Pugh MaureenMAUREEN PUGH (National): Thank you Madam Chair. I'd just like to make a contribution also to the Local Government (Community Well-being) Amendment Bill in the committee stage tonight.My colleague the Hon Jacqui Dean has coined a lovely turn of phrase for the title of this bill—I'm sure she'll speak to it again—the Tit-for-tat Bill". Labour introduced these well-beings into the Local Government Act and then in 2012 National took them out. So now Labour is putting them back in again hence the tit for tat. But the reality is that the removal of the four well-beings—the social economic environmental and cultural well-beings—did not prevent councils from actually doing any of them. It didn't stop councils or prevent them from taking account of all of those individual well-beings when they were planning or when they were investing. So in actual fact there is very little point in putting them back in except if we are going to impose a whole other level of compliance and reporting. I would argue that everything that councils do is actually done via the lens of how the communities and the environment are impacted. So councils make decisions based on the demands of their community the demands of their infrastructure and growth and also the impact on the environment. So already the councils are in effect doing what it is that these well-beings are setting out to do without the added compliance and reporting and I'll cover that compliance and reporting in a bit more detail.Every aspect of council activity will need to be addressed and assessed in terms of the four well-beings. We know this because councils have been through this in the past. So I would like to have some assurance from the Minister around what this reporting and compliance might look like once these four well-beings are implemented back into the bill because I can tell you that this is a huge cost and a huge compliance for local councils especially for those smaller ones—so just some confirmation of that from the Minister about how that will be reported and assessed once implemented.I know that there are probably some idealistic reasons for wanting to have these four well-beings back in the bill and we can assume then that if there is deemed to be such a need there is a problem to be solved. So I would like to know from the Minister what it is exactly that the councils that are not performing at the moment—what it is that we're setting out to improve or achieve in terms of these four well-beings going back into the bill.I do recall recently at a select committee process that the Government members on the select committee were adamant that they did not want performance targets inserted into the piece of legislation that we were debating—the bill that we were debating and working on at the time—and the rationale behind not wanting those performance measures or performance targets inserted into the bill was that it would distract from the actual performance of the agencies that would be responsible and that they would focus their attention simply on ticking the boxes rather than focusing on the real issues that needed addressing. So on the one hand the Government says "No we do not want to have performance targets or performance measures because they will turn into a box-ticking exercise." and yet at another level of legislation we are doing exactly that. So I think there is probably a little bit of a dichotomy there.I just wonder how this bill is actually going to encourage anything other than box ticking whereas I've explained previously that the actual implementation of the four well-beings is happening regardless of whether it's embedded in legislation or not. It certainly has not prevented councils from investing in the things that this legislation seeks to implement which are things like swimming pools and libraries and sports grounds.Another aspect that I'd like to explore is how developing these performance measures and reporting against these performance measures will actually be implemented and how we will explain it to ratepayers as the Hon Jacqui Dean has pointed out because by default it's the ratepayers who will be funding this new level.I also seek from the Minister some confirmation around the consequence of this bill and the need for independent auditing of these performance measures in this bill. I presume that will be done by Audit New Zealand as the independent auditor that most councils do use and also in terms of developing those performance measures will we then be expecting councils to have to employ additional staff to undertake the work of developing those performance measures and then reporting on them? In the previous iteration of this legislation there was a whole department required to set it up because the reporting has to be done in such a robust way that there are multiple levels of compliance required.For instance we have to be able to prove that the community has some degree of satisfaction with how the council is performing in one particular area and it may be that this is assessed in some way. Usually there would have to be a community survey where a survey goes out and the community is asked to grade the performance of the council. There could be up to five levels of performance as we've had in the past. Whether there is intervention required perhaps is an example. The second one could be that they don't actually meet a target that they do meet a target perhaps that they exceed a target or even that they achieve excellence.So that assessment has to be done for every single aspect of council activity. I just wonder whether the Minister can give some reassurance to council that this is not going to add extra compliance as well because if all we're doing is asking Audit New Zealand to undertake extra work within council—the invoice that is sent to every local government for their audit so far is usually around a six figure sum—and if we're asking ratepayers then to move to even more added cost I tell you they will not be happy with that. And I would just like some reassurance from the Minister of Local Government if I could that the level of compliance is not going to be onerous and that the performance measures are going to be realistic and simple to comply with. Or is every council going to be asked to develop their own set of performance measures and reports survey and then make public those outcomes?I do then also just want to touch slightly on the purpose of any reporting that Audit New Zealand may do and whether we are looking towards having some kind of a grading system for local government—whether we're expecting for Audit New Zealand to start ranking local government performance and if that is the case then perhaps we need to understand that up front and that would be appreciated. Thank you very much Madam Chair."