Goff Phil: Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 17 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8309. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill): Part 2 has two clauses. The first clause 9 is a validation clause. What clause 9 does by adding new section 170 is validate the closing date for submissions on the proposed plan that was adopted by the Auckland Council. Also new section 171 also added by clause 9 validates any hearings sessions of the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel that were held concurrent with another session. I want to come back and focus particularly on clause 9 but I will just mention clause 10 which is about consequential amendments. I have got a couple of questions about that as well.What we are predominantly dealing with in this part is validations. The word “validations” has a nice sound to it but what does it actually mean? A validation is what you do after the event to remedy a cock-up in earlier rushed legislation to retrospectively justify—The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Order! That is a word that has been ruled out. The member will not use that word.Hon PHIL GOFF: A validation is what you do to remedy a mistake made in previous legislation and to retrospectively justify what has been done illegally and without authority.When we do these things retrospectively we need to look at what lessons can be learnt from how the mistake—if you prefer to call it that—was made. I am conscious that this clause validates changes that I think were made in the amendment legislation that was passed 2 years ago. The irony of what we are doing in this session today is that we are considering legislation that has not gone to a select committee.Let us think for a moment about what the purpose is of taking legislation to a select committee. It is on the one hand to give the public input to make sure you have got the solutions right and to give the experts input but on the other hand it is to allow the select committee to work in a bipartisan way to prevent mistakes from being made in legislation. So what we would have done in a select committee is we would have had the parliamentary counsel before us to make sure that the drafting was accurate we would have had the officials before us to give advice and unlike in the Committee of the whole House we would have been able to cross-examine the officials.I do not think that happened back in 2013 and the irony is that we are doing exactly the same thing again. We are rushing through legislation that has not been considered by a select committee and I can guarantee that we will be back again to repair more mistakes that are made because we are once again passing legislation in haste.I want to ask a couple of questions of the Minister in the chair. The first validation we are doing is the closing date for submissions to the Auckland Council of 28 February 2014. We are remedying a mistake that relates to events that happened 20 months ago. The question that I have is: what are the implications of leaving it for 20 months before you validate this piece of legislation which did not create the proper authority and why has it taken 20 months to remedy this? This is something that should have been brought to the attention of the House much much earlier.I think the second validation is something that has wider consequences—that is in this legislation that we are passing it allows the independent hearings panel to meet concurrently. But what we find in new section 171 is that we also have to validate the fact that they have been holding these panels concurrently for potentially a long period of time.So my question to the Minister is: what is the scale of this mistake that we are rectifying in the Committee today? How long have those hearings panels been acting without legal authority to do what they have been doing and what are the consequences of having left it so long to try to validate what the panels were doing without the authority of this House?These are significant mistakes. Yes we are rectifying them and yes the Opposition will support the Government in rectifying this situation but the Committee needs to know what the implications are and why it took so long.