McKelvie Ian; Rurawhe AdrianIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Well I can assure you Mr Speaker that when that Government starts work most New Zealanders are going to sleep but a hard-working New Zealander has gone to sleep by the time that Government comes to life. Anyway I just want to make a few comments about this bill.DEPUTY SPEAKER: Mr McKelvie I'm still pondering whether you've actually said anything wrong there or not but keep going.IAN McKELVIE: I withdraw Mr Speaker. I withdraw. Anyway back to the bill. I think we've covered really a lot of what needed to be said about this bill in the second reading but Simon Watts in his contribution made a number of interesting comments. One of those interesting comments of course is the work that we as a Parliament foist on to local government and have done all of my career and public life and we keep on foisting it on to local government and hence the reason for—I think I've been through at least three or four funding reviews for local government in my time; not one of them has brought any change. Hopefully this last one will bring some change because there are one or two suggestions in it that I think would be quite useful for the sector. There's also a lot of suggestions in it that I don't think will be any use at all but that's not the point. The Minister did in one of his contributions during the committee stage talk about the fact that there was some difficulties—or he didn't perceive them but I think there are some difficulties with respect to the way information is transferred between regional councils territorial authorities and of course then you've got the unitary authorities that operate in a different manner. He did think that there was some suggestion in my comments that I'd do away with some of them. I certainly would. If I had my way we wouldn't have regional councils in the current form and that would solve some of this problem. But nonetheless I don't want to criticise my friends in the regional councils because they do do under the circumstances a pretty good job. And of course a lot of this information as I said earlier is already being provided by regional councils to the territorial authorities and certainly in my part of New Zealand which is the Horizons region they have a lot of this information and provide a lot of it. There's no comment about one or two other things that change the nature of this information and change it quite quickly. If we look at our rivers—and we've been building stopbanks I think since the 1930s in New Zealand and probably earlier than that but we've never concerned ourselves with what happens to the riverbeds themselves as a result of building those stopbanks. And of course we've seen both in the two big rivers in the Manawatū the Rangitīkei and the Manawatū and we've certainly seen in Hawke's Bay and the Tairāwhiti or Gisborne region the significant impact of putting those stopbanks up then not maintaining the rivers inside them and consequently the information that we might have had on a land information memorandum (LIM) on the outside of the stopbank becomes a very different kettle of fish as a result of the changes that take place in those watercourses. And so when we are considering managing what could be a potential fallout from the information that gets put on people's LIMs we've also got to realise that as public bodies we have a responsibility to manage the assets that we effectively manage or that those community organisations such as regional councils and territorial authorities and Governments manage on behalf of the property owners of New Zealand because if we don't manage those entities or those assets or facilities in the manner we should then we end up with some very strange things happening. And the other thing I wanted to really comment on was that whilst we haven't had this information on LIMs in most parts of New Zealand before nothing's really changed in the last hundred years. And if you look at the significant floods that have taken place as a result of Cyclone Gabrielle and Bola before it and probably going right back into the 1890s very similar things happened in our communities. Sure the riverbeds and those sorts of things have changed but nonetheless the differences between the events that are happening now and the events that happened then are only really caused by the infrastructure that we've put in place since those events initially. And I know that one of the major bridges in Hawke's Bay has washed out three times since 1931 so it's not the first time it's washed away in this event. And so we can get that sort of activity going on through generations.And of course historically when you've got to be a little bit older you remember things that have happened years ago. Now we're going to shove them on LIMs so everyone knows about them. There's no advantage of being old anymore because the advantage was taken away by the fact that they're recording all this information that they never used to record. Only those of us that were there could remember it. And of course if you think about interest rates in our younger generation today we could have told them it was coming. Anyway I don't really need to say much more about this bill. It has been mentioned and there is some interesting parameters around some of the information we acquire because some of the information for one reason or another needs to be kept under lock and key for want of a better word. This bill also—and of course it's called the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Amendment Bill—goes some way towards enabling councils and public entities to retain that information where it's required and it's mostly for security reasons that that would be the case because there's certainly no reason for us to keep information from the public and property owners in our regions. I hope this bill makes its way into law in about three years' time. I hope I'm still around and I wish the Minister of Local Government at the time it does all the best with the complaints they get as a result of it. Thank you Mr Speaker.SPEAKER: I might say to your reference to age you do get largesse from the Chair as respect for age Mr McKelvie!