Sage Eugenie: Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Sage Eugenie: Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 27 November 2012. Volume:686;Page:6832. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
EUGENIE SAGE (Green) 
: 
 Another title for this bill the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill would be the “Local Government Act (Bash Local Government and Ignore the Facts) Amendment Bill” because this bill is not focused on the evidence. There is very little evidence to suggest that the local government sector is not focused on core services. Three different reports have concluded that the sector has not significantly expanded the scope of its activities since 2002. When you look at the 2006 and 2009 long-term plans how much of the funding and expenditure was on infrastructure? Seventy to 75 percent of the capital programme was on roading the three waters and flood protection—core services. Then when you look at the regulatory impact statement again there is no evidence that local authority costs have increased as substantially as the Government is claiming. In particular when you have the Government claiming increases in costs it is using the CPI. Yet as a lot of submitters and councils have pointed out the local councils are engaged in buying things like bitumen not Weet-Bix and the basket of groceries that the CPI uses. 
When you look at the figures on debt those came from the 2009 long-term plans. They are 3 years out of date and they have been superseded. What the 2012 long-term plans are showing is that the sector as a whole is planning to borrow much less than in the 2009 long-term plans. And as other members have explained the borrowing is to fund infrastructure on that basic principle that the cost of infrastructure that benefits future generations should be spread across the generations and not paid for just by today’s ratepayers. One of the things that this bill is likely to do with its benchmarks and with its ministerial intervention powers that are tied to those benchmarks is that local government will focus much more on the short term and on keeping costs down so we will get a neglect of infrastructure spending and will not be looking at how you get the most value over the longer term. 
 Another name for the bill could be the “Local Government (Undermine Democracy) Amendment Bill” because that is another thrust of the bill. It does not recognise what local councils are doing or the full scope of their activities and by putting in place central control from Wellington it seeks to further narrow the work that local government is doing. Recently I received a copy from the Society of Local Government Managers of the 30 different projects that had been submitted for its excellence awards. Those award applications and the scope of the submissions that came before the Local Government and Environment Committee gave an excellent snapshot of the breadth of activities that local government is engaged in and the value of those activities and contrary to a lot of the rhetoric we are getting from the Government it shows that councils are looking to do more with less. 
One of the winners of those Society of Local Government Managers awards was the Hastings District Council with its iWay “Walk it Bike it Love it” project where it has put in place 108 kilometres of on-road and off-road pathways because it is investing in planned walking and cycling infrastructure to reduce its roading maintenance costs. By moving people off the roads and onto cycles or walking there is less wear and tear on the roads. It is a pity that the Government does not have a similar vision to that of the Hastings District Council in terms of its roading expenditure and promoting new motorways. So that project won one of those excellence awards. Another project that won an award was one that promoted cooperation and collaboration between councils to introduce a new online dog registration service for I think Hamilton and Rotorua. That is what we heard at the select committee: a lot of councils working together to collaborate and cooperate and reduce costs that way. 
But going just briefly to the whole democracy argument and the thrust of the bill in terms of undermining democracy we have that both in the ministerial intervention powers and in the reorganisation procedures and the end to the mandatory poll on reorganisation. There was a very good submission from the Buller District Council which looked at the claims that Government members had made that amalgamations had not happened. The Buller District Council pointed out that since 1999 there had been seven amalgamation decisions by the Local Government Commission and in two cases the commission decided that amalgamation would not produce better local government and that the status quo should remain. Five of those decisions did proceed to democratic polls and I would just like to quote what the Buller District Council said: “In each case”—where the decision of the Local Government Commission went to a poll—“a significant majority of the people democratically voted to reject the amalgamation proposal. When the people are given a chance to vote they continue to reject amalgamation. The reality is that communities seem to like the idea of local decision making and continued local democracy.” 
That is why this bill would be better titled the “Local Government (Undermine Democracy) Amendment Bill because it reverses the presumption that the status quo should remain until the people democratically decide by way of a poll that there should be a change. The way in which the bill is constructed—the very short time of 60 days to get 10 percent of electors to sign a petition—is clearly intended to ensure that the polls of residents will be avoided. There are not any examples of a petition getting so many signatures in such a compressed and short time frame. That is why this bill would be better titled the “Local Government (Undermine Democracy) Amendment Bill’’ because it is all about control central—central government—putting pressure on local government and not letting electors decide how they should be governed.