Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill

I would like to take a brief call on this. This is traditionally where we do a summing up of what has happened in the Committee stage of the bill, but I do want to address the title specifically. The title of this legislation, of course, is the Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill, and it is about transition. It is about the transition of eight different councils into a single super-city and it is about the transition from 13 district and regional plans into a single unitary plan to cover resource management issues in Auckland.

Consistently through this bill, the Labour Party has supported this legislation. It has supported the legislation because we are very keen to get a single unitary plan. We also supported bringing that plan into existence in earlier legislation. What would normally have taken 10 years under the Resource Management Act will take 3 years under the principal Act that we are now amending. The way that that was achieved was by having the plan notified and then having an independent hearings panel hear submissions on it. Thousands of submissions have been heard—I think 9,000—and there are still 5,000 to go. The 5,000 to go are on site-specific issues. That is going to put real pressure on the independent hearings panel to get through by the statutorily required date of 22 July. So we have been here to support this legislation with measures in this bill such as reducing the quorum, increasing the pool of panel members from seven to 10, and allowing the panel to hear the issues concurrently.

So we have no problem with the purpose of the bill. What we have had during the Committee stage is a real problem with the process. Everybody knows that this bill was drafted back before 16 September. Minister Nick Smith had it. If this House had been properly managed it could have been introduced, it could have been read a first time, and it could have gone to a select committee so we could go through the normal democratic procedure of giving the public their say, cross-examining the officials on how the bill was put together, and asking the Parliamentary Counsel Office about whether the drafting of the bill was appropriate and accurate, and we would have got it right—we would have got it right.

The great irony of the last 7 or 8 hours—we started this at half past 10 last night and we went through to midnight—is that, again, we have been rushing this legislation through, and more errors will be made. We have not learnt the lesson of what half this legislation is about—the half that does not appear in the title was “Validation”. Validation, as you know, is correcting errors that were made in previous legislation and retrospectively legislating for what was done illegally to be now considered legal. We have had a whole lot of questions, genuine questions, for the Minister in the chair. The Ministers in the chair—none of them has been the Minister in charge of the bill—have taken two brief calls. We did not have an opportunity for the select committee to check out why things were being done in a particular way, and we have not had that opportunity in the Committee either. I deplore the fact that legislation we support has nevertheless been rushed through in the way it has been, unnecessarily. This legislation could have been introduced a couple of months ago. We could have done it properly. We could have had a better chance of making sure we got it right. We could have avoided what inevitably will be future validation legislation, which comes out of rushed legislation.

So, yes, we do support this bill. We do support the transition that is occurring in Auckland. We want a single, consistent unitary plan that will bring good resource management practices that will provide for sustainable development in the housing area and the industrial area, but we want to make sure that it is sustainable and will ensure that instead of the complexity and the fragmented nature of the current district and regional plans, we have one plan. What the Government has not explained at any point in the Committee is why it has rushed it through in this inappropriate manner and has not taken the time to answer the genuine questions that members of the Opposition had.

Likewise, I just want to take the opportunity, on behalf of New Zealand First, just to sum up and again affirm that we are supporting this bill. But I have to say that at this very point, given the way in which proceedings have played out, given the seriousness with which we have tried to address this bill and to raise genuine concerns, genuine questions, about what we see as gaps in the legislation that could have been easily tidied up to remove any degree of uncertainty—I guess, given the way that it has been dealt with here today, and the fact that we know that this bill was introduced in September, it could have actually been referred to a select committee.

We have a wonderful select committee, the Local Government and Environment Committee, very well chaired by Scott Simpson—a most collegial committee. I know for certain that if the bill had been put there, we would have got it through the process, allowed submissions, enabled a report to be produced, and offered up some suggested amendments to the Government, well in time to actually have this legislation enacted so that the Auckland Unitary Plan could progress in a more expeditious manner. We are always trying to be helpful where we can on matters where we actually agree. But, you know, this process could actually have put me in this position where I could recommend to my caucus that, like the Greens, we vote against it purely on the principle of the process that has been followed here over the last how many hours, which has been seriously disappointing.

I want to say that there is one area where we will move into the third reading with New Zealand First still seriously concerned about the question of the quorum. I predict this: just as this legislation has been back to the House 13 or 16 times for amendment since it was enacted in 2009—just as it has been amended 13 times, we predict that this will come back for the toilet stop clause. The toilet stop clause will be when people realise that having a quorum of two does not allow one to let a member of the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel leave the room without adjourning proceedings. We raised a number of serious issues around having a quorum of two, and we are saying that if we had kept the quorum at three, then we would have overcome those points that we have raised in the debate today.

So whether we come back to amend the quorum and put it back to three, or not, will remain to be seen. But we are predicting that it will create some questions in the hearings when you have submitters sitting there and you only have a quorum of two—only two members sitting there—and one has to leave the room. Does that mean that we are now accepting here, when this legislation goes through, that in Auckland City when those hearings panels are working they will call a halt to proceedings at that moment, at that time, to allow that member to go off and do whatever they may want to do?

Just a cautionary—we could have resolved that more easily. It would have been nice to do that, but here we go, moving to the third reading, and I guess will we not do it until the same legislation comes back for the 17th time, for its next amendment. It is quite sad, really.

Clause 1 agreed to.

Clause 2 agreed to.

Clause 3 agreed to.

Bill reported without amendment.

Report adopted.