Street Maryan: Kaipara District Council (Validation of Rates and Other Matters) Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeStreet Maryan: Kaipara District Council (Validation of Rates and Other Matters) Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 12 June 2013. Volume:691;Page:11096. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour):It is as others have said not exactly a pleasure to get up and speak to this Kaipara District Council (Validation of Rates and Other Matters) Bill but I do so. I want to acknowledge John Robertson who is in the House tonight as a former member of Parliament who is the chair of the commissioners in Kaipara at the moment and I acknowledge his work.First of all though I want to begin with a tribute to Mike Sabin. I think I agreed with every single word in his speech. It was a very strong speech. If there are members of the Mangawhai Residents and Ratepayers Association watching this parliamentary session tonight and they are people who have been annoyed with Mike Sabin for bringing this legislation to the House can I just say to them that he has done exactly the right thing. He has taken the right course of action. He has brought it here and spoken very strongly about what he sees to be the injustices and the inadequacies that are the precursor to this bill arriving in the House. So I want to commend him for that speech and for bringing this to the House because it is a difficult thing to do.Most of us I think—but I will just speak for myself—have a pathological aversion to validating legislation—a pathological aversion to it. For this Parliament to be used to make an illegality legal is an abuse of this House. For this House to be asked to turn the incompetence the illegal practice the mismanagement and perhaps malevolence on the part of any local council—not just this one—into fact or legal fact when it in fact becomes a legal fiction is an abuse of this House.In February of this year we heard from Damien O’Connor when he was in a similar position to Mike Sabin. The Tasman District Council had asked him as the local member for most of the area of the council’s catchment to bring a validation bill to the House. Again I spoke strongly about how undesirable this is and in that situation in particular I railed against the former chief executive officer who really bullied theratepayers in that situation—the Tata Beach and Ligar Bay ratepayers—who did not want to pay for something that they were not seeing any benefits from by saying: “Well you haven’t got enough money to contest this. We’ll take it to Parliament and Parliament will fix it for us.”Well can I just warn every single local authority in the country that two of these in 6 months is two too many and that that will provoke a reaction either in this Government or a future one that will take away the ability of local governments where they are incompetent. Mergers and amalgamations might be made forcibly if the local bodies their officers their officials and their honorary officials or elected officials are incompetent to perform the task.I think it is not good enough that ratepayers in New Zealand who should be allowed to have a say about how their rates are used are forced into this kind of situation by what I think is incompetence rather than malevolence in this situation. However such local authorities need to be brought to account and we need to know that those who guard the guards—in other words Audit New Zealand which guards the guardians of taxpayers’ money—are also brought to account because that is something this Parliament can do.So the Labour Party is supporting this legislation in its first reading but I have to say—and I cannot address Mr Robertson personally while he is sitting in the House—to the commissioners who have asked us to support this bill that our support is only in its first reading because if there is another way through this mess that addresses the wrongs that illegal actions have brought upon the residents and ratepayers of Mangawhai then let us find it and let us find it without having to make an illegal action legal. Thank you.