McKelvie IanIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): I rise to speak to the Local Electoral (Equitable Process for Establishing Māori Wards and Māori Constituencies) Amendment Bill. Unlike most in this House I have gone through this process with a council some three times in my career. It is a complicated topic. It is a topic that is always dealt with in my experience with a significant amount of thought and in the case of the Manawatū District Council which I was obviously associated with we ran a marae consultative committee—well that was what it was called a marae consultative committee. It represented the 11 marae in the Manawatū District Council area. The issue that Ron Mark raised about who is going to represent us was absolutely the topic that always came up in the course of these discussions.Under the Electoral Act councils need to consult on this with their communities once every 3 years I think and it is in the middle section of the 3 years. So as they consult on it they go through a process that calls for public submissions which in our case involved the marae consultative committee heavily. If they had made the recommendation to the council to push on with this the council would have inevitably pushed on with it because very like the Resource Management Act changes that have recently been made the Manawatū District Council used that marae consultative committee as I guess the key driver for the decisions that the council made.In the course of those discussions over the three times I led them it was inevitably decided that we would not go down the process of trying to establish a Māori constituency or a Māori ward. One of the reasons for that—there were a number of reasons for it actually—was that that district council had 10 members on it three of whom were of Māori ethnicity or Māori background none of whom would have stood in a Māori seat or if there were a Māori ward interestingly. Very recently a friend of mine Wīremu Te Awe Awe was elected to the Horizons Regional Council in the general ward. Significantly he is a Māori. So I think that this can be achieved and I think it will be achieved. But one of the challenges we have got as a society is to encourage people to participate in the electoral process. Māori are just like the rest of us. They are reluctant to put their hands up to be included. I think this is a much better process for our communities to go down that path.The challenges of the current process are that if you do go out as Andrew Judd did in New Plymouth with a proposal to establish a Māori ward you then have to put it out to the public. If the public then get 5 percent of their community signing a petition I guess to ask for a referendum the council is obliged to run a referendum. If you could imagine the effort you go to to get 5 percent of your community to sign a petition that is pretty significant. So I think the process at the moment is probably quite satisfactory. I think it would be a shame to change that. I think that the voices we currently have on our councils particularly in my part of the country are satisfactory. I think they are very representative and they give everyone an opportunity to be heard.I just want to go back to the Manawatū District Council's marae consultative committee and I am sure that most councils throughout New Zealand have a similar or different type of representative committee that allows Māori to have a voice in what goes on in those councils. The Manwatū one worked particularly well.The one issue we did have though was that because it was based on marae representation it did not have the ability for what you might call—there will be a word for it which Adrian will know better than me. But outside Māori who came into the district had no place in that—what is the word Nuk?NUK KORAKO: Tauiwi.IAN McKELVIE: They had no place in the process. So I think that that was the concern we had.Peeni Henare: Money.IAN McKELVIE: Ha ha! You will confuse me. That was the concern we always had and frankly the marae consultative committee expressed that. This is a difficult topic. So for those reasons I am not in favour of this process. I think that the process we currently have established is satisfactory. I do see some pitfalls in that but—yes so I do not support this treaty. Thank you.