Ardern Jacinda: Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill(No 2) — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeArdern Jacinda: Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill(No 2) — In Committee[Sitting date: 24 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13660. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JACINDA ARDERN (Labour): It is my pleasure to take a call on the Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 2) which as my colleagues have already raised is a technical bill that will enable local boards to delegate responsibilities duties or powers that are already conferred upon them by the Local Government Act. So essentially it allows them to keep doing what they were doing but I think it is important to be clear that what they have been doing has not always been a clearly defined role. In fact local boards very early on under the new super-city structure very much had to carve out the roles that they would play. It was very ill-defined as set out in the primary legislation or as not set out in the primary legislation as the case may be.I want to pay tribute to local board members who have done a fantastic job over the past wee while the past few years of interpreting their role defining their role and doing as much as they could to give local voice local say in the areas they were serving where actually in many ways the super-city legislation gave them very few powers. So they have had to do a lot of work interfacing with council-controlled organisations and the council in order to define their role as place makers.As a resident in central Auckland obviously I sit under the area of theWaitematā Local Board which in particular I want to say has really been an exemplary board in terms of defining its role and working alongside the council-controlled organisations and the local council. In particular it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge the role of Shale Chambers on that board as chair and some of his team members like Jesse Chalmers who is leaving the board and is moving on but there is also Christopher DempseyPippaCoom and TriciaReade.Carol Beaumont: Great board.JACINDA ARDERN: They are particularly unified in the—did I sayPippaCoom? I hope I did. They are particularly unified as a team because they shared a vision as City Vision candidates. But some of the work that they did in particular gives the Committee an indication of where the board has delegated some of its voice back out to the community. In particular they are things like the Ponsonby Roadmasterplan where the board took the initiative to create a reference group to work alongside the community and business and other representative groups to come up with amasterplan to consult the community on and it is a particularly innovative plan. It really challenges some of the views that have been held in the past by council-controlled organisations like Auckland Transport around the greater use of cycle lanes and around how you integrate that in very busy thoroughfares like Ponsonby Road and how you encourage the greater use of public transport and other modes of transport. That is a way that this local boardhas chosen to use its duties and the powers conferred on it by Auckland Council to actually empower members of the local community and it has been very successful at that.There have been other examples where I have witnessed for instance the board having to grapple with the very contentious issue of parking. In areas like SaintMarys Bay and Freemans Bay you get overflow from the city where people seek to park there particularly because we have had an improvement of a lot of theoverbridges into the city—this being another initiative of the local board. That means that commuters can park in the suburbs and quickly commute down into the city. We are being a victim of the local board’s own success. To deal with that the local board has taken the initiative to work with the council-controlled organisation and work with Auckland Transport to try to come up with something that works for the residents where they get first dibs on their local parking. But how you manage that in a way that is cost-effective is very hard and so I commend the local board for what it has done there.Use of public space is another area where at first there was a view that local boards would be able to determine only things like what the playground equipment would look like. They have managed to go well beyond what the primary legislation originally set out for them and to do things like in my local area where I live where the local board has proposed an upgrade of Myers Park. It has been a thorn in the side of residents that we have a beautiful public space in the centre of Auckland City that has become a space that is simply not viewed as a safe space by public residents. It is an inner-city park there has not always been good lighting it is surrounded by quite mature vegetation and it has been used by the homeless and others as a place to sleep in the evenings and so people have sometimes avoided that area. The local board has gone through multiple public consultations on a plan to upgrade that space and again the consultation has been fantastic and the local interaction. It has not been consultation that has been conducted out of Auckland Council; it has been right there in the inner city and that has been absolutely fantastic.Some of the other innovative things that local boards have been able to do through these powers of delegation through the proper interaction between the board and the council-controlled organisations but even through central government agencies like the New Zealand Transport Agency have been like those in Auckland Central where there are spaces like the Campbell Free Kindergarten. Almost anyone who has driven through Auckland may at some point have driven past this. When you come to Victoria Park Market and you have got the Birdcage there on the right-hand side on the left you have an extraordinarily old kindergarten that sits on the edge of Victoria Park. That was a historic building that essentially was sitting right next to a massive piece of transport infrastructure which was the area where the New Zealand Transport Agency was building the tunnel.The local board did something very very innovative. It came together with the New Zealand Transport Agency and said: “Look we’ve got a space that needs to be upgraded and that we could use as a public space.” The New Zealand Transport Agency needed an extra storage facility for some of the equipment working around the tunnel. They collaborated upgraded the space and now we have a fantastic community facility that is absolutely brilliant.But it is not just that. Local boards are required to constantly input into what the council is doing. We cannot underestimate how much work is required in that regard. I counted in the last year alone to July 2013 that theWaitematā Local Board consulted on 25 different plans or things like alcohol plans—absolutely any and every initiative you can think of it was inputting back to council on. So that is an example of where we have that ongoing two-way relationship.Where it has been absolutely critical has been areas like the Auckland Unitary Plan obviously the biggest guiding document for Auckland City but also for controversial issues like the local alcohol plans where we really require local input in order to guide what local residents want to happen in their area. We do run the risk if we do not have that local voice of having for instance one community making a decision about having a one-way-door policy that ends at a certain time—it might be earlier than say what is going to happen on K Road—and then we will suddenly get the flow-on effect of everyone coming into the city as a result of those differing plans. Having a local board able to tap into what is going on in those other areas listening to your community voice listening to business associations and constructing something that works for everyone is absolutely fantastic.Not always is it the local board guiding some of the activity in the local area. Sometimes it is the community like in my area where the K Road safety group has formed itself because of ongoing safety issues. In that instance the local board has actively said: “Look we’ll come on board and help work with you to ensure that we make the most of the council facilities that we have access to as a delegated local board area.” But also it is willing to champion to local council when it makes the wrong call on something because of course the council does still have those powers around planning decisions. A critical example for instance in Arch Hill at the moment is the fact thatBunnings warehouse has come and got planning consent from the council in order to build a massiveBunnings structure in the middle of a residential area—in the middle of an area where the council has otherwise indicated that this is prime residential property. We should have mixed-zone areas we should be building four storeys up and then what does it go and do? It grants planning consent forBunnings to stick a massive warehouse in Arch Hill. It is an absolute disgrace. So in that situation we have had the local board come on board and say: “We are not in favour of this. We will represent the local community to the council. We do not have delegated authority but we do have a voice that can express.”For me these are great examples of what local boards can do. That is a reason why people must vote. These are all of the issues that they have a voice on on the community’s behalf.