Tirikatene Rino: Christchurch City Council (Rates Validation) Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTirikatene Rino: Christchurch City Council (Rates Validation) Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 01 April 2015. Volume:704;Page:2854. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]RINO TIRIKATENE (Labour—Te Tai Tonga): I am pleased to make a small contribution in the concluding parts of the second reading. When preparing my speech I went back to my speech on the first reading of this bill. It is fair to say that I was quite harsh on the Christchurch City Council just around the circumstances where we are now having to put in place retrospective legislation to correct errors and breaches of the law. I am always amazed at the language that is used. For instance this bill refers to validating irregularities. When you think of an irregularity you think of something that might be like a singular or rare event or just an aberration. Let us not forget that this bill is validating a succession of breaches by the Christchurch City Council that went on for 10 years from 2003 all the way to 2012. An irregularity? It was a most regular succession of blunders for over 10 years and it was only after 10 years that it spotted the mistake. I am just absolutely gobsmacked really that a major city council in New Zealand went on for 10 years breaching the Local Government (Rating) Act.I want to acknowledge the contribution from Mr Simpson as the chair of the Local Government and Environment Committee and I acknowledge his upright and critical remarks basically about the Christchurch City Council. I acknowledge him for that because we tend to like to sort of put rose-tinted lenses on over errors with good intentions and correct what were administrative anomalies but it is what it is: it was 10 years of breaches of the Local Government (Rating) Act. I do not know how big the rating base of Christchurch is but I know it is enormous. You multiply that by 10 years and that is a mighty number of rates that were levied and the resolutions to set those rates and impose penalties on them were basically in breach of the law.So here we are now using the highest court in the land Parliament to correct those errors. I think there needs to be a message that should go out to all local government authorities across the motu—across the country—to step up their game. They need to step up their game to make sure that we are not wasting Parliament’s time having to traverse and go over retrospective legislation to fix up what really are basic administrative errors. I certainly hope that local authorities around the country are as good as Mr Mark’s metropolis of Carterton. I understand that he is very confident in the robustness of the resolution processes that were applied in the setting of rates in his time as mayor. I certainly hope that the other local authorities around New Zealand are doing the same because if it can happen over the space of 10 years without being picked up even by internal and external audits in the second-largest city council in the country I just wonder what other anomalies may also be out there among the rest of the territorial authorities around New Zealand.That concludes my contribution here at this second reading. We are reluctantly supporting this bill but we hope that the message is loud and clear to all local authorities around New Zealand to lift their game. Thank you.