Local Government Regulatory Systems Amendment Bill

Thank you very much, Madam Deputy Speaker. It’s a great privilege to resume my call on the Local Government Regulatory Systems Amendment Bill. We were last debating or discussing this bill on Thursday night last week, so it’s great to be able to pick up and talk about all the good things that this bill will deliver for local government and for New Zealanders. I’d like to also acknowledge the excellent contribution of my colleague Jamie Strange, who spoke to the points last Thursday and made such a strong contribution to how dog parks and various other aspects of this bill will enhance participation of New Zealanders to be able to engage with their local government.

As part of the Governance and Administration Committee, that heard this bill, we received and considered 18 submissions on the bill, and it was great to be able to hear from different interest groups. Two key local government sector groups, Local Government New Zealand and the Society of Local Government Managers, submitted in support of the bill, and it’s good to see that we’ve had that engagement so far. One of the key areas that this bill goes towards changing is, interestingly, around how public notices are notified to the public, and as we’ve seen a big change away from print media and on to online, this bill will enable public notices to be notified in a way that people will engage online as well as hard copy if they wish to. So it’s good.

As this omnibus bill tidies up a range of different areas, one of the ones that I’ll just pick up on that I particularly like that the committee made a slight change to, but has strengthened it, I believe, is that the bill seeks to really look at increasing diversity in local government, and that’s good to see. It encourages participation in a wider sense, because what we do see, sometimes, is declining rates in some areas of New Zealand of people voting in their local government elections. With some of the remuneration of those key roles, we also see people struggling to be able to actually earn a salary and pay their weekly expenses. There is an increasing number of New Zealanders who have retired who have taken up that role, because it is only those who tend to be able to afford to live on that salary. So that’s a point that we need to be looking at for local government, to make sure we encourage young people and people from a range of different ethnicities and backgrounds and experiences to be able to represent New Zealanders at that level.

The amendment to the Local Electoral Act introduces a new duty to facilitate and foster representative and substantial electoral participation. The committee has made the change that—we recommended that this duty be placed with a chief executive officer, rather than the electoral officers. The chief executives, we considered, would be well-placed facilitating and fostering electoral participation and that that would be reflected throughout their organisations and in their approach to how they’re going about planning their elections. The current low level of participation in local elections means that the membership of councils is often less diverse than the communities they serve, and it would be great to see that change over time. The committee recognised there was some overlap between matters raised in the submissions on the bill and the Justice Committee’s inquiry into the 2017 general election and the 2016 local elections.

The one other point I’ll touch on before finishing is that the bill looks at really aligning a range of terms, and it removes the ambiguity from the local government regulatory system. There are various provisions in the bill where we want to make sure that the same language is used across other pieces of legislation in order to avoid confusion, and one example of this is the standardisation of the definition of “working day” across local government legislation. This will clarify the time allowed for statutory processes and will reduce the complexity of these processes for local authorities.

While we’re talking about the working day and local government, can I commend the Hutt City Council for agreeing to pay people the living wage in terms of their working day. It’s been great to see that happen—big supporter of the living wage all around. So congratulations, Hutt City Council, for achieving that over a long period of time. Thank you very much for the opportunity to add to this, and I commend this excellent bill to the House.

Bill read a second time.