Strange Jamie; Rurawhe AdrianJAMIE STRANGE (Labour): Mr Assistant Speaker thank you for the opportunity to take a call on the Local Government (Community Well-being) Amendment Bill in the second reading. I'd like to acknowledge the Governance and Administration Committee of which I'm a member and the chair Brett Hudson for the excellent work that he's done around this.This bill has one main objective: to promote the social economic environmental and cultural well-being of communities. We've heard from other speakers tonight that these are commonly called the four well-beings—social economic environmental and cultural.Now when this coalition Government was formed councils across the country breathed a sigh of relief. The reason they breathed a sigh of relief was because they knew they would have a Government who would listen to them who would engage with them rather than sort of lord it over them. Councils are broadly very supportive of this bill because they support the four well-beings coming back.Let's just have a look at some of the submissions. There were about 140 submissions. One of them came from Age Concern Tauranga—that Labour Party stronghold of Tauranga. Age Concern Tauranga considers that the restoration of the purpose of promoting community well-being to the local government act is an important step forward in ensuring better outcomes for New Zealand's communities." The key word here is "community". The key word is "community" because when we have strong communities—strong healthy communities—we have a strong nation.So let's have a look at these four aspects. The first one is social. So we're talking about things like playgrounds pools parks and reserves. We're talking about places where people come together to congregate to build community. Have a look at the economic aspect. The greatest strength of our economy is to have strong healthy families and strong healthy communities because then people can be productive. Without that base there is no productivity.The environment: we have one planet. We've been listening recently to some students who have been protesting about climate change and we've been listening carefully to them. Because we do have just one planet it's important that we look after the environment.The next one is around culture. I'd like to pick up on a submission from Creative New Zealand. This is what they said: "we see the Bill as having a significant effect on how territorial authorities choose to support arts and culture in their areas."I'd just like to mention my home town of Hamilton where there is a lot of public art—Hon Ruth Dyson: Isn't that a favourite tourist place or something?JAMIE STRANGE: I think it would be remiss of me to not add in here that Hamilton recently received an award for the most-visited city or town in New Zealand over the summer months. Unfortunately I think the secret is out—the long-held secret is out that Hamilton is a wonderful place to live and visit as we know. So there's a lot of public art in the city and people congregate around that. It creates meeting places it creates community and Creative New Zealand support this bill for that reason. South Waikato District Council also talk about the four well-beings and the importance of the four well-beings.I'll just close on this final submission here from Economic Development New Zealand. They say "our members are overwhelmingly supportive of the reinstatement of the 4 well-beings in the [Local Government] Act 2002." This is Economic Development New Zealand because they understand that you can't separate economic productivity from well-being; they're connected they're joined. "Members view the 4 well beings as [being] inseparable and encourage an alignment of effort and strategy at an organisational level both horizontally and vertically."I'd like to acknowledge the excellent work that Minister the Hon Nanaia Mahuta's done in the field in bringing this bill to the House and support it.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): I call Dan Bidois—five minutes."