Prime Willow-JeanWILLOW-JEAN PRIME (Labour—Northland): E te Māngai o te Whare tēnā koe. I rise to take a call—as the Māori Party aren't in the House tonight I do want to take this opportunity to just take a brief call on it. Firstly can I acknowledge the member who is a former local body councillor—deputy mayor I understand. As somebody—Chris Bishop: Deputy mayor.WILLOW-JEAN PRIME: Yeah; that's right. As somebody else who started out in local government this is actually quite interesting for me. I was first elected to the Far North District Council in 2013 and then a second time in 2016. So before coming into Parliament I spent one and a bit terms in local government. When I was looking at this bill I was trying to remember whether our council did have a process of declaring your interests. I went back online and I had a look at the minutes of meetings from 2016. It was my recollection that we did have a process whereby we declared our interests. It also made me think well what about the rest of the councils in my electorate in Northland. It turns out that so too do the Kaipara District Council the Whangarei District Council and the Northland Regional Council. Under the Local Government Act all councils are required to adopt a code of conduct but it is not a requirement that there be within that code of conduct the inclusion of a pecuniary interest register. That's the problem: there is an inconsistency in this across the country. And we've heard that from other speakers this evening who have made those contributions and have highlighted areas where they do have it and other areas where they don't have it. I commend the member on finding this gap in the legislation and proposing through a member's bill a way to address this issue. The purpose of the bill is that we want to ensure that the public can have trust and confidence in our councils and in local bodies. They make really important decisions that affect the community. Large amounts of money are often subject to those decisions. I think it is important to ensure that our communities can have the most trust and respect and that we have an open and transparent process around the declaration of their interests. What we see here in the bill is a lot of similar things that we are required to do as members of Parliament. I know listening to the contribution from one of the members of the Governance and Administration Committee—the member for Nelson Rachel Boyack—that she traversed all of those and said that sometimes in the original proposal it wasn't quite what we do here in Parliament and so there were recommendations to align it to that. But in other cases—and I think it was particularly around private property for example—they don't actually go as far as to revealing the exact location of those. I support all of those points in there.One thing I did want to cover off—because it hasn't been raised by any of the other contributions this evening—is the committee looked at Māori land. As you and I will know many people—many whānau—have interests in Māori land but those interests can be from a tiny interest and shareholding in a small parcel of land that does not derive any economic benefit and there is not going to be any dwelling on there necessarily. The committee were very clear about that: that in terms of Māori land that is captured within the scope of this legislation it would be where the member had an actual pecuniary interest in a Māori land trust. We do have many of those—and very successful ones—around the country and so that would be the type of interest that would be required to be declared under this proposed legislation.With that I just want to conclude my speech by thanking the Governance and Administration Committee for the work that they did the 23 submitters that wrote written submissions the seven oral submitters and of course the member who introduced the bill. I commend the bill to the House.