Barry Maggie: Waitaki District Council Reserves and Other Land Empowering Bill — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Barry Maggie: Waitaki District Council Reserves and Other Land Empowering Bill — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 14 November 2012. Volume:685;Page:6609. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
MAGGIE BARRY (National—North Shore) 
: 
 I rise to speak with pleasure to the Waitaki District Council Reserves— 
Phil Twyford 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I just want to inquire whether the member has in fact visited Forrester Heights because there is a Standing Order called the “Maggie Barry principle”— 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson) 
: No no. The member is being facetious. That is a debatable point quite frankly. I call the honourable member Maggie Barry. 
Hon Dr Jonathan Coleman 
: Point of order. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson) 
: I have dealt with the issue. 
Hon Dr Jonathan Coleman 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I would just like to note that there is a continuing pattern of the point of order process being abused in this House and that is a very good example. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson) 
: The member will be seated. I have dealt with the issue. This is a robust Parliament. There is always some leeway and it is up to the Speaker to judge the situation. I call the honourable member Maggie Barry. 
MAGGIE BARRY 
: Thank you Mr Speaker. 
Holly Walker 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I just have a query regarding the speaking order. I believe that the next speaker on the list should be my colleague from the Green Party Eugenie Sage. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson) 
: Actually to be quite truthful you are absolutely right. But I am now in the awkward position that once I have called someone I have to accept the call. I did not see the member. My apologies. Unfortunately I have called Maggie Barry and she has to take the call. I call the honourable member Maggie Barry. 
MAGGIE BARRY 
: Thank you Mr Speaker. Let the record stand true that Maggie Barry stands to speak to the second reading of the Waitaki District Council Reserves and Other Land Empowering Bill after a couple of false starts and mischievous ones at that. There is nothing uncommon there though particularly from the member who has come a long way from Devonport to Te Atatu and apparently he has flip-flopped on his holidays down to Oamaru. How commendable. 
My family landed in Oamaru back in the 1860s. It is an area we know particularly well. I am very happy to speak to this bill and I commend Jacqui Dean as a local member for finally getting this up and running. There have been a number of submissions around this over a number of years. We heard recently from the shockingly aged David Parker—such is the toll that leadership has taken on him. He has certainly aged in front of our very eyes has he not? The legislation languished under Labour for 3 years. There were submissions called for at that time which never got anywhere. 
I note the energy of Jacqui Dean who had to put up with a lot of silly conspiracy theories which the Hon Annette King said she did not share but still wanted to talk about again today. There have been a lot of mischievous comments made around this and I noted that Barry Monks has been talked about a lot. He was a submitter who came up with some arcane and as it turned out totally unfounded and incorrect information which held the Local Government and Environment Committee’s deliberations up for some period of time because it was wrong—completely wrong. That was the advice we had. Interestingly though Barry Monks has a long association with the area as the Labour Party candidate—the failed Labour Party candidate—for the area. Jacqui Dean holds the seat. I wonder why so many Labour Party people went down there to have a look. But let us put that to one side. We will give them the benefit of the doubt. It is not something that they usually do with us but we have a lot more largesse than that. 
I would like to talk about the issue at hand which is the putting right of something that is actually not something we should be dwelling on for this length of time in Parliament. The status of the land needed to be defined. This bill does that. There were mistakes made by councils dating back a very very long way. Section 13 of the Public Reserves Act Amendment Act 1862 provides that whenever any land is set apart by the Governor as a public reserve and by publication in the  
Gazette 
 has been declared to have been set aside as a reserve that land is not to be alienated by way of sale mortgage lease or otherwise. There is no argument about that but it is about how this land is described. There is no evidence to support the view that Lookout Point has been set apart as a public reserve under that amendment Act. We discussed all of this at length. 
When you go back through the files—and I guess the Oamaru Borough Council in those days was commendable in that it tried to keep as many records as it could; it was very careful about what it did with its paperwork but it did slip through and this was a mistake—when the council searched through what was there it was able to go through a very large paper trail indeed. I think a lot of our submitters are to be congratulated because they spent a lot of time and a lot of effort going back through the history going back through the paperwork and trying to determine what in fact is the status of this much sought after and locally very important piece of land. 
I do know Oamaru very well. I have been there many times in many incarnations as it were. Its botanic garden is amongst the oldest in the country and a very fine one it is too. It is visible from Forrester Heights or Lookout Point. For those members of the Labour Party who did not go on the tiki-tour down there we were given the pictures and we have had a look at it. To refresh our memories this is a prime piece of land that also looks out over the blue penguin colony. What some members may not know—such was the exhaustive nature of some of the submissions that we all know it now—is that it is a remarkable piece of avifauna rich reserves of dead bird fossils. It is very rare in the South Island. Bird bones especially of the moa are recorded findings in the limestone and have been preserved which make the area unique. So there are very many reasons why a lookout of this kind will be preserved. It needs to be properly understood in terms of what its status is so that it will be preserved in perpetuity. 
We heard from Mayor Alex Familton and the chief executive officer of the council Michael Ross as well that when this is finally resolved and goes through as I am sure it will once the Committee deliberations have occurred and then it is back here in the House again for its third reading they have undertaken to go back to the people of Oamaru and to ask them what it is that they would like. I think Forrester Heights and Lookout Point will be enshrined as a reserve and will keep that status. As Jacqui Dean has pointed out she has been walking there many times. It is a favoured place in Oamaru to look out over the harbour and look out over what is an extremely attractive historic town. 
There are a couple of issues that the council wanted resolved. It worked closely incidentally with Ngai Tahu which had also done a great deal of research on this matter and had found out that there was in fact no problem around the council’s view that the Waitaki District Council has a right to the freehold title to the land and that it is therefore not subject to the Ngai Tahu Claims Settlement Act 1998. This was something that was raised by a number of submitters. It is a legitimate concern or it was felt to be. Once again it was explored in detail. If anyone ever wondered about I suppose the robust nature and the rigorous nature of what goes on in select committees this really is a case in point this member’s bill. The level of detail that the submitters chose to come forward with was such that it then sent the very hard-working officials back to the books and back to the drawing board to double-check everything. I can assure you that the findings that we have come out with now are very much the accurate ones. 
When this matter was discussed within the Primary Production Committee in relation to the Reserves and Other Lands Disposal Bill back in 2009 there were I think 37 written submissions and there were a further 19 heard. That was that committee. But that was all put to one side and the committee that I sat on the Local Government and Environment Committee considered 27 submissions and they were very detailed as well. I have handed some on to my colleagues. Paul Goldsmith who is chatting happily here could perhaps hand them to me. Paul is handing over the submissions. Thank you—very good. He is paying close attention to his colleagues. There is a big stack of them. Suffice it to say that there were 27 submissions from interested parties and we heard seven of them. The detail was enormous. There are kilos and kilos of material. There is some around there as well. The other interested members of our party have also been looking at these. [ 
Interruption 
] Yes it is the visual part of the speech. I have the photographs in fact if the honourable member would like to see them. We could easily do that. This is a bill that we know far more about than we would ever have imagined possible actually. 
Land Information New Zealand has also taken a pivotal role in all this and the Department of Conservation. They have looked at it exhaustively. They too are satisfied that treating Lookout Point land as a reserve was indeed a genuine mistake back in the day. Their assessment of it—and it is one that I agree with—is that this mistake resulted from the various meanings and legal uses of the word “reserve”. I guess with a country as young as New Zealand sometimes the semantics have tripped us up where we have not had the traditional examinations at a local level. But these have in fact been corrected now. So although we very much appreciate the sentiment of the submitters and acknowledge that there is a contention in this issue after receiving advice from Land Information New Zealand and the Department of Conservation the belief very much of us on this side of the House and in the select committee is that the land was actually classified as a reserve for an endowment in aid of borough funds rather than as a recreation or similar reserve. 
The  
Otago Daily Times 
 not surprisingly—a very active local paper—has also taken a huge interest in this issue and has followed it. Again as somebody who is relatively new to this House I commend the local media for taking notice of and paying close attention to the detailed workings of cases that are reflected from their local community in the House. The Forrester Heights status is likely to change with something that the  
Otago Daily Times 
 predicted earlier this year and it is very much in favour of it as well as are a number of the people who have written in and given letter contributions to the  
Otago Daily Times 
. 
The Waitaki Ratepayers and Concerned Citizens chair said that he was disappointed in the decision because he was concerned that the land could be split up into residential developments and this was something that was echoed by some of the submitters. I think it is that fear that motivated many people to come forward to our select committee. They were worried that if the status changed then there would be other less welcome changes that would be occurring other than just tidying up the wording the paperwork and the semantics of it. But as I said the mayor came to the select committee and reassured us repeatedly that he would be checking with the people. It was an opportunity really to re-engage with the community on the use of land that was very dear to their hearts and the hearts of the community. 
So it is with pleasure that I speak to the second reading. Thank you. I commend this bill to the House.