SpeechSARAH PALLETT (Labour—Ilam): Thank you so much Mr Speaker. I rise for the first time in—Simeon Brown: This'll be a good speech.SARAH PALLETT: Did you say this will be good? I do hope so. I rise for the first time in quite a while physically in the House which is really a complete delight. It's actually really quite challenging to speak in the House via Zoom and I commend my colleague Mr Eagle for doing so earlier. It's quite challenging too when one's being heckled because you can't actually hear what's being said which means it's actually quite hard to respond and I think sometimes the fun of being physically in the House is being able to respond to the wonderful input from the other side.But I stand here tonight to talk to the Local Government (Pecuniary Interests Register) Amendment Bill which has been brought to the House by my colleague Mr Utikere who as we've heard actually had a history in local government as he was in fact Deputy Mayor of the Palmerston North council. I can say with hand on heart that the speakers before me are absolutely in possession of a far greater deal of knowledge on this particular bill than I am because I'm not part of the Governance Administration Committee but I would like to thank them for their work because I can see from the extremely detailed reports that a great deal of thought and work has gone into them. The reason why we're here—it really does make sense for us to be sitting here in consideration of this bill because people really do want to know that their elected representatives may or may not have any possible interests in the issues that come forward to them and I think it's completely reasonable that they do that. I did note that the select committee had discussions on who to include in this particular piece of legislation and did land on the inclusion of local and community board members which I think is completely appropriate. As we've heard some of them really have a great deal of financial responsibilities and I think it's completely fair; as the Privacy Commissioner said in their report local authority members do have access to information that isn't available to the wider public. I think it's reasonable that we can assess for ourselves and maybe engage in further questioning to assess whether or not there is a conflict of interest whether real or perceived or whether there may be personal gain. I found this really quite interesting coming to this bill for the first time from outside the committee because one of the things I was particularly interested in was the discussions that were had around the balancing of transparency on privacy—versus privacy I should say. I think this is a conversation that we're probably going to be having a great deal more in the House as time goes on because my take on the subject is that previously through history when registers were made available or there was a request for a register to be made available what that meant was that somebody had to rock up in person to a physical office and actually ask to go through a book. And if one wanted to gather—I mean there's nothing wrong with that. You know I come from a time when you know my university study in my 20s was done pre-internet so I'm fully familiar with actually gaining information. But what I do know from my experience is—Hon Member: From books. That's lucky isn't it.SARAH PALLETT: Lots of experience of books. What I do know from my experience is it's far far harder to gather information on individuals from these sorts of registers if you have to go from place to place to place physically rather than just click online. I think what we've seen over the past—actually really quite recently; definitely over the past year—is that some of our local councillors and local elected representatives have genuine reason to be concerned that their home addresses are not readily available to the general public. I think we've certainly seen that in Christchurch and I would like to emphasise the importance of ensuring the safety and privacy of our elected members whilst balancing that need for transparency. As I said I think we are going to be having some further conversations about that in the past. In the past? We're going to have conversations about that in the past? That would be clever of us; it's obviously getting late for me.So what does that look like and how does it compare with Parliament? I kind of wanted to take a moment to really congratulate Christchurch City Council because as the Hon Eugenie Sage said one of the issues here is around consistency nationally. Some of our city councils already have taken these steps and they've made these registers available publicly and in Christchurch City Council online. When I go through what the bill in its introduction version is going to look like and I compare it to what Christchurch City Council already has available I'm actually really heartened to see that they don't just meet the needs of this bill but they've added on some extra pieces of information that make it a little bit more consistent with what we have to do as parliamentarians. Of course we don't want to make it so onerous that we do discourage people from seeking positions in local government and community boards clearly especially as we've heard when sometimes they aren't met with the same degree of respect. They are frequently not met with remuneration that's concomitant with the effort involved. I have to say that speaking as the chair of wāhine caucus one of my particular areas of interest has been encouraging women into positions of leadership and into positions on community boards and in their local councils and I do want to be able to reassure them that they're going to be safe to do so. I do want to be able to reassure them that the legislation that we have which I am certain it does does actually provide that security. I can say that speaking from my own personal experience of recently filling in my own pecuniary interest form it's not onerous even at the level of parliamentary representative. It doesn't take a huge amount of time but it is really important that we do see exactly where our interests lie. So I do commend this bill. I do congratulate Mr Utikere for the good fortune of drawing this bill from the biscuit tin. As I think Dr Duncan Webb said in his first speech it's slightly odd sometimes to be congratulating somebody on the luck of the draw but I am absolutely delighted for my colleague in the class of 2020 that he has done so. It's such a worthy bill. It really is worth our attention. It's clearly been worth all of the effort that the select committee has put into it and I really look forward to seeing it progress through the House and I heartily commend it. Thank you.