Allan KiritapuKIRITAPU ALLAN (Labour): Tēnā koe e Te Māngai—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): Sorry to interrupt—I omitted to say this is a split call. My apologies.KIRITAPU ALLAN: Thank you Madam Speaker. Look it's a pleasure to rise and speak particularly after the former speaker Lawrence Yule our friend and comrade-in-arms across the aisle having I guess followed his esteemed career as a leader of local government at a national and at a local level—I'm not jesting now; he was very very good in his former role. It's interesting watching how this place can change people and you know take you away from those things those values that you held dear and see how people have to redirect. So I guess I just want to reach a hand across the aisle and express my condolences that you had to just give that contribution in this House because I know as this side of the House does that you actually really probably most likely support this bill.Like some of the former speakers have said tonight this is a redirection in terms of I think there's about—I'm not going to do the same thing but there's about that many pages tonight that we are scrapping from the amendments that came through under the previous Government and that the former head of Local Government New Zealand opposed as well—Lawrence Yule in his previous role. I guess for us on this side of the House what we're trying to do is empower those local decision makers at a local level to ensure that their towns are the best towns.The local government elections were the substantive political event over the weekend. I want to acknowledge the three new female mayors that I have in the East Coast electorate. We have just a fantastic really broad range of incredible candidates that put their hand up. So yeah I think you know across the country we saw an incredible shift of a lot of younger elected candidates. That excites me for next year's election in terms of who we might see enter into this House come the general election.But turning to this bill and these substantive amendments I guess this bill championed by the Hon Nanaia Mahuta goes towards making a number of improvements to our Local Government Act in terms of streamlining and ensuring that local government will I guess work constructively alongside central government to improve community wellbeing at that local level. Previous speakers have said in this House that this Government—we across the coalition pride ourselves on focusing on the wellbeing of our citizens focusing on the wellbeing of our communities and I guess for us ensuring that the wellbeing is at the forefront in terms of the decision-making frameworks for all local body councils and that those visions are aligned with us is something that we're very proud to be seeing enacted through this piece of legislation this evening.This bill brings about fundamental reorganisation and our approach to reorganisation is to remove that threat of amalgamation from local authorities. The member over there who spoke just prior—I remember living in the Hawke's Bay for a couple of years and seeing the constant conflict between the communities and the fear I guess that many—there was a constant debate. Fear's a bit of a heavy word actually but just the consistent debate in that area about what it meant to lose some of that local identity for some of those councils. So in this bill we are reversing the previous Government's changes which enabled that anyone could request investigations. Local authorities will still be able to request reorganisations themselves through the Local Government Commission or undertake those things through the new reorganisation process. The proposals will be made by members of the public and they must demonstrate significant different community support and you have to get that 10 percent threshold of those people to actually get in behind you.Look there's a whole range—it is a substantive piece of legislation. There are a whole raft of amendments that have been made this evening and that will become law very shortly. So without further ado I commend this bill to the House.