Goff Phil: Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 17 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8321. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill): I would like to take a brief call on this. This is traditionally where we do a summing up of what has happened in the Committee stage of the bill but I do want to address the title specifically. The title of this legislation of course is the Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill and it is about transition. It is about the transition of eight different councils into a single super-city and it is about the transition from 13 district and regional plans into a single unitary plan to cover resource management issues in Auckland.Consistently through this bill the Labour Party has supported this legislation. It has supported the legislation because we are very keen to get a single unitary plan. We also supported bringing that plan into existence in earlier legislation. What would normally have taken 10 years under the Resource Management Act will take 3 years under the principal Act that we are now amending. The way that that was achieved was by having the plan notified and then having an independent hearings panel hear submissions on it. Thousands of submissions have been heard—I think 9000—and there are still 5000 to go. The 5000 to go are on site-specific issues. That is going to put real pressure on the independent hearings panel to get through by the statutorily required date of 22 July. So we have been here to support this legislation with measures in this bill such as reducing the quorum increasing the pool of panel members from seven to 10 and allowing the panel to hear the issues concurrently.So we have no problem with the purpose of the bill. What we have had during the Committee stage is a real problem with the process. Everybody knows that this bill was drafted back before 16 September. Minister Nick Smith had it. If this House had been properly managed it could have been introduced it could have been read a first time and it could have gone to a select committee so we could go through the normal democratic procedure of giving the public their say cross-examining the officials on how the bill was put together and asking the Parliamentary Counsel Office about whether the drafting of the bill was appropriate and accurate and we would have got it right—we would have got it right.The great irony of the last 7 or 8 hours—we started this at half past 10 last night and we went through to midnight—is that again we have been rushing this legislation through and more errors will be made. We have not learnt the lesson of what half this legislation is about—the half that does not appear in the title was “Validation”. Validation as you know is correcting errors that were made in previous legislation and retrospectively legislating for what was done illegally to be now considered legal. We have had a whole lot of questions genuine questions for the Minister in the chair. The Ministers in the chair—none of them has been the Minister in charge of the bill—have taken two brief calls. We did not have an opportunity for the select committee to check out why things were being done in a particular way and we have not had that opportunity in the Committee either. I deplore the fact that legislation we support has nevertheless been rushed through in the way it has been unnecessarily. This legislation could have been introduced a couple of months ago. We could have done it properly. We could have had a better chance of making sure we got it right. We could have avoided what inevitably will be future validation legislation which comes out of rushed legislation.So yes we do support this bill. We do support the transition that is occurring in Auckland. We want a single consistent unitary plan that will bring good resource management practices that will provide for sustainable development in the housing area and the industrial area but we want to make sure that it is sustainable and will ensure that instead of the complexity and the fragmented nature of the current district and regional plans we have one plan. What the Government has not explained at any point in the Committee is why it has rushed it through in this inappropriate manner and has not taken the time to answer the genuine questions that members of the Opposition had.