Mackey Moana: Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Mackey Moana: Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 27 November 2012. Volume:686;Page:6828. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
MOANA MACKEY (Labour) 
: 
 I am pleased that Maggie Barry has woken up and given us her speech on Part 1 of the bill the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill. It is a little bit late because we are actually up to clauses 1 and 2 of the legislation but I welcome her Part 1 speech none the less. I thank the Chair for his indulgence in allowing her—a few hours late granted—to finally give her speech on Part 1 of the bill. It actually had nothing to do with the title and commencement of this particular piece of legislation. 
Again you see this extraordinary rewriting of history because yes there were submitters who came along and said that they supported the general thrust of the bill. But under questioning they could not actually say that they had any confidence that what the bill was actually putting in place was going to deliver the promised outcomes. When we put the facts and evidence to them—Maggie Barry calls them emotional nonsense but the rest of us call them facts and evidence—and said “Do you realise that this is not going to reduce the rates burden? It is going to do nothing except put unreasonable pressure on local government to continue to under-invest in infrastructure.” and after as Andrew Williams pointed out the Prime Minister told them that he wanted them to invest more the submitters had to begrudgingly accept that yes that could possibly be the case. I do not think I have actually ever seen groups like Federated Farmers Business New Zealand and the Employers and Manufacturers Association less enthused about a piece of legislation that they support than they were about this particular bill. They were hardly effusive in their praise for this legislation. They admitted that there were big problems with it and that it may not actually result in any of the promised outcomes that the Hon Dr Nick Smith had put forward. 
This bill is called the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill. Well that really does not sum up what is in it. That is a very innocuous-sounding title for a very very damaging piece of legislation. Maybe instead it should be called the “Local Government Act (It Ain’t Broke So I’m Going to Break It) Amendment Bill” because that is essentially what this bill does. There is no mischief here that needs resolving. There is no problem in local government that cannot be fixed under the current legislation. It ain’t broke so Nick Smith is going to break it with this particular piece of legislation. That is exactly what it is going to do because it undermines local democracy. 
Andrew Little 
: He did it to ACC. 
MOANA MACKEY 
: That is right; he did it to ACC as well. It undermines local democracy. It is built on a tissue of lies and of figures that were so shoddy that the ministry had to take them down off their website. It was a manufactured crisis that local government was so indebted and so out of control and carrying out all these bizarre and superfluous activities that Nick Smith had to ride in and clamp down and seize central control in Wellington and say “From now on you are only going to do what I tell you that you can do.” That is what we were told by the Hon Dr Nick Smith. 
But the reality is that council debt is prudent. There are a few councils that are having issues like the Kaipara District Council which is the one that is constantly referred to. Why we are destroying local government right across New Zealand because the current Kaipara District Council is in financial difficulty is a question that no member opposite has bothered to try to answer. So I wonder whether when Nick Smith was putting this legislation together as the former Minister of Local Government he considered just being honest and naming it the “Local Government (I Hate Local Government) Amendment Bill” because essentially that is the message that local government authorities have taken out of this. It is that Nick Smith does not trust them. They cannot make decisions on their own because he does not trust that they will make the same decisions that he might have wanted them to make. 
When we look at what is happening to local democracy in this legislation it is particularly concerning because this bill introduces powers for a Minister to defer local government elections under regulation—to just defer them. We know that this is happening because he wants to push through changes in Wellington that he has been planning for a long time. He has got a particular view in his head about how a reorganised Wellington local government region would look and so he wants the power to just say to the voters in Wellington “Sorry you don’t get to have a local government election in 2013 when every other council around the country apart from Environment Canterbury gets to have an election because I want to rush this through so quickly. Your democratic election is just kind of annoying and is interfering with my time frames so I’m just going to defer it.” Well that is simply not good enough. Local government is not some kind of underling that the Minister can just control at his whim. When Labour was in Government we saw local government as a partner—as a very important strategic partner. That has died under this current National Government and that is a tragedy. 
When you see every single council unanimously voting against this legislation saying they do not support it what Minister of Local Government does not take that seriously? What Minister of Local Government says that it is OK to make massive reforms and changes in local government that every single council—78 of them; every single one of them—opposes? Does that not raise a red flag that maybe just maybe the reforms are wrong and that maybe they are going to do more damage than good? When you look across the spectrum of local government in New Zealand these are not people who are aligned politically one way or another consistently. They are not all Labour supporters or National supporters; they are a mix. They represent communities that have very different issues very different values and very different politics and yet on this issue they all came together with one voice and unanimously said “We do not want this legislation.” 
The Hon Dr Nick Smith referred to them as being self-serving and said that Local Government New Zealand was nothing more than a union. That is what he said about Local Government New Zealand. As I said at the time that is not such an insult for us but I know for him that is about the highest insult he could possibly hand out. To call the very practitioners who every single day do this at the coalface who know their local communities who want to be able to prioritise for themselves what their council’s priorities are going to be—they do not want Wellington to tell them what the priorities are going to be. For the Minister of Local Government to ignore that is unbelievably arrogant—unbelievably arrogant. 
And why is the Government doing this? Well another title for this bill could be the “Local Government Act 2002 (Look Over There) Amendment Bill” because this is a diversion. This is a diversion. It is saying “Look over there so that you don’t see what we’re doing over here.” If you look at provincial New Zealand this Government has been sucking money out of the provinces from the day that it entered Government. Look at the issue of local roads. The Government has cut funding for local roads in provincial New Zealand so that it could fund its uneconomic roads of national significance in Auckland. That money has to come from somewhere so provincial councils around New Zealand have had to turn to taxpayers to foot that bill and to bridge that funding gap because the National Government has withdrawn support from provincial councils. And then it turned round and criticised them for increasing rates in order to fund that because it is the core infrastructure that has driven rates increases in New Zealand. It has been a historical underfunding of infrastructure; it has been a historical lack of planning for infrastructure needs—having a large number of people who stand on tickets of no rates increases and then get locked into not actually building the infrastructure that is required. 
John Key when he was Leader of the Opposition said that local government needed to come to the party and start funding infrastructure properly. Business New Zealand accused local government of having lazy balance sheets and said it needed to invest more in infrastructure because its debt levels were low enough that it was prudent to do so and then suddenly overnight we have a 180-degree flip where suddenly its debt levels are out of control. Suddenly it is being criticised for doing exactly what the National Government asked it to do which is to properly fund infrastructure because without it we are not going to have the regional economic development that is going to lead to the economic development nationwide that we need in this country. Then at the same time the Government pulls out what financial support there was from central government to help local government achieve that. That has driven a rates increase which this Government then turns round and blames local government for. The blame should not be with local government. The blame should very firmly be with this Government which has taken away from councils with one hand and then blamed them for having to find that money elsewhere. That is the reality of the situation. 
So the Hon Dr Nick Smith and whoever the current local government Minister is—we are not really sure but it is not going to be for long because the Hon Dr Nick Smith is going to be back in the helm before too long. The Hon Dr Nick Smith needs to think very carefully about what he is doing to communities right around the country because this is a solution looking for a problem but it is a solution that is going to absolutely gut local government in this country. It will absolutely gut local government. It is going to remove local democracy. It is going to mean that when Nick Smith is back in charge as Minister of Local Government he is going to have extraordinary powers. See the National Government had to pass legislation in this House to stop Environment Canterbury having an election. It does not want to have to do that for every other council that it is going to stop elections for. So by giving himself a nice tidy little power in this legislation Dr Nick Smith does not have to come to the House and speak to the voters of New Zealand and the voters whose rights to a democratically elected council he will be removing—