SpeechHon EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe Madam Speaker. Thank you. I'm pleased to take a short call on the Local Government Electoral Legislation Bill. The Greens are not represented on the Governance and Administration Committee so we weren't involved in the hearings on the bill but we strongly support the bill and its purpose to improve the processes by which individuals and communities are represented through and can participate in local government elections. This bill doesn't go nearly far enough. The Greens would like to see much more sweeping electoral reform to ensure that 16- and 17-year-olds have the vote in local authority elections so they can help chart their future and so that we improve representation in councils across the country through using a proportional voting system in the same way that this Parliament has become much more representative and much more diverse through MMP. The Greens think that STV should be enabled at local authorities throughout the country. That's why there are two Supplementary Order Papers in the name of Golriz Ghahraman which the House will consider in the committee stages to put in place voting for 16- and 17-year-olds and to ensure that the electoral system does cover that single transferable vote system so that voting is proportional.So this bill is much more modest in its ambitions in terms of providing a revised process for councils to decide their representation arrangements and to make sure that they consider Māori representation as a fundamental step in that process and to also simplify the process that unitary councils such as Auckland Council can go through to adjust local board boundaries as well as the coin-toss issue and making a fairer decision when an election result is tied.But I really must take issue with National's comments on this bill. They are really forgetting history. We heard from Mr Goldsmith that it offends the fundamental principles of democracy. When he started talking about the Canterbury regional council legislation—it was of course the National Government which completely removed the ability of Canterbury electors to vote for a regional council for a whole nine years. It totally threw out the ability to use the ballot box. So it is very rich for the National Party to be opposing this bill. It simply ensures that when councils are considering Māori representation there is not that extra barrier that they have at the moment of having to have a poll of electors. If councils want to establish an additional general ward there is no requirement that there is a poll of electors. So why would we have a differential rule in relation to the establishment of Māori wards? So this bill makes it fairer by removing that requirement for a referendum. I hope that Mr Goldsmith looks at National's initiatives in the local electoral law—getting rid of a whole regional council for nine years is getting rid of the fundamental principles of democracy. This bill is actually seeking to improve them.In terms of what happens in Auckland as the previous speaker Naisi Chen noted there is the ability to increase the number of councillors to up to 29 councillors to ensure better representation in Tāmaki-makau-rau and the ability through the bill for the council to amend the boundaries of local boards without having to go through that multi-step process with the Local Government Commission in terms of doing a whole restructuring of local government—the process for amending board boundaries at the moment is far too complicated. I really acknowledge the values of the Auckland boards. In virtually every bill concerning the Resource Management Act the local boards in Auckland have individually provided submissions to the Environment Committee for example and brought the perspectives about their local area into focus. So it's a very good initiative to ensure that their boundaries better fit their communities of interest.One concern the Green Party has about the proposals around Auckland is that the regulatory impact statement says that the Remuneration Authority has advised that it's unlikely that they will increase the size of the governance pool that council uses to fund councillor salaries which effectively means that if Auckland Council decides to increase the number of councillors the salaries will reduce because they'll be having to spread the same pool over more people. That problem isn't unique to Auckland but to ensure that we have transparent local government and we avoid the risk of corruption we need adequate salaries for councillors to encourage a wide variety of people to stand so that it's not just those who can afford it and so that there's no risk of people taking bribes essentially because their income is very low. So that issue of the governance pool is something I think that does need to be addressed.The Green Party strongly supports the bill and think that the National Party doth protest rather too much and that it has obstructed Māori wards virtually every step of the way. That makes no sense at all because we want local government to be representative of everyone in Aotearoa and that ensures increasing the amount of Māori representation at councils around the motu. Kia ora.