Local Government Official Information and Meetings Amendment Bill

Well, thank you very much, Madam Speaker, and here we are this evening, in urgency. The Government have put this House in urgency to deal with the most significant legislation that will deal with the biggest problems in this country! And I must commend the Minister in terms of the introduction to the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Amendment Bill. He absolutely nailed it, smashed it with the enthusiasm and energy that came out with that opening address. I acknowledge that I’m not even going to be able to come close in regards to that energy. But I do commend the Minister on that; for that reason alone—I don’t think for any other reason—National will be supporting this piece of legislation because it was such a great opening gambit while this Government sits in urgency in order to deal with this matter which, remarkably for those sitting at home watching, are going “Is the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Amendment Bill the biggest fish to fry in this country this evening?” Well, I tell you what, it is important but it is not the most important factor. But it does go to show that this Government—this is as good as it gets, and that, sadly, is the reflection in regards of where this Government is at the moment.

So let’s turn our minds to this bill, and I do want to acknowledge the Governance and Administration Committee. I tell you what—and I acknowledge the Minister and I’ve had the pleasure of being able to sit on that committee in regards to other bills that are passing through quite swiftly at the moment, like a fast-flowing river of water—it is a very good committee, the Governance and Administration Committee. But we had 36 submissions on that—local councils across the country—and I think that while it is correct to say that pretty much most of the submissions were in support, it was acknowledged that the context in which the majority of local governments sit at the moment is sitting under a burden of regulation and reform brought upon by this Government, and this is just another aspect in regards to that growing pile of treacle that is slowing down our country in order to achieve its outcomes. But the select committee went through this, they did some good work and, as a result, we’ve got the bill back in the House to discuss this evening.

The key changes in regards to this bill are in relation to the improvement around the land information memorandums (LIMs) and, in particular, improving the natural hazard information that is provided within those LIMs. As we have experienced and continue to experience the impacts of climatic change and the resulting floods and cyclones that we’ve seen in many communities across this country—in the last six months alone they have suffered greatly as a result of this—this bill will bring about improvements in regards to how that information is included within those statements and provide the appropriate mechanism in order for those disclosures to be made. Because it is clear that we are going to continue to see the impacts as we have seen to date, and that will continue for very much the foreseeable future. It is the new normal in regards to how we need to deal, and this bill in regards to those changes will deal with that. The other aspect—[Interruption] Sorry?

💬 Hon Kieran McAnulty: Lift your game, man. You’re all about enthusiasm, come on!

Well, there you go, there you go—appreciate the cordial back and forth here from the Minister, and he was right. He’s just giving me a bit of an up. I’ll try and gee it up a bit. Well, I’ll tell you what, three minutes into your speech and I was struggling as well but, you know, you got to seven and I’m not doing too bad, so just don’t wait; the best is always to come. And that will be the case because we are coming up to the most exciting part of this bill, and this is around the ability to withhold information that—oh, a little bit of water there to clear the throat—around the ability of the Act to be able to withhold information in regards to the Official Information Act. And this is quite a serious issue so we want to just pay a little bit of, you know, a little bit of serious—jokes aside; this is important.

The elements around ensuring that we’ve got the appropriate provision and provisions primarily relating to national security are needed to be improved, and that has been the case here, because as the Minister has outlined as well, there are a number of assets and activities that our local government sector provide which do have implications in regards to our national security, and it is important, obviously, to ensure that we’ve got the appropriate belts and braces around that to ensure that that information and the information in that regard is managed appropriately so, therefore, not to place us at any threat. So I think that aspect is obviously pretty simple and pretty sensible as well.

I think the elements or the opportunity in this bill that have been foregone is the opportunity to potentially make some greater enhancements in regards to dealing with some of the core issues that local government are facing at the moment. Obviously we all sit in anticipation of the other bills that will no doubt come through urgency, in due course, in regards to other elements of great importance to those in Government and less so to those New Zealanders outside of this House. But that is no doubt going to be occurring.

Other than those two key elements, there is not too much else in this bill and, on that basis, while National will be supporting these bills in regards to the sensible changes, we do see this as very much a missed opportunity in order to deal with the significant issues that our country faces. It does go and shoot home to the fact that this Government are pretty much out of ideas, and this is, as I said before, an example of what they deem is about as good as it is going to get from here on in. I think, if you take anything away from that, you can read—I just remember, though, the last Prime Minister, Ardern, when she said, “We won’t be doing any more legislation in the local government space unless the sector are saying this is critically important for us to do.” I think the reality is this is a bit of a long bow in regards to what is being demanded. I think the key issues that they want are obviously around the funding and financing and other aspects—

💬 Hon David Bennett: Nothing in it for them.

—maybe a little bit less regulation. “Nothing in it for them,” says the Hon David Bennett. But on that note, we’ll leave it at that. I’ve contributed more than what the Minister did in his opening address and, hopefully, with a little bit more sprite and energy.

💬 Todd Muller: A lot more.

A lot more?

💬 Hon Member: A lot more.

A lot more sprite and energy, and, I tell you what, it is difficult. But the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Amendment Bill will be supported by this side of the House, and that is that, and looking to the contribution of the next speaker. I’m sure it’s going to be inspiring!

I’m going to begin with a few comments about why this bill is such a serious matter and why it’s so important. And I want to acknowledge the Minister, who I believe has probably visited a lot more regions and councils around the country than the member who just resumed his seat, Simon Watts. Because, in my electorate of Nelson, that had severe floods last year, we have one of the most interesting—for the nerds in the room—natural hazards, which is the Tāhunanui Slump. And for those of you who are interested in geology and earthquakes and how land moves, I would encourage you to look up the history around the Tāhunanui Slump, which sits in the Port Hills above Nelson and has moved for hundreds of years as a result of earthquakes and flooding and road building at the foot of the slump—there are natural springs that sit underneath it. If the council were making decisions today, they wouldn’t allow people to build there. The impact of this natural hazard has affected lives and livelihoods.

So for the other side of the House to suggest that somehow this is only of importance to the Parliament—to the people of Tāhunanui who live in that area, this type of reform that local government has asked for is of significant importance to them. The importance for them to know, through a land information memorandum, the natural hazards that are in the area will affect whether people choose to build or buy in certain areas of my electorate. It’s really a serious matter. And for those people that are currently not able to live in their homes and suffering extreme financial distress as a result, this bill would have made a significant difference to them if it had been in place. So it’s an excellent bill. It is of importance to the people of New Zealand affected by these events, and I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Well, it’s a very difficult bill to do a 10-minute speech on, I’ll give you that, because there’s not much in there. But I won’t hold back for the Labour Party because it’s what they’ve all come here for; they want to hear what we’ve got to say. So, you know, this has been talked about by the other members, about how massive the changes are but actually how practical some of them are, as well. And at a time when, you know, people have had the loss of land and loss of their properties, it is a serious matter and anything that can be helped, in the Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) report or the land information memorandum report, is of benefit to those people and future potential residential or property owners that may encounter a difficulty in the future. So we understand the rationale and the reason for it. Doing it in urgency does not really make much sense but they haven’t got much else to do so we can understand why they’re doing this.

But I guess the biggest threat to local government at the moment is in regard to the assets of local government that are being appropriated by this Government, an appropriation which has been based on a theme that they have taken and this bill actually relates to it in a very loose sense, in the sense that local government should be given more respect than this Government has given them in what they’re doing around water and resources. And the resources we’re talking about here are effectively water, land, and other impacts. So it does have an impact on many New Zealanders and especially on local government.

Tell us more.

Tell us more? Well, I would, but I fear the Speaker might cut me off if I tell you exactly what’s happening in the Water Services Legislation Bill, and we can’t really divulge that because it’s in committee, as well. But suffice to say that it’s just a take of assets from councils. Everyone knows that.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order! Order! We are in urgency and so I do like to give a little bit more latitude to members. Straying from a bill—briefly—I can accept, but I think I gave enough body language warnings to the member that the time had come to veer back into the lane which is the lane of the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Amendment Bill. So I’ll ask the member to confine his comments to the contents of this bill.

Yes, and thank you, Madam Speaker. I wasn’t intending to go off lane; I was really just helping out a member and colleague that needed some assistance. And so, you know, in effect, this bill is something we will support. We see the practicalities of it. It’s just it’s very disappointing that a Government, after six years, gets to the stage where this is all they can ram through in urgency. And, you know, it’s really just a symptom of the Government that they are and how they’ve failed New Zealanders. And so we look forward to a speedy transition through the House.

Now, the member over there, Naisi Chen, is standing up already. I might have to take a few more sentences then if she’s going to stand up like that, you know, without being called. That’s completely inappropriate for a new member to do that and they should just read the bill again, maybe, and enjoy it. But thank you.

Thank you. I do want to just say I am very enthusiastic about taking my call, and so I really want to get up early. The Local Government Official Information and Meetings Amendment Bill—I like to call it LGOIMA. I think that’s probably one of the best names of an acronym ever that exists in politics. The LGOIMA, I think, is an excellent bill.

I know my good colleague Rachel Boyack has talked about Nelson, and I look at Auckland and the floods that we had over the anniversary weekend. The amount of property in that city and the amount of property that I used to advise on when we were doing conveyancing at the first law firm that I worked for—all of the land information memorandums that we had to go through and all of the information that our clients expected us to provide but we just simply weren’t able to.

Because I remember looking at those maps, those diagrams of flood plains, and they were so limited as to what had happened, actually. The devastation and the unpreparedness that Auckland City faced during the anniversary weekend—I really do think information is trump in this day and age, making sure that we are ready and prepared to face all of the changes that climate change will bring to our little country, and I hope we are prepared. So that’s why I commend this bill to the House.

This is a very important piece of legislation, because it clarifies how natural hazards are identified to property owners, current and prospective. This disclosure has been missing from information that property owners should have had access to, and should have been available to them for many, many decades.

Now, when we think about the purpose of the bill, to introduce changes to improve natural hazard information provided on the land information memorandum, the LIM, and to align withholding information with the Official Information Act processes—ACT agrees with both of these provisions, but I want to explain a little more what the implications of this bill are, what the bill does, but also what it means, because that has not been articulated by the Minister of Local Government or by anyone else here. So when we read the rather garbled executive summary—I’m not quite sure who edited this—it says that “purchasers do not make decisions that reduce natural hazards that may have significant consequences for community wellbeing, including the impact of natural hazard emergency response and recovery programmes.”

Well, that’s a little bit garbled, but what I think they mean is that if people buy land and think they’re going to develop it in a certain way, but it turns out that it’s subject to flooding or slips, erosion or coastal processes, then they might waste their money or they might build in a place that in the future someone has to rescue them from. That’s how I would interpret that, for people watching or listening at home or for members in this House. So it does make sense that natural hazard information is included on a LIM.

Now, what else does it do? It says the key benefits to purchasers are information from a single source—well, apparently that’s council—and to better inform property decisions that reduce or avoid natural risks, greater certainty for councils about what natural hazard information should be included on a LIM, and a potential reduction in costs as a result of limited liability. All of these matters are important to local government and to people who own property. The impact assessment says that stakeholders generally agree with the problem definition and support statutory amendment. The ACT Party does too.

There are some fundamental issues that this raises. I visited the Karekare community a few weeks ago and I was horrified to see the damage to homes caused by, in some cases, what are enormous landslides that have come from bush-covered slopes that if you stood back and looked at it on a sunny day, you’d think, “That doesn’t look prone to slipping.” It’s a beautiful bush-covered slope in the Waitakere Ranges in West Auckland above the Karekare coastal settlement, and enormous volumes of soil and trees and rock have literally fallen off the side of the hill and engulfed or completely demolished homes or pushed them off their foundations, and people are lucky to have got out with their lives.

But that land is council land that is or was a regional council park. You can go online and you can find reports from academics, from geotech specialists about the landslide risks in the Waitakere Ranges on those very cliffs that failed, but nobody at Karekare was told about that by a local council, even though they knew. There’s nothing in this bill that says what local government needs to tell people. It says what must go on a LIM. So when we get to the committee of the whole House stage, I’d like the Minister to answer some questions about that, because simply putting information on a land information memorandum that’s held in local councils’ files doesn’t necessarily give people who live in a place now the information they need about whether it’s a safe place to live, what they must do. So that may well be an omission or it may be intentional or it may be consequential.

But I also want to come to—forgive me; just got to grab some notes. What are the implications? So when information about natural hazards—and, in fact, it also includes land contamination, special features, or characteristics of land, including information about the likely presence of hazardous contaminants. What does it mean when a council applies information to your property file that says, “Here’s some information that we think your property is contaminated or is subject to a natural hazard.”?

Well, firstly, the property owner has a right to know. So I hope that local government would send them a letter telling them about the information. The first thing that will happen is when people get that letter, some of them will be shocked. Some of them will be upset. Some of them will fear that if they’ve been living on a property, if they have small children, for example, playing in the backyard, that those children have been potentially exposed to contaminants, and we know this has happened in places like Paritutu in New Plymouth, where agent orange was manufactured at a chemical factory there, and the airborne pollutants have ended up on people’s properties. We know that asbestos is present on some residential properties, and we also know that lead from lead paint is a common pollutant in soils in urban areas built before the 1990s.

So people will get a fright, and then they’ll ask, “What should we do, and why didn’t council tell us before? And if they knew, but they’ve only just put it on the property file, but they let us build here, who is liable for that?” Is it local council which knew? There must be many, many local councils which have this information in their files, because there will have been contamination assessments done. There will have been risk assessments for geotechnical risk, landslide risk, flooding risk, erosion risk. They’ll be on file.

What this bill allows councils to do is to put that information on an individual property file and then be able to hold their hands up and say, “This is not our problem. We don’t owe you an explanation or apology. This bill absolves us of legal responsibility for that, for having allowed you to build—and, by the way, now we’re divulging the information.” This matter was canvassed extensively in Auckland around soil contamination in residential properties in parts of the city back over a decade ago. This is not a new problem.

So implications: people are going to get a fright. They’re going to say, “How come you knew, but you let us build here? How come you’re only telling us now?” And then they’re going to say, “What do we need to do about it?” Because when someone gives you information that’s actionable, you do something with it. Well, imagine if we knew what to do. There’s something missing here. And maybe when it comes to climate adaptation, that could be the Climate Adaptation Act, which was supposed to be one of three bills introduced to this House this parliamentary term to round out the resource management reforms. Now, last night we debated the Natural and Built Environment Bill and the Spatial Planning Bill, and the bill that was missing that’s part of the Government’s reform programme that Minister Parker announced is the Climate Adaptation Act, and that would give local government and property owners a steer on how to deal with the implications of knowing about natural hazards that affect where it’s safe to live and who’s responsible, who can help, what decisions we should make that guide us living safer lives where we’re not wasting money on property developments that end up being stranded assets. That’s missing, and so I’ll have questions for the Minister at the committee stage about that as well.

Then, of course, funding, because local government is going to have to respond to some of this stuff. They’re not squeaky clean. They’re not excused of all legal liability. They’re going to have to respond. So what ACT would say is that the Government should be sharing at least half of the GST on all new building activity—$1.2 billion a year from central government revenue—back with local government that is signing off consents for new builds, because they’re going to have to pay for all of this.

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker, thank you. Pleased to take a short call on the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Amendment Bill. This is a sensible bill. The Government over the last decade has spent $11.4 billion, and rising, on responding to natural hazards. We live in the shaky isles. We’re assaulted by increasingly severe weather events, major floods, earthquakes, seismic hazards, and landslips, so having better information on natural hazards on the land information memorandum (LIM) to enable people who are fortunate and wealthy enough to buy a house to get that information, is really sound. Others have railed against this going through under urgency, but I understand that this bill does need to be passed by the middle of the year in order to meet the time line in the national adaptation plan.

I think this bill also meshes well with the Spatial Planning Bill, and the Natural and Built Environment Bill, which we, as the previous speaker noted, were discussing last night, because in the regional spatial strategies, councils have got to identify matters that relate to the risks arising from natural hazards and the effects of climate change. So that planning at a regional level, and then this work that is including accessible information that the public can actually understand on the LIMs, will help people make good purchase decisions when they’re buying homes.

As the departmental report noted, there’s an expectation that there will be significant improvements over the next five to ten years in the information that we have available on natural hazard risk data. We’ve got the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) developing a national flood-risk model. We’ve got the Earthquake Commission (EQC) with its portal for natural hazard risk and resilience. We’ve got the national direction that will be part of the national planning framework on natural hazard risk management, and we’ve got the work that’s happening under the national adaptation plan. Can I assure Mr Court that I understand that the Climate Adaptation Bill is coming, but it will largely deal with issues around managed retreat rather than just the natural hazard risk information that these LIMs will provide. So this is a part of that bigger jigsaw, and a very useful part of it.

I think, also, there was quite a sort of discussion in the submissions that the Governance and Administration Committee considered about what level of information regional councils had to provide to territorial authorities for them to include in the land information memoranda, and the department referred back to the Kāpiti District Council case on coastal hazards, where the court held that councils need to provide known natural hazard information. They don’t need to believe that the information is accurate or even probably accurate, but there has to be a reasonable probability of the event occurring. So I think there’s still quite a level of uncertainty in exactly what information regional councils need to provide, and the department has said that regulations are likely to be developed to provide guidance here, and submitters were concerned that there’d be good consultation with local government before those regulations are developed.

So I think there is a need for quite a bit more policy work before those regulations are developed, so that we do ensure that there is better guidance to councils. But this is a step forward, and the Minister has gone through the other provisions around non-disclosure, the protective provisions that emulate the regime and the Official Information Act for when information shouldn’t be disclosed on national security grounds. We recognise that there’s concern about that, but again, it’s not really going further than what is already in the Official Information Act at that national level. So the Green Party, like others in the House, supports the bill.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’ll also take a short call on this bill at the second reading. I’d like to acknowledge the Minister. I’d like to acknowledge all those who made submissions; it certainly has been well received by our local councils. We see the effects of climate change front and centre—you know, there’s been a lot of wet events over the past few months, we’ve certainly seen sea-level rise, and a bill like this is important as we continue to adapt to that climate change.

The reality is, as much as probably every New Zealander would like to live in Hamilton or Palmerston North, we can’t take them all in. I mean, that’s just the reality. I’m sorry to disappoint New Zealanders here tonight and sort of break the collegial mood, but the reality is we basically do have a sense of freedom in our country. People can generally live where they want to. However, that has been challenged due to climate change, and Hamilton and Palmerston North can’t take everyone. So it’s important that we continue to work through—providing good support for councils and information for homeowners. I commend this bill to the House.

Joseph Mooney—a five-minute call.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. I rise to speak to the second reading of the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Amendment Bill. I didn’t have the privilege of sitting on the Governance and Administration Committee, which considered this, and I will yield my speech at the end of this and we’ll hear from Ian McKelvie, who has been a great chairperson of that great committee and is also very experienced in local government as well as central government, so I’ll look forward to hearing from him.

Just to return to my contribution, I note that the purpose of the bill is to provide clarity and certainty for local authorities on the provisions of the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act 1987. Submissions have arisen that this bill will address, and I’ll turn to those quickly.

The LGOIMA—as it is colloquially known—allows for the withholding of information in certain circumstances, which is essential when other concerns might make the disclosing of information desirable, but there’s a mismatch between the Official Information Act (OIA) and the local government official information Act. The changes to withholding information for reasons of national security which this bill will address are common sense and they already exist within the Official Information Act. However, the lack of conclusive withholding of grounds is currently preventing both the intelligence agencies from practically providing security advice to local authorities, and local authorities from seeking advice on security threats, including foreign interference and cyber-attacks, and getting that information from intelligence agencies. So having consistency between the OIA and the LGOIMA makes sense, and aligning the two is a good thing. I note that the LGOIMA lacks these provisions primarily by virtue of having been entered into law a lot earlier than the Official Information Act and not having been updated as much, which this bill will do.

I see that there were 36 submissions received by the select committee from interested groups and individuals, and the select committee heard oral evidence from 10 submitters. These provisions, in terms of the report back to Parliament, don’t seem to have raised much attention, or at least much that had to be addressed by the select committee in their consideration of the issues.

I note that the other thing that this bill does is amend the Act to set out clearer requirements to provide natural hazard information in land information memoranda (LIM). It would introduce provisions to allow regulations to be made for the purpose of providing natural hazard information, and this is particularly important for property buyers, as we’ve seen with weather patterns around the North Island, in particular, this year. It has certainly demonstrated the risks some property owners face in the event of a natural disaster, and therefore it’s crucial that property buyers can be fully informed about the issues that might affect a property. So this bill will require regional councils to provide natural hazard information and support for territorial authorities, and will also limit the legal liability of local authorities when providing natural hazard information in good faith.

I note that the select committee did recommend some changes to this. It was concerned that this could require territorial authorities and regional councils to produce new data and information for properties’ specific assessments, and the select committee noted that that was not the policy intent of the bill and it has made some suggestions to make it clear that the territorial authorities and regional councils were not required to create new information for each individual LIM.

Another concern that the select committee looked at was a potential requirement that a regional council could be required to provide natural hazard information to a territorial authority, even if that information did not relate to land in that territorial authority’s district. So the select committee recommended a proposal to change the designation to make it clear that that was not the policy intent of this bill.

The other main thing they looked at was that a particular amendment to section 55 in clause 9 would not unfairly impact persons or organisations that would need to be consulted. The select committee was concerned that there would not be a specific requirement for consultation with councils and territorial authorities, given that they are central to providing these LIMs, and so the select committee also recommended some changes to make it clear that that was the intent of the bill.

So with that, I will end my contribution and say that the National Party is supporting this bill through to its conclusion.

Dr Tracey McLellan—five minutes.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Thank you for the opportunity to make a very brief contribution on the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Amendment Bill—LGOIMA, as my colleague Naisi Chen first introduced in this debate. I’d like to acknowledge the Minister the Hon Kieran McAnulty, who I know is incredibly passionate about all things to do with local government; also like to acknowledge the members of the Governance and Administration Committee and all of the people that have made considered submissions on this bill. Essentially, it’s a common-sense bill which, in a nutshell, just allows homebuyers to have the requisite information that they need going forward and to make good decisions. On that basis, I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I also rise to make a short contribution on the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Amendment Bill. I want to acknowledge and thank the Minister Kieran McAnulty, but also the Governance and Administration Committee—I was not a member. And thank you to the submitters for putting their views forward.

It’s a really important, common-sense bill, but important for people in our community who are able to purchase a home. We were one of the areas badly affected by the weather events in Auckland—in South Auckland and Māngere—and a couple of those homeowners are still at quite a loss in terms of what they had to face. This bill that is being introduced, in terms of the Act, will provide better information, which is very valuable for the homeowners. The legislation will be very helpful and provides better understanding for the homeowners. It also provides the specific purpose of the natural hazard information. And on that note, it’s a good bill. I commend it to the House.

We certainly support this bill. But I thought I should take the alternative view on it because there will be some significant challenges as a result of this bill. I expect the current Minister won’t be the Minister at the time those challenges arise, but it’ll be some years away. But I guess the point I want to make is that some years ago, some in this House might remember the Kāpiti Coast District Council attempting to put sea-level rise on some of their coastal land information memorandums (LIMs), and the controversy that caused with their ratepayers and the issues it caused for the district council—it caused them to pull those from the LIMs. And I guess that’s a little bit of the background to the reason we’ve got this bill today. And I’m not criticising this bill except to say that I think there’s going to be significant challenges when some unsuspecting property owners open their eyes to what’s on their LIM.

The challenge will be—and the Governance and Administration Committee did talk about this, so I can’t say that we didn’t discuss this briefly, albeit briefly, in the course of the select committee. The challenge will be that the bill doesn’t stipulate the efficacy of the information that’s going to be applied to these LIMs, and I think we’re going to end up with some very difficult situations in the future. I’m not saying we didn’t need to bring this bill to the House or this issue didn’t need to be dealt with; I think for sure it did. All around New Zealand, there are very different states of readiness to deal with this issue, and having come out of the Manawatū 2004 storm events which at the time, interestingly, was the biggest insurance claim in New Zealand’s history—been usurped by a couple of decent old disasters since then. A lot of work was done around LiDAR in the lower Manawatū, and I would think that Horizons Regional Council is probably as up to date as anyone in the country with that sort of information.

Even in the Manawatū where that information has been around for quite some time, it still causes reasonable controversy because when people go to develop what they thought was a perfectly buildable or developable property, they find that in fact they’ve got to do quite significant work to be able to build on that property. I’m not criticising that process; I think it’s probably necessary. But the outcome of this bill will cause some significant angst in our community in the future, and I think that’s something we need to be aware of.

I do think that the intention of the bill, particularly with respect to property information, was necessary to deal with. I often wonder whether we can deal with these sort of things better in the course of putting them through the House, because the challenge that we get—successive Governments have had a lot of criticism from local government for the load they’re putting on local government in New Zealand. And it goes right back to my time in local government, which started well over 20 years ago. And that load has continually been lumped on to the ratepayers of our country. So as a result of this, local government is now going to have to deal with a whole new batch of information they’ve got to provide and a whole new batch of, I guess—what would be the word? Not protest so much as opposition to the activities they’ve been—I shouldn’t use the word “forced” because I kind of agree with the way we’re going about this, in a way. But they’re going to be faced with a whole lot of controversy as a result of that. And people are definitely going to be very upset when they see what appears on their LIM. I think we’ll see significant court action over this. Of course, once it’s resolved, it will be resolved.

But the reason for my doubt about this—well, not my doubt, but my concern about it—is I think there’s going to be a significant variation in the information that’s applied to getting this on to LIMs. Unless we get a standard set—and it could well be that the result of this bill promotes, in due course, a sensible set of actions that then promote a standard across New Zealand that maintains some relativity across the country so we don’t have different standards being applied by different councils, and consequently different information being put forward by different councils.

And again, if you go back to the Manawatū storms of 2004 and you look at what’s going on in Hawke’s Bay right now, the decision was made very early—as a result of the damage in those 2004 floods—what to resurrect and what not to. And so I think the issue that you’ve got with all this sort of information, once it’s there, is it provides a whole lot of obstacles that we don’t foresee at the time it’s put there; insurance is one of them. So we’ll suddenly see some variations in the way insurance companies deal with things in some areas, as a result of the information that appears on these LIMs.

So I think it’s going to be challenging for councils to implement this—it won’t be challenging for them to implement; it will be very challenging for them to deal with the noise that comes about as a result of it—I think in some areas particularly. It is an issue, though, that we’ve got to deal with as a country. And I think that certainly the last two major disasters we’ve had in New Zealand have really pointed to the fact that we haven’t been particularly good at this over the years. The information we collect is changing quickly, and the technology we’re using to provide that information and to attain that information is changing quickly as well. So I think that while we support this bill—and I think it’s probably sensible—I do think it’s going to create some significant challenges for our councils and probably one that they’ll come back to the Government with, or a Government at some time in the future with, to find a way of dealing with it. Because it could even get to the point of people anticipating that they should get some compensation for the result of what we applied to these LIMs.

So that’s a major concern I’ve got about this. And I suppose I was thinking as I lie back in my armchair I’ll be able to say, “I told you so” when this happens. But I’m not like that. Not really. So I do think it’s quite a problem for us, and it’s a problem coming our way. But I still also agree with the fact that the problem exists and we have to deal with it somehow. So that’s quite a challenge.

The other issues in this bill have been well dealt with by, certainly Joseph Mooney, and other speakers before me. I don’t need to carry on with that. I do want to thank the select committee for the work they did on it, and those officials that helped us get to the point we got to. We often forget the officials in the course of this, and we had a bill in select committee this morning where the officials have been under significant pressure to deliver on something that’s probably going to have a marginal result in due course. But none the less, we should remember that they have to do the work because they’re the servants of the Government—in, I think, the same way that the people who have to implement this bill are, effectively, the servants of the councillors, and the councillors are the people that should be funding this, not the poor old officers that have to go out there and deal with all the flak that comes about as a result of us forcing this bill or any other bill on to another sector of our community and then dealing with it. So I won’t talk any more. I’ve talked too much. But thank you. We support it.

It’s pleasing to be able to stand and take a short call on the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Amendment Bill. In light of the destruction from climate change such as severe weather and natural hazards, it makes absolute sense to amend the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act.

I have seen the damage myself from climate change, having visited Kahungunu after Gabrielle, and let me just say: it’s devastating to see this kind of damage from severe weather done to our communities. These amendments will provide that critical and important information for local government to be able to make those better decisions around the location of housing, land; whatever it is, this bill and the amendments to it will help provide a better foundation for that decision making.

I’m not too sure that I understand the anxiety that my colleague over there mentioned earlier, but what I can say is that this is an important start—a very important start—in terms of providing another tool that can help us to best manage these issues that we live with, in this world today, around climate change. I commend this to the House. Kia ora.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

I declare the House in committee for consideration of the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Amendment Bill.

In Committee

Parts 1 and 2 and clauses 1 to 3