Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 2)

on behalf of the Minister of Local Government: I move, That the Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 2) be now read a second time. The Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 2) will amend the Local Government (Auckland Council) Act 2009 to provide powers for local boards to delegate responsibilities allocated to them under that Act. Such powers were initially provided for through transitional regulations. These will expire on 31 October 2013. This bill replicates the expiring provisions and places them into the principal Act.

This bill provides a permanent and necessary solution to the issue of local board delegations in Auckland. There are 21 local boards throughout the Auckland region. They have a significant and wide-ranging role that spans most local government services and activities, including making decisions about non-regulatory local matters such as negotiating service delivery standards; developing, monitoring, and implementing local board plans every 3 years, and negotiating local board agreements with the governing body; providing local leadership and maintaining effective relationships with the governing body, the community, and special interest groups; and identifying and communicating the views of their communities on regional strategies, policies, plans, and bylaws to the governing body and the council-controlled organisations.

Local boards provide local communities with an important say in how the services and facilities that make their places unique are delivered. They also provide an important opportunity for local concerns and views to have input into the regional decision-making made by the Auckland Council’s governing body. Only two of Auckland’s 21 local board areas have populations fewer than 45,000 people. This figure is around the average number of people who live in cities and districts outside of Auckland. Elected bodies serving populations of this size need flexibility in how they structure their decision making. They need to be able to create committees and subcommittees and to delegate appropriate responsibilities to them.

Auckland’s local boards are working well. They are contributing effectively to the governance of the whole region and the communities within it. Members of local boards feel empowered and effective in their roles, with 88 percent of existing local board members standing again in the 2013 local elections. The success of the local board model has prompted this Government to make it available in a modified form in other parts of New Zealand. Last year’s Local Government Act legislation allowed for the Auckland two-tier model of governance to be copied exactly, in some circumstances—that is, where a proposed metropolitan unitary authority has a population of more than 400,000, but it did not enable this for smaller populations. Further amendments to the Local Government Act this year will provide the ability for local boards to be established more widely where unitary authorities are established through reorganisation or amalgamation.

The Local Government and Environment Committee received only one submission on this bill. That submission came from the Auckland Council and supports the legislation as drafted. The submission represents the views of both the governing body and local board chairs, and reiterates that local boards need to be able to delegate their powers in order to function effectively. All local boards have made delegations to council officers, and most local boards have delegated responsibilities to individual local board members and/or to committees. The unworkable alternative is that all decisions must be taken by a full business meeting of the local board. The select committee reported back that the bill should proceed unamended, and I thank the committee for its prompt consideration of the bill.

Transitional regulations currently covering local board delegation powers will expire on 31 October 2013. Auckland Council requested that in order for smooth and efficient local board decision-making to continue, there should be no time delay in the passing of the bill. It is concerned that without the ability to alter existing delegations after this year’s local elections, it is likely that relatively minor decisions will need to be referred to full business meetings. This will cause delay and will impact on service delivery. Given the agreement of all involved and in order to maintain efficient and effective local government in Auckland, it is both practical and desirable that the Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 2) be enacted by 1 November this year. I commend the bill to the House.

Labour is supporting this bill, the Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 2), at its second reading. It is a pretty uncontroversial, technical bill. I mean, it is here in the House today only because of incompetence in the drafting by the Government of the transitional legislation for the establishment of the Auckland super-city. It is only because of the Government’s incompetence that we are here spending taxpayers’ money debating this bill, which should never ever have been brought before this House. It is fundamental that these local boards have to have the powers to delegate their tasks and responsibilities to the staff of the council. That is fundamental to their operation, and yet the Government was so incompetent that it put those provisions into transitional legislation that had a sunset clause. So we should not be wasting time on it in the House today, but it is an interesting postscript to the story of the establishment of the Auckland Council.

An amalgamation of eight local territorial authorities, the biggest local government amalgamation this country has ever seen, created the new Auckland Council, with more assets than Fonterra and Telecom combined. It was a new model of local government in this country, and I think that this is a good opportunity to just reflect on the story of that amalgamation. It started with the far-sighted and visionary work of the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance, set up by Helen Clark’s Government. It was almost destroyed by the brutish and crude anti-democratic implementation—

💬 Carol Beaumont: By Rodney Hide.

—of the royal commission reforms by Rodney Hide on behalf of the National Government. They did everything they could to subvert the intent of the royal commission. They replaced the royal commission’s recommendations with an extreme, centralised model of governance, which took power away from communities and away from the regions, and put it into the governing body. They corporatised 75 percent of Auckland Council’s assets and operations into these so-called council-controlled organisations, which do most of their business behind closed doors.

Unsurprisingly, the people of Auckland were alarmed. They were alarmed at the threat to their assets, because it was very clear to everybody in Auckland over those years when the super-city was being set up that the way Rodney Hide and the National Government went about it was simply with the purpose of setting up the assets in these corporatised entities so they could be flogged off once John Banks won the mayoralty. That was clearly the plan, and, understandably, the people of Auckland were alarmed. So what did they do? They acted in the most rational way that they could in our democratic system and they elected Len Brown, a mayor committed to holding on to Auckland’s assets and committed to embracing the community. He is a man whose political style is all about uniting people, not dividing them, and someone who embraces Auckland’s diverse peoples and who embraces the youthful population of Auckland. It is Len Brown’s inclusive and dynamic leadership as the first mayor of the Auckland super-city that has really snatched victory from the jaws of the National Government’s best efforts to steal Auckland’s democracy and sell off its assets. That is the story, so far, of the Auckland super-city.

I want to remember the debates that we had in this House about, for example, the establishment of the local boards, whose ability to delegate their powers is the issue that this bill seeks to rectify. As I said, the National Government opted for a much more heavily centralised model than the royal commission had recommended, and it set up a proliferation of local boards—21 of them—with very few real powers. They had no power to own property and no power to make by-laws or regulations. They are there simply as a kind of public engagement mechanism, to advocate on behalf of their communities. In spite of the best efforts of the National Government, actually I have to say that the local boards have been quite successful. The jury, I think, is probably out still as to whether it is a successful model for the Auckland Council, but, by and large, they have been successful for two reasons. One is the tireless efforts of good, committed community leaders on those local boards working on behalf of their communities, and there is the inclusive leadership of Mayor Len Brown and his council, which, for example, involved the chairs of all those local boards in the Auckland Unitary Plan committee, which has been working so hard in recent months.

The second thing that was such a point of controversy during the establishment of the Auckland super-city was the council-controlled organisations, which, in a breathtaking move by Rodney Hide and his National Government cronies, corporatised 75 percent of the operations of local government in Auckland—extraordinary when compared with any other local authority anywhere else in the country. The predictions that were made in the editorial columns of the New Zealand Herald and by many other commentators have been borne out. Those council-controlled organisations have been largely unaccountable to Auckland Council. They have done much of their business in secret, and the hand-picked business appointees who are responsible for the governance of those entities—for managing the publicly owned assets of the people of Auckland—have acted largely behind a veil of secrecy. It does not surprise me that Mayor Len Brown has promised a review of those very badly named council-controlled organisations. Len Brown and his council have promised after the local government elections to do a review of those council-controlled organisations to determine whether or not that is the best structure for them, and to look, I think, at bringing some of them back in-house so they are subject to much more democratic control.

We argued in this House against Steven Joyce’s insistence that Auckland Transport, which spends on transport more than half of the rates that Aucklanders contribute every year—Steven Joyce insisted, against the recommendations of his officials in Treasury and in the Ministry of Transport—be set up as a council-controlled organisation, and he legislated for it. The only local government transport organisation in the whole country that Parliament has mandated by legislation had to be set up as a corporate entity. That is wrong.

It is still our policy to change the law—to legislate to give back that democratic right to the mayor and the councillors of Auckland, as the democratically elected representatives, to decide what the structure should be. Should it be a council-controlled organisation, or should it be run in-house? What do the people of Auckland prefer? We will carry out that promise when we are back in Government.

The third thing that I want to mention is debt. Financial prudence was one of the big motivations for the amalgamation. Rodney Hide trumpeted all the savings that he hoped to make. It was going to eliminate duplication and waste. He was much more reticent in this House about admitting that the IT system that his establishment authority imposed on Auckland Council would cost over the decade that followed close to a billion dollars—just for the IT system. It was like pulling hen’s teeth getting the Minister of Local Government in the National-ACT Government to admit the true cost of that IT system. Again, this is another example of Len Brown snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. His financial stewardship has allowed the debt to stay within a very reasonable level, while this Government has borrowed $50 billion. This National Government has borrowed more money than any other Government in New Zealand’s history. If the mayor that the National Government had wanted to be elected, John Banks, had won instead of Len Brown, we probably would have seen a continuation of what he did when he tripled the debt of the old Auckland City when he was the Mayor of Auckland City prior to the amalgamation. He tripled the debt. Thankfully, under Len Brown’s careful financial stewardship, we have seen a much better level of financial management.

Finally, I want to say that the leadership that we have seen from Len Brown and the Auckland Council over the last 3 years has been something that Auckland, our biggest city, and this country have been crying out for. For the first time since Robbie, Sir Dove-Meyer Robinson, in the 1960s, we have a mayor who has championed the need for a public transport system in Auckland. Len Brown, to his credit, rolled Steven Joyce and Gerry Brownlee, who for 3 years blocked Aucklanders’ aspirations for a decent modern public transport system and a City Rail Link that will double the capacity of the existing rail network. That is a victory for Len Brown. That is why Len Brown has no credible opponent from the right wing in the mayoral contest this year. That is why he will be elected. That is the story of how Len Brown clutched victory—

Order! The time has expired.

As we have heard from previous speakers, the Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 2) is a non-controversial bill. It is supported right across the House. This bill is quite simple. All it does is amend the Local Government (Auckland Council) Act 2009 to provide the powers for local boards to delegate responsibilities allocated to them under that Act. These powers have already been in place and are working really well. They have been in place for the transitional regulations, but those powers expire on 31 October 2013. It is very interesting when the member Phil Twyford was talking about transitional regulations, because those transitional regulations were always an interim solution. They were there to give local communities the flexibility to work out and tweak the operations of local boards during the political reorganisation of Auckland. But now is the time for them to become a permanent part of Auckland’s legislation.

I have to say that sweetness and light has broken out in the Local Government and Environment Committee, because this model has been working so well that we have unanimously supported it going forward. The confirmation of this legislation has been agreed to by the Auckland Council, and it has been agreed to by the 21 local boards and their board members. It simply allows local boards to get on with the business of representing and serving their communities. All communities want effective and efficient local government management. There is no doubt about that. It is very important that this is passed in the next few weeks so that those local boards in Auckland can get on with their job in a seamless manner.

The success of these local boards in Auckland has prompted changes, so the Government has made this kind of model available in other parts of New Zealand. This Auckland model is a two-tier model. It can be copied. Originally, it was designed only for metropolitan unitary authorities with a population of more than 400,000, but due to demand by local authorities, further amendments in the coming year in the next Act will allow smaller councils to have local boards. They will be established more widely across the country. These changes deliver on requests from local government, and they will give them a broader range of reorganisation options to enable more efficient and effective provision of local government services and facilities.

It is possible that amalgamated local authorities may be able to achieve economies of scale in infrastructure investment and operation, and be better able to access specialist expertise and resources. We see that this is a real problem, particularly in smaller councils across the country. But it is important that even as they access these benefits, they do not sacrifice community input or identity at a local level, and this is where this two-tier model can be very successful, as we have seen in Auckland. As we go through this reorganisation process, the Local Government Commission, in consultation with communities undertaking any reorganisation, will determine the establishment of local boards, and whether that is appropriate, justified, and desirable. As I have said, this bill is non-controversial. All members of the Local Government and Environment Committee supported it. It is supported across the House, and I commend it to the House.

My colleague Phil Twyford is absolutely correct. We are here debating this Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 2) to try to fix the muck-up that this Government created when it rushed through the Auckland reorganisation. It rushed it through without proper consultation with the people of Auckland. It collapsed that particular process so that now all we are doing is simply amending something that should have been made permanent from the beginning. If the Government had had the foresight, if it had taken the time to keep its word by consulting the people of Auckland after the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance had completed its work, we would not be here. But we are, as a result of the muck-up that this Government created in its rush—

💬 Hon Member: They’re always doing that.

It is true—to control Auckland. In its rush to seize the assets of that great region of ours, it just overlooked some of the simple things. If it had taken the time, taken the advice that was given to it, and read the royal commission’s submissions, I do not believe that we would be here wasting Parliament’s time and wasting the Speaker’s time in adjudicating over this particular debate.

💬 Andrew Little: We should be at home.

That is right—when I should be at home, at this particular time. So, look—absolutely, we have indicated that Labour will support this. It is a technical bill. It gives local boards the powers to be able to delegate their responsibilities—as they currently have. Without that, local boards are going to have to continue going to the council to carry out their functions.

But I think that my colleague Phil Twyford was correct that in debating this particular bill it is timely to remind this House about the background context that led us to all this. Some in this House will remember that this is also an example of National breaking its pre-election promise. I do not know whether you will recall that during the general election campaign in 2008 Mr Key promised the people of Auckland that if National was in power, what it would do was receive the royal commission’s inquiry once it was completed, receive the options for consideration by the royal commission, and then it would comprehensively consult with the people of Auckland in accordance with the Local Government Act.

That was the promise made. What happened? The minute that National was in power, it refused to consult. It collapsed the process, and would not even give proper time to those who wanted to air their submissions. Again, we saw there that once National had the reins of power, once it was the Government, it did not care one iota about that promise that was made. It did not care one iota about the royal commission, and did not care one iota about the concerns of the people of Auckland. Instead, National imposed the structure on Auckland ratepayers. It was a structure that we believe was flawed. As my colleague Phil Twyford says, the jury is still out. It was a structure that was designed to corporatise the Auckland region. It was a structure designed to corporatise local government generally. That was perhaps one of the first shots National fired in this experiment, in attacking local government and local democracy. We have seen, since then, many, many other examples. Just to name a few—the override provisions in the housing accord, which the Government recently forced Auckland Council to sign up to. If the council did not sign up, this Government would ride roughshod over Auckland Council.

💬 Phil Twyford: They threatened them.

That is exactly right. The Government threatened the people of Auckland.

💬 Andrew Little: Oh, you’re joking—they didn’t!

Absolutely, it did. It dared to threaten the duly elected representatives of the Auckland region. That is what this Government did.

Another example is—people will recall—the suspension of elections in Environment Canterbury. Another example of the way that this Government is behaving towards local government is the way that it is gutting the Resource Management Act—gutting the Resource Management Act—to reduce environmental protections, and to prevent the consultation process that enables the New Zealand public to have a say about whether it is important to protect the environment or whether we side with the Government and just go all the way for economic development, irrespective of what we do to the environment and to the future of New Zealand.

It is just a travesty that these guys—this Government—would turn up and give these speeches as if it was doing Auckland a favour, when in reality, we are helping it to fix a mistake and fix the wrong and the muck-up that they have made. So I would hope that this House will recall—I know that certainly the people of Auckland will—that this Government broke its pre-election promise. I believe that many in this House would have witnessed that the people of Auckland retaliated. Thousands and thousands took to the streets of Auckland and they marched—men, women, children, church groups, trade unions, community organisations, Māori, Pasifika, the many nations of the ethnic community, teachers, cleaners, professionals, walking side by side.

I do not think that the Government remembers the protest of Aucklanders against this Government imposing its flawed structure upon them. This Government could not care less. It went ahead with it. It could not care a damn about the people of Auckland. It went ahead with the restructure and installed the corporate structure. But guess what? The people of Auckland retaliated again. They kicked out the Government’s favourite, Mr John Banks, and installed instead the people’s mayor, His Worship Mayor Len Brown. They kicked out that fella John Banks.

💬 Le’aufa’amulia Asenati Lole-Taylor: And Rodney Hide.

That is right. Well, we remember this. The people of Auckland remember this, but I do not think John Banks remembers it, because it is the same John Banks who could not remember that he had a ride in Kim Dotcom’s helicopter. He could not remember that he received a campaign donation from him. He could not remember that it came from him in the first place. We, the people, remember, Aucklanders remember, but John Banks does not remember, and certainly this Government here does not remember that it kicked Auckland in the guts.

I would say that the only reason these guys flip-flopped around the City Rail Link is that they noted in National’s polling that the people of Auckland were sick and tired of the Government bullying its way through—

💬 Simon O’Connor: Sick and tired of 20 percent rate increases.

—sick and tired of the Government trying to bully its way through, treating them with disrespect. That is the only reason why the Government flip-flopped. It is because it saw the writing on the wall. Aucklanders are going to show this Government in 2014 that they have had a gutsful of its bullying tactics, that they do not want this Government to be in power. I would not be shouting from that side if I was that young man there.

💬 Phil Twyford: What’s his name?

I cannot remember what his name is. I suspect that many in Auckland are not going to remember what his name is, either.

💬 Andrew Little: He’s the member for Tāmaki.

Oh, well—

💬 Phil Twyford: That’s Rob Muldoon, isn’t it?

I thought that was Robert Muldoon, too. The member for Tāmaki—a fine member he is. I am saying “the member for Tāmaki” because I suspect that many Aucklanders will not remember his name at all.

💬 Phil Twyford: Rob Muldoon was better.

That is right. To come to the point, we are here because of the muck-up this Government created. We are supporting the bill because we should not be here debating this. It is a bill that should have been absolutely formalised right from the beginning. If the Government had done its homework about it, if it had taken the time to consult the people of Auckland, the people of Auckland would have told it what to do. Many of them did, but the Government never listens.

I think that come 2014 the people of Auckland are going to retaliate. They are going to retaliate. I know that many members sitting on that particular side are going to be worried come 2014 because the people of Auckland are sick and tired of this Government playing its silly games and bullying its representatives, its duly elected representatives. And the fine group of people who are standing for Auckland, particularly that mayor, that young man Taua’aletoa Len Brown—he is not as handsome as some of us here tonight, but nevertheless he is going to be the next mayor because he is the people’s mayor. They trust him more than they trust that lot over there. So he is going to be re-elected this year. I am not so sure about that lot, come 2014.

The Green Party continues to support this uncontroversial Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 2), and I am pleased to speak tonight on behalf of my colleague Denise Roche. As others have said, it needs to be passed before the local elections happen and the new councils and the local boards are sworn in, because, otherwise, the powers of delegation that now exist will not be passed to the local boards. It is appropriate that we are considering it on Suffrage Day, when we are celebrating 120 years since women gained the vote in parliamentary elections. It is worth noting that women were able to participate, vote, and stand for election in local body elections well before 1893. The Green Party would like to acknowledge and remember the first female mayor in the British Empire. That was Elizabeth Yates, who was elected Mayor of Onehunga in 1893. In the last week Green MPs have been out and about around the country, talking about suffrage and talking about our power to exercise our democratic right and how ordinary citizens, ordinary women, campaigned, lobbied, and put pressure on male MPs to achieve that major change in 1893. I would also like to acknowledge the Hon Lianne Dalziel, who gave her valedictory speech last night. I congratulate her and recognise her role in this House and in Cabinet, and wish her every success in her campaign to be Mayor of Christchurch, because I think that, if elected, she will bring a new direction to the rebuild in Christchurch, one that will be much more engaging with the community and empowering of the citizens of Christchurch.

This bill is about making permanent these powers of delegation that the local boards have—the 21 local boards in Auckland. As others have done, it is worth looking at a bit of the history there. When they were established, the Government, both National and ACT, promised that the Auckland Council, the board structure, and the council-controlled organisations would be about efficient and effective local government. There were lots of promises about trimming the fat of local government in Auckland, about it being a lean machine, and about retaining democracy. We do not think that it has worked as well as that, in the sense that where you have got major promises of being a lean machine, we now have the same number of people employed in local government in Auckland as were employed before several hundred staff were made redundant in 2010. So you had a huge amount of churn that was unnecessary, and Auckland Council has recognised that you cannot reduce the number of people working for the council without reducing services, so we need the people to do that work. We have also seen with the council-controlled organisations—and I certainly agree with Phil Twyford about how inaptly titled they are—a loss of democracy and a very secretive decision-making process, which we get in organisations like Auckland Transport; Auckland Tourism, Events and Economic Development; and Auckland Council Investments Ltd.

This bill is about a very narrow issue around Auckland. The bigger issue is about these council-controlled organisations, their limited accountability, and the lack of democracy in terms of the way they work and the fact that they are responsible for more than $25 billion worth of assets but they do not have enough accountability. So there should be legislation to change that. When Nicky Wagner spoke, she talked about the Auckland model being rolled out elsewhere. Certainly, the Local Government and Environment Committee was in agreement about this bill, but the Government’s proposals to take yet another axe to local democracy will be strongly opposed by the Green Party because the proposals reduce democracy. Local boards have nothing like the powers of the Auckland councils that they replaced. Local boards have no ability to levy rates. They have no ability to make by-laws. They can prepare them, but they cannot actually sign off on them. Those further changes to local government will be an attack on localism, they will be an attack on democracy, and they will be an attack on the ability of councils to represent their communities, so we will be opposing those.

But going back to Auckland and the boards, last month Auckland University of Technology’s school of social sciences and public policy released its first research from its super-city project. That was a report called Super City? State of Auckland. One of the authors was Professor Judy McGregor. She highlighted some of the problems we have got around the structures at Auckland Council. She said: “While the Super City is functioning well in many areas, we are still seeing a lack of clarity about the roles of the Council as governing body and the Local Boards. There is also a perceived lack of accountability of Council Controlled Organisations…It is critical that these relationships are sorted out, otherwise we may see more local communities wanting to break away and seek to regain control of local governance and rates revenue.” If the local boards are to represent their communities well, they need to reflect the diversity of those communities. The Super City? State of Auckland report again said that the diversity of elected representation in Auckland was disappointing; that there were few Māori and Pacific Island members on either the Auckland Council or the local boards, a small number of ethnic councillors and a very small number of ethnic board members, nor are there many female directors of the council-controlled organisations.

At 31 March this year, in terms of those seven council-controlled organisations, only 15 out of 51 board members were women. That is only 29 percent. None of the board chairs were women. Not only are they unrepresentative in terms of lacking accountability and not being democratic, they do not represent the diversity of people in Auckland. There is obviously a strong glass ceiling still in place at the council-controlled organisation level. Similarly, there is an issue with women’s representation around the council table in Auckland. Eight out of our 20 Auckland councillors are women. That is 40 percent. It is a bit better than the 34 percent of women representatives that we have in this House, but it is still a minority. On the local boards, we had 39 percent women representatives there. So we need better representation of women, of ethnic minorities, on the boards. We need a better arrangement around the council-controlled organisation structure—much more democratic decision-making is needed there, removing that veil of secrecy. We need the Government not to proceed with its major attack on local government that it is planning in rolling out the unitary model elsewhere, because in a lot of the regions of New Zealand, it is not appropriate. So we support this bill, but we will be opposing the changes to local government that the Government is planning to introduce.

I too rise to support this Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 2), along with the support of the Green Party and the Labour Party. I thank them for it. The public listening in, members in the House, and you, Mr Deputy Speaker, will possibly be a bit confused—I do not want to say you are confused, Mr Deputy Speaker—and intrigued that you can have such long, verbose speeches from Labour and Green members, attacking the National Party, attacking the legislation, and yet supporting it. Right across the House we have essentially 121 votes supporting this bill, and yet the Labour Party and the Green Party are angry. I do not know why the Labour Party is angry. I know that the Green Party is angry by nature, but the Labour Party just seems to be generally angry indeed. But they do support this bill, and we thank them for that support.

The bill amends the Local Government (Auckland Council) Act 2009 to enable Auckland’s local boards to continue to delegate powers, as they have done up to recent times. So this is now fixed in stone, through legislation. They are quite able to delegate those powers. They have done it successfully to date. They will continue to do so. As for my vote, I am going with the Green Party, the angry Labour Party, the National Party, and every party in this House in supporting this bill. It is the right thing to do.

I am going to disappoint the previous speaker, Phil Heatley, because I am going to make it the third party that is going to speak not in anger but in an informative way. Firstly, I would just like to point out to the previous speaker how you spell the word “democracy”. It is spelt “d-e-m-o-c-r-a-c-y”. It is something that the National Party members should learn and take home and practise, because they do not seem to be able to get it off their lips. They just do not seem to understand the whole principle. They understand the principle of corporatising New Zealand. They understand the idea of selling out to their mates. They understand the idea of 50 percent of the shares in power companies going to 2 percent of New Zealanders. They understand about making sure that their mates all do very well out of the new corporatised New Zealand. But at the end of the day New Zealand itself is worse off in terms of—what is the word—democracy. It is democracy.

Here is a little history lesson for you. Back in 1989 there were 27 borough councils in Auckland. They were the Mount Eden Borough Council, the Mount Roskill Borough Council, the East Coast Bays Borough Council, the Papakura Borough Council—all over Auckland there were borough councils. They merged them into a number of cities in 1989 to form Manukau, to form Waitakere, to form North Shore, to form Auckland City, and then the outlying districts of Franklin and Rodney. They did that so that you could get critical mass in areas and communities of interest, so that they could move forward in those particular communities.

However, there was a problem across the region, because Auckland did need to be supported in terms of its transport, its major infrastructure, and its connectivity. There was agreement. In fact, I know because I helped pass a motion on the North Shore City Council calling for regional cooperation—

💬 Maggie Barry: Where did you pass it—on a lemon tree?

No, I did not pass it on a lemon tree; I passed it in a council motion. It was to call for regional cooperation in terms of transport, major infrastructure, and coordination in Auckland, but it did not call for the gutting of the Auckland democratic system, and it did not call for the Auckland councils to all be returned to 21 local boards. Basically, this was a back-to-the-future situation of going back to 21 local boards, which previously were 27 borough councils. Now, 3 years later, we have a situation where this Government wants to roll over that legislation and ensure that those 21 local boards continue to be able to delegate their powers and their responsibilities to committees, subcommittees, board members, and council officers. Unfortunately, we have to still support that in terms of the legislation because that is what we are faced with now in Auckland—21 local boards. It would be irresponsible of us not to continue to roll over those powers that were given to them through the transition authority, because otherwise on 31 October we would have democracy in Auckland crippled at its knees and the council not able to delegate some of its powers to various entities.

So we will be reluctantly supporting this, but we will at the same time be giving you something of a history lesson. I will also advise, in doing so, that I can recall vividly an 800-page royal commission report, which had taken several years to prepare and which over 30 well-respected, internationally recognised consultants helped prepare and submit on. It had thousands of submissions from all sorts of entities and very, very learned people involved in local government and in terms of governance throughout New Zealand submitting on it. That 800-page report cost $4.5 million—the royal commission went to the likes of Toronto, London, Los Angeles, and all sorts of places around the world to compare and come up with its recommendation as to how Auckland would be governed—but it was thrown out, and about 9 days later the 800-page report was replaced by Rodney Hide’s 34-page photocopied proposal for Auckland, which basically made a nonsense of what the royal commission was suggesting. What the royal commission was suggesting—again, a history lesson for you—was that, yes, certainly there was a problem in the integration of Auckland. There should have been an overarching council—an Upper House, so to speak, which would be a bit like having an Upper House of this House—that would control the big-picture stuff in terms of the transport, the roading, the infrastructure, water, and that sort of thing, but it would leave the community-based things at local council level so they could get on with running the communities of Manukau, of Waitakere, of the North Shore, and of the central isthmus, and get on with their business. That was thrown out and replaced by the 21 local boards.

As a result now, these 21 local boards are pretty well kneecapped entities. You have an example in the situation last week, for instance. The Devonport Food, Wine and Music Festival, which has been going for 24 years and was fully supported by the North Shore City Council for many of those years and, prior to that, by the Takapuna Council, will not exist in the coming year. It will exist no longer. What is the reason? The reason is that the new Auckland Council will not give it any community funding, and now it receives funding from only one local board on the North Shore, the Devonport-Takapuna Local Board. All the other boards on the North Shore have said that they have other priorities in their local board areas and cannot give funding for the food festival in Devonport, which has been going for 24 years. I have had emails from all over Auckland and, indeed, all over New Zealand, and I am sure that the MP for the North Shore, Maggie Barry, will have had the same response, saying what an absolute disaster it is that this iconic local festival is not going ahead, simply because the new structure set up by Rodney Hide no longer supports the likes of that festival.

And there are other things, such as the SPCA Wag ‘n Walk, which used to be in Milford. It has gone. It has disappeared. It has gone over the bridge because, again, the North Shore funding disappeared. It has been taken over the bridge. We used to have Movies in Parks on the North Shore. They have disappeared. Now only one local board on the North Shore, in the Kaipātiki area, is having Movies in Parks this summer. The other boards are not funding it, so, again, half of the North Shore will have it; the other half will not have it. Music in Parks used to be in all the local parks around the whole of the North Shore. Most of the North Shore will not be getting that this summer. Likewise, the New Zealand Body Art Awards, which started in the Glenfield Tavern about 12 or 13 years ago, this year managed to survive only because the likes of myself, George Wood, and George Gair—three former mayors—stepped into the Auckland Council offices and said: “If you stop funding the New Zealand Body Art Awards, it will fail.” We managed to resurrect that. This is what is coming out of these local boards in the Auckland area. Basically, it is completely divide and conquer, and the whole of the Auckland area is now being run by 21 small, little local entities, all protecting just their own particular patch. This is back to the future. This is how Auckland used to operate pre-1989 under the old borough councils. I can assure you that if I have anything to do with it in the future, we will go back to some form of entity that allows communities of interest such as the North Shore, such as Manukau, and such as Waitakere, to again provide for their communities of interest.

It is not in the interest of the local communities at the present time, where you can literally go through a patched quilt of situations across the Auckland isthmus, where, as you drive through this local board, it does it this way; as you drive through the next local board, it does it that way; and as you drive into the next one, it is a different way again. That is not good coordination in Auckland, and that sort of thing has got to stop. However, we will support this so that these boards do have some powers. On the other hand, I can assure you that there are going to be reviews in the future.

Look, the Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 2) is a technical bill. It was an extraordinary speech from the previous speaker, Andrew Williams, who was talking about everything other than this bill, which is providing powers for Auckland local boards to delegate responsibilities, duties, and powers, and to continue on in the fashion that they have done for the last 3 years. It makes a good deal of sense, and I commend this bill to the House on that basis. Just quickly, drawn to question the success of the council over the past 3 years, I found the structures take you only so far. The critical ingredient is the quality of the leadership, and that is why the elections coming up in the next month are so important. I commend this bill to the House. Thank you.

It gives me pleasure to rise to speak to the Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 2). I want to pick up on a comment that the Hon Phil Heatley made earlier, where he said he wondered why people on this side of the House were so angry about a piece of legislation on which we all agree. Well, clearly we are not angry about the piece of legislation. We would not be agreeing with it if we were. I do not think anybody is naturally angry, which is what he was suggesting. Being naturally angry requires far too much energy for most people. I think when people are angry there is always a reason for it. When the buttons of local democracy in Auckland are pushed, the members opposite will always get an angry response.

It should be no puzzle to the Hon Phil Heatley. When local government matters come up, the dissension, the discontent, and the riding roughshod over democratic process that is the hallmark of this Government comes to the fore. It should not be any surprise to the Government. We have seen it do it in Christchurch. We have seen it do it in Auckland. This should be no surprise. When local government representation is denied to people, in the usual way, then they do get upset. People do get upset. We have been upset by it, and it should be no surprise if we start to sound angry about people having their democratic rights and their ability to participate taken away. So let us just settle that one.

There is a perfectly good reason why members on this side of the House who come from Auckland do express anger about it. Having lived for nearly 30 years in Auckland, I feel the same way. But as I am no longer a representative from the Auckland area, but from Nelson, I will give over that right to my colleagues who still reside there.

What I wanted to say, apart from happy Suffrage Day to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, is that I am delighted in some of the early comments on the purpose of the bill. We know that it amends the Local Government (Auckland Council) Act to enable local boards to delegate responsibilities and duties and powers conferred on them under the Act. Currently, they are able to delegate those powers. This provision is in the Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Fees and Charges Regulations 2010, but those regulations expire on 31 October this year.

Just a few weeks ago I was in this House berating the Minister of Energy and Resources, Simon Bridges, for the complete ineptitude—in fact, it was not his piece of legislation, but he was carrying it at the time. It was Gerry Brownlee’s Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill where regulations had been disallowed, had been reintroduced, had had a disallowance motion put on them again, but I had withdrawn that disallowance motion because legislation was to come into the House in time for regulations that would see a rolling-over of an existing condition. That all happened out of time. Gerry Brownlee did not get one of those deadlines right, and as a result we were passing the legislation weeks after the time the regulations had actually expired. I would like to congratulate the Hon Chris Tremain on getting it right, and perhaps he could show the Hon Gerry Brownlee how it is done.

The purpose of this bill is that it amends the original Act to put those powers of delegation into the Act itself. Instead of having it just as regulation, this bill will amend the primary legislation. That is what Gerry Brownlee should have done, but did not. He chose not to, or was too lazy to, or did not know he had to, or for some other reason—all of which comes down to incompetence in the end.

Chris Tremain has done the right thing. The bill amends the Act before the regulations expire on 31 October. Whoopee! The Government has got it right. It has got the sequence right, and that is one of the reasons why I am absolutely delighted to support this bill. This means that the Act itself, which becomes effective from 1 November 2013, will be effective the day after the transitional regulations expire, which is great. That is as it should be. And it has been brought to the House for debate. So full marks to Chris Tremain. Go and tell your senior colleagues how it is done. Thank you.

I rise to speak in the second reading of the Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 2). Here we go. It has been harmonious. Even the Greens agree with it. It is uncontroversial. It will pass before the end of October. Everybody supports it. There is not much more to be said. I will no longer waste the time of the House by taking up any more time from the House. In fact, it is one of the few occasions when I have agreed with Phil Twyford. We do not need to linger on this, but unlike him I am not going to ramble on endlessly about irrelevancies and untruths. I will just leave it there, and commend the bill to the House. Thank you.

Carol Beaumont, 5 minutes.

Can I also wish everybody a happy Women’s Suffrage Day, including yourself, Mr Deputy Speaker, and start on this Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 2) by—as another speaker has already done, but I want to do as well—personally acknowledging the first woman mayor of the British Empire, Elizabeth Yates, who was the mayor of Onehunga. I work in that electorate. I am a list MP based in the Maungakiekie electorate, where Elizabeth Yates was the first woman mayor of the British Empire. It is a great achievement, and in fact it was in the same year that women won the right to vote in New Zealand that she was elected mayor—so, 120 years ago. She is buried in St Peter’s Church graveyard in the middle of Onehunga. So I think that is an important thing to acknowledge here on Women’s Suffrage Day.

As others have said, this is a technical bill and we do support it. It was reported back unchanged from the Local Government and Environment Committee, where only one submission was received, and that was from the Auckland Council, which sought the change. But I do want to reinforce what others have said: that the reason we are here is that the Government pushed through under urgency the Auckland Council legislation—and I remember it well; I debated it late into the night with many others—without having adequate consultation, without getting it right, and with many matters still left up in the air, not least of which was the issue of the power of local boards.

What this bill does is sort out a potential problem, which is the very important matter of allowing local boards to be able to delegate responsibilities to individuals and to committees. This is important so they can go about their job, because, as others have noted, what are called local boards in Auckland, which are part of the Auckland Council, are in fact organisations dealing with substantial numbers of people. They are the same size, generally, as the average district or city outside Auckland, so they are large. Only two of the 21 Auckland local boards have populations of fewer than 45,000 people. So these are not small organisations. They need the power to delegate to get on and do their job.

The bill actually also identifies the things that they are not able to delegate, which it should do, particularly things like communicating the interests of people in the local boards’ areas in relation to strategies, policies, plans, and by-laws, and they are not allowed to delegate the ability to promote, propose, amend, confirm, modify, or to revoke a by-law, adopt a local board plan, and so on. So we have no question about any of that. That is fine, but it is a result of the process that created the Auckland Council, which was the process around the Local Government (Auckland Council) Act.

I just thought I would talk a little bit about the local board in my area because others have mentioned that there still remains some uncertainty, and I think that is true. Boards were not given clear powers in the Auckland Council legislation, and there has already been reference made to the work that Judy McGregor and others have done in looking at the state of local government in Auckland. It is fair to say that it is a work in progress, that the local boards have been established, and that they have gone about trying to do their job. The local residents have tried to figure out what their job is, and slowly people are getting a better understanding of it, but it is certainly not all sorted.

In the area I work in there is a board that has two subdivisions. It is the Maungakiekie-Tāmaki Local Board. I want to acknowledge the work that it does. I think residents in the area are slowly getting a better understanding of that work. But the board has been involved with others in the community around the Onehunga foreshore project, the Glen Innes Music and Arts Centre, increased funding for community grants and community events, the improved Onehunga Mall, the carpeting of fields in Waikaraka Park, the Mount Wellington War Memorial Reserve, and a range of other things.

So I want to acknowledge the board members: Simon Randall, Bridget Graham, Brett Clark, Josephine Bartley, Chris Makoare, Alan Verrall, and, until the elections, Leila Boyle, who is not standing again. They have done a good job. Housing is one issue that is important in our area, and I just want to particularly acknowledge the work the board has done around a housing warrant of fitness. The local board has actually put up a proposal to improve the quality of rental housing in the board’s area and to look at getting better outcomes for tenants. It is an area of high deprivation, or part of the area is. This warrant of fitness scheme will be the first of its kind in the country, and I want to commend it for that work.

I commend the Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill (No 2) to the House.

Bill read a second time.