Hughes Darren: Local Government (Auckland Reorganisation) Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
Hughes Darren: Local Government (Auckland Reorganisation) Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
[Volume:654;Page:3635] 
Hon DARREN HUGHES (Senior Whip—Labour) 
: 
 I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. 
Sandra Goudie 
: Mindless! 
Hon DARREN HUGHES 
: I say to Mrs Goudie that I have a point of order. This is very serious point of order and I want to word it as carefully as I can. We are in Committee and it is a Saturday morning. The Opposition has put up a lot of amendments and new parts by way of amendment. Obviously some are more detailed than others. This particular new part Part 10 is very important to the Opposition because it directly affects the lives of 6500 people. My point of order is that on the last part considered by the Committee if we include the time taken on points of order a closure motion was accepted within 40 minutes of the Committee’s considering a brand new part that had never been near a select committee and had not been distributed to members until today. 
The point I am making is that I understand that there will be pressure on both you and the other Chair of the Committee to get this business through as quickly as possible. I respectfully say that a part must be given the due consideration of this Committee regardless of whether it is a Tuesday afternoon a Wednesday evening or a Saturday morning. I think that we need to have the chance to debate our new parts which have not been to a select committee. The level of public scrutiny— 
Hon Simon Power 
: This is outrageous! It’s your discretion; he shouldn’t be telling you this. 
Hon DARREN HUGHES 
: The Deputy Leader of the House can interject. I said at the beginning that I was trying to take a careful but serious point of order to reflect to the Committee exactly how we feel about this which is that this particular part is of importance to us. I am not challenging your ruling Mr Chairperson because there has been no ruling. There is no closure motion before you; we are at the beginning of the debate on this part. I respectfully submit to you that the previous part was shut down very very early. I want an assurance that that was not a tariff simply because we are meeting on a Saturday morning which appears to be the reason for the Government’s sense of urgency about the closure motions. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Rick Barker) 
: The first point I make is that the Chair will not feel pressured about accepting closure motions. I do not feel pressured in any particular way. I observe that I consider these new parts to be in a slightly different context from the parts that have been tabled in the House because those were on notice and so on and these are not. 
Secondly I am guided—and I am sure that the other Chairs have been guided—by content. We need to concentrate on the subject matter at hand. I have said that I will be quite liberal and let people make other comments as they go through the parts. If someone makes an interjection and the member responds that is fair enough. But we do not want the rest of the speech to be on the interjections; we want to be on task. 
Thirdly I assure the member that there is no tariff. A closure motion having been accepted for the previous part does not mean that this is the rate that we will carry on for all other parts. It will be about the content of the part the content of the speeches and the way that the Committee conducts itself. The length of debate can go up; it can go down. But content will be important.