Wade-Brown Celia; Brown SimeonCELIA WADE-BROWN (Green): I'd like to follow up on this understanding of local people having a say on local issues. First of all I'd like the Minister to think about the depth of a representation review which goes into looking at not only equivalent numbers or whether people are on the Māori roll or the general roll. I want to give you an illustration from Wellington. Most people—it's like Auckland; when people think about Wellington they probably think about the waterfront. But actually we have a huge western hinterland—now of course with kiwi in it. But what we discovered was that there were rarely people from Makara in Ohariu Valley—and not the electorate—on the council. So we established we chose to have in every representation review since a Makara Community Board and an Ohariu Community Board. And for other somewhat historic reasons dating back to 1989 we also had a Tawa Community Board.Now that's the sort of complex decision-making whether you agree in every case or not but it's complex and it goes to the local people and there were a lot of submissions from Tawa and from the rural area. There is no way that you could get that information in a binary referendum. And for the record in this House you can have a multi-option referendum which might be new to some. But we're not looking at multi-option here. We're looking at whakaae or whakahē [agreement or disagreement]. Going on with the depths and the engagement and going out to the wonderful community halls that we have in the west of Wellington as a select committee we inquired and found out that councils were able before making that decision in line with this legislation as to whether to rescind the Māori ward to establish one or to have a poll that they could do consultation. My question would really be: after this legislation has come into effect what is the Minister's view about the time that a council would have to go out to their community to be able to make a decision by 6 September. So if you walk that back even with hard-working council staff you really need to allow a couple of weeks or three weeks between the end of submissions and earlier if you're also having hearings which I think you should on a matter like this. That actually means that if your decision making at the full council is on 6 September it goes to a committee a week before that the report's written before that and the hearings and the submissions are before that is 6 September really fair if local people are going to have a say on the matter that matters to them so much?In all of the other important decisions that councils make—about how much they'll spend on wastewater or whether they will have a crossing or whether they will change speed limits if they're still allowed to do such things—it's taking time and connecting with the community rather than giving them a—we never had a referendum on 30 kilometres per hour versus 50. We had evidence and submissions and discussion. And you can actually weigh the evidence of whether it's a road safety expert or whether it's just somebody that's a little bit impatient and sometimes a little careless of others. And we could listen to that particularly when you were able to ask people in their oral submissions which I think is still as we heard at the select committee a great way of hearing from people.So I would like to ask the Minister to give us his reflections on locals having a say on the matters of elections and other council decisions how long that takes and what kind of consultation should be done before rescinding or proceeding with a Māori ward.Hon SIMEON BROWN (Minister of Local Government): I thank Her Worship for the question and the answer to her question in regards to consultation yes I acknowledge it's a short period of time. But ultimately we've well signalled the change. Some councils have already started to have these conversations. For example Greater Wellington in their submission even acknowledge that they are already having conversations with mana whenua and that was disclosed as part of their submission to the select committee. In terms of her concern about making sure that the public have the opportunity to have their say I call allay those concerns by noting that they will have their opportunity to vote in a referendum and that means that everyone's vote will count. It will count equally and they will be able to do that at the next local elections.