Heatley Phil: Tasman District Council (Validation and Recovery of Certain Rates) Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHeatley Phil: Tasman District Council (Validation and Recovery of Certain Rates) Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 19 February 2014. Volume:696;Page:16090. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL HEATLEY (National—Whangarei): I rise to support the member Damien O’Connor on this local bill that he introduced to the House the Tasman District Council (Validation and Recovery of Certain Rates) Bill in its second reading. We are certainly supporting it as a National Party team. We understand the weaknesses in the bill but then as the member so clearly put it it is a very imperfect situation there in the Tasman district. We are making it better; we are not claiming to make it perfect. The situation there is that essentially the rate setting was broken. We are cobbling together the pieces to make the best of what is a difficult situation.This bill will validate rates set by the Tasman District Council for the period from 2003-04 through to 2008-09—that 5-year period during which the council did not follow the correct process in setting rates. We want to be clear about that. This bill will also validate rates and penalties paid over the period authorise the council to recoverany unpaid rates and ratify theTata Beach andLigar Bay stormwater rate. This bill will highlight to other councils the importance of proper scrutiny when setting rates.I know that Damien O’Connor in his first reading speech introduced this legislation with some angst and he has repeated those concerns just now. I cannot do better than quote Damien O’Connor in his first reading speech where he said: “I have to say I am not overly enthusiastic about bringing retrospective legislation to the House. However I am a very proud local member and I have spoken to the Tasman District Council and agreed to sponsor this bill into Parliament where a select committee can give it due consideration.” The member Damien O’Connor said he was a reluctant sponsor of retrospective legislation as of course we all are. “The main area where we seem to have this in the House is over fisheries legislation. This is not the case here.” said Damien O’Connor. “It is local government.”—it has made mistakes—“Mistakes do happen from time to time. I know each and every one of the councillors in good faith took advice from their staff and of course assumed that they had put in place valid rating claims on the ratepayers.”I do not know those councillors. The Hon Damien O’Connor obviously does know those councillors. He felt and he was assured that they in good faith had left the role to staff of actually putting together the rates and ensuring that they were brought together properly and that ratepayers would be legally required to pay those rates. As Damien O’Connor said back then “So this is perhaps a long and drawn-out and quite expensive process but it is one that we have to go through none the less.” And that is what brings members to the House today. The National Party is joining Damien O’Connor in passing I hope when the vote goes through the second reading of this piece of legislation.It is true that we have seen issues like this arise across the country from time to time. We just recently dealt with a similar issue in Kaipara. National as the public will know has introduced Better Local Government reforms which will help make local government more efficient more responsive and better focused so that these types of issues do not arise again. They will help the National Government drive the reform process to ensure that councils focus clearly on their core business are not frustrated or in any way confused and are not led to not pay attention to the detail of their core business. The Better Local Government reforms will include a work stream to monitor and improve council performance and to prevent future procedural errors as we see in this Tasman District bill and we saw in the Kaipara bill as well. So it is quite timely for us as the National Government to drive through those reforms to get better outcomes from local government for their ratepayers.I was on the Local Government and Environment Committee which went through the process in committee of looking at the clauses one by one and discussing them with the Tasman District public and the Tasman District Council and others who had a view. We made some changes. For example for the sake of consistency technical amendments will be made to clauses 5(a) 6 and 9 to replace the statement “declared to have been” with “declared to be and to always have been”. The committee is sympathetic to proposals to delete clause 9 but found that this course of action would be outside the scope of the bill. Damien O’Connor outlined the issues there.As such the committee has recommended only the technical amendments. Clause 9 seeks to validate targeted rates set by the council for the 2006 financial year for the purposes of the stormwater works in theLigar Bay andTata Beach urban drainage areas for example. The committee also noted that there would be many practical implications of deleting clause 9 and that is why the intent of the Local Government (Rating) Act 2002 is for local authorities to address rating errors as soon as is practicable. Under that Act we are ensuring that when councils come across errors theyact swiftly and justly. Leaving those errors setting them aside and not dealing with them leads to the problems we have seen in the Tasman District. I would like to emphasise not just to the Tasman District Council officials who are listening but to those in local authorities right across New Zealand that if you come across errors in the rating orders that councils have passed historically then the council needs to address those errors as soon as is practicable not just because it is useful to face up to mistakes and in the end deal with them but because the law says that councils need to do that immediately.Given the historic nature of the rating errors in question it would be difficult without such validation. The council would need to be required to determine which ratepayers had paid the rate in 2006-07 and the amount they had paid—a very difficult task for it to undertake. It would also have to ascertain whether the current ratepayers are the same ratepayers as those in 2006-07 it would have to apportion rates if there were multiple owners and it would have to write to each ratepayer advising them of the amount of the refund and requesting bank details for repayment. So in making those changes in the bill that we have before us today if the committee had recommended that that is what councils would have to go through—not only an onerous task for the council but one that would inevitably result in mistakes and would transfer angst from one group of people to another group of people from one set of ratepayers to another set of ratepayers. It is not this Parliament’s role to transfer vexed problems from one group to another and we are making the best as I said at the beginning of my speech of what is a difficult situation. The merits of setting a stormwater rate were found to be outside the scope of this bill.So in summary this bill is needed to validate certain rates set incorrectly during the period 2003-04 through to 2008-09. Without validation the council remains vulnerable to legal challenge from ratepayers over incorrectly set rates. No one is arguing that they will. Some residents have objected to details of the stormwater rates that they were not properly consulted on and that they are being charged for stormwater services they are not using but Damien O’Connor himself acknowledges as the bill’s sponsor that he has discussed their concerns and is convinced that the select committee will provide residents with an opportunity to engage and to move on. A key part of National’s Better Local Government reforms is to prevent this from happening again. I support—reluctantly like Damien O’Connor and others in the committee—this bill in the House today at its second reading.