Pugh MaureenMAUREEN PUGH (National): Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker. It hasn't happened to me very often in this House but tonight I've had an epiphany. It just dawned on me. I've been reading the debate notes on this particular bill and it's just dawned on me after listening to Mr Webb over there what this bill is probably all about. He's talked about the well-beings but then he's gone on to talk about local government providing social support providing heritage support and talking about health. This here is a divesting of the responsibility of central government and pushing it back down on to local government and the ratepayers. Well Mr Webb I can tell you that the ratepayers will not thank you for that. That is the role of central government and for someone who's got such a tight budget coming into their first round of budgeting I can see what the motivation is: you are trying to push all this back down on to the ratepayer.DEPUTY SPEAKER: Actually I'm not.MAUREEN PUGH: I can recall back in—Mr Webb is attempting to push it back to the ratepayers Madam Deputy Speaker. I do recall back in 2002 the unsettling effect that the legislation had around the local government sector when the well-beings were first introduced by the Labour Party. It was unsettling because it meant that any active lobby group could justify any project under those headings of well-being and it opened a huge can of worms. And the problem with these things that are what we used to call in the local government sector the nice-to-haves" is that these lobby groups will lobby really hard to get their "nice-to-have" project but then they're usually the same people that will come along at annual plan time and complain about the rate increases. And these "nice-to-haves" are a very slow creep. You get a new project one year you get another project the next year but actually the ongoing costs of these projects are continual because someone has to maintain them; someone has to repair them. Well then in 2012 the Local Government Act was amended and the well-beings were removed and guess what? The sky didn't fall in and it didn't stop the councils from doing the things that they needed to do. It didn't stop them investing in libraries or pools or playgrounds or parks but what it did do was refocus back on their core responsibilities. "Rats roads rubbish and water"—that's what we used to call it. What they want to know is when they turn on the tap the water will run and it will be clean drinking-water. What they want to know is that when they put their bag out once a week someone is going to come and pick it up and take it to a transfer station. What they want to know is that their roads when they come out of their driveway are going to be sealed and safe. There's one other point I would like to make about these particular well-beings. It is that when you've got a large council these costs are spread across a large number of ratepayers but I can understand that it is more palatable to make these changes for a Government that's lost sight of the regions. And the small councils that are running and managing those small regions—they don't have the same economies of scale so those "nice-to-haves" actually do have a much higher impact per ratepayer. I can tell you that in Auckland I believe that the average rates up there are about a thousand dollars. Well in some of those regions it's three times that amount. They can't afford the added cost of these "nice-to-haves". This side of the House is opposed to this bill. We believe that local councils are the best managers of their money and we do not support this bill.DEPUTY SPEAKER: The next call is a split call between Labour and ACT and I call Ginny Andersen."