Eagle PaulPAUL EAGLE (Labour—Rongotai): Well thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. It's always a pleasure to talk about local government particularly on a Thursday afternoon just before the break. Who said this bill is about repairs and maintenance? This is probably the most important bill we'll see this year no doubt. There'll be other more important ones but that'll be next week.So this will be the hour of delivery for local government. There we are. But look let's get serious because it is local government and local government is very serious as many of my colleagues in this House will attest to. Can I just say: look at some of the wonderful things that we'll be resolving in this bill. One of the things I most like is the way I believe that this bill will ensure much greater turnout. Well it will go to some extent to ensure a much better than 40 percent turnout. I know after running in three elections myself that one of the most disappointing things is that despite a whole lot of different things that the electoral officer would do it still wouldn't produce a turnout of more than roughly 40 percent—and that's in an educated urban metro like Wellington. That meant that something's not quite right if decent Wellingtonians are saying there's something not quite right here.My Green colleague Jan Logie who spoke before certainly mentioned some of the issues because when you get the material you're suddenly faced with the reality of saying Look we've got these ward councillors we've got regional councillors we've got district health board members and of course we've got a mayor to vote for." You've got so many choices to make. You may never have met any of them. So ensuring that a better marketing campaign or better promotional effort goes on will go some way to ensuring that at least residents and citizens—because look when things go wrong they're certainly not shy to express their views. But sometimes they get a little bit—uh what's the word? I'll attack it from another angle. Sometimes they just are simply overwhelmed when they go into—in fact they don't even go into booths. They have to open up an envelope. They get the material. They look through that booklet and they go "Who and what are we going to vote for?"Nicola Willis: Not this time. They'll be voting on the buses.PAUL EAGLE: Oh did I hear buses?Hon Andrew Little: Not when they look at your photo Paul.PAUL EAGLE: But look—absolutely. The Minister points out when they used to see the Eagle on there they used to think "Oh there's a handsome man. We'll vote for him." But being handsome is not the only thing that will get you votes. That's correct but you do have to ensure that you are going to stand for something. I don't want to digress too much because it is important to know that at least there'll be some boost there hopefully in the voting numbers for the local elections this year.The other thing that this will go some way to resolving is the production of various reports and making sure that now great effort goes into producing those statutory documents—the draft annual plan the annual report—and to ensure that those documents now—and they are a telephone book in size. Not the Wellington telephone book though because it's quite a large document. But it's none the less a document that costs money. There are certain places that it must be sent to and certain entities must receive them but this time a PDF document will be fine. So using the internet is better for those documents and for other communication there. I mentioned the other day that even advising of an extraordinary or an emergency meeting can now be done in a different way too via the internet.So this as I said is probably the most important bill I believe in the last hour. It's certainly the hour of action as I've said before. I commend this bill to the House. Kia ora."