Twyford Phil: Local Government (Public Libraries) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Twyford Phil: Local Government (Public Libraries) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 07 November 2012. Volume:685;Page:6423. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatu) 
: 
 It is really lovely to be following the flower of the North Shore. That last speech was not so much a case of “spray and walk away”; it was more “spray and sit down”. It is clear that this bill the Local Government (Public Libraries) Amendment Bill—this very fine member’s bill from Darien Fenton who seems to have a knack for pulling excellent members’ bills out of the ballot and this is just another one in the series—has touched a deep nerve in the National Party benches. It exposes what is a philosophical fault line in this House and that is that members on that side stand for user-pays and an individualism that is in stark contrast to those on this side of the House who stand for public provision and— 
Iain Lees-Galloway 
: Community. 
PHIL TWYFORD 
: —community. That is exactly right. It was the British Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee who said famously that taxation is the price of a decent society. I would say—to paraphrase Clement Attlee—that public libraries are an indicator of the health of a decent society. That is why Darien Fenton has brought this bill to the House. 
It should not surprise anybody here that the idea of ensuring of guaranteeing the public library as a place where anybody in the community has free and equal access to the information commons is extremely challenging to the members of the National Party. The idea that people should have free and equal access—free and equal access—to information is an idea that National Party members simply cannot get their heads around. 
It is worth remembering that the public library is an institution in our society that developed at the same time over the last couple of hundred years and alongside free universal public education. It developed at the same time as we extended the universal franchise in our society. It developed at the same time as we began to govern our towns our cities and our communities through democratic public institutions and not through private oligarchies. There is a reason. Those are all fantastic public achievements in modern history and they are all based on the understanding that free and equal access to information is the cornerstone of democracy. 
That is what it is about and that is why National Party members do not like this bill. They do not like the whole idea that anybody should be entitled to turn up to a public library and have access to information whether it is on the internet whether it is on a DVD or whether it is in a book. Nick Smith got up in this debate and poured scorn on Labour for supporting a bill that he said infringed the rights of local government. This is the man who has sacked Environment Canterbury who is in the process of stripping local government of its powers and purposes and he got up and tried to poke the borax at Labour for interfering in local government. That is such an absurdity. But the thing is that Nick Smith pointed to the internet cafe as the great institution in Nelson. I think that that actually perfectly symbolises the National Party’s idea of society—the user-pays internet cafe. 
Over this side of the House we champion the publicly available publicly provided library where any child in a town a city or a suburb around New Zealand can turn up at that library and have access through broadband internet and a collection of books magazines and DVDs to all sorts of information. That is the kind of society that Labour stands for and that Nick Smith and the National Party clearly do not understand. 
I want to finish by paying a tribute to the librarians of this country. They are a wonderful breed of people who are dedicated to service. They are dedicated to the community and to the sharing of knowledge. All over New Zealand tonight librarians from our public libraries will be watching this debate with interest. They will be appalled by the selfish narrow-minded philistinism that they have heard from the National Party tonight. May the rage of a thousand librarians rain down on the heads of National Party members.