Penk Chris; Rurawhe AdrianCHRIS PENK (National—Helensville): Thank you very much Mr Speaker. The Rates Rebate (Statutory Declarations) Amendment Bill—there's not much to it let's be honest and I sort of almost feel obliged to fill in a few gaps really so bear with me please as I do that.Lawrence Yule: You do that Penk—you do that.CHRIS PENK: I've been encouraged to do exactly that—thank you Lawrence Yule. Rates are a necessary evil. I think if we accept that services that we expect to be provided by local government need to be funded in some way and if we accept that pending a more sensible way of collecting such revenue or at least a different way of collecting such revenue—I shouldn't speak above my station—then in the meantime we're stuck with rates. We've got them as a method that is clearly established in this country for supporting and funding the work that territorial authorities—aka councils—and local government in general perform.So if we accept all that and we accept also that there is the need for a regime where we have a rebate such that New Zealanders who are on a lower income or perhaps have a fixed income perhaps relating to a time of their life or other circumstances such that they can't pay the full rates—fair enough and indeed I don't think anyone is suggesting that that shouldn't be the case. So what we're really looking at in this bill is a question of whether it should be necessary to prove—one ratepayer one resident as compared to another—that they are not required to pay the full set of rates that their neighbour is. So that's a reasonably serious matter as far as it goes. It's justifiable but it should be justified and the current mechanism we've got for that is by way of statutory declaration the good old stat dec" as they're known on the street.So we've got a system that so far as I can tell works pretty well. I don't say it's perfect—nothing in this life is without getting too philosophical about it. I think we can say that there are other probably more pressing problems in the world of local government let alone the world in general that we could say we would attack before we turned our mind to different ways of attesting one's qualification for a rates rebate. So I haven't particularly been convinced by arguments—and I say this with all due respect to Mr Patterson of New Zealand First but the problem of a person who is unable to prove that they are the appropriate recipient of the largesse that is the Rates Rebate Scheme that's a more fundamental difficulty for that person than the existence of the current legal framework where we have someone sit down and sign in front of someone else to say that that's so.I've done extensive research into this bill by which I mean I looked on the website just before I came on. I've read the whole thing as well but luckily that didn't take long because there's not much to it. But having actually gone to no more nor less trouble than looking up on the website to see how one does this currently there's a form one fills in and to be honest it's not the hardest of all Government forms. We all sort of roll our eyes a little bit at the paperwork; I certainly do—confession time—but you know to be honest it's not the worst of them and I think if you can save several hundred bucks by doing that I think that's a reasonable step to be required to take. To turn up and sit down in front of a lawyer—you know I know that's not always the most pleasant thing to have to do and I say that having been one of course—or a member of Parliament; again guilty. But anyway that's all that's involved and I really don't think that it's particularly helpful for us to be occupying ourselves too deeply in circumventing that. So my attitude is that as expressed by colleagues and I don't think I can get much more excited about it than that.Ian McKelvie: Mr Speaker?ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Ian McKelvie.Matt Doocey: Oh look at that! Off the sub bench—impact player!"