Local Government Law Reform Bill

I am delighted to be able to take a call on Part 8, which is only four clauses—clauses 69, 70, 71, and 72. Basically, in my view, this part takes us back to yesteryear, to a time—as those in this Chamber who were around then will recall—that was one of the worst possible times for traffic enforcement on our roads.

We had a department of traffic officers, which was part of the Ministry of Transport. That was bad enough. Fortunately, when it merged with the police we got a better standard of behaviour, and traffic officers began trying to work cooperatively and collaboratively with motorists. I am delighted that that is what we got. But we also had a number of local authorities with their own traffic enforcement units. I know that Darren Hughes would not have been around in those days, but if he had I would have loved to take him—

💬 Mark Blumsky: He wouldn’t have been born.

He would not have been born at that stage, but I would have loved to take him to see some of the local authority traffic enforcement units and show him how they operated. We had a number in Auckland. Mount Albert had one and Tāmaki had one. It was quite clear that the public’s perception was that those units ended up being just little Gestapo-type units that were heavily focused on revenue raising, were not too fussed about anything to do with road safety, and pinged anybody and everybody whenever they could. I know of a mayor in Auckland who got pinged for doing about 5 kilometres over the speed limit by one of these “Flash Harries” driving up behind him, hauling him over, and pinging him, when just about everybody drove at that speed on that road.

One of the best things that happened because of the local government reform by Dr Michael Bassett, a Labour Minister—and I give him credit for what he did—in 1989, when he forced a whole lot of amalgamations, was that he actually got rid of what I think was a scourge. Eric Roy from Invercargill might remember there was an Invercargill traffic enforcement unit. Fortunately, I never drove around Invercargill enough back in those days to know—

💬 Eric Roy: It was awful.

There we go. The experience at the exact other end of the country, at the bottom of the South Island, was exactly what we experienced in Auckland.

Now the definition of an enforcement authority—either the police or, in some cases, Land Transport New Zealand, which used to be the Land Transport Safety Authority—is being repealed, and the ability to issue infringement offence notices, in this case relating to the use of special vehicle lanes, is being given to employees of local authorities, or Transit, or a public road controlling authority. It is being given to a whole range of people—what I would call basically Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. I do not actually think there are too many local authorities out there right now that, if they were given some powers of enforcement and the ability to issue infringement notices, would want to go back to those bad old days.

💬 John Carter: It’s the last thing they would want.

I do not think any of them would want to, but I signal caution to this Committee that the moment we start enabling that to be the case, we will get slippage. Eventually, some little empire builder within one of the little operations will decide that, hey, it would not be too bad if they could—

💬 John Carter: What, the local authority?

I know that John Carter is surprised to hear there could be some empire building going on within local government. I know that it has not happened to date. It certainly did not happen in Wellington City when Mayor Blumsky was in charge—that is for sure. In fact, if anything, the place was—

💬 John Carter: Not in the Hokianga county, it didn’t.

I do not know where Hokianga county was, so I cannot comment on that.

💬 John Carter: Neither did I.

Neither did the member—OK. But all I want to say is that the reason for the National Party’s opposition to this provision is that it is really not needed. If there are breaches of all sorts of things—such as a car with just one person in it driving down a special transit lane for vehicles with heavy occupancy of, say, three people, and blocking up the lane, or a car using a bus-only lane and causing trouble—there very clearly is a proper authority to enforce those laws, just like there is an authority to enforce speed limits and to take dangerous cars and drink-drivers off the road, and it is called the New Zealand Police.

We heard the Minister of Police, who also happens to be the Minister of Transport, waxing lyrical in the House today about the 1,000 new front-line police officers. There was no question about it. In fact, she was berating any member who questioned whether we would get that huge increase in the number of front-line enforcement officers. If it is the case that there will be this huge ramping up of the numbers of front-line officers to go out and do enforcement duties—and I presume the Minister is to be taken at her word—then does it not make far more sense to task those people, who are trained and who have the respect of the New Zealand public, to do this work? Despite some slip-ups by a few bad policemen from time to time—and we have all heard a few examples—I still think that, in the main, the police are well respected in this country. I certainly believe they are much higher up the pecking order than politicians or secondhand-car salesmen, in terms of the public’s respect for them.

💬 John Carter: Not as much as they were.

That is true. My colleague John Carter makes an interesting interjection. The public’s respect for them is not quite as much as it used to be. I think the police need to be ever-vigilant and on guard. But let me tell members that any slippage we might witness in police standards, ethics, behaviours, and so on will be multiplied tenfold if every man and his dog can run an enforcement agency and issue infringement notices.

A gleeful look will come across the eyes of some local authorities—revenue, revenue, revenue! They cannot pull back on the rates lever, because they just cannot get any more blood out of some stones. For example, some elderly people who live in Bucklands Beach, in my electorate, now pay rates of $5,000 per annum for a small cottage—what used to be a beach house. Members who can remember back as far as I can will recall that Bucklands Beach was a holiday location for people who lived in Auckland. It was a long drive out to Bucklands Beach. Actually, since road congestion has got as bad as it is now, it takes as long to get to Bucklands Beach as it used to back when there were no roads. We often set out in the afternoon, in the hope that we will make it there. But these people, who have lived in a little crib for some time, are paying unbelievable rates. Now, of course, we will have local authorities saying: “Well, we pretty much can’t squeeze much harder on the rates lever. How about we start a fantastic little revenue job here, with infringement notices being given out left, right, and centre for all sorts of things?”.

I admit there are some limits to Part 8, but I say to the Minister of Local Government that I am always nervous about thin ends of wedges. What will happen the moment we give local authorities, as we do here—public road controlling authorities—this power? The Labour Government keeps saying that it is looking forward to one day having private participation in our roading. So are we, but it does not look like it is going to happen. What about a private roading authority? What will happen if we do what Tony Blair’s Government has done in the UK? It let Macquarie Bank go ahead and build the M6 toll road in Birmingham. It is completely privately owned and privately built. If we are to let public road controlling authorities have an enforcement role on public roading, why do we not say in this legislation that if a road is built by a private company with its own money, it will have the right to enforce standards in road safety, lane controls, and management?

The reason, of course, is that we would never allow that. Even the National Party—even me from the right-wing end of the National Party—would not allow a private company to have an infringement enforcement—[Interruption] Oh yes, I am. I am a good old right-wing Tory. Even I would not want private companies having their own little police force out there, running around and issuing infringement notices. So private road controlling authorities are not included in this part. Public road controlling authorities are, but they should not be.

Transit’s behaviour in recent years has been nothing short of disgusting, in a whole range of areas. Road control is the one thing I would not task Transit with right now, based on its inability to do even its core function, which is to build roads. Its inability to do even its core function of building roads is so legendary now that I would not want Transit to become an infringement-issuing police force in its own right.

National is very, very opposed to Part 8. I am going to get very confused later, because I think National will support the bill, but, without doubt, we will be voting against Part 8.

💬 Mark Blumsky: It will be on the basis of Hansard.

All right; it will be on the basis of Hansard. Well, at least we will have on record, so that the good motorists out there, the public of New Zealand, will know, that while National has any fire in its belly at all on this matter, it does not want to see anybody other than the New Zealand Police have control of this issue.

For the sake of the Hansard, and so that we have the record very clear when someone wants to go back and have a look at what was said, I tell the Committee that National opposes Part 8 of this Local Government Law Reform Bill. I want to make that very clear, because there is a real possibility that because of the changes that have been made to the microchipping provisions, National might support the third reading. That does not mean to say that we support all of the bill. Certainly, we do not support a good number of parts. I want to make that very clear. For anyone looking in the Hansard record, I say that National does not support this bill.

💬 Hon Maurice Williamson: I’m not going to support this part.

I am sorry—National does not support this part. I will correct it in the Hansard. It will be OK. It will read all right when I get the Hansard.

I want to take us back to 1998, when the previous member who spoke, my good friend and colleague Maurice Williamson, was the Minister of Transport. He actually brought this amendment through. It was never intended to give authorities other than the New Zealand Police the right to issue infringement notices. That was never the intention of the bill. If anybody in this House—or, indeed, in the general public—is interested, they can go and look at the Hansard. The whole purpose was to allow Transit New Zealand to set up some bus lanes, and some freeways for buses and passenger transport, etc. But infringements by people were the responsibility of the police. Members can go back and have a look at that provision. What happened, of course, was that some local authorities thought that because they had been given that responsibility, it had to mean they were in charge. So away they went. They started thinking that they were enforcement agencies, and that they would issue a ticket or two—they would start to do this and that. But Transit came along and said—

💬 Hon Maurice Williamson: Show them you’re like Rick Barker.

Well—it must be the snow! Transit came along and said that if local authorities could do that, so could they. So away went Transit and had a jolly old time until somebody said: “Hang on a minute; where’s your authority?” Transit said it did not have any, and so it stopped doing it. But then Transit came to the Minister of Local Government and said that it had been in the habit of doing it, and that it actually needed to do it. So the Minister, instead of going back to the history and seeing what was intended and, more important, what was needed—

💬 Hon Maurice Williamson: He was disgruntled—under pressure.

Well, no. He just followed his old rule of giving more to local government at more cost to ratepayers. You know, it was the silly attitude of just transferring responsibilities from central to local government. It was a small chink, a small step, but it was the thin end of the wedge.

The people of New Zealand need to know that what is happening now is that the Labour Government is putting in place something that was never intended in the original legislation. I say to the Minister in the chair, the Hon Mark Burton, that if he is uncertain about that, he should go back and have a look at the history of the legislation. I have read it. I actually remember putting the bill through. In fact, I remember putting a number of bills through. There was something to do with water at some stage, a bit earlier on, when the Minister—

💬 Hon Mark Burton: Maritime transport, I think.

Is that what it was called?

💬 Hon Maurice Williamson: I’m still getting counselling.

The member thinks he is! The point is that in the history of this bill, it was never intended that anyone other than the New Zealand Police should have the authority to issue infringement notices. But this Government is now putting that responsibility on to somebody else, and that is nuts. [Interruption] Well, it is not even an issue that would worry my mother.

What would worry my mother is the fact that giving Transit New Zealand anything to do, at all, would be the problem—because it sure as hell cannot build roads. It sure as hell cannot do anything, at all. So why should we expect it to be able to issue tickets properly? It cannot, it should not—but it has been doing it illegally. Now the Government wants to tidy up the situation, but the Government should stop. The best thing it could do is go back to Transit New Zealand and start getting it working and carrying out its core responsibility—tidying up the congestion in Auckland would be a good start. So would tidying up the congestion in Wellington, in Christchurch, and in other places—[Interruption] Whangarei—can members believe that in Whangarei there are traffic jams now? We have cars, and people have started to drive them—and it is nuts.

I feel inspired by my two colleagues Mr Williamson and Mr Carter. I must say some things about the Local Government Law Reform Bill as well. After days and days spent fighting the evils of certain elements of this legislation, I have to say this part is worse than the one on dog chipping. This is seriously bad, for all sorts of reasons, and my colleagues have outlined some of them. There has been concern about the mechanism of providing the option of collecting fines to others than the police, and I will give members a couple of examples. The select committee received submissions about this. Someone said they had 3 years of fines, they had actually been doing this, and they needed to revalidate backwards in case someone came along and wanted their fine back. So they have been involved, ultra vires, in the collection of money. What is this about? In places like Auckland where—

💬 Hon Maurice Williamson: Lucky there’s someone listening tonight.

Lucky Auckland, where everybody wants to be in their cars, has bus lanes and people can drive on a bus lane. They are not supposed to, but what is done with them if they do? The local authority says it wants to have the right to impose fines. It wants to have the responsibility for it. There may be a car lane that requires a car to have passengers before it can be used. If someone drives in that lane alone or with a blow-up dummy in the car—

💬 Darren Hughes: What?

That would be for the purposes of looking as if there is a passenger, I say to Mr Hughes. In that case, an offence would be committed. [Interruption] I ask members to settle down. The question is not whether there should be specific-purpose lanes; it is who gets to police those who offend. Let me state again that there is an issue of concern about this being a “click the ticket” provision. Section (3A), inserted by clause 71, provides that the local authority can go to the Minister and say that not only is it policing, but it deserves the right to retain a portion of the fine. We say that is the thin end of the wedge, and we have some significant concerns about it. National, in its minority report, sets out quite clearly that we think this is inappropriate. We think the people who should do the policing are the police, and that neither local authorities nor Transit New Zealand should become enforcement agencies. We make that point quite clear.

Another issue I wish to raise here that makes it a little more acceptable is that the provisions in Part 8 are locked in only until 30 June 2009, because there is to be a review of the Transport Act 1962. So that review should enable us to look at the whole issue. Nevertheless the principle that we stand on is that it should be only the police who do the enforcing. The points that the Hon Maurice Williamson made about private roads and a whole lot of other arrangements are not where we want to be going. The issue is quite clear. It is a matter of principle, and there is an opportunity for people who are given enforcement jobs outside of the police to overstep the mark. There are no monitoring provisions outlined—

💬 Hon Maurice Williamson: What about those private security firms doing the minding for the police now?

Exactly. There are no provisions in this bill that say if they break the laws we will do X. There is no audit process; there is nothing. This is a hugely dangerous provision and we will certainly be voting against it.

I can assure those who are listening that at no stage did the Wellington City Council want to have its own traffic department—certainly not while I was the mayor. At no stage did we have a group of people wanting to put on uniforms and go marching through the streets, catching people out on traffic lanes and issuing them tickets. I would suggest to members, though, that the council did have some initiatives that made a difference. We put people on the streets who looked after the safety aspects of the city, because we felt that there was a shortage of people keeping an eye on the crime scene. But at the end of the day there was no desire for us to have a traffic department.

It became very clear through the submission process in the Local Government and Environment Committee that the enforcement issue has to be addressed. I remember asking the Ministry of Transport officials whether, if this bill were passed by the House, councils could retrospectively challenge and ticket people whom they had captured on some infringements. If I am right, the officials made it clear that there was no chance of this bill bringing in a retrospective ability to charge those people.

It is quite clear that areas like the North Shore have issues to deal with. The North Shore has a problem with its bus lanes; that is quite clear. The mayor made a presentation to the select committee and made it clear to us that people are abusing the bus lanes. Cars are using the bus lanes, and they should not do that. He also made it clear to the select committee that the enforcement of those lanes made a difference, and did have an impact on how many people actually broke the law. He made it clear also that his ability to issue infringement notices has made a difference. When asked, though, he did acknowledge that the police resource shortage is one of the reasons why the council wants the ability to issue tickets. It is a pity to find, yet again, that where there is a central government problem with resourcing, local government feels that it has to step up and fill the gap. We see in this legislation the way local government wanted to do that.

We in the National Party do not want to see local authorities given the ability to issue infringement notices. We believe that such an ability would have the potential to grow. I note that among the number of councillors who made submissions, a couple of councillors wanted to be able to issue infringement notices on traffic lights. They wanted their officers to be able to stand on corners and capture cars going through traffic lights. I suggest that that is, if you like, phase two of the opportunity this legislation provides. I would not mind if the Minister made a comment on that—it was an actual submission to the select committee.

With those types of submissions coming through the process, the Minister should understand the National Party’s concern as to where this will end. Before we know it, the council officers standing at the traffic lights, capturing cars going through red lights, and writing down licence plate numbers would want to have cars so that they could follow offenders in case they had not written the numbers down correctly—and they could capture offenders when they parked. So we might well have little city council cars running around operating as enforcement cars. Obviously, I am taking the idea a lot further than the Minister or I would ever want to see it taken, but my point is that when we open a door in situations like this, we become concerned as to how far that door can be opened.

I have real sympathy for those who made submissions to the select committee. They have a problem. In this case, their bus lanes—Transit lanes or whatever we call them—are being abused. I do not believe that giving councils the authority to dish out infringement notices is the answer. I believe that this is an issue for central government, its resourcing of police, and its prioritisation to put councils in a position where they can handle the problem in a much better way.

Listening to my colleague Mark Blumsky speak has prompted me to take another call. He has brought to my mind an issue that has not been covered. I want to put it in this context. What we are doing now is to give local authorities and Transit the ability to issue infringement notices. Earlier we had a debate on the Government’s proposals to change the laws around dog control. It says not enough dogs are registered, and it wants to bring in a microchipping regime because local government is having trouble in policing dogs. That is the Government’s rationale for that measure.

The question that comes to mind is why the Government thinks local government will be able to do any better in policing traffic infringements than it does in dog control.

💬 Bob Clarkson: Microchip the drivers.

I ask the member to hang on. We will get to how the Government may manage that issue in a minute, and I ask the member not to give my story away. Twenty percent or 30 percent of the dogs in this country are not registered. The Government has said that local government cannot cope and is not dealing with the matter properly—it has all the laws, but the system is still not working—so it will introduce microchipping. Fortunately, we have managed to stymie that a bit, by managing to get the bill amended so that farm dogs do not have to be microchipped.

💬 Hon Maurice Williamson: Working dogs.

Farm working dogs.

💬 Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON: My chihuahua’s a working dog.

Of course—absolutely. Lots of dogs work. When we walk down the street, we can see them working all the time.

💬 Mark Blumsky: Winston is.

Yes, Winston works—Winston works a lot, actually.

The point is this: where does it logically take us if local authorities—organisations throughout the country—cannot do the job we have imposed on them? Where do we go next if we tell them to issue infringement notices, and they come back and say they are having trouble in enforcing them? What is the next logical step? The next thing that will happen is that it will be decided the best thing we can do is to microchip buses. That will be the next thing we debate in Parliament. Obviously, if the Government cannot microchip the dogs and wants to be consistent, the next thing it will do is to say that we do not know who drove a particular bus, so we had better microchip drivers.

Where do we go to from there? The next thing is that instead of having drivers and passengers, we will have blow-up dolls and—

💬 Bob Clarkson: Are those working bus drivers?

That is the point. Then we will have a debate on whether the drivers are working bus drivers, urban bus drivers, or rural bus drivers, and whether they have to be microchipped in the country. Where do we go next? What happens if an urban bus driver is microchipped but goes to the country? Do we take the chip out? What logically follows?

The point is that what we are doing is silly. We can make this whole debate stupid. What I have just said is silly, because the problem we are talking about is that the Government is doing something jolly silly. It is not focusing on where responsibility should lie, which is with the police. If the police have a problem with regard to administering infringement notices, then they should be given more resources. If that is the issue, we should make sure that the authority with the responsibility for the job can do it.

We should not pass the buck to local government. The Government is already continually moving a stream of responsibilities to local government, and local government is finally starting to wake up and say it does not like all the stuff the Government is shifting to it. In fact, the Minister in the chair, the Hon Mark Burton, is himself—and my colleague will talk more about this—starting to acknowledge that fact, yet tonight he supports the passing of this bill. It was never intended in the original legislation to allow local government and Transit to have this responsibility. But the Minister happily says that we should we should pass it over to local government. Rates rebates, prostitution law reform, building controls, and anything we can think of are shifted away from central government, so that the Government cannot be blamed for them, and are handed over to ratepayers and local government.

I say to the Minister that the National Party opposes this measure. We oppose it because it was never intended and because it is just another compliance cost—an unnecessary burden on local government. We do not support it and we will vote against this part.