Kuriger Barbara; Rurawhe AdrianBARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki - King Country): Thank you Mr Speaker. So yes this is a problem that needs to be solved but the way the Government is going around this is not the way to solve the issue. You don't change a bad process by using bad process. So what the Local Electoral (Māori Wards and Māori Constituencies) Amendment Bill actually says is to align the treatment of Māori wards and Māori constituencies with the treatment of general wards and general constituencies as much as possible. Now no one's disagreeing with that. There is a problem that we need to solve here. The last speaker talked about the fact that this Government is giving local government the tools to do this. So why does stage two of the impact summary then say—which we're not doing tonight and we're not into yet; this is somewhere down the track to follow—establish a new process for decisions on whether to establish Māori wards that [are] better aligned with the current process for establishing general wards and constituencies"? So what we're saying is we're going to do this and then after we do this we're going to work out what is the best process to do this. Now if anyone's ever heard about putting the horse before the cart here it is.It's quite concerning really to read through this when we hear about what the select committee process is going to be. I've seen some pretty shocking select committee processes in the last Parliament—processes where the public were open for submissions for a week in some cases 12000 submissions and 20 people got to the table for one day to be able to give their say. Why is this Government so scared of letting the public have their say on this issue? We often learn something and we must trust the public to help us make decisions. We as politicians don't have all the answers and someone may just come in with a good idea. So the one-week consultation on this process is an absolute farce. It would be far better to run this process properly and have any changes come into force in 2025. That's the problem that we have that actually this is being rushed through. It's changing something and we don't know that we've actually got the best process to run this going forward.Legislative guidelines actually state that legislation should have prospective not retrospective effect. If retrospectivity is intended this must be stated in the legislation and capable of justification. I don't actually see anything that is stated in this legislation that justifies why it's retrospective other than the time frames: "We have to do it in a hurry—we have to do it in a hurry." If it was needing to be done in such a hurry why didn't the Labour Party talk about it on their way into Government? Why didn't we give it to the public to use their voice? What are we scared of—what are we scared of? Why should we not be letting the public—isn't that what we're here for? I mean even the departmental disclosure statement states the policy details have not been "tested or assessed in any way to [assure] the bill's provisions are workable and complete". So I'll repeat that: has not been "tested or assessed in any way to ensure the bill's provisions are workable and complete".So I would encourage any speaker on the other side to get up and tell us on this side of the House how they think the bill's provisions are workable and complete. If they haven't been tested and assessed I want to know what their assessment is: how the Government's members have actually assessed this to know that it's workable because actually I just think that you're using a very short-sighted very quick very rushed process to solve an issue that could be solved in a far better way if we just took the time to listen to the public work through and make sure all the provisions are aligned. But no unfortunately this Government does not trust our local people to make local decisions and it's another case of "Government knows best" once again. Thank you.DEPUTY SPEAKER: I call Debbie Ngarewa-Packer—five minutes."