Local Government Regulatory Systems Amendment Bill

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s good to come back to my speech.

Poorly designed and implemented regulatory arrangements could result in significant costs in terms of business productivity and profitability and the wealth of individuals and families. In the end, the country as a whole will suffer, because the country’s economic performance and well-being will be negatively affected.

New Zealand has a very large and complex regulatory sector, made up of 200 or so regulatory regimes. More than 10,000 people work in regulatory roles, so it is a very complex regime. The local government legislative framework that we are dealing with now is also a very complex arrangement of multiple Acts and these Acts are amended from time to time, and sometimes we do not get everything right. Sometimes those changes in various Acts can be inconsistent. It is therefore necessary for us to come back and rectify these errors.

This bill is also a direct response to the New Zealand Productivity Commission’s 2014 report on regulatory institutions and practices. This report has noted some major issues that we need to pay attention to. For example, two-thirds of regulator chief executives reported they had to work with legislation that is outdated or not fit for purpose. Only 10 percent of the businesses surveyed believed that regulatory requirements in New Zealand were rarely or never contradictory or incompatible with each other. The report also notes that it can be difficult to find time on the parliamentary calendar for repairs and maintenance of existing legislation. As a result, regulatory agencies often have to work with legislation that is out of date or not fit for purpose.

Now, the changes in this bill are minor. Nevertheless, they help to improve and maintain the effectiveness and efficiency of our legislative regime or regulatory system. For instance, this bill will reduce local governments’ filing compliance costs. According to law, local governments are required to file some documents with some Government agencies. While this is a very good public service, it can incur costs. This bill will require local governments to file certain documents online—to make these documents online—instead of filing these documents in hard copy with Government agencies, because these documents have low value as notifications. They are mainly for public record and for public accessibility. So by requiring these local governments to make these documents available on the website instead of them filing them with Government agencies, this will reduce the cost and also will make accessibility even better.

So this is a good bill. I commend it to the House. Thank you.

Kia ora, Mr Speaker. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou, kia ora. I rise to take a very brief call in support of this legislation. It’s an omnibus bill. I understand the genesis was the 2014 Productivity Commission report into local government, essentially modernising, streamlining, reducing costs and inefficiencies in the local government space.

One area in particular I’m going to be following up in detail in the select committee is the changes to the Dog Control Act 1996. Here, they’re going to replace the definition of a “disability assist dog” and align the notification requirements of local authorities. It’s something I’ve heard from animal welfare groups and advocates—that we do need to improve the status and the public visibility of disability assist dogs. Most commonly, people are aware of guide dogs and vision-impaired dogs, but as we’ve seen, particularly in the US, a number of other assistant functions of dogs have been recognised in US law—most notably, I think, in California, where dogs are allowed on public transport, they’re used to assist in reducing anxiety, mental health issues.

It’s becoming more and more common in New Zealand, but without a common identifier, we have seen conflicts overseas where people have tried to bring a dog into a business, and have been removed, and we’ve seen legal challenges as a result. I think we’re going to see more of these cases in New Zealand. So the idea of a common regulatory function and a common visibility function for disability assist dogs, potentially in a wider context, will be a very interesting issue to raise in the select committee.

The Government recently held an animal welfare hui where a number of dog, cat, and companion animal groups sent a very clear message to the Government. There are a number of issues in terms of the Dog Control Act which also need modernising in terms of potentially looking at the regulation of breeding: how dogs are bred, and the conditions in which they’re bred. We’re seeing the rise of dog sales on TradeMe and other online platforms where, perhaps, the animal welfare standards aren’t as high as many Kiwis would expect.

So there are still a number of issues with dogs and companion animals in New Zealand that the local government legislation deals with. We very much support modernising it to make sure those animals get a fair go. Where they’re used as companion animals for disability assistance, we want to make sure that there’s a good, modern, robust regime. So look, we support this very common-sense, reasonable omnibus bill. We’ll be looking at this area in particular, amongst the various issues raised.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, and I apologise for not waking up early enough this morning. Ha! The Speaker will know what I’m talking about.

💬 SPEAKER: I do. And I don’t want any inference taken from it.

Ha, ha! Exactly. Thank you. I’ll just make a brief contribution to the Local Government Regulatory Systems Amendment Bill. It’s a pleasure for me to do that, and of course, I was a former participant in local government for a number of years before I came to this great place, and I can understand the frustrations of many in the sector as they go through a process of, I guess, local government and governance and then find that there’s regulations that are either outdated or are difficult to interpret that cause trouble.

Of course, in this House in the last few years, we’ve had a number of occasions where we’ve had to go back and amend legislation to enable rates and things like that to be set because the regulation that governs those things has not been adhered to by local government, and often—well, I wouldn’t say in those cases, but often—it’s not the fault of local government, because some of the regulations that we expect local government to deal with are quite difficult. They’re outdated and there are some quite interesting examples of them, actually.

I just want to talk about—going back to the Local Government Act of 1974, there’s an alteration to that that deals with the requirements around designating a road as a pedestrian mall. So if you go back to 1974, it’s unlikely there were many pedestrian malls. Manners Mall might have been there, but there wouldn’t have been many pedestrian malls in New Zealand at that time. So at that time, those sorts of regulations weren’t thought of. So it’s really quite interesting that things get put in legislation and then, a number of years later, they’re clearly outdated.

Also, in the clauses of this bill there’ll be some changes to the Rates Rebate Act. That relates directly to provisions around the eligibility of residential villages and things like that, which again, in those days, weren’t thought of, basically. So a lot of these things get outdated quite quickly and we’ve got to readjust them and bring them up to date.

The other thing that really interests me was that Gareth Hughes talked about something that I was actually going to talk about—he’s almost taken the very words out of my mouth—because I think the dog issue is really interesting because there’s a much greater use of all sorts of animals for companionship. As our population ages, there’s going to be a much greater desire for older people—and I’m one of them—to take our dog round the park, and, of course, a lot of councils have regulations that prohibit dogs from going into public places, and—when you think about our history—with good reason. I fully support the issue that Gareth Hughes raised because I think it’s going to be very important in our future, and I think you could stretch that as far as looking at residential homes and council-owned housing and things like that, where companion animals of one kind or another will be necessary. So I think we’re going to see some changes in that sort of regulation too, and this is just the start of that.

I want to make a couple of other comments about local government in my brief contribution, because these changes won’t really make any difference to our rates or the cost of local government. One of the real challenges I think we’re facing as a country is how we manage costs of local government—costs of all sorts of government—and the impact that those sorts of standing charges have on people with fixed incomes. Again, as our population ages, that cost is going to increase significantly. So we’re going to have to look at alternative forms of funding for all sorts of things, and local government’s one of them.

I think if you look at the fact the Minister of Local Government’s got an inquiry into local government funding at the moment—I’ve seen two of them in my time in public life. Both of them produced quite comprehensive reports and were taken no notice of at all by this place. I hope this latest one is taken some notice of, and I hope it comes up with something that will serve the purposes of local government in a good manner.

The last thing I just want to say in the short contribution—I might just say a couple more things, but the last thing I want to say in this short contribution I was going to make is that every three years we elect people to local government throughout New Zealand, probably almost thousands of them. These people go into local government to make their communities a better place to live, and we’ve got to give them the tools that enable them to do that. In some cases—I think if you look at district councils and city councils—that’s relatively a people-related issue. But if you look at our regional councils, our health boards, and things like that, they’re much more complicated issues than we face in the course of local government dealing with people, and so some different skills are required. But I do think we need to give our councils the tools to enable them to get on with life and, once elected, to get a little bit of pleasure out of the little bit of work they do to assist their communities.

I think that that’s pretty much all I want to say, but I do think that the review of these regulations is really important and adds a great deal of value to what we do as a country, and, hopefully, it will make life simpler for the participants in local government throughout New Zealand. I’ve got a great deal of pleasure in commending this bill to the House, and, like Gareth Hughes, I look forward to the discussions we might have on dogs in the select committee. Thank you.

I understand this is a split call. You have five minutes—Jamie Strange.

Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker. It’s a delight to stand and talk on the Local Government Regulatory Systems Amendment Bill. I’d like to acknowledge the Hon Nanaia Mahuta, who’s brought this bill to the House. She’s doing an excellent job in her portfolio, engaging with local government.

I’d like to begin by talking about the importance of collaboration between central and local government. As someone who used to work at the Gisborne District Council for four years, I understand some of the systems that take place in terms of local government. When we have local government and central government working together, it really is—I was going to say it’s a beautiful thing, but it’s certainly a very practical thing, and it may be beautiful as well.

This is fairly standard sort of legislation here, simply updating some of the key aspects around the Local Government Act. This is simply an example of a strong, stable Government getting on with the job of governing. Some parties enjoy a bit more of a shock jock style—you know, whatever they do with their time—but this Government here, we’re not into any sort of shock jock stuff. We just get on with governing, and that is, basically, simply what we’re doing.

It’s really making this legislation fit for purpose—fit for purpose—and there are a few key areas that it focuses on. The first one I’d like to talk about—and the previous two speakers, Gareth Hughes and Ian McKelvie, mentioned it as well—is the aspect around dog control. Now, as I said, as someone who’s worked in local government, I’ve always had a high level of respect for those staff members who work in the area of dog control. It’s been said that all politics is local, and certainly local government, you know, out-works a lot of this stuff.

Actually, the Baha Men once sang “Who Let the Dogs Out?”. Some might say that relates to politicians, but I’m sure it doesn’t. I’m sure they were thinking of something different there. But look, dog control officers are just an example of some wonderful people who are working to make our community function well, and they need support in terms of updating legislation. This specific aspect is around the disability assist dogs. I’m delighted that the Minister has taken this into account in terms of the Productivity Commission’s July 2014 report and, hence, made these changes.

Another aspect I’d like to touch on is the Local Electoral Act 2001. The purpose of the changes here are “to empower councils to improve representative and substantial participation in local elections, and to clarify when a successful candidate in a by-election may come into office.” We’ve certainly heard quite a few times in this House that we need more participation in local body elections, and I acknowledge members on both sides of the House who have been councillors before. The fact is that we’re generally around the 30 percent mark for most local body elections. In a by-election recently, we got down below 10 percent—for a by-election. This is something that certainly is a problem, because we’ve got people who aren’t engaged in our electoral system.

I’m very pleased that the wording of the explanatory note of this legislation says, “to empower councils to improve representative and substantial participation”. So councils may look at electronic means, and I know the Hamilton City Council have had discussions around this. This is just one example of what they might do, but this bill broadens it so that the councils are empowered to do it the way they want.

So, just to summarise, this is just an example of a Government getting on with the business of governing, and updating legislation accordingly. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker. I’m happy to take this particular call on the first reading of the Local Government Regulatory Systems Amendment Bill. Other speakers before me have covered several topics that this bill covers, but I’ll just highlight two very brief aspects of the bill. It clarifies when a successful candidate—as Jamie Strange just pointed out—in a council by-election may come into office. I hear the words “successful by-election candidate” and can’t resist giving a mention to our colleague Dan Bidois and his successful by-election result. It’s not council, but it’s certainly a successful by-election result. Good one, Dan. The bill also makes a number of changes to the Local Government Act and to the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act, the primary of which is inserting a definition for “Internet site”—just a couple of the changes there that we’re looking at in the late afternoon here in the House.

Now, in general, these changes seem to be focusing on trying to lift participation in local elections—that’s a good thing—and improving public access to council information—another good thing—and, of course, the internet is the key tool that the omnibus bill is focusing on. So they’re small and they’re uncontroversial changes, and the intention of the bill is one that we can support and, in fact, it is one that we are supporting.

I do want to draw attention, however, to the regulatory impact statement prepared for the bill by the Department of Internal Affairs. It states, “The frequency of occurrence for all issues is believed to be low and the impact for most is low.” In the next paragraph, it goes on: “Data does not exist on frequency or scale of actual incidents or lost opportunities arising from the identified issues. Collecting this data would require a disproportionate amount of time and resources, relative to the minor nature of the issues.” So what they’re essentially saying there in the impact statement is that the issues that this bill is addressing are not worth the time to report on, but also that they’re actually not really issues.

Now, I don’t want to be negative, and as I said, these are simple and smart changes that we are supporting, and every so often is it not right that we need to do just a bit of housekeeping on bills here in the House? This is not a bill that’s trying to solve all the problems in local government. The purpose is to clarify vague parts of existing legislation and to make sure that local government uses an important tool when making public announcements. These are good things. I just hope, though, that this is not the highlight of the Government’s programme of reform for local government. There are some significant issues that need resolving: three waters, funding tools, and, of course, there’s just that little aspect of fixing up something in the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act, which I have a member’s bill on—it just so happens. To do that; it’s around getting transparency and accountability and not withholding any information. So those are just some very, very fundamentally important aspects in local government that do need to be addressed.

We’re supporting this bill, but I hope that the Minister recognises the importance of some other massive streams of work that need to take place. Thank you. We support this first reading.

Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker. Let’s not pretend that this is the most exciting bill that’s come before this House, and it might even win a competition for being the most boring. But, you know, I love it for that—

💬 Simeon Brown: This is Parliament. Don’t play down the seriousness of this place.

—because these bills are really, really important. As Mr Simeon Brown, who’s yapping away over there, which is quite apposite for this bill, would well know from the Regulations Review Committee—he blinks and blinks there as he looks at the page in front of him—detail is important. The people who have to work with this legislation absolutely need to have workable legislation. This isn’t—

💬 Simeon Brown: Name one thing the bill does. Tell us your favourite clause.

This bill does five great things. Not only does it improve electoral systems in the Local Government Act—

💬 Simeon Brown: How?

—by enabling—Mr Simeon Brown, you’re going to bite off a bit more than you can chew very soon, yap, yapping off there in the corner. It does it, Mr Brown, by allowing electoral officers to expand the way in which they recruit electors so that marginalised communities can be better approached to engage in the electoral process. But you know what? It’s really important—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Order! Order! The use of “you”—

Sorry, Madam Assistant Speaker. It is important that one has these important reviews of detailed legislation.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Order! Members, can we just have a little bit of order. I’d like to hear the speech, thank you.

Sorry, those newer members are a bit excitable on the backbench of the other side. I can entirely understand as it’s late on a Thursday.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Not helpful, Dr Webb.

I’ll try to be helpful from here on in. My real point was this: that these kinds of technical reviews are an important part of the legislative process. I commend the Minister for taking the time, essentially, to do a clean-up, to make sure that there’s a whole lot of what appear to be minor things out there—officials who have to work with this kind of legislation desperately need to know things like what “a working day” means for when a notice of appeal comes into a local government. We may think it’s trivial, but for the person who’s wanting advice on when to put that notice of appeal in, it can be a very, very important thing indeed. And, indeed, the definition of what an assisting animal or dog is—that’s very important for exactly these kinds of things.

So I’m not going to spend a lot of time in this House talking about it, but I do absolutely commend the work that the Minister has done here to make sure that the job of officials in local government is made easier, more effective, more productive, and more efficient. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker. Well, that’s a very hard act to follow—not. So we have before us today a very simple omnibus bill. It does create some minor changes to the Acts that local government works with. It’s simply just keeping up to date and ensuring that the Acts that local government work under are easy to work under and are, of course, fit for purpose. We’ve heard some great examples today of where the Local Government Act and the various Acts that they work under probably do let us down in this modern day and age.

Over time, there are various tweaks made to all sorts of Acts, and that creates an inconsistency, sometimes, between the Acts—that they’re all working together. But, actually, working on the coalface of this legislation, it does create a bit of complexity, and this bill simply aims to tidy up some of that complexity. It is actually in response to the Productivity Commission’s report of 2014. They did mention the challenges of time and the political constraints in getting legislation through the parliamentary process. So this omnibus bill is just a collection of some of those recommendations that came out of that Productivity Commission report, and we’re tidying it up, starting from today.

There may have been some delays in getting the legislation into the Parliament, but it seems that this hasn’t been the case in the last year. In fact, in the nine years before that, it was difficult because there was so much legislation before the House. But there seems to be a gaping hole in the workload now, and so I just say thank goodness that the National-led Government left so much work piled up that it’s filling the gap in the workload of this House.

The omnibus bill makes changes to the Local Electoral Act 2001, the Local Government Act 1974, the Local Government Act 2002, the Local Government (Rating) Act 2002, the Rates Rebate Act 1973, and the Dog Control Act 1996. It also makes changes to the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act 1987, which we all know as LGOIMA. But I do note in the drafting of the bill that even though we are attempting to become more modern and use electronic means, there’s no mention in this amendment to LGOIMA of using electronic means for holding meetings, and I do hope that the select committee turns its mind to that.

I have a particular interest in this from my time in local government, when if you needed to call a council meeting together and you needed a quorum, some of the people available actually lived four hours’ drive away. For them to come to the council meeting to rubber-stamp, say, the adoption of an annual plan or an annual report, a four-hour drive or a 4½-hour drive each way seemed a nonsense when we could have perhaps Skyped and used electronics.

In my experience in local government, there were always two areas that you didn’t ever want to mess with without raising the hackles of the ratepayers, and they were libraries and dogs. I always remember the largest turnout of submitters to an annual plan would be if we ever threatened to make any changes to the fees for library books. In the end, we decided that, actually, we’d make it free, and that did away with that problem.

It is good to see some changes being made to the Dog Control Act, and we’ve heard from Gareth Hughes earlier today about some of those changes. But I do recall another issue that came up in local government, which was raised around search and rescue dogs, and whether they should have some special mention in the Dog Control Act. So perhaps the select committee may turn its mind to that in its deliberations. The changes to the Dog Control Act include a schedule. That schedule is amended by Order in Council by the Governor-General so that that list can be adapted as is seen fit.

Also mentioned by my colleague across the House before was around the—

💬 Simeon Brown: The only sensible point he made.

Well, it was a sensible point—thank you, Mr Brown. It was around the Local Government Act 2002. It does mention—and I know this from working with the team at council—whether something was submitted on a day and it had “a month” ahead. So was that a calendar month? Was it four weeks? In different Acts, they refer to the different terms, so in some Acts—under the Resource Management Act it will be “1 month”. Is that a calendar month? Is it four weeks? I think we still have room to build some more consistency around the language that is used.

It’s good to see them putting these definitions around some of the working days, as well, and actually spelling out the exclusions of working days, and they are mostly our public holidays and also the Christmas break period. I still believe that there are some tweaks that could be made, and I do hope that the select committee will turn its mind to those. We do need our regulatory systems to be flexible and we do need them to keep pace, which is very common-sense, but we also need them to keep up with the technology—hence my point about LGOIMA—and with the expectations of our communities, and our communities do expect now to be able to access council information and council notices via electronic means, as well.

So these changes are minor, as we have said. They do bring about the modifications that are needed to tidy up the Acts within this bill. I look forward to the bill making its way through this Parliament, and I commend it to the House. Thank you.

Kia ora, Madam Assistant Speaker. I’m pleased to round off the debate on the first reading of this Local Government Regulatory Systems Amendment Bill, and I agree with my good colleague Dr Duncan Webb that this is an exciting piece of legislation! At times, there are different types of legislation that we have to put through this House, but, as the Minister Nanaia Mahuta said in her first reading speech, this is more about repairs and maintenance so that we can get the odd jobs done as parliamentarians. This is about the closest we’ll get to it, but no doubt there will be some substantive heavy lifting that we will be doing later on as well, as we put through our agenda as a coalition Government.

As has been covered quite fully in this debate, we are tweaking and making minor technical amendments to a range of Acts which control or regulate local government in New Zealand. As we know, local government is very important. I for one know that in my vast electorate, I’ve got pretty much just about every type of local government that there is, except for a super-city. But there is—

💬 Dr Duncan Webb: Christchurch.

Oh well, Christchurch comes close—it is super.

It’s important that we do make these technical amendments which come around periodically, and I do commend the Productivity Commission for laying the groundwork for us to put through these amendments in this bill.

I just want to quickly touch on a couple of matters. I think this type of legislation is very important, because we know what happens when local authorities get things wrong. We’ve had numerous occasions in my time in this House when we’ve had to do fix-up legislation—retrospective legislation—when councils have not adhered to procedural matters properly, or whatever obligations or requirements that they have which haven’t been adhered to. It is left up to us as a Parliament to correct those errors. So it is important that the legislation which governs our local authorities is very clear, is up to date, is modern, and is able to assist in the work of local authorities.

Secondly, I also want to touch on what stuck out for me in this bill, which was local authority elections. Make no mistake, local authority elections are very, very complex, whether it’s just the enrolment side of things, whether it’s the voting system, or whether it’s just the eligibility. So there is a whole host of complexity, and when you apply that, overlay that across rural, provincial, city, unitary type—the whole range of different entities that we have in the local government sector—it is very important that that emphasis is given to electoral officers to have the mandate to ensure that there is wider participation and engagement in electoral processes, because, as we have heard from earlier speeches, the turnout in local body elections is actually woeful.

So we do want to adopt more modern technology and processes, and I’m sure this is an evolving space, but we’re making good progress with the changes that we are making in this bill, and I’m sure others may emerge at the committee stage. But, for now, I commend this bill to the House.

Bill read a first time.

Bill referred to the Governance and Administration Committee.