Dean JacquiHon JACQUI DEAN (National—Waitaki): Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker. National is pleased to support this bill the Local Government Regulatory Systems Amendment Bill. It contains a number of clauses in it and as the Minister for Building and Construction has outlined makes a number of tweaks to legislation all of which are eminently sensible. There are one or two perhaps which I want to speak a little more to but we are pleased to support this because in effect it's our bill. So I want to acknowledge the work of the Hon Anne Tolley when she was the Minister of Local Government in bringing forward—[Interruption]ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Order! Order! I apologise to the member. Could the two members at the back of the House please take your seats?Hon JACQUI DEAN: Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker. That was an interesting intervention so now I will continue for the benefit of those members to just perhaps say once again that we are supporting this bill and the reason we're supporting this bill is because the provisions in the bill came from National when we were in Government.It really just underlines the fact that the National Government was very focused on reducing red tape for local government and the clauses in this bill—most of which are very sensible and eminently sensible but there is one clause I do wish to speak to—do exactly that. It was a very strong focus of the National Government to attack those very issues that made local government inefficient out of date and inconsistent between some of the provisions and some of the Acts. So again I say—and I'll probably say it a few more times during the course of the speech but this is a good piece of work mostly because it did come from the previous Government.It does actually give rise to the open-ended question—and I know that members on this side of the House are also thinking this. I'm pretty sure that it is something that is troubling them also and that is: gosh isn't local government lucky to have a bill brought forward with some pretty insubstantial amendments when over the other side of the House we have a Government telling us how endlessly busy it is? So why is it that up to two hours of tonight's House sitting time can be spent on debating something which effectively should be business as usual for any Government and could be put further down the Order Paper with no harm done to anyone? Could it be that there is a lack of legislation coming through? I just wonder and I just wonder whether the other members of the National Party are wondering the same thing. I bet they are—I bet they are.But here we are. Here we have got the Local Government Regulatory Systems Amendment Bill before us and so I'm not going to painstakingly go through clause by clause by clause. I could—I could—but again I'm going to leave that to my colleagues because I know they want to do that. I know they want to go through changes to the Dog Control Act Local Government Act 2002—they are busting to make contributions around those clauses I just know they are.But there is one part that I do wish to speak to and it is a new part and it's the second one in the bill. It is Amendments to Local Electoral Act 2001" and it does make quite a substantial change to responsibilities of councils. So the purpose of the changes to the Local Electoral Act is to empower councils to improve representative and substantial participation in local elections. "Nothing wrong there" I hear you think and on the face of it there is nothing wrong with that. But how are they going to do it? So we are putting a new purpose into the Local Electoral Act which empowers local authorities to increase participation in local elections. We all want that. Participation is declining in each and every election and I think participation is down around 40 percent. There are members here who might—it's around 40 percent.Lawrence Yule: 42 percent.Hon JACQUI DEAN: Forty-two percent. You see when Lawrence Yule gets up to make a contribution I just know he's going to hammer this point because I know he cares about it a lot—that and some other points.But how are they going to do that? Are we going to yet again under this Government give an unfettered power to local government to increase participation in local elections? It sounds great on the face of it but I can tell members something: we will be watching this part through the passage of this bill through the House. In select committee we will be very very interested in just what is meant by the insertion of the part into this otherwise very very good bill. I will leave my contribution there and I commend the bill to the House."