level of detail is just not required. If someone works in a role whether it be a supermarket worker or a consultant they shouldn't be required in their interest to actually disclose what their salary is. Absolutely they'll be required to disclose that they have that employment—but not for example the level of detail that would actually just go a little bit too far in disclosing that member's individual and private information.We made some changes around interests of members who are involved in other organisations. This is quite common in local government: that you'll have people involved in a community organisation sitting on the board of that organisation and that organisation may be seeking applying for funds from a council and that's extremely common. Rather than requiring a member to list the full list of organisations that they sit on the board of we made a determination that only those that received funding from a council or that have applied for funding from that council would be required to actually be listed on the register.As other members have noted we've changed some of the details around gifts and travel costs so that it's a cumulative amount. Again you've probably heard me say this quite a few times tonight we made some changes to be consistent with requirements for members of Parliament.I'll just finish by noting the possible amendment to consider as listed in the select committee report. Mr Speaker as you'll be aware in your role as chair we as a committee ended up considering a matter in terms of how the bill interacts with the LAMIA—so the Local Authority (Members' Interests) Act—how those two bills interact. We had that conversation very very late in our discussion. We had to make a decision as a committee which we made unanimously which was something we felt was important and we all agreed this was an important amendment but we weren't within the time frame to include it within the report back to the House. So the committee all unanimously agreed that this was an important amendment to make but for a whole lot of timing reasons we weren't able to do it in time for the House. So my hope and encouragement is for the House to support Mr Utikere's Supplementary Order Paper when he introduces it.So look I managed to get to 10 minutes and I think I got through the whole thing. So thank you Mr Speaker and I didn't run out of time which was great. So I commend this bill to the House and look forward to further contributions.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ian McKelvie): The question is that the motion be agreed to.