Utikere TangiNAISI CHEN (Labour): Thank you Madam Chair. It's a pleasure to take a call on this bill. The Governance and Administration Committee has spent a lot of time mulling over the details and having a lot of input from not only the officials but also from the member who sponsored the bill Tangi Utikere. I want to congratulate him for getting his bill to this stage and I thank him for all his involvement in the whole legislative process. His own personal experience has really helped guide us through this whole process. Obviously I just want to recognise all the work that Ian McKelvie the chair of the select committee has done.I just wanted to make a contribution on two things and one is the Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) in the name of the member from the ACT Party. During the select committee process we had actually already traversed this issue. We had not only received submissions but we had discussed them with officials and I think the answer already given by the member who sponsors this bill is extremely adequate and thorough and why we're not going to support that SOP.I just wanted to make a reflection on the time that I was—my colleague Vanushi Walters sat on a community trust board. We had this practice—which I want to encourage for all organisations whether they're governed by a board a council executors—whereby at the beginning of every single board meeting we would pass around the room a clipboard with our names and our pecuniary interests or our conflicts of interest because we were looking at granting funding. Those practices as recommended by organisations such as the Institute of Directors of New Zealand and Governance New Zealand I would recommend to every single organisation—that we do have internal systems set up to make sure that we rid ourselves of or at least are transparent in terms of our conflicts of interest or particular interests when we are sitting at a decision-making table. But putting it in this legislation is not appropriate. It's not that we don't support transparency—far from it. We want to make sure that the public sector in New Zealand is being transparent in the jobs we do and the other influences that we have in our decision making. But there are other means to do it and so I would encourage all of the council-controlled organisations and other organisations to look at their internal practices and ways of doing this.There was another issue that was raised during the select committee process that I wanted to particularly give awareness to and I think the member who sponsors this bill would like to comment on it as well. It's about the fact that the responsibility of declaring your interest and removing yourself from situations where there is a conflict of interest would solely fall on the person with that conflict of interest. It is not a chance for particular I guess bullies for want of a better word to use this as a way of making a vicious and malicious attack on council colleagues around the table. This would solely be like the way we do some things here in Parliament for instance in the select committee process where the sole responsibility would be on the person with that perceived conflict of interest. So I will leave that to the member.TANGI UTIKERE (Labour—Palmerston North): Thank you Madam Chair. I thank the member for her question. Clearly she is someone who is connected and aware of her own local community—a good hard-working member of Parliament and also a member of the Governance and Administration Committee. Thank you too Ms Chen for confirmation that the select committee had actually traversed this issue. It's always good I think to remind some members who perhaps hadn't heard it first second or fifth time of that fact.She is quite right in that this is an opportunity to explore what is good practice in terms of internal systems and that's why councils will be expected to apply that as a particular regime or approach for council-controlled organisations for council organisations and for council-controlled trading organisations as well. There are other means to capture that and the member has outlined that.On her second point she is also correct that the responsibility does lie with the individual elected member and there are two things that I would like to draw to the committee's attention on that. The first is that it is not the responsibility of other elected members to draw to an elected member's attention the nature of a pecuniary interest. The legislation is quite clear and that is the premise behind the select committee's intent in including that in its report to the House. That's why the Supplementary Order Paper in my name is seeking to distinguish that—that they are two separate pieces of legislation and the declaration under this bill cannot be held over the head of an elected member under the guise of LAMIA the Local Authorities (Members' Interests) Act to force them from the decision-making table. The second point I wish to make on that—and it does also touch on something that I know the Green Party had referred to in first and second reading contributions—is the role of the registrar. The role of the registrar is to collate the information and to make the information publicly available by way of the amended accurate summary. It is not the responsibility of the registrar to check the details and the accuracy of the information that is disclosed. That responsibility that onus still rests with the member which is very similar to the approach taken here in Parliament.