Local Government (Community Well-being) Amendment Bill

This is a split call.

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for the opportunity tonight to speak on the Local Government (Community Well-being) Amendment Bill in its third reading. It is a third reading, and it is my first opportunity to speak on this bill. I do understand it went to the Governance and Administration Committee, where it would have been shepherded through under my good friend Mr Brett Hudson, who’s a very good and able chairman.

I do want to turn to a couple of the provisions of the bill, but the first one is the primary focus, I guess, which is “to promote the social, economic, environmental, and cultural well-being of communities”, and the concern that we have on this side of the House is what does that mean in terms of cost and in terms of increased rates. I would like to turn initially just to the very, very good submission that was put in by Federated Farmers, who are one of the few organisations who do work across New Zealand, across every territorial authority, and across every regional council, certainly in terms of the organisations who submitted. So I do think they have a very important perspective, and this is what they had to say. Their recommendation, which is in paragraph 3.8, says, “Federated Farmers recommends that the Bill should not proceed and it should be reconsidered after the Productivity Commission’s upcoming inquiry into local government funding has been completed and its findings and recommendations considered by the government.”

I think that’s actually a very worthy thing that the select committee and, certainly, this Parliament should consider, because, as I understand it, the Productivity Commission’s submissions closed back in February—so, quite recently—and, in fact, they’ll be reporting back in about November. So it’s not very far away at all for Government and, indeed, this Parliament to wait and look at their findings and say, “Right, we need to take those on board and actually incorporate those into this legislation or, indeed, scrap this legislation and come up with something quite new.”

I did suggest this was going to be a brief call, but before I finish, I do just want to cover off a couple of comments that were raised previously when this bill was debated last week. The first one of those is that I enjoyed the contribution by Ms Chlöe Swarbrick, as I often do, but in her contribution, she said that what National was saying was that it is untrue that there would be increases in rates as a result of this bill. Well, Ms Swarbrick, I just want to point you to the contribution of your colleague Mr Paul Eagle, who, a couple of speeches before you, actually said that when this bill passes, “I know that councils will unleash a range of things”. So—to end—my question to Ms Swarbrick is: how does she think those things will be paid for? Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. There’s a wonderful project in my community. It’s a project run by an organisation called Te Whāngai Trust. They are an organisation who, some 20 years ago, identified the problem of young people who had fallen out of education, work, and training and who had got into a cycle, potentially, of drug or alcohol offending, had entered into criminal activity, and were falling out of the system. So what the good people at Te Whāngai Trust decided to do was to establish a native nursery to bring in these young people, to nurture them, to support them, to teach them, to mentor them, and to not stop doing that until they had helped to transition these young people into sustainable employment to get them on to their feet as young people who can be proud of themselves and make a contribution and sustain themselves and do something good for their community.

This trust has a native nursery that they have set up in my electorate, in the community of Wesley, in partnership with the Puketāpapa Local Board—the local governance unit in my community—and in partnership facilitated by the board with a range of other community organisations. Te Whāngai Trust at that site now brings in young people from our community who need this support. They provide that support and they also provide, now, native trees for local environmental projects, and that cycle of work is exactly what this bill is about. It’s about recognising that local government at its best, when it really understands local communities, is the best-placed layer of government to work with them and deliver the outcomes that our communities need.

There you have a project that delivers social, economic, environmental, and cultural well-being outcomes. It is exactly the kind of thing that is good for our communities, that our communities want to be delivered, and that local government is better equipped to deliver, I would argue, than central government. This bill, in restoring the core competencies of local government to deliver those well-beings, is actually, I think, just confirming what most people in New Zealand believe the job of their local government is to deliver.

What is the institution of a library in a local community if it is not about the social and the cultural well-being of our communities? What is a local business association supported by local government if it is not about the economic well-being of our communities? What is a tree-planting project or an environmental stream restoration run by local government if it is not about the environmental well-being of our communities? Yet we have members on the other side of this Chamber seriously attempting to contend that those activities should somehow be beyond the stated remit of local government. That’s what they’re contending when they say that those well-being outcomes shouldn’t be identified as the core competencies—

💬 Maureen Pugh: No, we’re not.

—of local government. Well, if those members are not imputing that, as the member says, then it’s difficult to see what sustains the arguments that they are putting forward when they’re saying that these well-being outcomes should not be defined in the legislation that sets out the remit of local government in this country.

The reality is that local government in New Zealand is, in fact, more constrained even under this legislation than local government in virtually any other country that we compare ourselves to. That’s the reality on any measure, and, in fact, some of the submitters whom members on the other side of the House have quoted are submitters who, in fact, in other forums argue that local government should have more powers delegated to it.

Now, that’s not what we’re arguing here, but we are arguing that the core competencies that most New Zealanders expect to be delivered by local government should actually be reflected in the legislation, and let’s address head-on this argument which keeps coming up about rates. This was disabused in the second reading, when, with about five seconds of a Google search, the Taxpayers’ Union very helpfully informed me that under the previous legislative regime set in place in 2012 by those members currently in Opposition, rates increased at four times the rate of inflation. So the legs that the Opposition has to argue on this point are very stumpy indeed.

The reality is that local government is always under enormous pressure in the space of rates. The pressure comes because of years of underfunding because of its significant infrastructure needs, and I think it behoves those of us in central government—who should think of our local government colleagues as colleagues and not just whipping boys—to address those issues instead of making spurious arguments around the well-beings that have always been a part of local government in New Zealand, and will continue to be. I commend the bill to the House. Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

Thank you very much, Madam Deputy Speaker. It’s my pleasure, tonight, to stand up and speak against the Local Government (Community Well-being) Amendment Bill in its third reading.

I think Mr Wood has just given us a perfectly good example of why we don’t need this legislation. The reality is that he’s talked about all of the social projects, he’s talked about the trusts that were set up in his patch, and he’s talked about libraries. Well, actually, libraries have been around for a terribly long time, and they didn’t need four well-beings in the Local Government Act to put them there, because local government can simply do whatever its community asks it to do and is prepared to pay for. So, putting them in legislation simply adds a huge bureaucratic level—

💬 Michael Wood: How?

—into the reporting and assessment of local government. I can speak from experience, Mr Wood, because I was involved when the four well-beings were actually put into the Local Government Act. The reality is that every single activity of council has to be assessed against every one of those well-beings, and in order to do that—in order to have that assessment—you’ve got to consult with your community to see how they feel that you have performed against those assessments in the four well-beings.

So we have this huge compliance layer that is added to local government, and the reporting that needs to be done gets added into the audit process. Now, we all know what happens when you have Audit New Zealand come in to order your local government accounts and your activities—what happens is that Audit New Zealand comes along and then assesses again how well you’ve performed against those well-beings. There, Mr Wood, comes the cost. And where does that cost lay? Of course it lays with the ratepayers; there is no other way it can be paid for. So why would we want to layer yet another level of cost onto the ratepayers for absolutely no benefit? The things that happen in local government can happen with or without this legislation.

The only reason that I can think of that this Government would want to add these well-beings in is because it is divesting responsibility for those social outcomes back to local government, when it is the domain of central government to take care of. For that reason, I oppose this bill.

E Te Māngai o Te Whare, tēnā koe. Ngā mema o Te Whare nei, tēnā tātou katoa. Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for calling me. It’s been a busy day for all of us. During the dinner break, I was fortunate enough to host the Wairoa District Council in the Grand Hall. So I think there’s some relevance around empowering local councils, and we had one in our midst today. So I’m really fortunate to take a call in support of the Local Government (Community Well-being) Amendment Bill, and to remind us all that there are three main goals of this particular bill.

The first one talks about restoring the purpose of local government “to promote the social, economic, environmental, and cultural well-being of communities.” The second part is “to restore the territorial authorities’ power to collect development contributions for any public amenities needed as a consequence of development” and from the reserves from non-residential development. Thirdly, to get the technical clarification around development contribution powers in so far as the New Zealand Transport Agency is in mind. So those are the goals.

One thing that I do want to talk about, and that makes us distinctly different on this side of the House to that side of the House, is our desire to return democracy—return democracy back to our locally affected officials. It’s to empower and give them the tools that they require, through legislation, to make local decisions where they are best made. Like I say, having Wairoa District Council here in this House to celebrate the exponential, I guess, commitment and innovation that comes out of Te Wairoa with iwi leaders and with local businesses is testimony to a piece of legislation that allows that to happen for the people of Te Wairoa. It is around empowering our locally elected officials to ensure that they have the tools to make the decision.

I want to reference the speech, just briefly, of the Minister in the third reading, where she said, quote: “This bill is a key part of an all-of-Government shift towards taking a more inclusive, holistic approach to measuring our success as a country. It is no longer enough that we define and measure the health and progress of our communities in a narrow fiscal sense.” When you trip around the various local authorities, you can tell without having to sit around their board tables—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: I don’t, I don’t.

—that their passion for the environment, for the culture, and for the social outcomes for that community is absolutely apparent. So it’s no longer the narrow fiscal sense of measurement that having these four well-beings, under the last Government, enabled or hamstrung a lot of the local authorities.

Now, from that side of the House, I heard the allegations around overspend and the extra compliance costs, but I didn’t hear much proof. In fact, what I am led to believe is that evidence shows that council spend prior to 2012 and 2014 amendments was a lot less—i.e., before we removed these four well-beings from the Local Government Act, our councils were actually fiscally well managed. So the allegation that reintroducing them is going to lead to more spending—I have yet to hear from that side of the House any proof of that matter.

As we know, the local government sector in this country is the second, to the central government, largest asset holder throughout this country. It’s important to us as legislators that we enable them to make those decisions closer to home that meet those well-beings around social, economic, environmental, and culture—and this bill attempts to do that.

I do want to commend the Minister for bringing this bill to the House. I want to commend the submitters, and I understand that there were 129 written submitters; 28 from the local authorities, 74 from various interest groups, and 27 from individuals. It is a really important piece of legislation that, clearly, both councils and individuals and groups have submitted on. Out of those numbers of submitters I see 45 supported the bill and 10 opposed, and the balance of them were obviously keen to ensure that the legislation as we are reading it, as a third and final one, is robust and fit for purpose. I want to thank the submitters. I want to thank the Minister for bringing the bill in, and for the officials that have worked on it.

It is about returning the democracy to local authorities. It is to make sure that they are meeting the needs of the community as and when they wish to do that, and, like I say, this is a piece of legislation that distinguishes this side of the House from that side of the House. I recall coming into Parliament six years ago, when the promise of the Government of the day was to introduce online voting. That was a way of ensuring that people participated in the democratic decision-making of local government. It didn’t happen.

Shortly after that we had the amalgamation, which in Hawke’s Bay went down like a dead balloon. It was actually Te Wairoa, the Wairoa people, that actually stopped amalgamation in the greater Hawke’s Bay region.

It is important that we listen to local government. As I’ve travelled they’ve asked for these four well-beings to be returned. They see opportunities beyond just meeting the enabling four well-beings that we’re putting back into this bill. But it’s actually jumping ahead into the real business of creating relationships with iwi and with businesses to bring greater gains to their region and to their areas. I want to commend those very progressive councils that are doing that as we speak.

I’ve yet to hear any dissention to the movements of this coalition Government to reintroduce those four well-beings. It’s really a positive reception that this is happening, as we read this bill for a third and final time. But I’m thinking beyond the passage of this particular legislation and look towards those opportunities, particularly in our rural and provincial towns, which often get left out of the mix.

So as we commend the Local Government (Community Well-being) Amendment Bill, the amendments, to the House, it is with a, I guess, sense of positivity and excitement that this bill does put back the authority at the local level, with communities, with the businesses, with iwi who just want to get on with doing the right things for those communities, create those opportunities. They want to work in partnership with this coalition Government. I think that’s a good thing for New Zealand, and I think it’s good for all local body authorities across the country that now we have the legislative framework to enable them to do the things that they want to do in their community and bring those gains.

I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. There’s obviously been some scheduling problems here that’ve allowed us to actually speak on the same bill on the same side of the House to reinforce a very strong message.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: People take a call or they don’t.

One thing I’ve really enjoyed about coming here is meeting my fellow politicians on both sides of the House. There are some very able people here, very bright people, very successful. Most only come here because they’ve been successful at what they did before they came to the House. They’ve been successful at organising their electoral campaigns. So the people don’t do that, shall I say, by counting paper clips. You do that by making sure you know what success looks like. If anyone ever goes into a business, anyone ever goes into some sort of a strategy, or even to stand for Parliament, some think if you tick every box along the way then success will just happen. Well, it just doesn’t happen like that; you’ve actually got to have vision.

You’ve actually got to understand what success looks like, because otherwise you will end up in the situation where—and I have to say a lot of people I know have worked for big corporates in New Zealand that’ve been led out of Detroit, led out of cities in the States, who do impose on all their companies around the world a very strict reporting regime where you must do this, you must count that, and they demand this quarterly reporting back every quarter. Lo and behold those who don’t do it. Those who are on the ground doing that job very quickly understand it’s to the detriment, often, of the local business. It’s to the detriment of the local operation. It’s to the detriment of the local country.

So the way around that is to make sure you have some sort of understanding of what it is you’re trying to achieve. I used to coach young men playing rugby, and at a coaching session, before you actually went into the drills, it was so important that you got those young men to understand why you had them running around doing the same thing time after time. It’s so that they got that muscle memory so that they understood they actually had to win. The whole idea of the game was to win, and everything we were doing was to make sure that they didn’t have to think about all those little things they were doing because they understood the vision was to win.

That brings me back to this bill—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: That would be good. That would be very good.

—which I could see you were probably impatiently waiting for me to do. I had to do a little bit of contextualisation, because what this bill does is ensures that local councils understand. Many of us as politicians, we sit in our offices or we’re out there at markets and we’re approached by our local constituents, and what they say is “Why aren’t you doing this? What aren’t you doing that?”—a plethora of things. Often these things are local body issues. So what becomes more and more apparent is the absolute necessity to understand what it is we’re trying to achieve, and those four success factors—social, economic, environmental, and cultural—just ensure we have a context, ensure we have a marker, ensure we have a template against which to succeed how we are actually succeeding. Again, if we go down to counting the paperclips, we might know exactly where the paperclips are, we might know every machine, we might have ticked off every box necessary, but it doesn’t actually mean we’re doing the job that people want us to do.

One of the previous speakers mentioned Federated Farmers being directly opposed to that. Well, Federated Farmers. I’d invite them that—so often when we’re talking farmers, particularly when, as I say, those shiny backsides from the city come and talk to them, the answer when we’re talking about why they perhaps might need a subsidy when the weather goes, about why farming is an intricate part of New Zealand, and, coming from a farming background, I certainly understand that, but it’s bigger than that. Farmers will talk about being the custodians of the land. Farmers will talk about “Someone’s got to be out there. We love the land. We’re third generation.”—these things. It’s much bigger than just how much milk fat they produce, how many lambs, how many kilos of wool. It’s actually much bigger than that.

They’re the very people that now are using this argument about why we shouldn’t impose the same broad understanding of what success looks like on our local bodies—those very local bodies they’re likely to be highly critical of, because they will make them dig the latest cess ponds; they’ll make them divert their waste in certain directions. Well, the reason those things are done, the reason we need to understand that—and some of those things, the individual may not realise why we do those things, why it is that those particular things are done, because they may not be understandable because they’re done against a bigger picture of what that success looks like.

I go back to those four successes: social, economic, environmental, and cultural. Aren’t they a good mix, those four things? Any one of those things taken in isolation will do some of the things that the Opposition are worried about. If we only look at the social side, but without looking at the economic side of it, yes, of course it will put us in danger. Of course there will be a danger that we’ll become less efficient, but look at them in their entirety. That’s what, again, I think the mistake that those on the opposite look like. They break it down into counting the paperclips. Success does not come from knowing how many paperclips there are, so look at those things in their entirety.

I mean, someone talked about libraries before. OK, libraries now, as we will all know, are struggling for relevance. The smart ones have moved. They have gone to electronic books; they’ve gone to all sorts of other things that attract people in there, because economically they will never be—tell me any library anywhere in the world that has actually paid its way. Swimming pools: swimming pools do not actually pay their way. So if we only look at it from an economic point of view, none of those things would ever be built. They certainly wouldn’t be built today.

In my own Ōhāriu electorate, we’re having a very nice new library built. It’s going to be highly relevant. There’s other things that are going to be going in there that are going to attract people there to make sure it becomes relevant. It won’t be just the good old library, but it still will not pay its way. I’m hoping we’ll have a very nice cafe in there, being very near to my own electorate office, and those other things that will make it relevant.

So, again, in those things—just look at libraries, just look at those things that council do. Council grounds sit around. How often are our council grounds sitting there empty? Luckily, we’ve now got those council grounds that have got artificial turfs, and the smart clubs have actually started to adapt. So they do use those things 24 hours—with, actually, some chance of paying. They still will never pay their way, it still requires—because they’re part of our whole environment; they’re part of our culture.

Culture, that whole thing that the country—whatever you think of rugby, we’ll stop while we’re watching, hopefully, the All Blacks in the World Cup final in Japan. That is the thing—they’re bigger than any breakdown because, again, if you were sitting, designing something, breaking it down into only its economic components, only those little bits that we tick, the boxes that we can tick—would we actually be supporting sport on a Saturday? No, we wouldn’t. Someone’s actually got to have a look at making sure that all those things balance up. This is, again, why I would invite the Opposition—who, naturally enough, will oppose this; it’s their job—but, actually, sit back and have a look at this. Imagine if we didn’t have these there. Imagine if we took them away and we didn’t have—the reason why it’s survived, now: it’s been residual. These things were in place, removed—so, often it takes five to 10 years before the residual, before the effects of these things—we change a law, we change a thing; it doesn’t happen overnight, but it’s a slow residual.

I have my own theory about why our road accident rate is so high at the moment, back to decisions that were made five or six years ago. So it takes a long time for these things to come through. So it is that so often we’re getting now, it would seem, the breakdown in some of our councils, some of our local services. There are problems there, because without an understanding, without our councillors—very good people who get out there, work hard. We see them out in the weekends doing a great job. Without them sitting around the table and having a measure—we’re going to pass this, but what is it, how will this help us to be successful socially? Will it help us to be more successful socially? Will it help our economy?

I think the Opposition should be, actually, very satisfied, be very happy, that the economic well-being is in there, because against all these strategies, against all these decisions we’ll make, there will be an economic box to be ticked as well. Does it make sense economically? But not just economically—socially, environmentally, and culturally?

Again, the environment, and—I’m pleased to see; hopefully, we will see—I’m looking forward to the consensus we will get on the environmental changes we’re obviously going to have to make, but if we break it down, no one will ever make those changes. I remember, again, being outraged, growing up on a farm, when all of a sudden we were forced to build a cesspit outside the cow sheds when we’d been putting it straight into the creek. Absolutely—this was a terrible thing, these “commies” from the local council making us dig a cesspit. Luckily for us, there were people that had a bigger vision, a bigger understanding that us piling—continuing to do what we’d done, farm the way we had done for many years, wasn’t going to work. So it is that we ask of our councils this very thing, so the councils right around the country, now, will be having council meetings this week once this bill goes through, understanding that, actually, is this going to improve things socially? Is this going to improve things economically? Is this thing going to improve things environmentally and, importantly, is this going to assist things culturally?

So Madam Deputy Speaker, as the last speaker on the bill, I have no hesitation commending this bill to the House.