Leary IngridINGRID LEARY (Labour—Taieri): Thank you very much Mr Speaker. I really appreciate actually that the Minister also engaged in this debate—it is serious. My brief contribution is as the former chair of the Finance and Expenditure Committee (FEC) just to share a bit about the experience. I know that the Hon Barbara Edmonds was shepherding some of the bills through that committee at the beginning of the process. I had the privilege of being the chair at the end of the process. My view is that the trust of this Parliament would be eroded if we were to have this short call back date—for different reasons actually than the previous speaker—not just because members of the public might feel that they don't have the time to submit but actually the technical ability of the Finance and Expenditure Committee and the officials to be able to furnish the advice and to be able to consider it appropriately.I would remind you sir that we had an unusual situation last year—one of the more difficult times for me as the chair of that committee—where we prepared debated and presented to this House a unanimous report that had some remarks about the way the advice was given to the committee and some recommendations from us to bring on board an expert to be able to help us be able to decide whether something was a material change a substantive change or just a minor change. Now that may seem quite nit-picky. It was actually an incredibly important thing we did. We had tables drawn up and we were able to debate whether we thought there were material changes. Sometimes the officials had made changes to the bill that we would not have had sight of and we would not have been able to truly be accountable for if we had not had that expert advice and the time to be able to go through that forensically.These submissions that come to us from the city councils are all different. They are lengthy. They are prepared by lawyers. They are incredibly technical. We took our job really seriously and we made sure not only that we had the time to vet which submissions were repeated and which were making new points but also that we were able to be across all the material and across the whole bill so that when it was presented back to the House nobody could say there was an unintended consequence in there that hadn't been thought through.Now sir I don't believe that this process can happen with the report back time that is in this referral. I also believe that more importantly actually the trust of the public which is already been eroded through urgent processes and through just a diminishing sense of trust and faith in politicians—if we could change this today I think that would be a really powerful signal to the public that this House does work independently of the executive that it does have its own mind and that it does make the right decisions and do the right thing for the people who have so much vested in this.Sir I've got no new points to make apart from one example. People have talked about the impact of the decisions that will come out of this on real people. In the Clutha area they will have a 75 percent rate increase over the next three years. That is the example. That is why we must take this seriously and why I would invite the Government members to do what we did on the select committee. It was not easy as a Government chair of the FEC to do the report that we did but we were of one mind to do the right thing because that's what the situation required. Now I invite the members particularly those who sat on the committee with us to do the right thing and support the referral date to be pushed out—maybe till August; that's not unreasonable. What's at stake here is really important and I would just ask the House to take this really seriously. Thank you for the opportunity sir.