Woods Megan: Environment Canterbury (Transitional Governance Arrangements) Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoods Megan: Environment Canterbury (Transitional Governance Arrangements) Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 05 April 2016. Volume:712;Page:10157. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): I am happy to take a call on Part 1 of this bill to spell out why it is that Labour will not cannot and will never support this legislation. Part 1 of the bill which contains the preliminary provisions of this bill—that is clauses 3 through 7—actually contains some pretty important elements of this legislation.First and foremost is the purpose clause of this legislation where I would like to turn my attention. This is of course the part of the bill that tells us what it is going to do. Clause 3 says that “The purpose of this Act is to provide governance arrangements for the Canterbury Regional Council that will—(a) operate during the 2016 to 2019 local authority election-cycle period;”. But it is subclause (2) that I would like to turn my attention first of all where it says: “To this end this Act—(a) replaces the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Act 2010; and (b) provides for a new governing body for the Canterbury Regional Council comprising a mix of elected and appointed members;”. This is of course what the Minister for the Environment euphemistically refers to as a mixed model of democracy. This of course is a Minister who thinks democracy is a little bit too risky and is something that we as elected members should exercise caution on before allowing it back into any part of our country.The first question that I would like Nick Smith the Minister in the chair to address is an issue that was raised by officials in the regulatory impact statement. It is around the consultation document that lies behind the piece of legislation that preceded it. Why was it that it went out and really gave only a fait accompli of this one model with there being a range of options that were not canvassed in terms of what the future of Canterbury would hold?This is something that submitters on the bill raised. In particular the Christchurch City Council in both its submission on the discussion document that preceded this legislation and its written and oral submissions on the legislation before the Local Government and Environment Committee raised particular questions about why it was that this is the path the Minister chose to go down and said that it was only one option. Treasury of course found the need to raise questions about this in the regulatory impact statement and said that it could not give the kind of advice it would otherwise if that had been practised differently.So I am looking forward to hearing the Minister give us an explanation of why it was that only this single option was put forward in the discussion document because it was not like the Minister did not know this was coming. It had been nearly 3 years since he had last cancelled elections in Canterbury and he had had plenty of time to plan for the next phase and what came next. So that is in the purpose statement and I would like to hear from the Minister.I would also like to then turn my attention to clause 6 in Part 1 of this legislation which is the clause that deals with the repeal of this legislation. It is actually only a few days after the sixth anniversary of when the Minister first sacked our elected representative regional council in Canterbury and replaced it with Crown appointees. When that council was first sacked in 2010 there were a lot of statements made in the media and the Prime Minister was even moved to make some statements to say that it might be as late as 2013 before Canterbury could have representative democracy back in its region. But did that happen? No it did not. What happened before the expiration of the 2010 legislation is of course the Minister just put in place another piece of legislation that extended the Crown appointees over elected representatives in the region of Christchurch.So we have absolutely no faith that the repeal date of this legislation will in fact in essence be what is stated in clause 6 of the bill. When the bill states that it is repealed on the close of the resumption day we know that behind the scenes there have been moves by various Government agencies to make the situation that the Minister is putting into place permanent. We know through Official Information Act requests that the Ministry for Primary Industries was lobbying asking that the situation where the Crown appoints half the regional councillors in the case of Canterbury be made permanent. I would like to hear from the Minister in the Committee stage of this legislation an absolute assurance to the people of Canterbury—should National still be in Government but that will not be the case because we will be able to take care of that but more on that later—that in the Minister’s mind this is the last piece of Draconian legislation that takes away democratic rights from the people of Canterbury.As we get more into the substantive parts of this legislation in Part 2 we will talk more fully about what some of the problems are. But I want to know from the Minister that this is what he means this time. When you read through the documents prior to the discussion documents being issued I have no faith. I have no faith that in the Minister’s mind this is the end of the road. We have no cause to have faith in Canterbury because we have had our votes stolen twice—not only in 2010 but by the subsequent legislation that came into play for the 2013 election.At the time when votes were first taken away there were jokes going around. Will Canterbury or Fiji be the first to have democratic elections? Well the Minister can be proud to say he is presiding over a region that is standing firm and not returning to democracy. What is being proposed and defined in Part 1 in clause 4 “Interpretation” in no way represents a return to democracy. The Minister seems to think he can be a little bit democratic in the way that you might like to be a little bit pregnant. But a return to democracy means giving Cantabrians the right to elect their regional councillors. This legislation does not do that. It does not return Canterbury to what the rest of the country enjoys and that is a democratically elected regional council.The Minister needs to justify this and I look forward to the Minister taking a call to justify this because he has failed to do so to this date. There is simply no justification for this. The kinds of arguments that we have heard put up—that democracy is a little bit risky. The people who elected this Minister might like to be a little bit afraid that their elected representatives considered the system of representation under which he is elected is risky.I am sure we will get into those debates more fully in a more substantive part of this bill—the idea that this has to be done for the good of Canterbury. We will have a discussion about water quality in Canterbury and we will see that in the 6 years since the commissioners have been in place we have seen a decline in water quality in our region. I look forward to hearing from the Minister what the justifications are why he never went to the people of Canterbury with a broader set of proposals and an assurance that in his mind this is the end of the road. Thank you.