Seymour David: Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSeymour David: Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading[Sitting date: 17 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8262. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): When the member who has just resumed her seat Jan Logie apologised for her state of mind I thought she was just being gracious but as her speech proceeded I realised she was actually being quite honest. I rise in support of this bill. It is somewhat regrettable to be here discussing it so late at night to make a number of technical changes to the dimensions—not to the process not to the people involved and not to the accountabilities but to the dimensions of the hearings of objections to the Auckland Unitary Plan. It is a very small technical change that is being made to the legislation and it is worth reflecting on quite why this small technical change to the dimensions of the process not to the process itself is actually required. The reason is that in order to meet the statutory requirements for a new plan we are going to have to change the balance between the demand for hearings from Aucklanders and a lot of people from the Epsom electorate who have hearings required under the Proposed Auckland Unitary Plan process on the one hand and on the other hand the supply of people to do the hearings and hear their objections.The reason that there is this imbalance of supply and demand is ultimately that the plan that the Auckland Council has attempted to impose upon the people of Auckland is so at odds with the national growth of a city and with the preferences of Aucklanders for how their city will grow and develop. At the base of the problem is actually epistemology—the fatal conceit on the part of the planners that they know what the correct density of Auckland should be in 30 years’ time how people should live how they should work and how they should travel and that the planners are able to tell us what sort of housing we should have and how our particular communities should grow regardless of what our preferences for those communities might be.This hearings process is an opportunity for the people of the Epsom electorate and the people of Auckland more broadly to be heard. The planning orthodoxy with which we are being confronted has been so out of whack with how the city should grow that we find ourselves here late at night in the House being heckled by simpletons in order to increase the supply of hearing time to meet the demand from people who wish to object to this conceitful plan that would change the shape of our city if it were allowed to strangling the supply of housing to Aucklanders pushing up the price of housing and leaving us in a situation where we have to be here late at night to right what is a simple technical matter.I am here to support this bill because it allows the people of the Epsom electorate and the people of Auckland to have their say in this planning process. But it would be a far better world if we had a model of growth for cities where the planning profession were put back in their box where they respected the desires of communities rather that conceitedly impose models of development upon them where we had a situation where cities grew organically based on the property rights and the expectations of people who are already in those cities and where we did not have Byzantine rural/urban boundaries at the perimeter of the city strangling the supply of housing to Auckland and where the city could continue to expand and give people big backyards where big dreams could grow up.Yet we are here in order to give the people of the Epsom electorate and the rest of Auckland the opportunity to have more time to contribute their views about how they would like their community to develop across Auckland City into the future. With that I commend this bill to the House.