Lee DeniseDENISE LEE (National—Maungakiekie): Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker. I'm happy to take this particular call on the first reading of the Local Government Regulatory Systems Amendment Bill. Other speakers before me have covered several topics that this bill covers but I'll just highlight two very brief aspects of the bill. It clarifies when a successful candidate—as Jamie Strange just pointed out—in a council by-election may come into office. I hear the words successful by-election candidate" and can't resist giving a mention to our colleague Dan Bidois and his successful by-election result. It's not council but it's certainly a successful by-election result. Good one Dan. The bill also makes a number of changes to the Local Government Act and to the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act the primary of which is inserting a definition for "Internet site"—just a couple of the changes there that we're looking at in the late afternoon here in the House.Now in general these changes seem to be focusing on trying to lift participation in local elections—that's a good thing—and improving public access to council information—another good thing—and of course the internet is the key tool that the omnibus bill is focusing on. So they're small and they're uncontroversial changes and the intention of the bill is one that we can support and in fact it is one that we are supporting.I do want to draw attention however to the regulatory impact statement prepared for the bill by the Department of Internal Affairs. It states "The frequency of occurrence for all issues is believed to be low and the impact for most is low." In the next paragraph it goes on: "Data does not exist on frequency or scale of actual incidents or lost opportunities arising from the identified issues. Collecting this data would require a disproportionate amount of time and resources relative to the minor nature of the issues." So what they're essentially saying there in the impact statement is that the issues that this bill is addressing are not worth the time to report on but also that they're actually not really issues.Now I don't want to be negative and as I said these are simple and smart changes that we are supporting and every so often is it not right that we need to do just a bit of housekeeping on bills here in the House? This is not a bill that's trying to solve all the problems in local government. The purpose is to clarify vague parts of existing legislation and to make sure that local government uses an important tool when making public announcements. These are good things. I just hope though that this is not the highlight of the Government's programme of reform for local government. There are some significant issues that need resolving: three waters funding tools and of course there's just that little aspect of fixing up something in the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act which I have a member's bill on—it just so happens. To do that; it's around getting transparency and accountability and not withholding any information. So those are just some very very fundamentally important aspects in local government that do need to be addressed.We're supporting this bill but I hope that the Minister recognises the importance of some other massive streams of work that need to take place. Thank you. We support this first reading."