Nash Stuart: Reserves and Other Lands Disposal Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeNash Stuart: Reserves and Other Lands Disposal Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 01 July 2015. Volume:706;Page:5002. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]STUART NASH (Labour—Napier): The thing about Reserves and Other Lands Disposal Bills is that they come around my understanding is about once every 7 years. What happens is that they are supposed to be non-controversial. About once every 7 years there are enough changes to warrant a bill and a piece of legislation going through the House and here we are. But as Mr Parker has alluded to and I think the Minister for Land Information alluded to this in her second reading speech—it was not in her first reading speech because the Minister who gave the first reading speech was actually the Hon Richard Worth who departed this House a while ago I believe. The thing is we are now 7 years on from when this was introduced. So one thing I would not mind knowing from the Minister is whether she is going to put any Supplementary Order Papers forward and whether there are any other parcels of land that should actually be included in this because my understanding is we are about due for another piece of legislation along these lines which will include all the other changes that councils and various local jurisdictions will want included in a piece of legislation.The last thing we really want to do is actually delay legislation another 7 years for a whole raft of reasons. First of all it is the reason that Mr Parker outlined. If in fact this is causing economic cost to any sort of local authority for undue reason then we need to mitigate that risk because the last thing we want to do is impose even greater costs on our local councils. But the other reason is it is not good legislation. I mean the legislation in itself is not bad but what I mean is it is bad process. To have a bill like this on the Order Paper for 7 years—and let us hope that after the Committee stage it is not going to languish for another couple of years because it might be Kelvin Davis who gives the third reading speech as the Minister if it is in 2017. But anyway what I am trying to say is we need to get this piece of legislation through the House. One of the things that again my colleague Mr Parker talked about is the economic cost.You know when I look at the list of reserves and lands affected obviously the first one is the Auckland Art Gallery development. At the time it was a development but even at the time it was retrospective. The thing about this piece of legislation that we all acknowledge—and I do not blame the Minister for this because I think there were even two or three Ministers before this current Minister who were in charge of this. But what was acknowledged was that this was not a good way. This is not good process in terms of allowing these chunks of land to be passed on to other ownership. The Auckland Art Gallery development—what this was about was that the Auckland City Council proposed to amend the definition of “Albert Park” so the Auckland Art Gallery could be extended. Now the Auckland Art Gallery has already been extended. I am assuming the ribbon has already been cut so I do not know what would happen if this piece of legislation did not go through the House. I mean we are supporting it. It will go through the House. But I am just saying that retrospectively is just not a great way to do it. In fact I think at the time the mayor was John Banks. I can imagine the conversation that went on in the council chambers. He would have gone “Don’t worry about it. We’ll just whack it in a Reserves and Other Lands Disposal Bill. They come up about once every 7 years. It does not matter if it is retrospective; it is going to go through anyway.”Well again we cannot have this sort of legislation going through retrospectively because what it actually does is it perverts the course of democracy. By that I mean those who were opposed to anything in this bill—and I think there were around 30-odd submissions. I was not on the Primary Production Committee but I think there were around 30-odd submissions. It is very difficult to present a submission against a piece of legislation when the process you are actually objecting to has already taken place. This is very much the case in this piece of legislation and the Minister will be well aware of this as are other members on the select committee. A number of the submissions were to do with the Auckland Art Gallery. Submitters came and they knew it was pretty much a waste of time. I do not mean that in a disrespectful way but it was a waste of time their submitting on something that had already occurred. This is the problem we get into when we are looking at retrospective legislation because it just rankles when it comes to the whole democratic process.There were a couple of other things. The Auckland volcanic cones land—what happened here was that the Department of Conservation wanted to amend an Act so decision making in relation to volcanic cones in Auckland is with the Minister of Conservation not the Governor-General. There were a number of concerns about this because the department believed that if the decision-making process was given to a Government Minister then what may end up happening is Government policy may end up having sway when in reality what we need is an Order in Council from the Governor-General—[Bell rung]Hon Louise Upston: Mr Chair.The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): I have already called Stuart Nash.STUART NASH: Thank you very much. Actually I am very pleased that the Minister is going to address some of these concerns. Like I said the Minister does a good job in this area so I am very keen to hear her contributions.Carmel Sepuloni: What?STUART NASH: In this piece of legislation—that is all; not in the other stuff. But on the volcanic cones land as I was saying what we did not want to end up with is a situation where a Minister of Conservation had pressure put on him or her by other Ministers of the Crown to undertake or to allow or to permit an activity to be undertaken that perhaps played into Government policy as opposed to what the community actually wanted. That was actually quite controversial.Dunedin Octagon land—that was simply the case of the Dunedin City Council proposing to move a restriction regarding the erection of structures in the Octagon. That was non-controversial. It went through. Everyone understood what the council was trying to achieve there and everyone backed that. The Kahurangi National Park—again this is the classic case of why we need these sorts of bills. The Department of Conservation just wanted to formalise the realignment of State Highway 6 through parts of the Kahurangi National Park. It will have gone through all the right processes—[Interruption] No no Mr Twyford this was totally non-controversial. It went through the right process. This is the sort of thing we need to do every now and again to make sure that we are delivering the services to New Zealanders that New Zealanders expect.But then Mr Parker talked about Lookout Point. This was controversial. I know that the cost of the land was severely discounted because this legislation had not gone through; the Waitaki District Council could not offer title. The other thing I understood—and I am not too sure whether I should be saying this but someone did send me an email saying “You’re speaking on this …”—there was a perceived conflict of interest here. I might be out of line when I talk about this so yes I am going to be a little bit careful. But someone said to me that when the local MP put up a bill to actually make sure this did go through the Reserves and Other Lands Disposals—well a member’s bill actually—her husband was the lawyer at the time and there was just an impression there was a slight conflict of interest.The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): No no well you are right. You should steer well clear of that sort of reference and just come back to what you were talking about.STUART NASH: OK. The Māhinepua Bay reserve land—I think one of my colleagues might be talking about this because he knows a lot more about this. It was slightly controversial and there was a level of disquiet actually when the bill was presented and I think there is a Supplementary Order Paper in place to actually withdraw those clauses—the Minister might know that—from the bill itself. Marlborough District Council—this was the Picton office land. This goes back to a 1903 transfer of the Picton office land and removes an antiquated interest on the title of the land. Again this is the sort of clause that is in these sorts of bills that come to the House once every 7 years. I do not know how many of these things have been backed up. This goes back to 1903. That was a long time ago. I do not think even Winston was in the House back then. He might have been but I am unsure. So it goes back a long time and every now and again these things come up. I suspect that more and more and more of them are going to come up as councils are challenged to have a look at their balance sheets and say “OK what is necessary what is antiquated how do we upgrade everything.” because the level of governance requirements on local authorities is getting—I would not say more onerous but ratepayers and the Government are expecting a higher level of engagement and a much greater level of accountability. So I suspect we are going to see a lot of these clauses where 1903 pieces of legislation or 1903 transfers or similar instances are going to need to be remedied just to bring them up to 21st century standards.The next one was the Nelson Marlborough District Health Board land. I had some slight concerns about this and I spoke about it in my second reading speech. This was where the Nelson Marlborough District Health Board wanted to remove any caveats around five titles of land the board holds. The caveats around these pieces of land were that they could be used only for district health board purposes. I was really unsure—and I had a good look at a lot of the material behind this—why those caveats existed. I suspect that what happened was that this land was given or bequeathed to a district health board in times past and part of the condition of that bequest was that the land could be used only for health purposes otherwise the land would return to the owner or to the Crown or something along those lines. But like I said I am unsure and my investigations proved fruitless to be honest. It would be quite interesting to know. I doubt whether the Minister has the background on this because it is quite specific. It would be interesting to know whether that is the case because the last thing we would want to do is to get into a situation where two or three generations ago specific land was bequeathed for specific purposes—