Moroney Sue: Local Government Borrowing Bill — In Committee 
Moroney Sue: Local Government Borrowing Bill — In Committee 
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SUE MORONEY (Labour) 
: 
 Thank you for the opportunity to take my first call on the Local Government Borrowing Bill. I want to speak to Part 1 which is the part that sets up the New Zealand Local Government Funding Agency and is of course the meaty part of the bill. 
I do want to profess that as I am not a member of the Local Government and Environment Committee I probably have more questions than answers in terms of this Local Government Funding Agency and what it can be used for. I say at the outset that it seems to me that the one thing that might help the funding agency would be the implementation of a capital gains tax. Why do I say that? Well it seems to me that if we were to level the playing field for how New Zealand investors choose to invest their money then perhaps they would look more kindly at this. Perhaps it would have lots of New Zealand investors who otherwise invest in property and the sorts of things where they can have basically tax-free profit at the moment. If we had a capital gains tax I think this would become more attractive to investors. Perhaps they would be looking more to investing in a vehicle such as this in order to improve local infrastructure or whatever it might be. That would be my opening comment. I think this bill could sit alongside a number of other policies that are being debated literally as we speak. 
But my questions are about the sorts of things that ratepayers and residents are debating all the time in their communities. At the moment in Hamilton and in the greater Waikato actually we have quite a debate occurring and I know that Iain Lees-Galloway will be very interested in this debate about funding a velodrome for the Waikato. This proposal has come through from Sport and Recreation New Zealand which is a Government-funded agency. Sport and Recreation New Zealand has a lump of money that it wants to put into the project and it has chosen Waikato as being the preferred option for this. 
Iain Lees-Galloway 
: Outrageous! 
SUE MORONEY 
: Iain Lees-Galloway is outraged because Palmerston North is of course another city that bid for exactly the same project. But here is the part that I know he will like: I am opposing the ratepayer funding of the velodrome project for the Waikato. I know that Iain Lees-Galloway will be very pleased that I am doing that and so are local ratepayers I might say. Although Sport and Recreation New Zealand and BikeNZ might think this is the ideal location for a velodrome it is the poor old ratepayers who will be asked to stump up for a velodrome that will cost $28.5 million. 
That might not seem like a great deal of money but currently in Hamilton the ratepayers are facing an 8 percent increase in their rates. They are not too keen to have more rates lumped on top of them as well. Also in Hamilton we have just recently experienced a $30 million contribution to hosting the V8 Supercars event. The cost was originally supposed to be $13 million but it has blown out to $30 million. So there are a number of reasons why ratepayers in Hamilton and the surrounding areas are asking some serious questions. They are asking “Well hang on haven’t we funded enough of people’s pet projects?”. If people have pet projects like a velodrome which let us face it will not be used by the vast proportion of the population—cycling in a velodrome is an elite sport—why should Hamilton ratepayers be funding them? Those are the questions that some local ratepayers are asking and I think they are really valid questions. 
In regard to this bill my questions are around that. Some people are asking why those bike enthusiasts who want to race around a velodrome and not just ride around streets a cycleway or anything else we might choose to invest in do not fund a velodrome if they really want it. They ask why they do not spend their money on it. The question I want to ask is whether this is a vehicle where that could happen. Could the group of people who want to see this go ahead actually put money into this funding agency and say that they want it to be used for a loan for a specific project? The question I really have is about some clarity as to whether that could happen. My guess is that the answer is probably no in terms of transparency accountability and those sorts of issues but I would like some clarity on that because as I say it is an issue that we are facing in the Waikato as we speak. If such a fund is used for a venture like the velodrome—