Pugh MaureenMAUREEN PUGH (National): Thank you Madam Speaker. I stand also to speak to the Local Government (Rating of Whenua Māori) Amendment Bill tonight in its second reading. The National Party is opposing this bill strongly. I take the point that the member who's just resumed his seat Paul Eagle has brought up in this debate tonight around 1.4 million hectares of land that is available for development that is Māori-owned land and I have to compare that with the amount of land that is in private ownership by other ethnic communities or other ethnic people including Pākehā and I have to wonder why this particular bill targets one ethnicity over another. I know we all want our land to be productive but why is this particular bill targeting Māori-owned land and not all land? If we were truly looking at the potential of land across this country we would be promoting the same outcome for all land that is undeveloped. I've got some in my backyard that if the Department of Conservation estate would stop seeding it with gorse seed we would be able to keep it developed. But do we have a rates remission proposal for that? Absolutely not. And I have to ask why. Why on the other side of the House do you not support all undeveloped land and why is it particularly targeted at one group?In the bill—the purpose of the bill—it states it's to support the development of Māori land but it's exclusive. And when we think about some of the other legislation that has been going through this House recently—the elimination of the democratic process around the establishment of Māori wards—and then we turn our minds to the three waters proposal that is happening where we're talking about waste water storm water and drinking water and then we think about some of the other controls that we have around significant natural areas that are happening on private land you start to see an accumulation of legislation that looks exactly like State control by stealth. So we are heading into this regime where actually private property rights are being degraded and I think we're heading into very dangerous territory.The amazing thing about this piece of legislation is that it's not actually required and the reason it's not required is that councils already have the ability to remit rates and they do that through their own rates remission policy. So where is the need for legislation? Councils write off rates every year. But the unintended consequence—or maybe it is the intended consequence of this piece of legislation—and I'll take you back to how the pie is broken up in local government. A council has to look at its intended costs for a year and all of the projects maintenance the new assets they're developing and then they put a cost on that. They work backwards from the cost of the expenses for the coming year and they set their rates based on that. So the less ratepayers that you have that are contributing to those public assets the more that is landed on the people who actually do pay their rates and so what we've got here is a bit of a cost transfer into those people who are the multiple owners of Māori land. If we think about 1.4 million hectares of land that is available then there is a huge amount of equity tied up in that land and surely the cost of rates is not the barrier to development; it is probably more a willingness or an unwillingness to take on financial risk and do that work on that land.Councils already have a huge rate burden and all we are doing is diluting the amount of people that are available to pay for those public assets we are increasing the financial burden on those people and I contend that this is grossly unfair. Everyone in this country has the God-given right to pay their fair share and this bill does nothing to support that.