Twyford Phil: Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 3) — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTwyford Phil: Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 3) — Third Reading[Sitting date: 04 May 2016. Volume:713;Page:10795. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): It would be unkind to say of my fellow Te Atatū resident and colleague Alfred Ngaro that he is all preamble and no substance. So I will not say that because that would be unkind but I do have some unsolicited advice for the list member Alfred Ngaro: life is all about getting the ratios right. Whether you are making a hamburger or doing any other task in life it is all about the ratios. So have a think about that.Not all members are lucky enough to have a bill drawn out of the ballot and I am sorry to have to rub it in for other members in the House that I have had five bills selected in the short time that I have been in this House. It is hard work actually. It is hard work for a hard-working Opposition to keep up with the flow of members’ bills coming through. But this is such a listless diffident do-nothing Government and its members have so few ideas of their own that they actually rely—they come to us for ideas for their members’ bills—Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: So back to the bill.PHIL TWYFORD: The member sponsoring this bill Alfred Ngaro has acknowledged in the House that this bill actually was inspired by work that I did in my first term in Parliament here. The Western Leader which is a great newspaper that serves our community in west Auckland reported in May 2011 my calling for a law change to prevent people from serving on more than one local board. I rest my case.This is a problem that is worth fixing. I always think of this bill as being the “Warren Flaunty bill”. Mr Flaunty lives in west Auckland. He is a very successful pharmacist and at the time that I made my statement to the Western Leader back in 2011 Mr Flaunty was serving on five local boards: three elected local boards that were part of Auckland City plus the licensing trust board and the local district health board. As wise and effective as Mr Flaunty is in serving his community many of us took the view I think that it was not really possible to do justice to three distinct geographically contiguous local boards covering the best part of a population of about 300000 people or perhaps closer to 400000. I think that was the genesis of this bill.There are some good reasons for it. Just to touch on them briefly I think that it is quite hard for someone representing three different local boards that inevitably will at times be competing for funding and will be competing for different development projects and so on to avoid potential or perceived conflicts of interest. I think also that there are real questions when a member of a local board in Auckland is paid a salary of about $50000—it is basically a reasonably substantive part-time job and I know some people actually would put in the equivalent of full-time hours serving their communities in this position. It is very hard for someone to actually put in that time as a really effective and hard-working local board member when you are on three elected local boards. They are—it is really important to remember I think—different from an elected governance board in the commercial arena where you might attend the occasional board meeting read papers and answer emails but the time commitment falls far short of being a half-time or full-time position.So Labour is supporting this bill the Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 3).I wanted to just finally pay tribute in this election season to the fantastic people who are putting themselves forward to represent and serve our communities—people like Shane Henderson Will Flavell Paula Bold-Wilson Tiaria Fletcher Georgina Papa Matt Grey Brian Lythe Mike Williams. These are fantastic people in the community that I represent. They are the Labour team for the Henderson-Massey Local Board and they will do a fantastic job for their community.