Tasman District Council (Validation and Recovery of Certain Rates) Bill

I move, That the Tasman District Council (Validation and Recovery of Certain Rates) Bill be now read a second time. Can I firstly thank all the members of the Local Government and Environment Committee for the efforts they made in trying to reach a win-win solution with this bill. I suggest it was more like a win-draw solution in the end, but I do acknowledge the extra efforts they made to try to get a solution.

It could be said that what goes around comes around, and there are a number of lessons in this whole process for not only the Tasman District Council and its staff and councillors but also many councils up and down this country. This bill has been subject to much concern and comment—and quite rightly so—from a group of ratepayers from Ligar Bay and Tata Beach who brought this issue to the attention of the Tasman District Council. I appreciate the efforts that they went to to follow through with this, which is effectively leading to the bill in Parliament today.

As its name suggests, the bill seeks to validate a number of irregularities that occurred in the setting and assessing of rates by the Tasman District Council over a 6-year period from 2003-04 to 2008-09. In this regard I do find myself repeating the words of a colleague in the House at the end of last year. He was saying, with regard to the Kaipara District Council (Validation of Rates and Other Matters) Bill, that no one is a fan of retrospective legislation, least of all the MP who is required to sponsor that legislation. So I bring this legislation to the House somewhat reluctantly but on behalf of the ratepayers in the northern part of my electorate.

As I say, it is never a good look to have retrospective legislation to rectify failures that have occurred, and this bill effectively validates the actions of a council that failed to follow proper process and to meet the requirements of the Local Government Act. But it is, as the member previously acknowledged regarding Kaipara, the only way to make progress and give some certainty.

The question I would like to see answered on behalf of the Tasman ratepayers is whether it is also the case that the overseers in the case, Audit New Zealand, provided proper safeguards for the ratepayers through those years when, effectively, it approved the process in the Tasman district. And, of course, that was proven not to be valid. Some would say the ratepayers of Tasman District Council had been let down. As advisers told the committee, Tasman District Council failed “Rates 101”, effectively, and that is something of a condemnation for a council that has prided itself, I guess, on process. It certainly demands proper process of its ratepayers when they come to make applications, so it does go, as I said, to the situation of what goes around comes around.

In regard to the ratepayers of Ligar Bay and Tata Beach, I would just like to say that, firstly, they ended up paying a rate they considered was not valid. They have not been receiving specific water drainage services but, indeed, were asked by the council to pay a rate. They have been angry and frustrated. It was, indeed, their follow-through that alerted the Tasman District Council to the mistakes across other areas of its rate demands.

Tasman District Council, of course, as is prone to happen in councils, absolutely denied any problem with the setting of the rates and denied the fact that these rates were illegal. The origin of the dispute, as I said, lies with the challenge by those ratepayers. When the council denied that anything was wrong, the ratepayers then took that to the Ombudsman. The Ombudsman came to an interesting conclusion, and there are a couple of quotes I would like to refer to: “The procedure for making a rate is set out in section 23 of the Local Government (Rating) Act 2002. I am accordingly not satisfied that a rate has been made.” The Ombudsman went on to say: “I am accordingly not satisfied that a Tata Beach Urban Drainage Area has been established.” And, finally, to take a quote: “I have formed a view that levying a stormwater rate for Tata Beach was based wholly or partly on a mistake of law and fact”. Effectively, the rate was not properly imposed.

These things may seem technical to someone from the outside, but a particular ratepayer in the group decided to follow through with this and was proven to be correct. In investigating it, the Ombudsman said that, actually, there are a whole lot of rates that have not been set properly. I would like to acknowledge Mr Schmuke and a number of people who live over at Tata Beach for their tenacity. They have brought this to a head, and they have probably alerted a number of councils around the country to the technical challenges of setting rates.

Parliament deems rates, levies on industries, and taxes paid to be very sacrosanct, and it is important that there are protections for both the person paying the rate and those people who demand them. Unfortunately, limitations around a local bill and the scope of the notices advertising meant that the request by the local ratepayers at Tata Beach and Ligar Bay to have clause 9 omitted from the bill was not possible. And, in fact, the bill put to the select committee had to be passed in its complete form, or, if there were to be any amendments, there was a requirement to take the bill back for consultation, which the council did not want to go through; I guess officials certainly did not.

There was a view that even if the bill for all of the rates for Tata Beach and Ligar Bay were omitted, it would have been a big challenge to then go and find the people who paid the rates at that time and subsequent to that, and find out where they are living now and how much they had paid. So the committee, on balance, decided that we should proceed with the bill as presented by the Tasman District Council, without any change.

The people who raised the issue, the people who were proven to be correct, the people who still think they are paying a drainage rate when they should not be, are still a bit sore about this. But I have to say that, on balance, we should acknowledge their efforts and we should assure them that the rates paid by them will protect their properties better than they otherwise would if there was no money. So I think that, overall, we have made some progress in what has been a long and tortuous process for a number of key ratepayers.

I would just like to say to Tasman District Council that although I am happy to sponsor this bill and to put it forward, the council should hear the lesson, and that is that officials in councils should listen to ratepayers who come along with queries and with issues, because often they are correct. And this is a unitary council, so the normal tension between resource management of a regional council and the district council’s responsibilities does not exist in Tasman District Council. It is one council for both areas of responsibilities. That tension that often gives better accountability does not occur in Tasman, so we are reliant on the wisdom, the skills, and the judgment of officials in one unitary council. I am not convinced that that is the best way forward. None the less we have a unitary council in Tasman, in part due to the lobbying and cheap politicking of the Hon Nick Smith some time ago. But we will put that to one side and say that the passage of this bill will validate rates that have been claimed by the Tasman District Council.

Without this bill’s passage those rates are, effectively, illegal, so the council needs certainty over the income it took. It does not want to be subject to any legal challenge. But in passing this legislation in whole, we should acknowledge the efforts of the Tata Beach and Ligar Bay residents who brought this to the attention of the council first, and then to the Ombudsman. Then legislation in Parliament was required to rectify a problem that was initially denied by the Tasman District Council.

Councils up and down this country should take note—there may be some technical problems with rates being set today or yesterday, so double-check. And councils should appreciate the fact that ratepayers, ordinary people of New Zealand, can make mistakes in dealing with councils, and they should not be clobbered for it, just in the way that Parliament is facilitating the passage of this bill and acknowledging the mistake of the Tasman District Council but not making it pay the penalty.

I rise to support the member Damien O’Connor on this local bill that he introduced to the House, the Tasman District Council (Validation and Recovery of Certain Rates) Bill, in its second reading. We are certainly supporting it as a National Party team. We understand the weaknesses in the bill, but then, as the member so clearly put it, it is a very imperfect situation there in the Tasman district. We are making it better; we are not claiming to make it perfect. The situation there is that, essentially, the rate setting was broken. We are cobbling together the pieces to make the best of what is a difficult situation.

This bill will validate rates set by the Tasman District Council for the period from 2003-04 through to 2008-09—that 5-year period during which the council did not follow the correct process in setting rates. We want to be clear about that. This bill will also validate rates and penalties paid over the period, authorise the council to recover any unpaid rates, and ratify the Tata Beach and Ligar Bay stormwater rate. This bill will highlight to other councils the importance of proper scrutiny when setting rates.

I know that Damien O’Connor in his first reading speech introduced this legislation with some angst, and he has repeated those concerns just now. I cannot do better than quote Damien O’Connor in his first reading speech where he said: “I have to say I am not overly enthusiastic about bringing retrospective legislation to the House. However, I am a very proud local member, and I have spoken to the Tasman District Council and agreed to sponsor this bill into Parliament where a select committee can give it due consideration.” The member Damien O’Connor said he was a reluctant sponsor of retrospective legislation, as, of course, we all are. “The main area where we seem to have this in the House is over fisheries legislation. This is not the case here.”, said Damien O’Connor. “It is local government.”—it has made mistakes—“Mistakes do happen from time to time. I know each and every one of the councillors, in good faith, took advice from their staff and of course assumed that they had put in place valid rating claims on the ratepayers.”

I do not know those councillors. The Hon Damien O’Connor obviously does know those councillors. He felt and he was assured that they, in good faith, had left the role to staff of actually putting together the rates and ensuring that they were brought together properly, and that ratepayers would be legally required to pay those rates. As Damien O’Connor said back then, “So this is perhaps a long and drawn-out, and quite expensive, process, but it is one that we have to go through none the less.” And that is what brings members to the House today. The National Party is joining Damien O’Connor in passing, I hope, when the vote goes through, the second reading of this piece of legislation.

It is true that we have seen issues like this arise across the country from time to time. We just recently dealt with a similar issue in Kaipara. National, as the public will know, has introduced Better Local Government reforms, which will help make local government more efficient, more responsive, and better focused so that these types of issues do not arise again. They will help the National Government drive the reform process to ensure that councils focus clearly on their core business, are not frustrated or in any way confused, and are not led to not pay attention to the detail of their core business. The Better Local Government reforms will include a work stream to monitor and improve council performance and to prevent future procedural errors, as we see in this Tasman District bill and we saw in the Kaipara bill as well. So it is quite timely for us as the National Government to drive through those reforms to get better outcomes from local government for their ratepayers.

I was on the Local Government and Environment Committee, which went through the process in committee of looking at the clauses one by one and discussing them with the Tasman District public and the Tasman District Council and others who had a view. We made some changes. For example, for the sake of consistency, technical amendments will be made to clauses 5(a), 6, and 9 to replace the statement “declared to have been” with “declared to be and to always have been”. The committee is sympathetic to proposals to delete clause 9, but found that this course of action would be outside the scope of the bill. Damien O’Connor outlined the issues there.

As such, the committee has recommended only the technical amendments. Clause 9 seeks to validate targeted rates set by the council for the 2006 financial year for the purposes of the stormwater works in the Ligar Bay and Tata Beach urban drainage areas, for example. The committee also noted that there would be many practical implications of deleting clause 9, and that is why the intent of the Local Government (Rating) Act 2002 is for local authorities to address rating errors as soon as is practicable. Under that Act, we are ensuring that when councils come across errors they act swiftly and justly. Leaving those errors, setting them aside, and not dealing with them leads to the problems we have seen in the Tasman District. I would like to emphasise not just to the Tasman District Council officials who are listening but to those in local authorities right across New Zealand that if you come across errors in the rating orders that councils have passed historically, then the council needs to address those errors as soon as is practicable, not just because it is useful to face up to mistakes and, in the end, deal with them but because the law says that councils need to do that immediately.

Given the historic nature of the rating errors in question, it would be difficult without such validation. The council would need to be required to determine which ratepayers had paid the rate in 2006-07 and the amount they had paid—a very difficult task for it to undertake. It would also have to ascertain whether the current ratepayers are the same ratepayers as those in 2006-07, it would have to apportion rates if there were multiple owners, and it would have to write to each ratepayer advising them of the amount of the refund and requesting bank details for repayment. So in making those changes in the bill that we have before us today, if the committee had recommended that, that is what councils would have to go through—not only an onerous task for the council but one that would inevitably result in mistakes and would transfer angst from one group of people to another group of people, from one set of ratepayers to another set of ratepayers. It is not this Parliament’s role to transfer vexed problems from one group to another, and we are making the best, as I said at the beginning of my speech, of what is a difficult situation. The merits of setting a stormwater rate were found to be outside the scope of this bill.

So, in summary, this bill is needed to validate certain rates set incorrectly during the period 2003-04 through to 2008-09. Without validation, the council remains vulnerable to legal challenge from ratepayers over incorrectly set rates. No one is arguing that they will. Some residents have objected to details of the stormwater rates that they were not properly consulted on and that they are being charged for stormwater services they are not using, but Damien O’Connor himself acknowledges, as the bill’s sponsor, that he has discussed their concerns and is convinced that the select committee will provide residents with an opportunity to engage and to move on. A key part of National’s Better Local Government reforms is to prevent this from happening again. I support—reluctantly, like Damien O’Connor and others in the committee—this bill in the House today at its second reading.

Malo le soifua, Mr Assistant Speaker. Thank you for this opportunity to speak on the Tasman District Council (Validation and Recovery of Certain Rates) Bill. I note that following this bill there is a range of members’ bills, including bills that have been put up by my colleagues. I would like for the House to be able to spend time on those particular bills, ushering those through, so my comments on this particular bill are not going to be very long.

I note also the Local Government and Environment Committee’s report. I am a member of that committee. I regret, however, that as a new member I have not had the opportunity to sit through all of the discussion around this particular bill. I do note that the committee received 14 submissions from interested groups and individuals and it heard four. Like the previous speakers, I too am somewhat reluctant. I am sort of dragging my feet on this bill. I know that my colleague Maryan Street aired it quite well when we were debating the Kaipara District Council situation. But as much as I am a strong supporter of local government, as much as I value the role that local government plays in community development and in nation-building, and as much as I strive and aspire to ensure that, going forward, there is a close working relationship between central government and local government, I have to say that when these rates validating bills are placed before the House, it just makes it harder for those who do not believe in local government to come on board and support the kind of vision that the Labour Party has for local government.

I note, however, that the Tasman District Council, in presenting this bill and asking Parliament to consider it, had this to say. It said that the “Tasman District Council failed to set its rates correctly across the District due to incorrect administrative procedures from 2003/2004 to 2008/2009, and we failed to include a map in our 2006/2007 Long Term Council Community Plan (LTCCP) to adequately describe the area covered by the Ligar Bay and the Tata Beach stormwater urban drainage area rates.” The council admits its “procedural mistakes and are now seeking to rectify the situation through this Bill. Council is very sorry and apologises to our community for our mistakes. We are very embarrassed for the mistakes—and rightly so. We also apologise for needing to take up Parliament’s and this Select Committee’s valuable time in order to correct our errors.”

I do not doubt the sincerity of those words. However, what my colleague Damien O’Connor emphasised earlier in the latter parts of his speech was a call for councillors to treat seriously the roles that they play as elected representatives. Sure, we can call these procedural mistakes, but the fact of the matter is that if we want the public to take an active and participatory role in our local decision-making, then we need to treat our stewardship of local councils with a great deal of care and responsibility. By and large, if most residents are given the opportunity to see the intimate goings-on of councils—as far as the public are concerned—they can rightly make all sorts of allegations when these mistakes are made.

So I recognise that when we look at the 2011 local body elections, we seem to be heading into a new era, a crossroads in our local government system. On the one hand, you have the school of thought promoted by others of wanting to take control of local government. On the other hand, there is another school of thought arising from the strong desire of the public to participate more and the public demanding their right to have a say in those local government decisions. I saw in Auckland how, for example, the Pacific communities put up many representatives to run in the race for those local boards, and I can say that for Auckland, for the Labour Party at least, out of the 18 candidates who ran, 14 of them were elected on either the council or the local board. Out of those 14, eight of them were brand new candidates. I think that in many ways that reflects the strong desire that is held by many sectors in our communities to participate more in local decision-making.

I note that the committee, when deliberating on this particular bill, had an issue about clause 9. I think that there was a call—perhaps an advancing by some—for clause 9 to not stay as it is, and I understand that the advice received from the officials was that by removing that particular clause they would actually be dealing outside of the scope of this particular bill.

It gives me no pleasure to support my colleague on this bill. I think, as I emphasise again, the councillors, the mayors—you know, from this House at least—must look to how they can avoid these kinds of bad decision-making. And I think that Local Government New Zealand and the Society of Local Government Managers have a role to play in providing training—absolute training. I was a member of the council, and I think it is quite easy for new councillors to come on board, whatever the local authority is, and begin to feel that as new councillors they rely on the officials, that they rely on the senior councillors. That might be OK for some, but I think that when you put yourself up to run for these positions, you have got to be prepared to hit the ground running. I think not only do the councillors have the responsibility to be well prepared for these roles but also our officials on local councils have a role to play to ensure that their advice is of the highest standard. So those are my comments here.

In speaking on the second reading of the Tasman District Council (Validation and Recovery of Certain Rates) Bill, I want to, first, commend Damien O’Connor for the way that he has worked with the Local Government and Environment Committee over what has been a very careful consideration of the matters raised in this bill.

Members from across the House are expressing their reluctant support for the objective of the bill. I think that is the correct position to take on this bill, because although Parliament is here to enact legislation, I think we all feel uncomfortable with enacting retrospective legislation that picks up the pieces from a lack of due process in local government. It is important that our select committee consideration of this bill, our readings in the House, and the comments we are all making on this bill reflect that but also acknowledge that although you can point the finger as much as you like and point out the deficiencies, what matters, actually, in Parliament and in the bill that Damien O’Connor has brought to the House is that we find a solution for the ratepayers. It is the ratepayers who are the ones who are feeling the impacts of deficiencies in the decision making of their local authority.

I do hear the comments of the previous speaker, Su’a William Sio, about capability and capacity building within the local government sector, and he is quite right. That is why this Government has brought in a broad programme of Better Local Government reforms to ensure that the kind of situation we see in this bill does not arise again. It is germane also to recognise that local authorities throughout New Zealand come in many different forms and many different sizes.

We do know that as a result of the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance, after a process of a commission and then council organisation, we now have, I think, what is becoming an effective Auckland Council. It is not perfect. Of course it is not perfect, but we have a much more efficient large urban local authority—still with the same powers. It does have its own Act—yes, it does—but, essentially, it still has the same powers as the Tasman District Council, just on a vastly different scale.

The Tasman District Council’s activities are Tasman’s activities; they are not Auckland activities, and probably do not want to be. Those people live in a very nice rural corner of provincial New Zealand, on the West Coast, and none of them, I imagine, is going to argue that they would want their council to be any different. The reason I am talking about the differences between local authorities is that although we might have Tasman, we might have McKenzie, and we might have Waimate and other local authorities that are effectively tiny—there might be one full-time planner and one full-time finance officer—when the finance person, for example, goes away on maternity leave, has to be away, or goes on a course, there is simply not anybody to fill the gap.

So I think we need to recognise that although local governments are very, very different in terms of their capacities, we expect them to have the same capability in setting their rates. Why is that important? It is important because we are taking money—tax-paid money—from ratepayers to provide them with council services, such as, in this instance, stormwater drainage and other rating matters.

So we have to have every sympathy with the ratepayers of the Tasman District Council and they have to have the confidence, and should have the confidence, that their elected members, the chief executive officer, and the people who work for the chief executive officer have the capability of correctly striking the rates. In this instance they have not done so, and the Local Government and Environment Committee has also dealt with other councils where that has not been done properly.

I want to just talk a little further about the ratepayer. We call them ratepayers, but they include our elderly citizens. We are all, I guess, ratepayers in this House, and everybody who works here is a ratepayer. We all expect our local authorities to provide us with good services in turn for that cheque that we write out every quarter or that direct debit that we provide every quarter. We expect, as ratepayers, to get good value from rates—it does not matter whether we are politicians or whether we are retired and on a fixed income, like my mum-in-law. She is a superannuitant, so she is on a fixed income. She has got to pay rates too and it has a big impact on her life—arguably more so, perhaps, than on a politician’s life. But we all expect to get good value from rates and we expect, absolutely, that if people are going to be taking money out of our wages—our tax-paid wages—that it is done fairly, it is done for a good purpose, and it is done correctly.

The Tasman District Council (Validation and Recovery of Certain Rates) Bill puts right those deficiencies in the decision making of the Tasman District Council. I imagine that there has been an election between now and the time when this bill was lodged and Damien O’Connor was working with the council to find a solution. So there might have been a number of changes in personnel, but I can guarantee that from the mayor and the chief executive officer down they will be having a pretty close look at their rate-setting mechanisms. It is all set out for them. It is all set out in the Local Government Act and the Local Government (Rating) Act. It is all set out for them. It is incumbent on them to set the rates correctly.

The Better Local Government reform package, which this National Government has been working on since we came into Government 5 years ago, has been introduced to provide clarity around the role of local government. I cannot help wondering whether that focus on providing good services and good infrastructure for ratepayers is long overdue. So we have done a piece of work, the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Act 2012—was it in 2012, Minister Tremain?

💬 Hon Chris Tremain: The first one was in 2012.

We are considering an amendment bill from 2013. That is before the Local Government and Environment Committee now. They are all part of that drive to provide better public services to ratepayers. It does not matter whether they are in Tasman—we are dealing with the Tasman bill at the moment but we have dealt with other similar bills. I hope that we do not have to do so in the future, but we may.

So the Better Local Government reforms that this National Government is working hard on—and the Hon Chris Tremain has played an important part in that work—are aimed at stronger governance in the local government sector. They are aimed at providing greater efficiencies for ratepayers, more clarity for ratepayers, and more responsible financial management for ratepayers—and perhaps this comes to the nub of this issue for local government. We also have a really strong desire—and let me just talk about my dear mum-in-law—to keep rates affordable for everybody in our communities.

I acknowledge that it is OK for politicians—all of us politicians—because we can afford our rates. Of course we can afford our rates. We are privileged in all sorts of ways and we must not forget those people on fixed incomes. For them, the rates bill is a big portion of their expenditure and they expect—and they should expect—good performance, clarity, and a real purpose of local government that is there to provide good service for them.

I support the Tasman District Council (Validation and Recovery of Certain Rates) Bill. I do commend the local member, Damien O’Connor, for bringing it to the House. And I do hope that we can get this bill through in a timely manner so that the ratepayers of the Tasman District Council can move forward with some certainty and confidence in their local authority.

Tēnā koe. I hope that we can get the Tasman District Council (Validation and Recovery of Certain Rates) Bill through in a timely manner. I will be taking only a short call. Along with others, I acknowledge the work of the bill’s promoter, the Hon Damien O’Connor. Like everyone else who has spoken, none of us likes retrospective legislation, and it is a concern that both the Tasman District Council and the Kaipara District Council have had to ask Parliament in this term for retrospective legislation because of defective rating resolutions. The Christchurch City Council is suggesting that it may need to do the same. So it certainly might assist if the Department of Internal Affairs provided templates to councils on the form of their rating resolutions so that these are made correctly and we do not have to waste parliamentary time on such matters.

The Green Party supports this bill because it corrects the procedural mistakes made by the district council and it is validating something that the council could not have done if it had got the process right. We agree with the council’s assessment that its mistakes did not deprive people of any significant rights. As others have explained, these mistakes were administrative errors between 2003-04 and 2008-09 and a failure to include a map that adequately described the Ligar Bay and Tata Beach stormwater urban drainage area. None of the 14 people who made submissions argued that it was inappropriate for the stormwater rate to apply to their properties.

If we did not pass this bill, then the council would be faced with the cumbersome task of unwinding that urban drainage area for Tata Beach and Ligar Bay and finding a different mechanism to pay for the stormwater infrastructure.

As the photograph provided by the council shows, it is quite a comprehensive network of about 3 kilometres of pipe and some 50 sumps in a stunning area of New Zealand, Golden Bay. We want to ensure that the stormwater treatment and discharge mechanisms there ensure that water quality is not downgraded. As Mr O’Connor has acknowledged, it was Mr Schmuke’s unhappiness with the proposal—his work and that of others—that brought the defects in the rating resolutions to the council’s attention, which led to this bill.

One of the other reasons we are supporting the bill is that all of the residents and ratepayers in the Tata Beach and Ligar Bay areas do receive a benefit from the stormwater services, even if it is an indirect benefit. After heavy rain, the fact that the stormwater system exists potentially reduces the likelihood of flooding on their properties. It is because the council uses quite a progressive approach to funding the stormwater system, where it charges all ratepayers the same rate per dollar capital value of their properties, that you have the cost spread across everybody equitably. If the council had to unravel that, then potentially it would require a much more difficult way of funding the stormwater system and the capital infrastructure improvements.

But it is puzzling that because of the quite rapid growth in the Tata Beach and Ligar Bay areas, because of their coastal location, the council has not required a development contribution from subdividers and land developers to help fund improvements in the stormwater system. It has relied just on rates. This is where I take issue with the speakers from the National benches and their comments about Better Local Government. A major attack on development contributions, which will have ratepayers feeling the burden that some National speakers said they were concerned about, is the way in which the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill (No 3) seeks to restrict the ability of councils to levy development contributions for community infrastructure. That bill has a very narrow definition of community infrastructure and will restrict development contributions from being levied for anything much beyond things like public toilets and planned infrastructure on council reserve land. It means that the council would not be able to levy development contributions for things like libraries or swimming pools. And that means the cost of these community facilities, where you have got growth in coastal communities in Golden Bay and in towns and cities around the country, potentially falls on ratepayers.

So the Government members are weeping crocodile tears when they talk about protecting ratepayers, because their changes to the Local Government Act, by narrowing the scope of development contributions for community infrastructure, will put those costs on to ratepayers or mean that infrastructure like swimming pools and like libraries is not provided by councils because it is not affordable when areas grow. So it is crocodile tears from Government members to talk about their concerns for the impact on ratepayers, because councils would then have to turn to them.

This bill is an unfortunate one, but it is one that we will support because it does remedy these procedural errors by the Tasman District Council. But we think that the Department of Internal Affairs should be doing much more to make sure that councils have a template so that there are fewer councils making these procedural mistakes. Thank you.

I rise to speak again on the Tasman District Council (Validation and Recovery of Certain Rates) Bill. I just want to traverse a couple of things that have not been covered already, but before I do that I want to acknowledge the speech of the member who has just resumed her seat, Eugenie Sage. I think she highlighted in her speech some of the critical issues around this particularly vexing bill. I do not wish to relitigate that material but there are some points that I do want to make about this bill.

It is now a truism to say that none of us enjoys bringing retrospective legislation of this sort before the House. I am one of those who have declared themselves to be pathologically averse to such legislation. But I do want to explain for a moment why the Local Government and Environment Committee arrived at the position it did and why I personally have come to the point of supporting this piece of legislation. Living and working as I do in the Nelson area—part of the Tasman District Council catchment covers the Nelson electorate—I have a lot to do with the Tasman District Council and the mayor and the councillors there, although the particular areas of concern are in the electorate of my colleague the Hon Damien O’Connor, West Coast - Tasman.

The controversy around this particular situation arose when the council designated Tata Beach—which is a beautiful area—along with Ligar Bay as one of its urban drainage areas. The area is one of 16 settlements that have to pay towards stormwater works around the wider Tasman District. The Tata Beach and Ligar Bay ratepayers discovered the change only when their rates bills soared by some hundreds of dollars a year. Bob Schmuke, to whom the ratepayers and certainly the Tasman District Council owe a debt, is the person who brought forward the error that the Tasman District Council had made and took the case to the Ombudsman, and he was successful in that effort. He was successful.

But at that time the Tasman District Council said that it was going to then take this situation to Parliament to remedy. The Tasman District Council’s Chief Executive Officer at the time, Paul Wiley, was reported to have said in a report that was in the Nelson Mail on 18 February 2010—and here we are with the second reading—that “The costs of going through a court process, which we believed we would win, are a hell of a lot more than the quite simple expedient of going along to Parliament saying ‘fix this technicality with some retrospective legislation’, and that is what we are doing,”. That was a comment attributed to Paul Wiley, the former Chief Executive Officer of the Tasman District Council. He said he did not know how much the legislation would cost. In my experience in raising other local bills, I understand that there is a charge by the Office of the Clerk of some $2,000, so certainly that would be all that the Tasman District Council would have to pay as far as Parliament is concerned.

But I must just register that it is a somewhat cavalier attitude towards what the taxpayers pay to have this House go through all of the stages—the first reading, the second reading, which we are up to now, the Committee stage, the reporting back, the third reading stage, and the final Royal assent. There is a great deal of expense, actually, in bringing a local bill to Parliament and that falls on all taxpayers. I wanted to make that point because I was a bit concerned that there seemed to be a slightly cavalier attitude within the Tasman District Council.

However, I am supporting the bill, and I want to explain briefly why I am doing that. It is to do with the way the Tasman District Council exercises its ability to rate ratepayers. I support the way it does it, but it made a mistake in this instance, and it would have been a costly mistake to the council had it not been for this legislation before the House. But the principle behind this that I support is that community assets must be paid for by all members of the community for the sake of the community, whether or not one uses those assets. Bob Schmuke’s particular case, which gained a lot of sympathy—and certainly from me as well—was that he was not even hooked up to this stormwater system. He was not hooked up to it, it did not impact on his property, and here he was with these additional rates that he had not been advised about.

But in the end I came down on the view that the good of the community is borne most equitably by all of the members of the community. I may not use the Nelson libraries—although, in fact, I do—or I may not use the Riverside Swimming Pool in Nelson, but I am very pleased that the facilities are there for the benefit of all who live in Nelson. The same thing applies when it comes to drainage systems and urban drainage systems. They, in the end, provide a collective benefit. In this case, should they have been paid for by the three houses that were linked up to this stormwater drain, they would not have been affordable. By spreading the cost, there is an important piece of infrastructure in place that benefits the whole community, in principle. It is that principle that I support and that principle that has brought me to the position—again, reluctantly but persuasively—of supporting this piece of legislation. Thank you.

Maggie Barry.

Yes, indeed, Mr Deputy Speaker—still and always. Thank you very much. I rise to speak to the Tasman District Council (Validation and Recovery of Certain Rates) Bill. It is at its second reading, and it is a local bill sponsored by Damien O’Connor.

As other speakers have noted, this is yet another validation bill. We endured Kaipara and the horrors, the torture, the intense discussion, and the pain of the taxpayers—the ratepayers, I should say. Although, of course—as Maryan Street, who has just resumed her seat, pointed out—because this bill has to be validated through Parliament, it becomes an expense that the taxpayers have to deal with. One would caution all councils, as the member sponsoring this bill did in the opening call in this debate, to learn from this and to listen to their ratepayers. If things are not going well and there are grumbles and complaints, then for goodness’ sake address the issues before they become a problem.

Damien O’Connor pointed out at the outset that one of the issues around this is that the Tasman District Council is a unitary authority, so it does not have, perhaps, the same checks and balances as are provided by regional councils or other closer councils working alongside it. Perhaps had that occurred, then this silly mistake, really, of not including a map with the rates and therefore invalidating them would never have occurred. I find that when I look at some of the correspondence—looking back over it now, because it was last winter when we heard many of the submissions on this bill. We heard 14 submissions in all. One of them, from the Tasman District Council Mayor, Richard Kempthorne, really does get to the heart of the matter. The council, he wrote in his letter in part of his submission to us, “… fully acknowledges that we made an error in setting the 2006-07 rate for the Tata Beach and Ligar Bay stormwater urban drainage area. We regret that the error was made.” And so say all of us and the ratepayers of the area.

The mayor went on to say that “We also note that if we had included the required map, the rate would have been lawfully made and the rates would have been payable.” So when you peel aside all of the other things that have been a problem in this, it comes down to a basic fundamental error. It has cost ratepayers tens of thousands of dollars and endless, countless hours, and you cannot measure the cost of the misery that many of the ratepayers have been through in that area over this.

As others have before me, I would like to acknowledge Bob Schmucke. Without his energy and without his determination and effort, this case would not have got as far as it has. When I call it a case, it almost is that, because there have been so many warring parties that initially tried to say “Not my fault. Can’t do anything about this.” There has been a lot of obfuscation around the issue, and a lot of other issues have come into play.

I know that there are aspects of this that the Local Government and Environment Committee agonised over, but we were not ultimately able to help some of the people who had issues around whether or not the stormwater pipes should have been laid in the areas that some of the ratepayers wanted them to be in. I will not go into all of the detail of that, because I think others have tracked that over before me. But it is very much a warning to other councils. It is a warning to take heed of what you do, to be very careful about your procedures and processes, to listen to your ratepayers—as I said a moment ago—and also, I think, to embrace the Better Local Government reforms that this Government is putting through. Part of those reforms is that we want local bodies, local councils, to be really careful around their monitoring and improving of their own performances for their ratepayers. Perhaps the publicity around this bill will show other councils that their own processes may and will come under greater scrutiny. So the silver lining to this cloud that is hanging over the Tasman District ratepayers is the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill (No 3), which we have started to put through.

I look back at some of the calls that were taken at that time, as someone who sat on the Local Government and Environment Committee throughout the Kaipara hearings and now on this bill, and there are a number of issues that continue to come up. Maurice Williamson, the Minister for Building and Construction, took a call on behalf of the then Minister of Local Government Chris Tremain, who I must say has done an excellent job of putting this through to this point. He made the point in his call that although the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill (No 3) that we are talking about is not specifically aimed at these worst-case scenarios—Kaipara and Tasman District—it is really going to help out in those kinds of situations and prevent them from happening again. That is my absolute belief in this.

We do not propose, really, to discuss the details of the particular cases, but they do provide salutary lessons for us all, and that informs us as legislators. The bill and the legislation that we are passing around local government will address the lessons, and the changes enacted will allow Ministers to identify potential problems before they get too bad and before they get too expensive and almost insurmountable for the local people to deal with, which is why they have had to come back to Parliament to be validated by us today.

Our local government legislation does introduce requirements for greater transparency in the management of infrastructure, and also a lot more discipline in the documentation of agreements for infrastructure that have to be provided, not just by the council employees themselves and their elected representatives but also by third parties that may be contracting and may be part of the problem. So all of these things are vitally important, and perhaps if the Tasman District Council had had the benefit of this legislation and the scrutiny and the requirements that come with it, it might have made a better job of what it needed to do.

One of the Green members took a call and said that on this side of the House there were crocodile tears being shed for ratepayers. That is absolutely incorrect. We have a genuine concern for ratepayers and for the rise in rates, as Jacqui Dean pointed out in her call. She is no stranger to putting through very good local bills as a member, because she represents her community and cares about what they say, and that is really the purpose of local bills. So she is no stranger to that. And as she pointed out, members of her own family who are on fixed incomes struggle in a big way with these kinds of rates hikes and irresponsible spending, let alone problems that blow out as a result of absolute errors, and incompetence in the case of Kaipara. I think the Auditor-General’s office, in that case involving Kaipara, as we discussed exhaustively at the select committee, does have a case to answer in its very large bill, which the Auditor-General said was one of the most complicated she had ever been involved with in her 20 years. The office spent a phenomenal amount of time trying to deal with the inefficiencies of a local council that kept no paperwork, that did not follow due process, and that did not do what its ratepayers elected it to do, which is to be a good steward and a prudent manager of the funds that it was paid. So all of these sorts of things are important to keep in mind.

In my own electorate on the North Shore, I am very mindful that a lot of older people on fixed incomes have properties that have very expensive rates. That is the nature of the way we do the ratings—based on the land value, and the improvements, of course. But people are finding that they are living in places for which they are struggling to find the rates money that they need, and that is why local authorities and, in particular, councils need to be very, very careful about what they spend their money on. Spraying it around and squandering it on the four well-beings is not going to get people where they need to be. Those are the kinds of things that actually need to be addressed in legislation.

This Government has the courage of its convictions and the knowledge, as opposed to the wittering that is going on at the moment from the opposing benches. We have the knowledge, the competence, and the ability to put through decent legislation that is aimed at helping the ratepayers.

💬 Tracey Martin: How terribly sad for the people of North Shore that they got landed with that.

It is not aimed at puffing up local body people, as that member who is interjecting at the moment very much is. She is an individual who tends to think she does a much better job than her own ratepayers allow. In fact, I do not think her own mother got elected on the basis of the legacy that was left for her by her daughter. It is a sad state of affairs. I know that the member has a very high opinion of herself as a list MP, but I know that that is not at all reflected by people in her own community. But there you go. We will withdraw from the petty politics and the yapping.

Let us say it is suffice to say that the Local Government Act 2002 and the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill (No 3) are going to work very, very well to make sure that the problems that occurred at Kaipara and occur in the Tasman District Council (Validation and Recovery of Certain Rates) Bill will not occur again, and that is a very important part of why we as a Government will continue to put through reforms, despite the braying of the opposing forces. That is why I support this local bill. I support Damien O’Connor in what he has done. I acknowledge, as many have said, that we are making the best of a difficult situation. We are making it better, but we are not making it perfect. But we are doing our best. Thank you.

I had to pull out my handkerchief in the last couple of minutes of that particular speech, to wipe away the tears of laughter. They were not crocodile tears; they were tears of absolute amazement from listening to the previous speaker, Maggie Barry. It never fails to amaze me how some of the National Party MPs who sit on our Local Government and Environment Committee have so little knowledge of local government or, indeed, of their own electorates.

It is unbelievable that the previous speaker said that because Tasman District Council is a unitary authority, which is a combination of a regional authority and a territorial authority, these sorts of mistakes could happen because it does not have the checks and balances, because it is not a normal council. What an extraordinary statement, when we have got unitary authorities around the country that have done a fantastic job over many years. So there is a total lack of understanding as to what a unitary authority does. And it is extraordinary for her to then say that all these councils, like Tasman and other places, are squandering money on all these things like the four well-beings.

If you ask the average person in the street whether it is important that they have economic development, whether it is important that they have a good environment in their town or their district, whether it is important that they have social responsibility in their community, and all these sorts of things, the average person will say: “Actually, we do want that. We choose to live here because this is the place where we want to live, and these are the expectations that we have.” Otherwise, as we have seen in the United States, cities like Detroit end up absolute ghost towns because they do not provide the four well-beings. They do not provide that community spirit and they become, literally, wastelands. We have seen that in parts of New Zealand, but, fortunately, local government is responding to the challenges.

Despite this National Government trying to absolutely kneecap local government, local government will persevere. Under a Government where New Zealand First has involvement, and where you will have the likes of Tracey Martin with her local body experience, me with my local body experience, and Denis O’Rourke with his extensive local body experience, we will get on, and I can tell all of local government out there that we will properly support local government.

I can recall that when National first became the Government back in 2008, it took it close to 12 months to have its first meeting with the mayoral forum and the Local Government Forum around New Zealand—close to 12 months before it even met with local government. It was appalling. Under the previous Government—the Labour Government, supported by New Zealand First—they met every 6 months, at least. But this Government—no, it has no regard. But, anyway, back to the Tasman District Council.

I would challenge the member Jacqui Dean, who is having a good chat with Maggie Barry at the present time, to really understand what a unitary authority is. She said these councils are small and have probably got only one staff member doing a particular function, and so when they go away on maternity leave, it does not get done. Well, I would just inform that learned National Party member that according to the Tasman District Council website, it has in excess of 200 staff. At the moment, recent vacancies have been advertised for a revenue accountant, a management accountant, a senior management accountant, a coordinator of land use consents, and a water resources officer. Those are just some of the some recent appointments that it has been making.

Tasman District Council is a significant council that covers a wide area. It is far from being some little council where there are a half a dozen people sitting at the top of a flight of stairs, doing something, and then putting an “Out to lunch” sign up when they leave. It is doing a good job and doing a very, very responsible job in that part of the South Island. Having said that, it has made some errors, and they were very simple errors in terms of what it did with setting the rates in that period.

As Maggie Barry mentioned, the letter from the mayor explained it very well. He mentioned that in that particular period, 2006-07, it overlooked including a map when it was setting the rates, and it did not properly describe the area in the Tata Beach and Ligar Bay area in terms of this. The mayor went on to say: “If we had included the required map, the rate would have been lawfully made and the rates would have been payable. Therefore, passing the bill in its current form would validate a rate that would have been made lawfully if the map had been included.” So it is quite simple. It was a simple administrative error that needs to be rectified.

The mayor went on to say—this was to the select committee: “We have explained to you that the Tata Beach and Ligar Bay ratepayers receive a service from the stormwater infrastructure provided in their communities, and they pay for this through our club approach. In our view, not only is there no legislative power to remit the rates but it would also be not equitable to remit the rates to the Tata Beach and the Ligar Bay ratepayers. A reason for this is that it would mean other ratepayers in the district would then have to pay for stormwater services, including those at Tata Beach and Ligar Bay, while the ratepayers in Tata Beach and Ligar Bay do not pay for any.”

So, quite obviously, it was not going to be fair to do that, and in the end Damien O’Connor brought this to the House and fair enough. But, in so doing, it is very interesting in that this opens a bigger can of worms in terms of the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill (No 3), which is going through our select committee at the moment as well, where, again, the National Government is wanting to do away with development contributions.

We heard from the learned Maggie Barry—who is having a good chat with Jacqui Dean at the present time, again—that the Government is wanting to do away with things like development contributions, and all this sort of thing, but she said at the same time: “But we don’t want councils to put up their rates. We don’t want them increasing their rates.” Well, I have got news for that member, which is that, basically, development contributions were brought in by the likes of North Shore City Council—which was the lead council, virtually, in this whole area in the last 10 years—to ensure that the growth of a city, or a community or a district, was funded by those who came into the club. It is like joining a golf club or a tennis club. If you are the last one in and you have already got all the facilities, you pay a joining fee. You pay a joining fee to join the club.

It is the same in local government. If developers want to come in and set up a whole new subdivision, and they are coming into a city and they have not contributed anything at that point in time, they pay a development contribution as their contribution to join the club, to then provide all the services across the city. It is a total nonsense on the part of this National Government to say that things like swimming pools, libraries, and other community facilities of that nature should not be paid for from development contributions but from the existing ratepayer base. That is absolutely nonsense. When we on the North Shore were planning for the new Albany library to be built for a growing population, we had to start taking development contributions 7, 8, and 9 years ahead of when the new library was going to be required, from the new subdivisions, from the new sections, from the infill housing, and from the people cutting off their back lawns, so that when the population got to that point, we could build the library with the funding. You know, you do not wait until everybody is there and then say: “Oh, we’ve got an extra 40,000 people in our city, and they cannot read a book because the nearest library is 14 kilometres away.” That is not what you do.

So it is interesting to hear the comments from the National Government—but we get that from them. When we went through other local government legislation last year and the year before, it was astonishing how ignorant the National Party members were of most of the facts in relation to local government—totally ignorant. Even Paul Goldsmith over there, who wrote John Banks’ biography, seemed to have a lack of understanding of how local government operated.

So, basically, I would suggest that many of the National members on the Local Government and Environment Committee should maybe take the next adjournment to go off and learn “Local Government 101”, and find out what local authorities actually do around New Zealand. They should go and spend some time with Local Government New Zealand. They should go and speak to some local bodies. They do not like to come down off their high horses and speak to mayors and councillors, but they should go and find out how local government operates in this country. We have only two tiers of government in New Zealand: central government and local government. As a result, they might actually realise that central government and local government are mutually supportive of each other and that it is not central government trying to kneecap local government all the time.

I have never listened to a speech from that member, Andrew Williams, that has not been twice as long as it needed to be. I was not sure whether we were debating a local government amendment bill or the Tasman District Council (Validation and Recovery of Certain Rates) Bill, because it sounded like he was more interested in talking about local government. I was not sure, from the end of that speech, which certainly went round and round the mulberry bush many, many times, whether he supported the bill or not. That is the complication with this kind of legislation.

I would make one point on development contributions, which are not related to this bill but which seem to be the topic of debate in most of the speeches. We are not doing away with development contributions. We are getting some discipline around that process. It does not necessarily follow that you have to put up the rates. You actually just have to get some discipline around Government spending, and that is what this Government has shown very effectively around bringing Government spending under control in a disciplined fashion and getting back to surplus. That is why this Government enjoys the support that it has.

💬 Phil Twyford: Forcing councils to put rates up.

Only if they keep on spending more, and what we need is some discipline around spending.

💬 Phil Twyford: Someone has to pay, Paul.

You do not have to pay great sums if a council is efficient. That is what all our local government reforms have been about. They are about trying to get some efficiency into local government. But if we return to the bill, the Tasman District Council (Validation and Recovery of Certain Rates) Bill—

💬 Andrew Williams: Hasn’t worked in Auckland.

Well, it has not worked as well in Auckland as it could have, primarily because we have had a raging leftie as a mayor, who has been spending like a runaway train. It is time we got some discipline back into the council, and then Aucklanders will be a lot better off.

I come back to the Tasman District Council (Validation and Recovery of Certain Rates) Bill. It is worth going back to the details, because nobody is comfortable with, or enthusiastic about, passing this sort of bill, which validates procedural irregularities made by the Tasman District Council. Let us go back and see just what happened here. What happened was that the council had identified a series of procedural irregularities under the Local Government (Rating) Act in the process used to set rates between 2003-04 and 2008-09. They were mainly in relation to failing to comply with sections 23, 24, and 57 of that Act. In summary, these sections required that the rates are to be set by a resolution of the council, and that the resolution must specify certain details of the rates and of the penalties to be paid. But, more important, the resolution must be separate from resolutions to adopt annual plans and funding impact statements, even when these documents contain details of the rates. It also must be that the resolution is made after resolutions to adopt annual plans and funding impact statements pertaining to that financial year.

That is a reasonably clear legislative outlook, and it has to be done in a certain way, but, unfortunately, the Tasman District Council made a number of mistakes. It purported to set and assess the rates and rates penalties by way of a resolution to adopt an annual plan and funding impact statement, rather than by way of a separate resolution. So it tried to get everything into the same resolution, rather than by separate resolutions. It also resolved to adopt rates prior to the adoption of the annual plan and funding impact statement pertaining to that financial year. So it got things round the wrong way. It passed the resolution before the adoption of the annual plan, rather than after the adoption of the annual plan.

Secondly, but worse than that, in 2006 the council purported to set and assess a targeted stormwater rate for properties within the Ligar Bay and Tata Beach urban drainage areas. We listened to a number of submitters on this topic in the Local Government and Environment Committee, which was very ably chaired, I might say, by Nicky Wagner. It enjoyed a good measure of bipartisanship as we dealt with, and tried to get to the bottom of, what was a tricky issue. I do want to pay tribute to the work of Damien O’Connor on this bill, because no local member of Parliament particularly wants to have to shepherd a bill such as this through Parliament, but he did it with good grace. We listened carefully to the submitters on each point.

Getting back to 2006, the council purported to set and assess a targeted stormwater rate—[Interruption]—if you could just pay attention, please—for properties within the Ligar Bay and Tata Beach drainage areas. However, it failed to visually identify the geographical location of the rateable land to which the targeted stormwater rate applied in the 2006-07 funding impact statement, as required under section 17 and schedule 2 of the Local Government (Rating) Act. So, in essence, it failed to produce the map. Those are the procedural irregularities made in regard to the resolutions.

This is all very irritating, but, in essence, when we were faced with the request to pass legislation to overturn some mistake that was made previously, obviously the committee was not comfortable with it if there was some way in which the rates were not proper rates or they should not have been done or they were not part of the overall plan, and that was never the allegation here. It was a procedural irregularity. The advice that we had from the Tasman District Council was that if the map had been included in 2006 and 2007, in the funding impact statement, the rate would have been lawfully made and the rates would have been payable. So it was the absence of the map that made what were otherwise quite acceptable rates unacceptable. This piece of legislation is trying to fix the situation.

What are the alternatives? The alternatives are that we could have just said: “Oh well, maybe the council should just forgive or pay back those rates because they got it wrong.” But that is actually more complicated than it seems because paying back rates is not easy. There is actually no legislative power to remit the rates. The council would then have to run around and see whether it could find the people who owned the land back in 2006 and 2007, and then that would not be fair because those people who would be getting their rates back in effect would not have paid rates for that year. They would have had the stormwater coverage and the benefit of it all, but not have paid for it. So that is hardly fair to the rest of the people of the Tasman District. It is an awkward juggling act that Parliament was set to deal with, and, on balance, after a great deal of consideration, we decided to come down in favour of this bill.

When I come back to some of the broader issues that we are dealing with here—

💬 Phil Twyford: Talk about John Banks. We always enjoy that.

Certain members have raised the biography of John Banks. The only thing I would say in relation to that is that I do write about successful people and not failed local body politicians. Maybe there may be an opportunity for Mr Williams’ political career to take off, in a very late trajectory, and reach that sort of height, but I am not necessarily confident that that is going to happen. As for Mr Twyford, I am not sure, either. But there may be an opportunity before too long, with the fast rotation that we are seeing in the Labour leadership, for Mr Twyford, although I personally would favour Moana Mackey, being a close cousin of mine. So there we have it. I think Labour does have issues, but we do not want to get distracted from this bill, which is very different.

I suppose, just in summing up, the broader issues that I want to draw on are that National’s Better Local Government reforms will help make local government more efficient, responsive, and well focused. This bill deals with an example of when the Tasman District Council was not well focused and it was not particularly efficient, and that is always going to happen. People do make mistakes. I suppose the overall lesson of having to deal with these sorts of bills is that we do not want to have a legislative set-up for local government that is so complex that people regularly make mistakes. On the other hand, we do absolutely expect and require that local government does do things correctly, so that ratepayers can have confidence that they are paying things legally and that all the boxes are ticked. The Better Local Government reforms include a work stream to monitor and improve council performance, to help prevent future procedural errors. This bill will highlight to other councils, I am sure, the importance of proper scrutiny when setting rates. I have no doubt that when other councils consider this bill and others such as this one, they will see it as a very powerful warning that when it comes to the time of setting and passing procedural law matters—

I am sorry to inform the member but he has utilised his entire allocation of time. I am advised that this is not a split call—Moana Mackey; 10 minutes.

It is always scary to get a glimpse of the world through the eyes of Paul Goldsmith once again. I do not think that I have ever seen a member looking so desperately for the Speaker to tell him that his time had concluded, because he got to the end of the research unit notes about 2 minutes before the end of the speech and had to start repeating himself. That is quite a hefty workload in a day for Paul Goldsmith. I do not think I have ever heard him give a 10-minute speech. I hope he does not get a nosebleed from the effort.

I am actually not going to take too long on the Tasman District Council (Validation and Recovery of Certain Rates) Bill. I think that members have covered it adequately. We do not like passing retrospective legislation in this Parliament. It is the best of a number of bad solutions. We certainly acknowledge that there have been inconsistencies in the way that the Tasman District Council has dealt with the setting of rates. Unfortunately, Parliament has to step in and retrospectively validate them. We have seen a little bit of this happening in recent times. Certainly, members have raised issues around the function of auditing, and picking up on these solutions so that problems can be resolved before it comes to this would be helpful.

I do not think there is really anything more that I can add to the debate, apart from saying that we will be supporting the bill. Unfortunately, we will be supporting it, but it is just one of these things that we need to do.

I rise to speak in support of the Tasman District Council (Validation and Recovery of Certain Rates) Bill. I notice that there is a theme—I am not a member of the Local Government and Environment Committee, which worked very hard on this bill, and it is to be complimented, particularly the chair of the committee.

💬 Tim Macindoe: You were a very fine chair in years gone by.

In years gone by I thoroughly enjoyed working as the chair of the Local Government and Environment Committee. It was fantastic. It was a very busy committee, and the second-largest in Parliament.

💬 Phil Twyford: Good times.

They were good times—they were. But I think this bill has been very well handled by that select committee.

I was interested to hear Moana Mackey, who is something of a veteran politician herself, say that she would rise reluctantly or sadly to support this bill. That seems to have been a sentiment that has been expressed by almost every speaker. Without having been party to the submissions and the detail of the bill, I have reflected on why that might be. I reflected on the question of how this whole thing came about. I guess one could say that it was users versus non-users of a service, collective benefits being sought versus individual rights, and peremptory changes being made by a council versus transparent procedures.

The good people who live in Tata Beach and Ligar Bay who are affected by these stormwater rates are strong individuals. I have met them. I know them. They are nice people. They have a fine sense of personal justice, individual rights, and what is right and what is wrong. Tasman District Council, which I think is probably one of the country’s larger unitary councils, is a council of fairly determined councillors and very experienced staff. I think there has been a case of a certain amount of antagonism, if I can use that word without it affecting individuals, and a certain amount of antagonistic points of view on both sides in relation to identifying the problem and then seeking a solution to it. It was a “Yes, you will.”, “No, we won’t.” sort of job. So the councillors found themselves nonplussed.

This seems to have been a somewhat long-drawn-out bill. Observers could say that there was an element of wishing that it would go away or hoping that the antagonism would stop. I understand that they have tried a variety of mediation techniques, discussions, and listening to individuals and to one another, to seek settlement. It did not happen. So legislation became a requirement. Not to proceed would have simply passed the vexation of one group on to another group, and it would have gone on. So they sought legislation.

What is the parliamentary view of that? One of the things that we learn early on as politicians is the difficulty of preparing legislation and the difficulty of foreseeing unforeseen circumstances. If you look at New Zealand, statistically it has its fair share of re-legislating or passing of legislation to correct things that were not foreseen. As this is a country of some speed and a very fine sense of fairness, I think it is reasonable to anticipate that you will be correcting legislation for unforeseen circumstances.

The difficulty with this particular piece of local legislation was that it did not have an unforeseen consequence; it was perhaps just representative of equivocal leadership. Things were not done correctly, and yet people wished to hold on to what they had done. The council’s apology has been commented on as being singularly sincere. Some of the comments that have been made today have been that this bill was in fact a waste of Parliament’s time. I do not perceive it to be a waste of parliamentary time, because there was no other solution apparently available to the contestants in this particular issue. Therefore, in my mind, it is not a waste of time. I think it is a perfectly proper use of parliamentary time. It is necessary to re-establish confidence and certainty in the work and the efforts of the Tasman District Council.

We have heard from a variety of speakers on this bill, from Maggie Barry, Jacqui Dean, Paul Goldsmith, Nicky Wagner, Andrew Williams, Moana Mackey, and others—people who, one could say, are fairly experienced in the ways and workings of district councils. If we were not to pass this bill, then people would be deprived of their rights, and the consequences would be very long-drawn out.

We come again to the point that has been made, that the good of the community has to be borne by the whole of the community in order to create collective benefits. That is OK as long as the whole of the community is in a position to share the benefits. I understand, without knowing the particular detail—and I have not participated in any of the select committee discussions, having being engaged in other select committees—that in this case there will be people who are not really comfortable with this outcome. I think that is always going to be the case where you have this type of imposed legislation to try to sort out a problem. So they will not be particularly happy.

But let us remember the purpose of the bill. The purpose of the bill is not to make people happy, because Parliament did not make them unhappy in the first place. What we have to do is validate the rates set by the Tasman District Council for the 5-year period affected, during which the council did not follow correct process in setting the rates. I think the fact that the complainants in this issue will hear very clearly that the council has acknowledged—and we in Parliament acknowledge—that it did not follow correct process is going to ameliorate a lot of hard feelings in this particular issue.

The bill also validates rates and penalties paid over the period, and authorises the council to recover any unpaid rates and ratify the Tata Beach and Ligar Bay stormwater rates. I have no doubt that that bit will stick in some people’s craw. They will feel that they were robbed and that it is not a fair way to do it. I am assured by members of the select committee that every other possibility was exhaustively examined—exhaustively examined. Having been a member of that particular select committee for about 3 years, I am very familiar with the excellent advice it gets, the work of the local government officials who advise the committee, and the sincerity and commitment of the individual members of Parliament, from all parties. I think it is one of the select committees that demonstrates a lot of bipartisan approaches to the work in hand.

One of the things I take confidence in, in particular, is that National’s Better Local Government reforms will help make local government more efficient, responsive, and well focused. The Better Local Government reforms include a work stream to monitor and improve council performance, in order to help prevent future procedural errors. Finally, this bill highlights to other councils, sadly—sadly—the consequences of not having proper scrutiny when setting rates. Thank you.

Annette King—the Hon Annette King.

Yes, thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and it is nice to see you too. I rise to support the Tasman District Council (Validation and Recovery of Certain Rates) Bill, brought in in the name of the very good local member of Parliament Damien O’Connor, who somewhat reluctantly brings in this bill to validate specific rates in the Tasman District Council area. None of us likes retrospective legislation. It is necessary in this case. I support it. I congratulate the ratepayer who discovered this error and brought it to attention, and who has ensured that we now have legislation to fix this irregularity.

It is a fantastic part of New Zealand: Ligar Bay, and also Tata Beach. You probably know it well, Mr Deputy Speaker. I certainly do. I have spent holidays there. In fact, my old schoolteacher Miss Dizren retired there, and I know for a fact that she used to go swimming in the nude on a regular basis down at Tata Beach, such was the cleanliness and the beauty of this place. This is not quite in the bill, but I thought I would get it on record that it is a pristine and wonderful place. It deserves to have proper rates struck for it, and I support the bill.