Clendon David: Rodney District Council Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Clendon David: Rodney District Council Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 21 July 2010. Volume:665;Page:12549. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DAVID CLENDON (Green) 
: 
 Kia ora koutou. It is a privilege to speak to the Rodney District Council Bill which is essentially a rearguard action by the people of Rodney who have been steamrollered into something they did not want a bar of—and for very good reason. I have some affinity for the area having lived at Whangaparaoa for some 13 or 14 years and I recently held a public meeting in Whangaparaoa. It was on an entirely different topic. The meeting was attended by Green Party members and supporters but also predominantly by members of the public who were perhaps not politically affiliated. One needed only to scratch an inch below the surface to find a great deal of anger and frustration at the fact that Rodney has been pushed into this unwanted and in many ways unnecessary amalgamation. 
Our colleague Tau Henare who spoke earlier was reflecting on what I think is an extremely optimistic view which is that the Government will not take a political hit on this issue. I will disabuse the member of that belief. There will be a political cost to this. There is a great deal of anger and frustration at the loss of democracy as there has been throughout the very ungainly and unsatisfactory process of melding Auckland into one mass. 
This local bill is a result of the frustration about that hostility and that attack on democracy which has occurred in Auckland and elsewhere particularly in Canterbury. Throughout the region people feel disenfranchised. They have spoken but they have not been listened to. Mr Twyford and I and other Labour and Green MPs ran a series of meetings. We went around the entire region to hear people’s stories including the stories of people from Rodney. They presented very compelling arguments as to why at least north Rodney—if not in fact the entire district—ought to be left out of the amalgamation. Over 6000 people signed a petition. They went to the trouble of presenting that petition to Parliament. They also sought people who supported the amalgamation and they managed to find only a few hundred in north Rodney who supported that contrary view. 
It is true that a number of people think that the super-city is a good idea. Many of those people are under what is clearly a false belief that they will get a bigger slice of a larger pie. In some quarters there is some understanding and expectation that Rodney going into the Auckland super-city will mean that more money is spent in Rodney on roading on infrastructure on transport and on other public amenities. We know that whoever comes into the council in a few months’ time will use a great deal of money expenditure and other resources simply to establish the super-city and simply to get some workable form to the very poorly designed super-city and the increasingly poorly implemented process of creating the super-city. It will be a very long time before the Auckland Council has the time or the wherewithal to consider the outlying parts of the city—Manukau District Franklin District and indeed Rodney District. 
There is a reason why the proponents of the super-city were so determined to have Rodney District in the super-city particularly north Rodney which is primarily a rural environment and far from Queen Street far from the west the south and the North Shore which are primarily urban developments. I have one word and that word is land bank. Some would have it that Greater Auckland should aspire to have a population of some 2 million people which is 600000 or 700000 people more than we currently have. Clearly those people will want to live and work and enjoy recreation somewhere. It is very clear that Rodney District is being preserved as a land bank for future development despite the wishes and aspirations of people who currently live there particularly given that there is a strong push to move the metropolitan urban limits in the false belief that the spatial plan will render such an organism unnecessary. 
This bill represents a good statement of the very deeply held feelings of the Rodney District people and the Greens will be very happy to support the Rodney District Council Bill on that basis. Kia ora.