Hipkins Chris: Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 17 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8283. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): Thank you very much Mr Chairman—that is an interesting call. I am very happy to take a call on this Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill. I will be a little slower standing up next time.I do want to just begin my remarks though by picking up some of the comments that some of the National members made in their contributions in the first and second readings last night where they were talking about how important this bill was to ensure that the public got to have their say. They were waxing lyrical about the importance of committee processes and the public hearings and public submissions process and how important that was. I did think that that was somewhat ironic given that this very bill which they claim is going to enhance those processes is going through Parliament without any such scrutiny itself—without any such public submissions process—without really any good reason.Why could the Government not have simply done this using regular sitting time? This is not something that necessarily would languish for a long time in a select committee. It still could have gone through the regular legislative process. With a bit of competent management on the Government’s part—and I suspect that that was the biggest barrier that it faced in doing this properly—it could have actually got this through within a reasonable period of time and still had the democratic process respected and adhered to. There are very few bills that go through this House that are not improved through having a select committee process and often the select committee process allows us to pick up what seemed to be minor or trivial things in the drafting of a bill that actually turn out to be quite substantial.Given that we have ended up having to amend legislation yesterday that went through under urgency—we have amended it again under urgency because there were errors in it that were not picked up when it went through under urgency the first time—I think that this legislation certainly could have been quite significantly improved or maybe it could not have been but certainly we will never know because it did not go through that process. But it is possible that we will end up having to come back and amend it.Anyway Part 1 of the bill deals with the substantive amendments and the first one that I want to talk to is reducing the quorum required for hearing sessions from three members to two members. That may seem like you know a rather inconsequential amendment to many people but the difference between having three people hearing your submission and two people hearing your submission can actually be quite significant. It can actually make quite a difference and it can certainly make a difference to the submitter’s sense of having been heard. The Labour Party is supporting this bill through because we agree with the intent of the bill but I think that this is something that we should certainly consider and tease out a little bit more as this debate progresses.The whole point of having a process like this is to ensure that people feel that they have been heard. No such process like this is ever going to result in everybody being happy with the outcome because consensus on many of the issues that we are talking about will be almost impossible to achieve but people are more likely to accept the outcome if they feel they have been heard. So the first question I think the Committee needs to turn its attention to is: if people feel the process is being truncated and they are not getting their full chance to be heard by a full committee will they end up feeling that they have been heard? I think you know that that is a legitimate question to ask.There are some questions around logistics. Reducing the quorum required from three members to two members of course does not mean that there cannot be more members on the panel and I would hope that in most instances there would still be more members than that on the panel. The quorum is the minimum required. As we know from select committee hearings although a quorum may be two or three members for a small select committee there are often six members present hearing public submissions and that is a very positive thing. So it is important to remember that a quorum is the minimum required and that for administrative purposes this will probably make life easier in terms of scheduling the meetings but I would hope that the people involved will take their responsibilities quite seriously and ensure that they attend as many of these hearings as possible. Therefore members of the public when they are making their submissions will be heard by more members than that.This bill also allows the possible number of appointed Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel members to increase from seven to 10 excluding the chairperson. It is kind of interesting because on the one level we are lowering the minimum number required but increasing the maximum number required. With regard to my initial comments about people needing to have the sense that they are being heard it is quite possible that they will be heard by—[Bell rung]