Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill

on behalf of the Minister for the Environment: I move, That the Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. The purpose of the bill is to provide more flexibility to the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel to help ensure that it can deliver its recommendations on the proposed Auckland Unitary Plan to the Auckland Council by the statutory deadline of 22 July 2016.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! Can I just ask the member’s colleagues—it is quite rude to do that, Mr Naylor. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. In order to achieve this, the bill has three main components. Firstly, the bill reduces the quorum required for hearing sessions from three members to two members. Secondly, it will allow an increase in the possible number of appointed hearings panel members from seven to 10, excluding the chairperson. Thirdly, the bill will enable the hearings panel to make its recommendations on the proposed Auckland Unitary Plan in stages after hearings are completed on a particular topic, rather than in one final report.

Before I discuss these components in more detail, I think it is important to reflect on the context of these changes. In 2010 this Government embarked on a reform of Auckland’s governance arrangements, including the development of a single combined plan covering the whole region. Auckland’s first unitary plan is the biggest exercise of its kind undertaken under the “RMA”, or the Resource Management Act, and it includes the review and the rationalisation of the seven district plans, the Auckland Regional Policy Statement, and regional plans inherited from the former councils into one new, comprehensive unitary plan.

The streamlined process was designed to significantly reduce the time to produce a plan for Auckland than what would be needed under the standard Resource Management Act plan-making process. It will reduce the uncertainty, the cost due to complexity, and also it will enable speedier implementation of improved rules and regulations to support the need to increase the supply of housing, as well as business land, in the Auckland region. The unitary plan, of course, is critical to responding to Auckland’s growth and the resulting demand for development opportunities for both housing and employment.

The Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Act established this streamlined plan-making process, and it went through this House, as you all know, including an independent hearings panel that was created to hear submissions on that proposed plan. This is intended to result in a faster delivery of a high-quality, operative Auckland Unitary Plan, but to meet this need for fast delivery of the hearings panels, it is required to make recommendations by 22 July of next year.

The hearings panel made good progress. Approximately 79 percent of the hearings have been heard to date, but the independent hearings panel published 13 items of interim guidance on regional policy statement topics and subsequently on district plan level topics of regional significance. Hearings on site-specific matters are due to begin in mid-January of next year, but the focus of these topics will be the impact of proposals on specific sites, and, thus, potential impacts on individual property rights. Accordingly, the level of public interest for these topics is quite high.

The matters due to be heard represent approximately 57 percent of all the matters raised in submissions, and 39 percent of those submitters have indicated that they want to be present at a hearing session. Auckland Council estimates that these submissions contain approximately 20,000 separate requests for a change of zoning, relating to more than 150,000 properties across the Auckland region. If a high percentage of the submitters who indicated that they wished to be heard actually attend the hearings, then more days of hearings will be required than the current time frame allows, and that is why we need to make a dramatic increase in the expected workload of these panels, and it raises the risk that these panels will not be able to deliver on those recommendations at that due date in July of next year.

So it is critical that the hearings panel be able to continue its good processes and to make the recommendations to the council on time, and that is why a number of changes to the Act are required via this amendment bill. The first main component of the bill, of course, reduces the quorum required for hearing sessions from three to two members. Currently a quorum of a minimum of three members of the panel must be present at each hearing session.

Reducing the quorum from three to two, of course, will allow for up to four concurrent sessions to be held at any one time, and it allows for more submitters to be heard within the existing time frame. I consider it possible for many site-specific topics to be heard by only two members without any loss of quality of those particular hearings. For more complex or controversial topics, the existing quorum of three should be maintained, but I have every confidence in the panel’s ability to use its discretion about what is appropriate for each hearing session.

Secondly, the second component, as I have already described earlier, will allow an increase in the possible number of appointed hearings panel members from seven to 10, excluding the chair. Currently the panel comprises a chair and seven other members—a maximum of eight members on these panels. Allowing the appointment of an additional three panellists will ensure that the submissions, again, can be heard by three or more panellists, and allow up to three concurrent hearing sessions at any one time, and this would raise the overall number of panel members from eight to a maximum of 11, including the chair.

Again, the third component is to enable the hearings panels to make recommendations on the proposed Auckland Unitary Plan in stages, particularly on a particular topic, after hearings are completed, rather than one final report. Currently the panel is required to make its recommendations on the proposed Auckland Unitary Plan on one report after it has finished hearings of all those submissions.

Enabling the panel to make its recommendations in stages, again, is to expedite this system and give increased flexibility for the panel to run this process as it sees fit, and, again, reach that deadline of 22 July of next year. I believe it is a sensible and it is a pragmatic proposal, as it would give Auckland Council more time to consider the hearings panel recommendations. To avoid confusion, Auckland Council will still be required to issue its decisions on the entire Auckland Unitary Plan. This will be done within 20 working days of receiving the final set of recommendations from the hearings panel.

To support these policy changes, additional recommendations are required. Firstly, the bill will create a requirement for the Minister for the Environment and the Minister of Conservation to consult with the Auckland Council, the independent Māori statutory board, and the chairperson of the hearings panel prior to appointing additional or replacement hearings panels members. Secondly, the bill will clarify that the hearings panels may hold hearing sessions concurrently, and that an additional chair may be appointed for the purposes of chairing a hearings session.

It is critical that the hearings panel contributes to the good progress that it has made and deliver the recommendations to the council by its statutory deadline of July of next year. This bill needs to be passed by the end of this year to ensure that the policy changes can take effect prior to the expected increase in workload, which, of course, will start in January of next year.

This bill represents a great opportunity to ensure that the country’s largest planning process remains on track to become operative as soon as possible. It is Auckland’s first unitary plan, and it is significantly larger in scope and more complex than any planning exercise undertaken in New Zealand to date. Having been a member of the Auckland City Council, which put together the last unitary plan, I understand the real complexities and the time that it takes to put such processes through. With pride, I recommend this bill to the House.

That speech by the Hon Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga would have been one of the sleepiest deliveries of any introductory speech that I have heard during my entire time in the House. I know that we are under urgency, that we have been meeting since 9 o’clock this morning, and that it is a quarter past ten and probably past the Minister’s bedtime, but I thought that he could have put a little bit more enthusiasm in the speech than that. The Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill is a bill that is supported by the Labour Party. In fact, it has been requested and supported by Auckland City, and this party is certainly supportive of Auckland City and the desire to make that a great city. I hope that this bill is a sign of a change of heart by the Government, a new readiness to cooperate with Auckland City in the future, because in the past it has seemed that that has not always been the case. In fact, Auckland City and the central government often seem to have been working down different paths. I am sorry that the Minister who is in charge of the bill, the Hon Nick Smith, is not here to say this to directly—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order!

—but I regret that some of the time when the Minister makes comments about problems that Auckland faces, he is scapegoating Auckland as the cause of the very problems that his central government refuses to address. So I hope that this bill, working to implement something that Auckland City wants, is a sign of a better future in the relationship between central government and Auckland City. I hope that the Minister realises, coming as he does from a smaller town, that with 36 percent of the population of the country and 36 percent of the production of the country, for New Zealand to succeed Auckland has to succeed, and for Auckland to succeed we need a decent unitary plan. That is what this bill is designed to help facilitate.

Actually, the bill does two things. First of all, it corrects mistakes in the principal Act, the Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Act of 2010—and I will get to those errors, because we have had a couple of days of urgency where all this House seems to be doing is correcting mistakes made by a Government that has been hasty and has ill-considered the legislation before it. Urgency is never a good way to correct mistakes, because when you force a bill through under urgency, in the middle of the night when the Minister is barely awake, and you do not send it to a select committee, you do not get a chance for the public to have scrutiny of the legislation, nor the committee to have scrutiny, nor the experts who could have corrected the mistakes that led to our doing this now under urgency. It is a vicious cycle, but the Government never seems to learn from its mistakes.

The first thing this bill does—and I will come back to it later—is to correct errors that were made in the principal Act, and because those errors need to be corrected, we are from the Opposition and we are here to help the Government. The second thing, and the most important thing that this legislation does, is to facilitate the processing of submissions on the draft Auckland Unitary Plan. This plan is the most complex and far-reaching of any plan that has been considered, probably in the history of this country. It is incredibly important. The unitary plan brings in 13 different district and regional plans, and it brings them together into one. And it means that we will have a resource planning mechanism for Auckland that is less complex, less fragmented, and, hopefully, better able to facilitate sound development, sustainable development, and housing affordability in Auckland.

Towards the end of my speech I want to focus on housing affordability, because the Minister, in his comments about this bill, has emphasised that this is a way to help address Auckland’s housing crisis. Well, it may, but it will not come anywhere near the need to address the level of crisis in Auckland’s housing, where house prices are now, on average, over $900,000, where they have gone up in a year by $180,000, where rents are increasing by three to four times the rate of overall inflation, and where homeownership has dropped to its lowest level in 64 years. Although the Minister may be optimistic that the unitary plan can address all of this, I have got news for the Minister: he is going to have do a whole lot more than this, and he needs to do a whole lot better than this in order to address that problem. The unitary plan is one aspect of the solution for Auckland’s crisis, but it is only one aspect, and a lot more needs to be done.

What the principal Act did was instead of relying on the Resource Management Act to bring together these 13 different plans—that would have taken a decade—it brought in a streamlined process whereby the unitary plan could be notified, submissions could be heard on it by the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel, and then that panel report back to the council. A statutory deadline for that report back to the council with recommendations has been set, it is 22 July 2016, and there is a huge amount of work still to be done—it has heard thousands of submissions, but it has another 5,000 submissions to be heard on site-specific issues. There was a real risk that this unitary plan was not going to be completed by the statutory deadline, would not be considered by the council before the council elections in October next year, and, as the Minister said, the council would not have the new unitary plan in place at the time that the special housing areas legislation is due to expire.

I am not quite sure why the Minister should be worried about the impact of the special housing areas legislation being due to expire, because the Minister set a target for Auckland of 39,000 extra houses. Does that not sound good—39,000 extra houses for Auckland over 3 years? Even if it achieved that it probably would not resolve the imbalance of supply and demand, but it would go some way towards it. But the special housing areas legislation, the expiry of which the Minister is so worried about, was due to facilitate that, and what did it do? Well, here is the business section of the New Zealand Herald. You know, 2 out of the 3 years now having passed towards the goal of 39,000 houses, how many houses have been built in the special housing areas?

💬 Phil Twyford: Let me guess.

Let us have some bids. How many houses, out of the 39,000 that were needed by Auckland, have been completed?

💬 Phil Twyford: 10,000.

10,000—do I hear something a bit better than that? That is very optimistic, from Phil Twyford.

💬 Phil Twyford: 5,000.

5,000—he has halved it, but he is still not there—nowhere near there. Do you know, Mr Assistant Speaker, how many houses have been completed in the special housing areas?

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): No.

No, you do not know. Well let me tell you. It is 102—102 whole houses completed under the special housing area legislation, but the Minister says that we have got to rush this legislation through under urgency for fear that the special housing legislation expires. Well, I welcome 102 houses, but 102 houses, when the goal was set by the Minister himself of 39,000 extra houses, is not good. Although I have made a little bit light of it, it is a serious problem. It is a serious problem because Aucklanders no longer can achieve the Kiwi dream of owning their own home. Aucklanders can barely afford to rent their own homes. In fact, the Government is spending $2 billion a year in subsidising rentals because people cannot afford to make their rental payments—$2 billion a year and a lot of that is going into Auckland.

So let us come back to the question of the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel and how this Government is trying to facilitate it getting through the workload it has in front of it. It does it by three mechanisms, and we are in favour of those. Firstly, the bill reduces the quorum for hearing sessions from three to two members. That might have a marginal impact in terms of the quality of the input, but I think the impact would be just that: marginal. I think two members can cope with that, particularly on the very specific nature of the issues that they will be hearing from January next year. Secondly, it allows an increase in the possible number of appointed hearings panel members from seven to 10. That is a good thing because there will be more people available to serve on the panels. And, thirdly, it enables the hearings panel to make its recommendations in stages rather than in one final report. So it will make its recommendations after each point is reached in the hearings rather than as one. So we support those three measures. We support the measures to correct the mistakes of the past, but we are utterly disparaging of the Minister’s claim that even if we get this unitary plan right—and I hope we do—that that is going to solve the massive housing crisis of availability and affordability in New Zealand. It will barely touch on that. Much more needs to be done.

Well, there we have it. The contrast could not have been more apparent tonight. After the careful, deliberate, measured introductory speech from the Minister, we had the first version of the campaign speech for the Auckland mayoralty by the member for Mt Roskill, who has suddenly rediscovered his Auckland roots and is in full-blown Auckland campaign mode. He has ditched the Labour Party red tie. He has got his new campaign tie on. It has that sort of bluish, greenish tinge, and there he is, practising his speech for the 22nd, this coming Sunday, and he is going to be into it.

There he was, about to desert the Labour Party’s ship, about to leave all that he has been practising for 30 years in this House, and all for this speech tonight on this new bill, which is being introduced, as I say, after the careful, deliberate, and measured contribution from the Minister who did such a good job in setting out why it is that this House is considering this bill at this time on this night. It is an important piece of technical legislation that needs to be passed before Christmas.

The legislation needs to be put in place so that, as the member for Mt Roskill so rightly said, Auckland can continue to succeed. Even in the provinces, even in the beautiful Coromandel electorate, it is important that Auckland succeeds, because when Auckland succeeds the rest of the country succeeds and so too do the provinces. That is why I am very pleased to be able to stand in this first reading debate and support the introduction of this bill.

Effectively, when the principal Act was introduced in 2010 the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel was established. It was established to hear submissions on the proposed Auckland Unitary Plan. This plan is a very big piece of work. It is a huge undertaking. The submissions that have been received on the plan have been many and varied, and it is important that they get due hearing and that they are well considered by the hearings panel.

So this piece of legislation proposes to amend the principal Act to essentially do three things. First of all, it will reduce the quorum required for the hearing sessions from three members to two members. I want to spend a minute or two just going over some of these points, a little later in my contribution. The second thing that this bill does is it increases the maximum number of members of the hearings panel from seven to 10. The third part of this bill is to enable the hearings panel to make its recommendations in stages, after hearings are completed on a particular topic, rather than having to wait for the complete submission process to have taken place.

So what will reducing the quorum of the hearing sessions do? Well, it will reduce the number of members required to be a quorum from three to two. Currently the three panel members have to be present at every hearing session, so reducing this will mean that a flexibility can be applied that will enable up to four hearings to take place at the same time. That will speed up the process. It will speed it up and improve the efficiency.

Although three members could well be present for some of the more complex and controversial hearing topics, the panel can be relied upon to exercise its discretion. I have faith and I am confident that they will be able to exercise that discretion easily and well and without fear of concern about that process.

The second major point is that the increase in the size of the panel increases the membership from seven to 10. This will help ensure that that process of concurrent hearings can occur in a seemly and timely way. The third major change enables the panel to make its recommendations in stages. That has not been the case until now. So this is a good little technical adjustment that will help this unitary plan hearings process; it will help Auckland succeed.

I want to be the first in this House to wish the member for Mt Roskill, Phil Goff, well in his campaigning intentions. I am pleased that he has delivered the opening campaign address tonight, here in this Chamber. The few of us who are here have been privileged to hear that speech. No doubt we will hear it again on Sunday afternoon. I commend this bill to the House.

I thought the contribution from Minister of Corrections was a very lacklustre pitch for the local government portfolio. But, you know, local government is a great portfolio, and I can understand why Sam Lotu-Iiga would like to have a crack at it. With Alfred Ngaro sniffing around the corrections portfolio after the Minister’s rather underwhelming performance, I can understand why he would want to have a look around and see what else might be available. But on that performance—on the performance of that Minister in this debate—I do not think he has got much of a shot of picking up local government off Paula Bennett.

The theme of my contribution tonight is a message to the members on the National benches: what took you so long? After 7 years in Government, with 2 years spent brutally and undemocratically imposing the Auckland super-city on a very reluctant and unwilling Auckland community, and the last 5 long years spent fighting and quibbling and bullying the Auckland Council and being a block on the progress and prosperity of our country’s biggest city, finally we see the National Government bring to this House a bill that shows that it is cooperating with Auckland. It is actually doing with this bill what Auckland has been asking for. It is the first sign of any kind of real cooperation that we have seen in these 5 long years. I want to talk about that period a little bit in this first reading contribution.

For the folks at home wondering what a unitary plan is, I think it is worth just touching on a little bit of the recent history. In 2010, after a process of designing what the new amalgamated super-city would look like in Auckland, there were the first elections of the Auckland council, electing representatives to the structure that Rodney Hide had put in place at the behest of the National Party in Auckland—the highly centralised, over-corporatised Auckland Council. We then saw the council acting, really, on the vision that the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance had set out for it to develop the Auckland Plan, and, as my colleague Phil Goff said, the intention was the pulling together of all the threads in an integrated unified plan that would set out the vision for the city.

In 2013 there were the second elections and then the development of the draft unitary plan to replace 13 different district and regional plans and to give effect to that vision of one unified spatial plan for the city. It is bigger than Ben-Hur, as I think anyone who has looked at it will know. It is a huge, huge undertaking. As many have said before, it is really kind of the rule book for the future development of Auckland.

What we are seeing here tonight is a kind of a fix job by the National Government, and not only for poor drafting and errors in the original legislation. National decided to design a bespoke planning process for the unitary plan, because it had rejected Auckland Council’s request to give early legal effect to the draft unitary plan, which would have been a much simpler and cleaner process, by the way, and would have saved everybody a lot of trouble.

But, no, the National Government knew better. It insisted on designing a whole new bespoke process for this. It had not really thought it through. It had not thought through the quantity of public submissions and hearings that would be involved in an undertaking of this size. So what we are seeing tonight, really, is a bill that attempts to fix up some of those problems.

To really understand the context of this bill, we have to talk about two things. The first is the National Government’s tortured relationship with Auckland over the last 5 years, and the second is the deeply problematic handling, or mishandling, of the Auckland housing crisis. As the Minister, Nick Smith, has said, his main motivation for pushing through this bill is to ensure that the draft unitary plan completes its process before the housing accord and special housing areas legislation—aptly named the HASH legislation—expires later next year. So it is about those two things: the endless fighting and quibbling that has been going on between this Government and Auckland over the last 5 years, and the housing crisis.

It started in the 2010 election when, from the point of view of the National Government, the wrong guy won the mayoral election. National members spent the 2 years prior to the election trying to design a super-city structure that would allow the National Government and its cronies to dispose of the assets and run Auckland as their personal fiefdom, and then Len Brown—the wrong guy from their point of view—won the election. That is why they have not been able to get over themselves ever since. It has been 5 years where the culture of entitlement and born-to-rule attitudes have been held in check by the fact that someone else has been running Auckland, and they have been bitter and twisted about it ever since—in contrast to this bill.

This bill is cooperative. It is about moving Auckland forward, and it is about making decisions. For years we saw Steven Joyce and Gerry Brownlee pouring scorn on Auckland’s No. 1 transport project, the City Rail Link. I cannot even repeat this House the words that Steven Joyce routinely used when describing the City Rail Link to business audiences in Auckland. Nick Smith rampaged around Auckland like a sort of a rogue bull elephant, blaming Auckland Council for—let me remember what the quote was—killing the dreams of Aucklanders. That was what Nick Smith said. That was kind of the beginning of a whole pattern of several years of this National Government blaming and scapegoating Auckland Council for the housing crisis. And now Nick Smith wants to pass this bill, because he is worried that if he does not, there will be nothing to replace his special housing area records, which have been a spectacular flop when it comes to actually making a difference to the supply of houses in Auckland.

Part of the problem, I think, is that the National Government simply has not had anybody in its Cabinet who really understands Auckland. Auckland has had to put up with a string of mostly South Island and small-town Ministers who have travelled to visit Auckland, to tell Auckland what it should do. Steven Joyce is, I think, from Palmerston North, Nick Smith is from Nelson, Gerry Brownlee is from Canterbury, Amy Adams is from Selwyn, and none of them understands Auckland or has any kind of feeling for how a big city or an urban economy works.

Bill English is the other one who has spent much of the last 5 years railing against the Auckland Council for having this vision for a compact city, which this bill is designed to address by actually reforming some of the planning rules and getting a better balance between the city growing up and growing out. But Bill English, from Dipton, the great urbanist of the National Government, spent much of the last 5 years railing—

💬 Chris Hipkins: He’s from Karori.

Oh, yeah. He is not from Dipton. He is from Karori—sorry. He spent much of the last 5 years railing against the compact city as if was some great conspiracy. But what we have seen is that over these 5 years the National Government has been dragged, kicking and screaming, towards this moment—this moment of cooperation and a kind of a sensible, pragmatic working with Auckland Council to try to get a response and deliver the unitary plan within the desired time frame.

First we saw it when they got rolled on the City Rail Link, basically. They gave up. After 3 years of opposing the City Rail Link they realised they were hurting in the polls. They realised they were losing support in Auckland, because they were seen as a brake on the prosperity of the city. People like the Employers and Manufacturers Association and the chamber of commerce were saying to John Key “You are a roadblock to Auckland’s prosperity and Auckland’s development.”, and that is what finally shifted them.

So it is not a good look for this Government. It has been dragged, kicking and screaming, to this moment. At least this bill is a good, pragmatic response to the unitary plan and that is why Labour is supporting it.

I thank the member for his comments. Before I call Todd Muller, I am going to issue a bit of a warning. I think that at least three of the last four speeches have been very much just at the edge of the bill. I know that we are sitting under urgency, and that gives a bit more latitude, but I am going to ask members now to focus more of their comments on the bill.

I rise to say a few words on the Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill. “What a shame.” is all I can say to your previous ruling, Mr Assistant Speaker. I was all ready to go. It was almost general debate time. But anyway—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I have had to warn other relatively new members recently that when a ruling has been made by the Chair, it is not something for members to comment on. The member must just move on with the debate. [Interruption] Order!

Is it not great to be part of such a participatory democracy, particularly up in Auckland? When this bill was first introduced and we were thinking about how likely it was for people to be involved in the submission process, I am sure none of us had any sense of the thousands of people who would become involved quite to the level that they have.

We have heard one or two good speeches thus far, particularly the previous speech by Mr Goff, who was so enthusiastic about this bill and the opportunity to make a difference. Was it not such a contrast to have the negativity and depression of the subsequent Labour speech? Will it not be incredible in a year’s time when he is the mayor and the Opposition spokesman comes in to talk about housing? How very depressing for you, “Your Worship”.

However, as Mr Goff mentioned, there have been many, many thousands of submissions already heard, and there are many, many thousands still to go. It makes sense, does it not, when we have an opportunity here to be able to consider a bill that allows those submissions to be heard in a way that gives them due opportunity to contribute. The last thing we would want is for those submitters to have the opportunity to impart their views about the future of Auckland—as expressed in the draft Auckland Unitary Plan—to be constrained in any way.

Of course, what we have here are three particular areas relating to the reduction in the quorum for the hearings sessions. That is very appropriate. There is to be an increase in the size of the panel, and, I think most important, the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel will be allowed to make recommendations as it completes a particular topic, as opposed to waiting until all of those topics that are included in the Auckland Unitary Plan are complete.

In many respects, the reason that we are having this conversation is that we are almost the victims of our own success. We had no sense that there would be such involvement by the Auckland people. They have become involved, and it is absolutely appropriate to give them this opportunity. That is what this bill enables, and that is why I support it at its first reading this evening.

I rise to take the first call for the Green Party on the Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill. I always find it quite useful, when we are looking an amendment bill, to go and look at what we are actually amending. This bill amends another local government Auckland Council bill that was introduced in 2013. At the time that it was introduced it was one of three different parts of the Resource Management Reform Bill 2013, which was split into three bills at its third reading and voted on separately.

At that time we had serious concerns that all three parts of that Resource Management Reform Bill were a serious attack on local democracy and, basically, eroded the protections of the Resource Management Act, making economic imperatives a primary consideration when consenting for land use and the like. I mean, it even removed protections on urban trees, for example. What that bill was really about was the usual Government approach of delivering legislation that makes life easier for its mates—in this case, essentially, developers—all under the guise of really trying to do something about the Auckland housing market, which, by the way, it failed to do.

The Government at that time was saying that if it sped up the resource consent process, then it would enable developers to get through the consenting process quicker and they would be able to build more houses faster, and it would be cheaper for the developers as well because they would not have to go through the notification process. But the thing was it did not fix that, because, essentially, what was happening was that about 90 percent of the consents that were going through Auckland were going through unnotified anyway. Essentially, that was not what it was about; it actually was just about degrading the Resource Management Act.

So, yes, the original Act was just another way to make life easier for developers. I cannot think of another reason for the constant meddling by this Government in the affairs of the Auckland Council. The original Act was about forcing the Auckland super-city to develop a unitary plan for the entire region, and the Government was putting huge pressure on the council at that time to change its focus away from a compact city to extending the metropolitan urban limits. And we have heard the précis from the member Phil Twyford about the spatial plan that had been occurring up until that point.

When the original bill, which we are amending tonight, came to this House we opposed it—not just because our vision for Auckland is for a livable city and for a more compact city with a mix of medium and high-density housing along public transport links, where walking and cycling are part of the transport options, not just roads, and where we have affordable homes, where we have a clean environment, clean water, a clean sea, where we have affordable housing, and where we have safe and thriving communities. That is our vision for a livable Auckland.

We opposed that bill because we did not think that the measures that the Government was taking were actually ever going to deliver that, but we also opposed that because we thought it was about taking yet another slice away from local democracy. The original bill said that the Auckland Council would have to deliver the Auckland Unitary Plan, the planning document for about the next 30 years, and that they would have to report back the recommendations to the council by, I think, September next year.

Essentially, what the bill did was it set out a 3-year programme to develop an incredibly complex planning document that will basically guide the future of the city for generations. Others have talked about it as well. It was about amalgamating the council plans from the previous seven councils, the regional policies, and regulations—so really, really complex.

We opposed the original bill because we saw that the council was having very little control over that process. We saw the Government’s interference in the democratic processes of the local authorities, removing the right of the council to determine who would be hearing the submissions on that planning process, and on being able to even decide whether they would be on those hearings themselves—whether there would be councillors on them. That right was removed from the councils. So instead of that, the Government—and by that I mean the Minister for the Environment and the Minister of Conservation—was the one that essentially decided who would be on those hearing panels.

We are concerned about the way that happens because it seems to be an ongoing theme from this Government. It does it all the time. The latest one today was the appointment of the former MP Tau Henare to the board of directors for the Housing New Zealand Corporation and today’s revelations as well about Paula Rebstock and her huge daily payment for reviewing the Child, Youth and Family Service—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! Sorry to interrupt the member, but I had warned members earlier that it would be good to focus on this bill. It would be good if the member did.

The point I am making is that I am surprised that the Government did not appoint either of those two to the hearings commission to be hearing commissioners. Never mind.

Anyway, so it is really not surprising that the bill we have got here tonight is designed to fast track the hearings process, as there are still around 5,000 submissions that are specifically site based with submitters who want to be heard. A previous speaker from that side of the House said that he was surprised by that number, but, actually, that is just an example of democracy in Auckland. Certainly, people who really, really care about what happens to zoning in their communities submit on these issues, and that is what creates the number of submissions.

So, once again, this bill gives the Ministers the power to appoint hearing commissioners to speed up the hearing process so that the panel can meet the deadline that the previous Act set for the recommendations to be reported back to the council, which is July next year. That is when they have to do it.

So much of the legislation that this Government has introduced over the last 7 years is really about fixing a bunch of mistakes or adjusting for unrealistic expectations to more reasonable requirements. We agree that we do need a unitary plan and that it is critical for Auckland’s development. We acknowledge that despite our misgivings and worry about the lack of democracy around appointing the hearings commissioners to the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel, they are doing a reasonable job.

But, for all that, we are still concerned about the inroads into local democracy in Auckland, the constant meddling, and the number of pieces of legislation that this Government has introduced to hobble Auckland Council for things as far as the introduction of council-controlled organisations, which have made a whole range of council assets and council facilities unaccountable to the local people—the people who are paying for them. We have got some strong misgivings about this bill. In order for us to remain consistent with our previous approach, we will be opposing it, because we think that it does not really do much for the democracy in Auckland.

This is a really interesting piece of legislation to come before the House. In fact, when I first started looking through to find out exactly what it was the Government was wanting to put through the House under urgency I was quite surprised that I had to go all the way down to item No. 15 on the Order Paper dated 11 November. I had to go all the way down to item No. 15, Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill. That led me to actually do what all MPs should do—that is, we go checking our reference material. I went on to the parliamentary website and, lo and behold, what should I find but a list of Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment bills, which added something to my confusion because clearly the legislation that this seeks to amend actually came through the House back in 2009, led through the House at that time by the Minister of Local Government who was Rodney Hide, in what was known as the famous Auckland super-city bill.

So, reading into it, it interested me that here we have another Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill, and on the back of something like five or six others. In fact, just going through it, the number of times that this Parliament has amended the Auckland super-city legislation since 2009, I do not know whether members of the House, even the members of the select committee, have taken time to have a look at it. We are talking about legislation that went through in 22 September 2009, amended 14 June 2010, 26 March 2015, 11 December 2012, 22 October 2013, 19 September 2011, 3 July 2015—it must have been a Statutes Amendment Bill, amendment bill No 3. Auckland Council bills 19 November 2015—that is the one we are looking at now I guess—11 December 2012, 3 September 2013, 14 June 2010, and then there has been a number of attempts to amend this legislation also through members’ bills. The one that I did pick up was Darien Fenton’s Local Government (Council-Controlled Organisations) Amendment Bill, which was defeated by the Government back in 2012.

What it tells me is that we seem to have here a well-established track record of fixing things that were not right, right from the get-go. In fact, if I recall in my time as the mayor sitting outside—in fact I was not the mayor in 2009, I was just “Joe Blow” ordinary citizen out there doing what I was doing; listening to the debates, reading the newspaper reports, watching the television news, and seeing the controversy around the 2009 legislation, and, if I am not mistaken, there were often heard criticisms about the speed and the level of consultation that the Government of the day was engaging in with the public, and the fact that the Government really was not interested in listening to what people had to say about their legislation. They just wanted to ram through a super-city piece of legislation and create the biggest super-city in the southern hemisphere or this part of the world, certainly in New Zealand anyway.

So here we are on the back of numerous Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment bills, once again in the House addressing another problem that has been identified. I have to say that this time it appears as though—and other speakers before me have already said the same—the Government has listened to the Auckland Council and the independent Māori statutory board, has taken advice from the chairperson of the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel, and is moving through legislation that is aimed at making the hearings process more expeditious, more flexible, and that it is able to get through what is clearly a massive workload required in producing the unitary plan for our nation’s largest city.

I guess New Zealand First has to put on the record that we never were big fans of an Auckland super-city. We prefer democracy being delivered at the grassroots level in a meaningful way, not all the rhetoric that the super-city would reduce rates; that super-cities would reduce the rate of increase of rates; that super-cities would be more efficient; that this super-city piece of legislation that we are now amending again was the end-all, be-all to fix all problems in Auckland; that we would see greater efficiencies; that everybody would be happy ever after living in the never-never land of Auckland because the National Government had generated a “super, super, duper, duper, whooper” city that everybody would simply love.

Here we are again, amending the legislation for the umpteenth time in order to make perfect something that was touted as being perfect in 2009, was clearly criticised by many people up and down the country as not being perfect, and, in fact, was criticised because it would create such a big monolith of machine that it would be slow, bound with inertia, and find it difficult to respond to the needs of the public. I guess that is what this very piece of legislation is all about: making that big monolith that is simply laden with inertia, slow and difficult to turn around like the Queen Mary in the ocean, into something more flexible so that they can actually get through the work that has been laid out.

No one underestimates the seriousness of the work that has to be done. No one underestimates the amount of work that has to be undertaken by the commissioners and the hearing panels. We see that they are reducing the quorum. I have to say that the idea of reducing a quorum from three members to two made me sit back a little. I am not used to having committees with quorums of two, but the fact that you are making it possible to have concurrent hearings run simultaneously does go some way to explaining that. At this stage we see no need to not support that.

We are looking at the increase in the possible number of appointed hearings panel members from seven to 10. Given the workload, it seems eminently sensible to us. Enabling the hearings panels to make recommendations on proposed changes in stages seems eminently sensible, rather than waiting until the final report, if one is trying to move the hearings along and meet the deadline and time line imposed by the perfect piece of legislation that was passed in 2009; which is clearly not perfect because, once again, the House is back here amending it. Clarifying that the hearings panels must hold hearings sessions concurrently and that an additional chairperson can be appointed seems sensible.

What also struck me was looking at—peeling through my notes—the departmental disclosure statement. I have done a quick thumb through that. It is all pretty standard. Clearly, the Hon Chris Finlayson has ticked it off with respect to the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. Well, no surprises in there; consistency with the Treaty of Waitangi obligations—no surprises in there. What I did find a little surprising is: “For the policy to be given effect by this Bill, is there analysis available on: (a) the size of the potential costs and benefits?”. Answer: “No.” Well, I am looking forward to hearing some explanations as to why that has not been provided by the Minister in the Committee stage. And: “(b) the potential for any group of persons to suffer a substantial unavoidable loss of income or wealth?”. Well, that would be interesting. The answer on that is a “no” as well. I would be interested in hearing why nothing has been provided to us in that respect.

Regulatory impacts—extent of impact analysis available: “Has any further impact analysis become available for any aspects of the policy to be given effect by this Bill?”. That is a “no”. Cost-benefit analysis—I think that is the one that really stuck out for me, because I would have thought, given the level of the rhetoric, the volume of that rhetoric back in 2009 when people justified the formation of a super-city for Auckland on the back of reducing costs, creating efficiencies, making it cheaper; as we go into yet another amendment of that Act I am surprised that this Government, which prides itself on being very prudent with the management of the books and fiscal understanding, has not been able to produce for the House a cost-benefit analysis on this piece of legislation and how it is going to improve for—

Sorry to interrupt the honourable member. His time has expired.

Tēnā koe e Te Mana Whakawā. In rising to speak on the Local Government Auckland (Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill I do want to thank members of the Opposition who have indicated that they will support the bill, in spite of some of the rhetoric we may have heard during their speeches—rhetoric that I can only assume is driven by the internecine machinations within their own parties.

This is a very simple measure. It reduces the quorum for hearings on the Auckland Unitary Plan from three members to two. This is not an alien concept to us; we are doing the very same thing on our Education and Science Committee in Parliament—something with which Opposition parties are fully engaging. A reduced quorum will allow us to get through hearings in our inquiry into special needs. So this is not a new theme.

Secondly, it will allow up to four concurrent hearing sessions. This is a very practical measure to allow the panels to get through the work. It increases the number of panel members from seven to 10, and it will allow the hearings to be reported back in stages as they complete pieces of work, rather than as an entire piece of work at the very end. This is a practical measure from a practical Government. I welcome support from the Opposition, and commend the bill to the House.

The next call is a split call. Jan Logie—5 minutes.

It is with some pleasure I think, although it is quite late and my brain is a little foggy and I do need to say to the people of Auckland to whom this bill is important that I apologise if I am not at my sharpest right at this moment, but another consequence of urgency—

💬 Phil Twyford: Come on, Jan. Spark it up.

—I know I should toughen up, toughen up—is that we are not necessarily at our sharpest and showing our best abilities at this time of night, after sitting in the House for 11 hours.

We are now about to discuss the Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill. I understand that since 2009 there have been 16—16—separate bills in this House dealing with Auckland local government. And this is the fourth Auckland transitional bill since just 2009. I think that is a bit of an indication of a problem, and it does seem—I mean, the idea has been expressed already in this House—that there is a bit of a battle going on between this Government and the local communities’ leaders. There is a battle for control of Auckland and for control of the vision for Auckland.

The Green Party, we have a vision for Auckland. You know, we have a vision for a vibrant, connected, compact city with medium high-density housing along public transport lines, where people know their neighbours, where they have the resources to be able to feed themselves, the air is fresh, the school is close and it is safe to get there, and the people know their local leaders, and that they can talk to them and tell them what they want from their local community. This is our vision. Inherent in that vision is our willingness to adapt to what we are told is needed by that local community. At the very, very heart of the Green Party vision is the belief in appropriate decision-making. Those people who are affected by decisions, who are closest to those decisions, should be the people who have control over those decisions. Yet we have had successive legislation coming through this House that erodes that principle.

💬 David Seymour: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. We are 3 or 4 minutes into a 5-minute call, and the member has not addressed the bill at all.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): No, I am the judge. This is the first reading of the bill, and it is a 5-minute call. I am listening to what the member is saying and I invite her to finish. She has 1 minute and 53 seconds to go.

The member considers my contribution to be tiresome. I guess that is his view of democracy and his depth of reading this bill. The detail of this bill is that—

💬 David Seymour: What’s in the bill?

It has quite a bit to do with democracy, you might be surprised to know, Mr Seymour. It reduces the quorum required for hearing sessions related to the unitary plan from three to two people. It allows for an increase in the number of Government-appointed Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel members, from seven to 10. Clearly, it is a demonstration of this Government extending its reach in terms of removing decision making and participatory representative decisions from communities and local Auckland people. It enables the panel to report back in stages, which is something we probably would not have a problem with, and it enables the hearings panels to hold concurrent sessions with a stand-in chairperson. Again, that is something that we probably would not have a problem with. It is about speeding up the process but in a way that would ensure people’s voices can be heard.

But the core principle here is around democracy and who has control over the vision of Auckland. This House is again considering under urgency—a process that removes democratic participation in the decision making in this House—a bill that puts extra, additional power in the hands of central government and takes it away from local government. That is inappropriate and we will not be supporting it.

I call David Seymour—5 minutes.

When the member who has just resumed her seat, Jan Logie, apologised for her state of mind I thought she was just being gracious, but as her speech proceeded, I realised she was actually being quite honest. I rise in support of this bill. It is somewhat regrettable to be here, discussing it so late at night, to make a number of technical changes to the dimensions—not to the process, not to the people involved, and not to the accountabilities, but to the dimensions of the hearings of objections to the Auckland Unitary Plan. It is a very small technical change that is being made to the legislation, and it is worth reflecting on quite why this small technical change to the dimensions of the process, not to the process itself, is actually required. The reason is that in order to meet the statutory requirements for a new plan we are going to have to change the balance between the demand for hearings from Aucklanders and a lot of people from the Epsom electorate who have hearings required under the Proposed Auckland Unitary Plan process on the one hand and, on the other hand, the supply of people to do the hearings and hear their objections.

The reason that there is this imbalance of supply and demand is ultimately that the plan that the Auckland Council has attempted to impose upon the people of Auckland is so at odds with the national growth of a city and with the preferences of Aucklanders for how their city will grow and develop. At the base of the problem is actually epistemology—the fatal conceit on the part of the planners that they know what the correct density of Auckland should be in 30 years’ time, how people should live, how they should work, and how they should travel, and that the planners are able to tell us what sort of housing we should have, and how our particular communities should grow, regardless of what our preferences for those communities might be.

This hearings process is an opportunity for the people of the Epsom electorate and the people of Auckland, more broadly, to be heard. The planning orthodoxy with which we are being confronted has been so out of whack with how the city should grow that we find ourselves here, late at night in the House, being heckled by simpletons, in order to increase the supply of hearing time to meet the demand from people who wish to object to this conceitful plan that would change the shape of our city if it were allowed to, strangling the supply of housing to Aucklanders, pushing up the price of housing, and leaving us in a situation where we have to be here late at night to right what is a simple technical matter.

I am here to support this bill because it allows the people of the Epsom electorate and the people of Auckland to have their say in this planning process. But it would be a far better world if we had a model of growth for cities where the planning profession were put back in their box, where they respected the desires of communities rather that conceitedly impose models of development upon them, where we had a situation where cities grew organically, based on the property rights and the expectations of people who are already in those cities, and where we did not have Byzantine rural/urban boundaries at the perimeter of the city, strangling the supply of housing to Auckland, and where the city could continue to expand and give people big backyards where big dreams could grow up.

Yet we are here in order to give the people of the Epsom electorate and the rest of Auckland the opportunity to have more time to contribute their views about how they would like their community to develop across Auckland City into the future. With that, I commend this bill to the House.

I rise to take a very short call on the Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill. The Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel stems from the principal Act—the Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Act 2010. Its role is to hear submissions on the unitary plan and then to make recommendations to the Auckland Council, as most of my colleagues have already discussed and spoken about in the House tonight.

This amendment bill, as many speakers have already spoken about tonight, makes four changes to the principal Act, which provides for the hearings panel—for some of the changes. The first one, as we have heard, is a reduction in the quorum from three to two members. Extra panel members are to be appointed. The bill clarifies that the panel may hold concurrent sessions and appoint alternate chairpersons, and it enables the panel to make recommendations to the Auckland Council by 22 June 2016.

This is a very important amendment bill for the people of Auckland and the Auckland Council. It is an opportunity for the people of Auckland to have their say, to go and put their submissions in, and maybe even—and I do not want to denigrate what the Greens said tonight about their “Kumbaya” type future and what Auckland may look like, with neighbours all loving each other and being this whole community-type thing, which I doubt will ever happen in Auckland. But anyway, it is an opportunity for the people of Auckland to come in and be able to submit their plan to the hearings panel.

As Mr Len Brown, the Mayor of Auckland, said, the unitary plan will be the rule book for the future of Auckland. That is what Mr Brown said, and I believe that that is what it is going to be. There are huge benefits, as I have said, for the people of Auckland. I have no hesitation in commending this bill to the House. Thank you.

Given that this is an Auckland issues bill, can I, firstly, with your indulgence, Mr Assistant Speaker, take this opportunity to acknowledge the death of Jonah Lomu and convey to his wife and extended family our condolences, and just acknowledge the fact that Jonah was a great friend of Pacific youth, particularly in South Auckland. He will be sorely missed by many, not just in New Zealand but throughout the world.

I now want to come to the Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill. Because we are amending the Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Act 2010, I want to just reflect on that for the sake of the House, and particularly for those who were not involved in the initial debates in 2010. Members may recall that when we debated the Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Bill in 2010 that debate included two other major and significant pieces of legislation arising from the Local Government (Auckland Law Reform) Bill: the Local Government (Tamaki Makaurau Reorganisation) Amendment Bill and the Local Government (Auckland Council) Amendment Bill. In fact, what happened was, I think, that the House concentrated on the two significant pieces of legislation, and we paid little attention to the Auckland transition legislation. It almost appears that a pattern has emerged where when this Government is intending to hide things, it will include it with other significant bills so that nobody pays attention. People may recall that when public consultation went out on that legislation, it was during the Christmas period and people did not have a lot of time to make submissions on it.

Today, I have to say, I think Aucklanders will be equally sad that, again, we are debating issues that affect them without the privilege or without the benefit of having their experience, their expertise, and, in fact, their criticism of what this Government is doing. I want to say that members on the Government side paint it as if they are doing Aucklanders a favour. They are saying that this bill will allow Aucklanders to have a say. Well, Aucklanders will have a say. What this bill is about is it is going to fix some mistakes that the Government has made, mistakes that it has failed to fix as a result of the pattern that it has created for itself of rushing through things when it does not want the general public to have a view or to share a view in terms of what the Government is doing. And, again, you may recall that during that whole Auckland super-city debate, Aucklanders were outraged at the way that this Government collapsed the whole process and was determined to corporatise that whole Auckland super-city, and that is what we have seen.

In fact, the 2010 Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Act enabled the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel to be appointed by the Minister for the Environment and the Minister of Conservation rather than what existed at that particular time where councils appointed hearings commissioners. If we had councils continuing to appoint hearings commissioners, we would not be in this situation now of again trying to fix the mistake that the Government made. The Government made those mistakes, and it is amazing that, despite the views of the people of Auckland, this Government continues to think that it is doing OK, that it is smart, and that it knows what it is doing. The reality is we have a unique select committee process and all legislation ought to go through that particular process because that gives us the benefit of enabling the public, enabling those with deep experiences, and enabling those with expertise in these particular matters to have their say and for us to have the benefit of that experience and of that knowledge. Sadly, again, this Government just does not seem to have learnt from its mistakes and that rushing things through will, inevitably, end up with mistakes being made.

Here is the mistake—and I want to point out what we are clarifying. We are clarifying that the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel can hold hearings sessions concurrently. And so here is the hearings panel, which has been holding hearings for the public since September this year, and this bill is now saying: “You can actually do that legally.” Here is another mistake the bill is fixing—it allows the hearings panel to appoint an additional chairperson who can chair concurrent hearings when the chairperson is not available because they are chairing the other concurrent hearing. I suspect that the panel is already doing that, and it would not have this mistake if the Government had not rushed through the original 2010 legislation determined to corporatise the whole Auckland region for the sake of trying to control those assets and had allowed the council to appoint the hearings commissioners. Here is another mistake that this bill is designed to fix. It will validate any hearings sessions that were held concurrently prior to this clarification—another mistake. It validates 28 February 2014 as the closing date for submissions on the unitary plan, and it validates that any submission received between 14 January 2014 and 28 February 2014 is acceptable, as if it had been received within the statutory time frame for submissions. Another important mistake that we are having to fix in this bill is the error in the drafting of the principal Act relating to procedural requirements for the filing of appeals on questions on law with the High Court.

I do not have any problems with appointing additional hearings panel members, because if we consider the work that they are having to undertake, they are having to consider over 9,000 submissions. I understand, based on what is on the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel website, those 9,000 submissions are raising around 100,000 points concerning possible changes to the plan. There is no doubt in my mind, and in the minds of many of my colleagues, that the unitary plan for Auckland city is an important plan, but we said, right at the outset, that it was flawed in many ways. It was flawed because although this Government would talk the rhetoric about the principal subsidiarity, in actual fact, after some years of experience of the Auckland Council now, we now know that the structure is designed exactly as we predicted in those earlier debates of 2010. The public will have difficulty being involved in the decision making, because this hearings panel is a professional hearings panel of people who are well versed in the areas of unitary planning—and so it is a professional panel. When this Government says that this will give the public the opportunity of a hearing, they already have those rights. This is predominantly about fixing the mistakes that this Government made in the original legislation.

I want to say that when we went through the 2010 debate many, many people in Auckland all said that the way that the Auckland super-city was structured with its independent council-controlled organisations would, ultimately, divide the community from fully participating in our democratic processes that we have become accustomed to and that we in New Zealand value. I would have hoped that this Government had learnt its lesson from the consistent mistakes it has made with the various amendments to the principal Acts of that period, but it has not. I think—and I hope—that Aucklanders listening to this particular debate will recognise once and for all that that super-city structure was not set up to allow more democracy; it was set up, predominantly, for this Government to control that city and control its direction and control its assets in the same way it now appoints the hearings panel. I am hopeful that come the next local body election in 2016, we can get some good people on that council who can stand up and tell this Government where to go.

Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare, e mihi atu ki a koe mō tēnei pō. Before I begin talking about the bill, I would also just like to acknowledge the short poroporoaki by Mr William Sio for a great Aucklander and a great New Zealander—Jonah Lomu. Kia ora. It has been interesting tonight listening to the debate on both sides of the House. When I got the “midnight shift”, as they call it, I thought it was going to be quite a drag, but it has actually been a shift of enlightenment, because I have heard, from both sides of the House, a really good overview of the passion that comes out of Auckland. I have heard a speech from a former mayor, a potential mayoral candidate, and a housing spokesperson, and I have also heard an excellent introductory speech on this bill from this side of the House.

This is just a short call on the Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill. To me, as the final speaker, this bill provides the flexibility that is needed, particularly around the recommendations that are proposed by the Auckland Unitary Plan and the council’s statutory deadline—and it is a deadline; it is 22 July 2016. The other thing is the components of the bill—the three main ones that actually deal with reducing the quorum and also with increasing the number of members from seven to 10, as we have heard so many times. Around the reporting factor of the bill, it will also enable that instead of doing one report, it can be done in stages. They are the major sorts of components.

Just to highlight the fact, though, that this bill represents a great opportunity to ensure that the country’s largest planning process remains on track and becomes operative as soon as possible. That is the real essence of the bill itself. When we talk about Auckland, it is not just about Aucklanders; it is actually about the whole of New Zealand, because of Auckland being our largest and most populous city. I appreciate being able to take this short call, and I commend the bill to the House. Kia ora.