Ardern Jacinda: Local Government (Auckland Law Reform) Bill — In Committee 
Ardern Jacinda: Local Government (Auckland Law Reform) Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:663;Page:11547] 
JACINDA ARDERN (Labour) 
: 
 Talofa lava. It is my pleasure to contribute to this stage of the debate. Members on this side of the Chamber are particularly focused on local boards. There has been a lot of rhetoric about local boards a lot of talk about democracy and a lot of lip-service on giving local communities a voice. But to really understand the principles behind this debate I think we need to understand the context in which the submissions have been made. For no community is that more true than the community of Waiheke Island. An enormous number of submissions were made by the residents of Waiheke not only on each of the bills they were given the opportunity to submit on but to the royal commission itself and for good reason. No community knows more about the impact of poor decision-making by councils without local residents being given a voice than the people of Waiheke and no more so than through the decision made by the Auckland City Council last year on Waiheke’s waste management. For those who do not know the story I will give some background to this 18-month battle. 
Waiheke was a gold standard in waste management. A local initiative Clean Stream Waiheke under its director John Stansfield provided well over 20 jobs and diverted 60 percent of Waiheke’s waste from landfill. The waste was not just categorised as apparently some recyclers do but onsold. Not only that the company worked in unison with Jaytech Industries and Auckland University to develop a composite board made of waste products and durable enough to be used as a building component. They were doing what many communities aspire to. And what happened? Auckland City Council via a block vote by Citizens and Ratepayers councillors moved the waste resource contract at Waiheke transfer station to a multinational waste giant Transpacific Industries Group and not for 1 year or for 2 years but for 10 years. A $21 million contract was awarded against the strong opposition of not only a number of councillors but almost an entire community. 
Why does this matter? It matters for two reasons. Firstly if a community rightly calls for waste minimisation to be factored into a tendering process if it calls for sustainability to be at the heart of the way the community is governed and operates then local government needs to listen and should have listened. Secondly as I heard John Stansfield very wisely say at one point waste management is about human behaviour—and it is. No one knows more about the behaviour of a community and its people than the people themselves. That is why Waiheke did it better. 
There is a lesson to be learnt here. We know that generally speaking there was much to improve in the way our local governance structures worked in Auckland but there was also plenty of room to make it worse. Sadly I feel that we are dealing with the latter. I periodically sat on the Auckland Governance Legislation Committee for this third bill. In fact on one of the first days of submissions I was lucky enough to hear a submission from the Human Rights Commission. Not only did it criticise the process the Government had used to progress this legislation but it questioned the way the local boards would operate and the distorted hierarchy whereby council-controlled organisations have comparatively stronger regulatory powers than democratically elected bodies such as the local boards. The commission was right to point that out. 
Too often we have heard Government MPs try to claim that local boards will be stronger than community boards and therefore believe that this Government has somehow answered the concerns of submitters. I dispute that on both levels. I dispute the contention that they are stronger and further the contention that this is the kind of body we needed. Let us not be under any illusion here. The local boards will be the face of local democracy and will take on the majority of contact. Under the way we currently view local government they will be required to act like a council but will have none of the powers of one. 
Had this bill given local boards a true and genuine voice had they been given the kinds of powers that would allow them to determine substantive issues and to fulfil their own desire for instance to operate in a sustainable way then I would not feel so compelled to put forward a Supplementary Order Paper that would transfer all of Waiheke’s waste management powers to the Waiheke local board. The community may be under a 10-year contract but the least we can do is give back that decision-making power to the board for the longer term and for their future. 
I say to the Minister that Waiheke residents proved they did it better and now it is the Government’s chance to prove it listened to support my amendment and to go one step further than that and give people what they asked for—give local boards real power and stop leaving it all to chance. I would not mind spending a little more time on going over the reality of what we have been left with in terms of powers for local boards.