Special Debates — Local Issues

Members, we now come to the debate about local issues arranged by the Business Committee under Standing Order 80. Before I call a member, there is no speaking list. Members, I do have a list as advised by both members and parties, as I am fully aware, but any member can stand. It’s about local issues, not the impact of a general Government policy, and so I’ll be arranging things thusly.

Also, the speaking time is five minutes. You’ve been distributed approximate times for each party. It’s up to each party to manage their own time—I won’t be doing that—but members have up to five minutes, so if they have split it amongst their party, they should monitor those timings themselves.

I move, That the House take note of local issues.

E te Māngai, tēnā koe, tēnā koutou e te Whare. In the midst of the Omicron outbreak in early 2022, I canvassed local groups in Auckland Central about what services were at risk for our structurally marginalised communities if the pandemic ripped through volunteer teams. Collaborating with Sunday Blessings and the Student Volunteer Army, we established the Omicron resilience team to ensure that hot meals and advocacy support continued to get to those people experiencing homelessness and hard times. Eventually, we ended up getting a small council grant to formalise the structure, the network that that underpinned, and established the Ellen Melville Centre community hub for the fortnight from the devastating Auckland Anniversary floods through Cyclone Gabrielle.

It took days for Auckland Emergency Management to realise that this was even happening. In crises, our systems are tested in rapid speed. We see what works and what doesn’t, and we saw what worked; it was the community.

Our political institutions are supposed to reflect and represent and support our communities—those communities; all of us. It is why it was so galling that, in the wake and recovery of that climate change - charged destruction, Auckland Council’s annual budget went out for consultation, proposing to decimate resources for community, climate, arts, environment, culture, transport, homelessness, and social services. We are talking about permanent cancellation of more than 1,000 buses a day, while also increasing fares; ripping out a third of our bins in public parks; permanently closing 32 citizens advice bureaus, which were also on the front line throughout that flooding; 10 Kauri Kids early childhood centres. We’re talking about the gutting of our libraries, the slashing of water infrastructure upgrades, of arts and cultural programmes, that chopping of local board discretionary spending, and so many more brutal cuts alongside the sale of our assets.

This is not business as usual, and it shouldn’t be treated as if it is. The budget proposal is, in fact, contrary to every foundational and widely consulted policy plank underpinning Auckland Council, like the 30-year Auckland Plan, like the climate plan, and the City Centre Masterplan. This is the most significant and austere local government budget in my lifetime. That cannot be emphasised enough, especially in a House where approximately a third of the seats are made up by Tāmaki-makau-rau - based MPs. Think about a parochial version of the 1984 austerity budget.

And our communities? Well, they’re not happy. So, off the back of coordinating flooding and cyclone support, rehousing people, and coordinating resources, our communities, once again, organised. We saw, in record submissions, the most ever on any annual budget to the super-city council, here on the slash-and-burn budget. The crystal-clear majority of 51 percent of Aucklanders who submitted do not support cuts to regional services. At least 54 percent supported either the council taking on greater debt, greater rates, or both.

These cuts cannot stand. I think it’s really important to note that a different future is entirely possible, that different forms of political leadership are entirely possible. Auckland Council could, for example, follow suit, if the leadership demonstrated here in Pōneke Wellington by Mayor Tory Whanau, who is confronting the reality of infrastructural deficit and meeting community needs with a proposed 13 percent rates increase—or less than the cost of a cup of coffee per household per week. There’s also been proposals from the likes of A Better Budget For Auckland and many other community organisations. A different future is possible, because it turns out that austerity is expensive, especially for those in our communities who can afford it the least. Our communities will not continue to allow the privatisation of profit and the socialisation of cost—the deficit politics which rips the heart out of our cities and out of our services.

Mayor Wayne Brown knows full well my intention to continue campaigning on this. I really look forward to continued engagement with MPs across this House, because, once again, I must say, there are 40 of us who are based in Tāmaki-makau-rau Auckland. I also think it’s critical to note to councillors—Auckland councillors who may be watching—that we are watching, and we are looking forward to their leadership for Aucklanders.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Every time I enter this debating chamber, I do so as the proud member for Coromandel, and I always have uppermost in my thoughts when I’m in this debating chamber the people, the communities, the neighbourhoods, and the businesses of the beautiful Coromandel. But mine is a region that has been pummelled, and pummelled badly, by weather, by nature, and by a range of circumstances that have set the region back many years.

Now, it’s been more than three months now since the devastating impacts of, firstly, Cyclone Hale, and then Cyclone Gabrielle, really bashed the Coromandel Peninsula and neighbouring regions so badly. Now, I don’t want to take anything away from the devastating impact in parts of the East Coast, Northland, or in other parts of the country, but, as I rise and speak today, it is raining in the Coromandel again, and communities are wondering and concerned about what that might mean as autumn rolls on and as winter approaches. So I want to thank the contractors, the workers—the people who go out in very heavy weather events day after day, under difficult, challenging circumstances, to try and keep the roads open and to try and keep communities connected. But they do their best under difficult circumstances more and more frequently.

Strangely enough, often it is at times of great adversity that individuals and communities are often at their best, and that certainly has been the case in the Coromandel. There have been outstanding stories of commitment, of neighbourliness, and of care and compassion for people in circumstances that have been, in some cases, life threatening.

But it’s on State Highway 25, the main arterial route across the Coromandel, that I want to focus some thoughts on today in this debate. That road, from Kōpū on the Thames side of the peninsula, through to Hikuai on the eastern seaboard, has been closed for more than three months now, and still—and still—we are waiting, from the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA), a decision about what will be their preferred repair option. Now, that’s simply unacceptable—absolutely unacceptable. Now, I know they’re busy—I know that they’ve got a lot on. But for the people and visitors to the Coromandel, not knowing and not having certainty about what’s being proposed, let alone any sense of when the road might eventually be opened, it is concerning and it’s causing enormous angst but also real financial hardship and health risks to the people who live in or visit the Coromandel.

We’re told that it may be more than a year before that highway is open. That would mean a devastating, fourth miserable summer period for the Coromandel and for its businesses. Now, we’ve had two previous summer business periods completely ruined due to COVID, and then this summer just gone has also been impacted by cyclones and weather events. The prospect of a fourth consecutive summer is just too dire to contemplate for businesses in my part of the country, and the reason is simply this: the financial model that works so well in the Coromandel relies very heavily on a summer peak of tens of thousands of visitors every summer. So for many of the visitors and businesses, that’s the time when they spend time and money in the region. But for the businesses, that’s when they do the bulk of their revenue taking, and if they can’t get revenue over the summer period, there’s very little prospect of them making up over the winter months.

So I want to continue to put pressure on the Government, continue to put pressure on our local council, and continue to put pressure on the New Zealand Transport Agency to give us certainty, to give us clarity about what they’re going to do, and then do everything possible to make it happen. There is no sense of urgency I’m getting from either our council, our Government, or the NZTA about fixing State Highway 25 and the other fragile roads around the Coromandel Peninsula. As we go into what will be a long, wet, cold winter, I’m fearful for what that might mean for the people of Coromandel, but I will continue to fight for them every day that I’m in this place.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. The rain didn’t stop for 24 hours. Roads closed; schools flooded; dementia homes were evacuated; thousands of homes and businesses were ruined by contaminated water, which included sewage. And, look, this could have been Auckland, 27 January or Hawke’s Bay a few weeks later, but it wasn’t: this was South Dunedin on 3 June in 2015. Now, my heart goes out to the people of Auckland and the East Coast, because they now know all about climate change. But people in South Dunedin have known about this for a decade. We’ve lived with it, researched it, worried about it, and talked about it. People have planned for weather events, but, to be honest, not much has been done about proactively creating a vision for our city. Now, this is part of New Zealand’s highest deprivation levels; some households have got incomes as low as $14,000 a year.

But while they are poor in financial resource, they are hugely wealthy in social cohesion, aroha, community, and love for where we live. The land is flat, so there’s high levels of disability, and there’s a lot of older people. So if you put poverty, old age, and disability into the mix with climate change, that’s a very wicked problem. Insurance payouts were at $28 million at that time. However, the real cost in terms of economic and social damage of those floods was around $138 million, and the flooding wasn’t just severe, it was also in the most densely populated part of the city. So while most of Dunedin is hilly, South Dunedin is flat. It’s made up of fresh water, marsh, and swamps with sand underneath it, and then there’s dunes on the shore that protect, in a way, from sea-level rise. And the flat has become one of the most densely populated parts of New Zealand; it’s got lots of little Scottish houses on tiny little sections, built, basically, on to the sand.

So there’s three elements which make it a perfect storm when it comes to climate change: there’s sea-level rise and the wearing down of the dunes there; there’s the thin water table—so some areas are as low as 30 centimetres from where the water comes, and the hills around make it, basically, like a bath-tub, so the water comes down off the hills in weather events; and the land is sinking by one millimetre a year.

The fifth element is more man-made, and that’s around an issue that’s affecting so much of New Zealand—broken pipes—and this certainly came out after 2015. There was a bit of argy-bargy between the community and the council about what was to do with broken pipes or pipes that haven’t been cleaned; and what was climate change—and that was really divisive. It made a stand-off from the council with the community, and then managed retreat was mentioned. There wasn’t the care taken in to have that conversation, and people got really traumatised. Since then, people have learned from that—there’s been lots of research, bores have been drilled, there’s water forecasting enabled, lots of meetings by the council with locals, and the community does feel like it’s part of the conversation, but what it wants now is action. Eight years of reports and talking and consulting without any visible action is a lot of time.

Since I’ve been the MP, I’ve reached out to the Dunedin City Council several times to say that I think New Zealand needs a pilot for climate change adaptation, and I think that South Dunedin should be that pilot. We need creative, leading-edge urban design, design that can adapt to the water flows. So you could look at street cambers; look at how houses are built—whether they could be removed or moved around. South Dunedin could be a poster child for climate change adaptation, but it needs a scale of ambition that is more than I’ve seen from the local bodies, and it’s more than what ratepayers can provide. It needs political will and co-creation, so not a proposal that’s just put into a budget line; it needs to truly be co-created. It needs a vision that’s exciting and that inspires taxpayers from, say, the North Island to feel like they’re getting value for money from this.

So we are the single biggest community to face flooding from sea-level rise, at least in the medium term. I think that the work that the Dunedin City Council has done around mapping and showing how the housing market will naturally shift to move to higher and safer ground is fantastic—it’s world leading, it’s award winning, and we’ve been shown that, as local MPs. But I’ve been nagging my senior colleagues about this issue, saying, “I think that we need to have a co-created solution”, and I believe there’s political will.

It is crunch time, so we need a vision. We need the people in the city, the city leaders, to reach out to Government and say, “Let’s do something about this.”, because if we don’t pay for this now, if we don’t front foot and invest, we will end up paying with the aftermath. So do we get caught out and pay anyway, or do we invest?

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m here today to talk about the issues that I’ve heard about from so many people in Tāmaki. I’ve been out listening to locals, and what I’ve heard is that what people want are safe beaches, roads that get people places, shop owners and workers not being terrified that they might be ram-raided, and consequences for crime. People have told me that infrastructure is under pressure in Tāmaki. It’s a beautiful, beautiful place. More and more people want to make their home and live in Tāmaki, but intensification means more homes, more cars, and infrastructure under pressure. Our community welcomes growth, but we want to have more say on how it happens. We know what it means for the beaches when it rains. We know what it means on roads that mean they need as much work as the cycleways have recently got. And we know what that means, street by street, for our community.

I have put out a survey to the people of Tāmaki asking for examples of local infrastructure problems, and what I’ve received are lots of examples of where we can do better. In Glendowie, the council storm drains have flooded people’s gardens. In St Heliers, the stormwater pipes are too small and the drains are constantly clogged. In Kohimārama, we have drains that are clogged, especially around Madills Farm. Around Tāmaki Drive, the new cycleway, it doesn’t even drain when there’s minimal rain. Out in St Johns, the drains are clogged, and in Meadowbank and in Mission Bay, the stormwater system is overwhelmed. In Ōrākei, I’ve heard people say that the sewage is contaminating the stormwater system, and in Remuera there is raw sewage that’s overflowing and the pipes just can’t handle the number of people. And in Wai o Taiki Bay, we have sewerage that’s been incorrectly hooked up to the stormwater system. This is not an exhaustive list. There are so many problems. These are the examples that I have and I will be taking to local council.

But I’ve also heard about crime and safety. A few days ago, I visited two shop owners in Glen Innes who were ram-raided. There were young kids in a car who smashed in and burgled them. It’s not OK that our shop owners do not feel safe. It’s not OK that women don’t feel safe walking home from work. And it’s not OK that we have family members in our community who are being attacked at night.

We have to do better so people feel safe in the community, and we have to do better for the local infrastructure problems. I’ve been listening to the community. I’m going to work hard and be a strong voice for the people of Tāmaki. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. It’s an absolute pleasure, as the member of Parliament for North Shore, to be able to participate in this local issues debate this afternoon. I want to talk this afternoon about the mighty North Shore and, in particular, those communities on the North Shore that were impacted by the significant flooding that occurred at the end of January, nearly three months ago—in particular, the business community based on Wairau Road, in the neighbouring electorate of Northcote, that were impacted as a result of the significant waters that flowed through there.

It also is important to acknowledge that there was the loss of life of two people in the Wairau Valley of the North Shore, and that was again reinforcing the significance of that implication. But the business owners that I have spoken to in that part of the North Shore remain frustrated and challenged about the significance of the impact of the flooding and the damage that that caused, in terms of the urgency required from a number of actors in our society, including local government and central government, in order to try and provide certainty for their resolution and remediation from where they are. A number of members of my community in the North Shore who own businesses in the Wairau Road vicinity have lost significant cash flow. They have the inability to continue to operate their businesses, because those buildings are out of order. Many of them are operating out of Portacabins, using Portaloos, while they’re waiting for builders and assessors still, 90 days on, to be able to come in and provide some certainty.

I met with a number of those business owners at one of those businesses a matter of weeks ago, and one of the business owners there was brought to tears as she outlined and described the challenges and frustrations of not having certainty, in terms of being able to move forward. This is a significant business owner, a business owner that employs a large number of people, and the frustration and stress and challenge that she described, along with other members of her family and other business owners along that stretch of road, was very, very clear. In response to that meeting, I wrote a letter to both Watercare and also Healthy Waters—the two entities which have responsibility within the Auckland region for dealing with waste-water and stormwater.

Right behind the businesses that I am describing sits the Wairau Pump Station. This is the single waste-water treatment plant that provides provision of those services across that area, but also across the North Shore; right up until Devonport does that plant provide services. This is a 1960s waste-water treatment plant. It is a plant in which the pumps failed and, as a result of the pumps failing, a wall of sewage came down the Wairau Creek, which flowed down the Wairau Road, but also into Nile and Alma roads, off Shakespeare Road in Milford, and, as a result, flowed into the ocean at Milford Beach. That is the reality of what happened as a result of that sewerage outflow.

The challenge is that in March 2022, we had a similar flood. That flood indicated that there was a number of issues around the resilience of that infrastructure, and the plant in question actually was designated to be replaced in 2019. But, for reasons that remain unclear, that upgrade did not occur. What that reinforces is that, actually, the failure to take action could have mitigated some of the damage which our communities sustained and continue to sustain right on from now. I want to acknowledge the work by our local board on the North Shore, across both electorates, for the work they have done—also acknowledging a number of the community members: Bronwyn Bound is the centre manager of the Sunnynook Community Centre. She does an excellent job in terms of responding to that community. I want to reinforce that, as a community, everyone just wants to be able to move forward, have a solution in regards to certainty around how that infrastructure can be upgraded, so that these people can get on with their lives, get on with their businesses, and help support our beautiful neighbourhood.

Thank you, Mr Speaker; good things come to those who wait. This is a chance to talk about local issues and there is no issue more prominent in the beautiful geothermal paradise of Rotorua than our housing situation. It has taken a hit over the past few years, but, actually, it’s been a problem that has been decades in the making. We haven’t kept up with our local housebuilding and, as a result, we are short, which is why media reports as recently as midway through last year were highlighting just how bad the problem had got—our motels filling up.

That happened partly because of what happened during COVID. We took all of our homeless people off the streets and we put them into motels. It was the right thing to do at the time, but it caused a bit of an interesting situation where, when we looked up, actually many of our hotels in a really small space had been occupied by people that had been taken off the streets and moved into that kind of accommodation. The image and the perception of our city took a real hit and it’s only starting to get back on its feet.

Thankfully, something that happened last year was that we signed six months ago—this month, actually—the Rotorua Housing Accord. Now, what that is is it’s a partnership between the Rotorua Lakes Council, the iwi Ngāti Whakaue and Te Arawa whānui, and also Government officials. We bring the best brains to the table to be able to get around there, hold each other accountable, and try and work through some of these issues.

Some of the issues that have been worked through, just to date, are the idea of supply, getting a real idea about how much housing we’re bringing online—public housing, papa kāinga housing—and it’s initiatives that this Government has actually invested in. We’ve had to invest in it for the benefit of the people of Rotorua.

Just next month, actually, we’re going to be opening a 15-unit papa kāinga development just opposite Rotorua Airport. That’s very exciting. It’s something that we’re all looking forward to. We’ve built 200 public homes in Rotorua, but also 300 are still in train, still coming down the pipeline. So we’re definitely trying to build that supply, build ourselves out of this crisis one house at a time.

On top of that, we need to make sure that we’ve got supports in place. And this is something that I hope that people understand. We’ve come up with something really innovative, which is the idea of a bespoke housing hub, and it is situated on Fenton Street in the middle of the CBD. Anybody that needs that kind of housing support can go to one front door, and go and get it from there. Innovatively, the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) have got people stationed there as well, so if people do need some kind of Government assistance they can get that.

More importantly, the Ministry of Health have also put up a health practitioner in there as well, because, often, people that present have health issues too. It was something that was identified by MSD. They came forward and said, “We’re not social workers; we are an administrative agency that are there to help. But if people have got health problems, we have to send them back out the door and round the corner and hope that they get to the hospital or to a GP clinic.”

Having a one-stop shop like Te Pokapū has helped to fix that. And it’s been done in a very kaupapa Māori way. The organisation is run by Te Taumata o Ngāti Whakaue and they have gone and put over that place a layer—a korowai of aroha and tikanga, actually—around it so that people that go in there are treated with love, with respect, like they should be, because people that are facing housing insecurity, sometimes they need as much help as they can get.

So when we’re looking at the big picture, we are increasing supply in Rotorua. We are making sure that support is easy to access. We’re building papa kāinga to be able to help Māori to be able to create solutions for themselves as well. And we’ve got this thing called “contracted emergency housing”, which, basically, means we’ve still got some motels that are operating with homeless whānau inside them. They look a little bit different, because they’ve usually got a barrier at the front. The difference between contracted motels is that we’re able to put in a bunch of rules and regulations around how those places operate. And it’s really good. The reports are coming back that, yes, although they’re in motels, actually, they’re being supported and they’re being looked after while they’re in those spaces.

So some of our best, brightest brains in this space from back home, they’re the first ones to say, “Don’t take away the contracted emergency housing.”, because that’s still a valid option for people and we just need to make sure that we’ve got tight rules around it. And that’s exactly what’s happening. What we’re seeing is a reduction in the number of motels.

And every month, the Rotorua Housing Accord meet. You’ve got the mayor, you’ve got the chief executive, you’ve got the senior officials from inside the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development and Kāinga Ora, who sit around that table, and the iwi have put forward their brightest brains, as well as a way to help keep each other accountable and make sure that we’re building ourselves out of the homelessness mess that we’ve found ourselves in.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. One of the great privileges of the nine years that I’ve had as the MP for Bay of Plenty is, to the best of my ability, being an advocate for a community that is growing rapidly. I’ve had a number of successes, and I feel very grateful for them. But as I look to embrace the twilight of my political career, there is an area that I have immense regret about, on behalf of my community, and that is the appalling delivery of mental health services in Tauranga. Tauranga, I think, for many in the Wellington bureaucracy is still the small seaside town that it was when I was a young boy, but, in the time that I have been an MP, it has grown from 140,000 to 175,000. It was 27,000 when my parents bought a Chinese gooseberry orchard just north of Tauranga, and it is under huge pressure in terms of service delivery, not only infrastructure but also health.

I accept that this is an issue that goes beyond a single term and beyond a single Government. But I see across the House my friend and colleague from the other side Angie Warren-Clark, and the two of us, coincidentally, had the same campaign promise in 2017 to our electorate, which was that we would work hard to ensure that mental health provisions were improved in the city—and, in particular, residential—and we were pleased to see that the Government, two years later, announced $30 million to be spent for a residential mental health facility in Tauranga. It’s now 2023. The $30 million has largely been spent. It’s been spent in Whakatāne, and Tauranga still does not have any additional facilities for people with acute mental health needs, and, unlike other cities, it has absolutely no residential options for anyone under the age of 18.

Where this gets particularly challenging is when you have parents ring you and your office asking for help, asking for navigation of the health system, because they are completely at their wits’ end trying to be there for their child, who is still a child but cannot access the support, and then when you have to have, and listen to, the conversation when they ring again and say that the help didn’t come in time and they now have lost that child—this is a reality that my office has experienced, and I suspect it’s been experienced by Angie as well.

We have to do better. I appreciate that this is not a conversation where we spend time finger-pointing; it’s a time, actually, when we reflect, as members of Parliament, on our own local issues and our own communities and how we can do better. We have to do better than seeing a city that is growing at the pace of Tauranga simply unable to be able to be there for our most vulnerable young people—and vulnerable people, full stop. We have a city of 170,000 where we have 24 residential beds to assist people who have acute mental health issues, and that number has been unchanged for over 25 years—four Governments have come and gone in this time. This is not me just unloading on this Government; this is a challenge for a city that simply does not have the support that it needs.

When you come to the conclusion of your political time, you always look and recall the things that you’re the most proud of, and I have many. But this really sits with me in a very uncomfortable way because I feel that I just haven’t been able to break the inertia that sits in our health system—particularly in a Wellington context—to provide the support that the people I was sent here to represent are desperately needing and are not getting. I think, as a House, we must do better because the cries of the Bay of Plenty echo throughout the country. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Today, I want to bring what is, for me, an incredibly important local issue to the House. It’s one that has occupied a great deal of my time as a representative, first for nine years as the member of Parliament for Dunedin North, and it continues to be an issue that has occupied much of my mental and other energies in my time representing Dunedin. And it’s one that I know my colleagues from Dunedin and the surrounding electorates also continue to fight for the best outcomes for, and that is the Dunedin Hospital rebuild. It’s now a $1.68 billion hospital rebuild project—the biggest ever hospital build in New Zealand’s history—and everyone agrees that it’s necessary.

I want to remind the House briefly, at the outset, how it has come to pass that this project is where it is, and it really kicked off a long time ago when there was asbestos in the roof, when the operating theatres were leaking. Everybody agreed something needed to be done. I can remember asking then Minister of Health Tony Ryall, in 2014, why there was so much delay in progressing planning for a rebuild, why there was no money set aside, and so I petitioned. I campaigned in 2014 and 2017 on a hospital rebuild for the people of Dunedin, and was in the fortunate position then, in 2017, as the Minister of Health, to carry that project into Cabinet to get the initial $1.2 billion set aside, to get the sites secured. Much like the Mayo Clinic, it’s recognised that part of the medical training magic in Dunedin is that people can teach, they can research, they can operate in an operating theatre, they can go and grab coffee, they can get to a green space, they can collaborate with academic colleagues, all within walking distance. That is part of the magic that needed to be preserved and so dictated the local site.

Then along came Pete Hodgson as the local advisory group chair, and I want to acknowledge all of Pete’s work over the years. I want to acknowledge the clinicians right from the outset—the likes of David Perez, an oncologist of some note; psychiatrist John Adams; all of those in the clinical area who have driven this project from the outset to make sure that Dunedin and the Otago-Southland region get the very best possible health outcomes. We deserve it in the South, we deserve the best health outcomes, and we deserve the most modern hospital in the country.

It will be a state-of-the-art hospital when it’s completed. Concerns have arisen late last year about some of the cost savings, and I want to briefly address those and also pay tribute to the local MPs who fought to make sure, again, that the interests locally were well served. Rachel Brooking has written articles for the newspaper on this. Ingrid Leary has been outspoken on this issue too; so too Rino Tirikatene and Liz Craig. They have all joined together to make sure that this project moves along in a constructive way, working with the Minister to make sure that the clinical outcomes that are at the core of this project have been at the heart of decision making around additional funding that has come through. And, again, there was an extra $110 million late last year; there was another $10 million recently, as Ayesha Verrall addressed some of the concerns that had been raised.

So it is a huge project. There is ongoing work. There is a review around mental health beds. There’s a review around space for pathology. There’s recently been $97 million in additional funding coming through for data and digital infrastructure because it will be the most modern, state-of-the-art hospital in the country and so it jolly well should be.

So I want to also say thank you to Dr Ayesha Verrall. On her second day as Minister of Health, she showed up in Dunedin—actually, because of the way ministerial writs are handed over, it was actually her first full day in the job—recognising local concerns. She came back soon after Easter and announced changes, and it really is something of a credit to her as a Minister that she immediately identified the issue, stood up, and said, “I’m going to own this and I am going to find a solution that addresses the real clinical concerns that sit behind it.”, and I want to acknowledge and thank her for that.

I do also want to acknowledge my successor, Rachel Brooking, who will be the Labour candidate in the upcoming election, and the leadership that she is showing in taking this cause forward: questioning how we are going to make sure we have the adequate training and attraction for the necessary health professionals in the future; asking the question about the critical interprofessional learning centre that will be built—how that’s going to be progressed, and where the funding is coming from. This is an amazing project. It’ll be much bigger and better than the old one: 70,000 square metres in the old site, 90,000 in the new; 367 beds in the old, 410 in the new. It is a bigger, better, state-of-the-art hospital and I’m very proud to have been associated with it.

Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. Thank you so much. I want to talk about how Wellington was built as a city around excellent public transport and walkability. We had electrified trams, regional rail—and, in fact, the rail was electrified more than half a century ago. We have a beautiful human-scale urban form that allows a lot of people to live within the city, to walk to their destinations, and we are surrounded by a beautiful town belt. Wellington absolutely was a paragon of excellent transit-oriented development, living in harmony with nature.

In the electorate I live in, Rongotai, people use the bus more than anywhere else in the country to get to work. That’s right—Rongotai is number one in the country for bus use. That is despite the appalling and shocking situation with cancellations and ghost buses that we currently have. So, despite the current dire situation of bus cancellations, patronage is up: it’s back to 97 percent of what it was pre-COVID. People want to take public transport, particularly in Rongotai. Rongotai is also the fourth-highest electorate when it comes to people using a bike to get to work, and that’s before the explosion in cargo bikes carrying children that I often see on my commute to work on a bike.

What I want to say right now is that Wellingtonians deserve better public transport, just like every other community in Aotearoa New Zealand. We can afford to have excellent public transport. It can be fully accessible; it can be very affordable. It benefits our people and our planet and our climate. But, currently, decisions that previous Governments made are leading to the situation where people can no longer rely on public transport to be reliable. You know, I’ve talked to so many people in the past few weeks who’ve missed appointments or been late to work because of bus cancellations, and this is a result of subsequent Governments underfunding public transport. Everybody here knows that before I came into Parliament I worked in transport and urban planning; I am passionate about public transport and that’s why I got involved. Under the last National Government, public transport was a poor cousin; it hardly got any investment. During that time, decisions were made by the regional council to make long-term plans around bus contracts that had no—they did not build in population growth or growth in patronage. So we’ve had several decades of languishing public transport, which means that despite people wanting to take it and needing to take it, they can’t.

There’s a further element that I don’t think is fully appreciated, which is the housing affordability side. We also need more affordable and sustainable housing within Wellington and particularly within Rongotai, and we have the potential to provide that. How do we recruit bus drivers when housing is unaffordable? How do we recruit early childhood teachers when housing is unaffordable? There are so many jobs that no matter how much we put up wages, it’s not going to enable people to live in the area unless we increase the housing supply. And we do that through public housing, so that it is really about the people, not about profit. So that is something we can do.

The Greens have long been the champions of public transport in this country. Our campaigns have led to electrification of the rail network in Auckland, after many decades of it not happening. We’ve won the City Rail Link. We’ve been campaigning on light rail for Wellington since the 1990s, when James Shaw was in high school and first joined the Green Party. If the Greens are in Government, we will prioritise light rail because we know that Wellington—and, in particular, the Rongotai electorate—wants high quality, frequent, reliable public transport. Light rail will enable not only more people to move at peak time with fewer drivers—and that takes the pressure off the system—it means cleaner, quieter streets and it means more capacity for affordable housing within our city, which will make it even more vibrant. And of course we can have those fully complete streets, which mean protected cycleways so that people trying to get around on their cargo bikes with their kids—because it’s the most convenient way to get around Wellington—can do so and not feel in danger of being hit by a car. All of this is possible, but the Green Party is the party that can deliver the leadership to provide the public transport that all of New Zealand deserves, particularly the Rongotai electorate.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. First of all, I want to acknowledge the work that my colleagues in Auckland have done over the concern over the budget cuts that are proposed by our council. There’s actually been a lot of work on this during the recess to support our councillors and to bring to the public attention the issue about wellbeing in our community and how important it is that the budget reflects those priorities in Auckland. We held a forum, and it was really well attended and got that message out there, as to what’s important and what the basis of local government is.

I wanted to talk about, today, the new role I have as the Labour list MP based in Mt Albert. It’s a place that I live, and one of the issues that has been really big in that community is, obviously, the impact of the floods in Auckland. I saw that myself, because I live there. I woke up in the place I live and it was in fact a lake below my house. I had three people in my house who were refugees from that flood, because they’d been flooded out. My colleagues David Parker and Jacinda Ardern were both impacted directly, and they’re in the same suburb. I know that David Parker got in and worked really hard in his own area because one of his neighbours had been flooded out. He did the hard work of actually repairing that basement. I know that Jacinda Ardern turned up to the local cafe in her gumboots and got in and helped. Her own street, I know well, is one of the areas which is really subject to flooding. It’s been subject to flooding for a very long time. I’ve lived there for 34 years, so I know. It’s an area that’s got a lot of State housing in it, and those houses get flooded regularly. This was the worst I’ve ever seen. That housing is going to be rebuilt, and it will be rebuilt mindful of the flood risk. So, actually, the pipes that are going in the ground are the pipes that the Labour Government is funding. There is $3.8 billion worth of funding in that infrastructure area, and it goes into the pipes in the ground; it goes into the infrastructure. Then we build the houses that actually will be resilient in that situation.

We can see that that’s happened in places like Hobsonville and Stonefields, where the houses were built with this in mind, and they fared much better in the floods. But right now, in Mount Albert, there’s a lot of areas that we need to be very careful about, because the price that people paid was very real. There were dramatic slips. There was, obviously, a lake in my garden, and those kinds of things are fun to engage in for a few minutes, but then you realise that you’ve got sewage that’s going into that water and people are playing in the water. So it is a very big and real risk. I was really impressed that in that period, with the engagement that I got from people like Ginny Andersen, who had just become the small-business Minister, we went to those businesses that were massively impacted. She saw what was going on. But we also engaged with the leaders in that community. So the response that came out was actually well supported by evidence and understanding of what was going on.

Thus there was $5 million worth of support by 8 February. That was just days after that flood—$5 million to small businesses—and that was available to those small businesses. It involved things like mental health support for those impacted, and advice on how to run a business given what had happened—the catastrophe to those businesses. So those were real things that came out of real, grounded understanding of what was going on on the ground.

I just want to spend the last few minutes acknowledging how terrible it was and how stressful it was for people, because there have been so many catastrophes, and we have such a good reason to focus on some of those other catastrophes. But nobody has forgotten what happened in those areas of Auckland during those floods. They are not forgotten. The support continues, and I wanted to say that even today there was an announcement about tax relief for flood-affected businesses in the North Island. That will give people relief, with regard to the money that is paid by insurers, so that they’re not paying tax on money that will rebuild their businesses. That’s this Government: it’s grounded, and it’s doing its job.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. Northland—been there for 33 years. They say, “Come to Northland and have a holiday via the holiday highway”. Well, good luck, I say, to anyone south of there going through the Auckland isthmus north. If you couldn’t get blessed north—gracious me, I get into my car when I depart Parliament and I sit in that car for 4½ hours just to get home routinely. One road, one lane either way, and that’s assuming its state of repair is such that you could actually have a vehicle on it. Northlanders tell me they feel like a metaphorical poor cousin in their own country. Why are they second-rate citizens, they ask of me, and I cannot answer.

Cyclone recovery: “Comedic”, they say. Fixing the problems in Northland—places like the Mangamuka Gorge, shut for years now; thousands of people feeling isolated in their own country and that Wellingtonians and bureaucrats are not listening to the needs of the regions and outcomes. Gracious me, the Brynderwyns—every Northlander knows if the Brynderwyns goes down, we’re really stuck. The Brynderwyns, culminated with the Mangamukas—that part of New Zealand is unequivocally on its own. That’s our link to the hub of Auckland. And how do we ameliorate the worries therein? Farmers in Northland are also saying, “What of localism and local issues?” Trying to arrest all the issues around freshwater drainage and the stopbanks that were so heavily eroded in the latest cyclones.

Crime. I don’t know if many members of this House have spent a lot of time in Kaikohe or Kaitāia, but I can categorically tell you those good people don’t like going out on to the streets at night. Now, I am a Northlander; I have lived there for a long time. I don’t generally have issues with going to the theatre, you might say, in Whangārei. That was the reality of old; it’s certainly not a reality nowadays. If you are lucky enough to have a good evening out, the likelihood of having either your car stolen or having a shop window frontage stoved in by a whole lot of ram-raiders is an ever-increasing reality.

We have to address these issues. Why is Northland always one of those regions that seems to be, for reasons inexplicable to me, left behind? Certainly, ACT has a voice in this Parliament. We will certainly address those issues, and we will be taking them beyond this election. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s my privilege to talk around the Epsom electorate, where I’ve been based for a number of years now, focused, as always, on the party vote.

I want to talk about three issues that are top of mind. Many local issues have been canvassed across the board, and in Auckland, obviously, you heard a lot about the impact of those dreadful floods at the start of the year, but I wanted to highlight three areas.

One is crime in the area. I spent a bit of time with the owner of a superette in Parnell, on the main road there, who had been ram-raided twice and—well, smash and grabbed, rather than ram-raided. There was a ram raid and then a smash and a grab, and $40,000 of damage was done in his little shop and $15 worth of chocolate and confectionery were stolen, so the conclusion he drew was it was all about the excitement of the smash. But the consequences for him—now, the people were caught and he was told that they had been doing this on many other occasions. The frustration on this dairy owner’s face, and the look of sheer frustration on the face of his wife, stuck with me, because these are people who are working hard to develop their lives and support their families in this part of Auckland, in Parnell, trying to make a living, and they are being battered and assaulted and having their businesses turned upside down and made, frankly, unviable by what is widely regarded from their perspective as young criminals facing no consequences for repeated serious crimes.

We’re not talking about minor crimes. We’re not talking about shoplifting; we’re talking about stealing a car and smashing it into a building and running off in, again, more often than not, another stolen car and crashing that somewhere else—so tens of thousands of dollars of damage. Now, that all flows through to insurance costs and to the cost of the business and the cost that everybody pays. So that is why we think it’s so important, if you’re responding to the real issues on the ground in Epsom and in many other electorates across the country, that we deal more effectively with the out-of-control youth crime that we’re seeing in our city right here, right now.

The second issue I want to deal with is the growing pressure that the retail and hospitality sectors particularly—and I’m thinking in terms of Newmarket, but also Parnell—are suffering. You walk down the main street of Newmarket, which is one of the greatest shopping areas and precincts in Auckland and New Zealand, and it has magnificent shops in the big developments. But it also has shop after shop that is empty and boarded up and not trading. A lot of those small businesses and small operators are really struggling under the cost of living pressures that their customers are facing, but also there are the costs that have been imposed on those small businesses by what we think has been a rather thoughtless Government, which seems to believe that a Government can keep on imposing very significant increases in the minimum wage, extra sick leave, extra this, extra that, extra holidays, and bring in fair pay agreements, and somehow these small, family operated businesses out the back of Broadway Street and Teed Street, or something like that, can just soak up the costs and continue to thrive, and that is not the case. Any Government that cares about small-business owners, in particular, and the flow-on effects on New Zealanders who are just trying to buy things in an effective way needs to be much more disciplined in its approach to adding costs.

The third area, which was raised with me a couple of times when I was out door-knocking in the rain in Mount Eden last Sunday, is the slow irritant of what appears to be a war on motorists in our city, in Auckland, with this strange desire to make us crawl around at 30 kilometres an hour in modern vehicles that have never been safer, and the epidemic of speed bumps everywhere. People just want to get to where they want to go and they don’t want to have to crawl around. I suppose the only point is it’s a very strange priority of any Government to try to drive the people of Auckland and Epsom crazy by making them go so slow when they’ve got places to go.

So I just wanted to raise those issues around crime and around the pressure in the retail area.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. First, may I take the opportunity to encourage the people of Nelson and Tasman to prepare for the potential of heavy rain events over the weekend. Yesterday, I joined a briefing call with our local civil defence emergency management group (CDEM) and councils, as our local teams prepare for the potential of heavy rain.

The events of August 2022 still hang heavy over many people in our community. I wish to acknowledge that for many people, it may be an anxious time. In order to get prepared, I encourage households to take the following steps. If it’s safe, check your drains and gutters for any debris that could cause surface flooding on your property. Make a plan with your family; agree where your meeting point will be if you’re separated from each other. Keep your phones well charged and have a battery-powered radio available. Put together a grab bag, including water, snacks, medication, warm clothing, and rainwear; don’t forget to add food and medication for your pets. If you’re on social media, follow and check the Nelson Tasman Civil Defence pages and the Nelson City and Tasman District Council pages. Finally, consider whether you need to be out and about on the roads, and drive to the conditions. If you can work from home, please do so.

I know that some Nelsonians may be feeling anxious about the potential for a severe event, especially following the significant event we faced last year. If you are feeling concerned or anxious and would like to speak to someone, please text or phone 1737 at any time of the day or night to speak to someone. I have had reports from locals who were affected by the August 2022 floods that they’ve found this service very helpful.

My thanks to our local CDEM and emergency response teams who are using their expertise and skills to ensure our region is prepared. You are our heroes. Kia kaha.

Now, to the local issue that I want to speak to in the House today—and that is what I call the Richmond transport mess. Richmond is in the western part of the Nelson electorate and is the largest urban area in the Tasman district. Over the past few years, there has been a massive growth in housing, leading to urban sprawl and congested roadways. Unfortunately, there was no plan by the Government of the day, or the local council, about how increased transport would be accommodated.

What has transpired is a very congested set of intersections that intersect between State Highway 6 and local roads where we have a number of different road users competing for access to our transport network. The area is a State highway that connects some of our biggest industries to the State highway network, such as Nelson pine industries and numerous horticulture and other primary industries. This is the only legitimate road access for industry to get their goods by truck to Nelson port for export.

The intersection at Lower Queen Street and State Highway 6 is also the main intersection where vulnerable young children and older adults cross the road from the Berryfields development, to visit the Richmond Library, the supermarkets, the local mall, the council buildings, the Ministry of Social Development, a number of other service agencies, and to get to school. It is often unsafe for people to cross the road at this very busy intersection. With a growing number of residents in the area, and limited public transport options—although not for long—we’ve had a significant increase in car traffic in the area. Right next to the intersection is the Great Taste Trail, our region’s premier cycleway for tourists and commuters, right next to busy roads with trucks and a growing number of cars. It’s been my long-held view that this is the most congested and unsafe part of the transport network in our region. With a growing number of homes being developed, it will only get worse.

Since early 2020, before I became the local MP, I have been working with the council and Waka Kotahi to push for progress on a transport plan for this area, because we didn’t even have one. I’m delighted that a transport plan for Richmond has now been agreed between Tasman District Council and Waka Kotahi and that my advocacy for this has paid off. It’s the first important step to getting the Richmond transport mess sorted out. Now we have to get it funded, consented, and on Waka Kotahi and Tasman District Council project plans. As the local MP, I will continue to advocate and push hard for this important project, so that we can get around our region safely and using multiple transport modes.

As the local MP, I will continue to fight to fix the Richmond transport mess. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Thank you for the opportunity to be able to get up and speak as the member of Parliament for Whangaparāoa, and the proud member of Parliament for my electorate.

I want to raise several issues. The first one is the Pūhoi to Warkworth road of national significance that I fought hard for as the local member. It was started under a National Government whilst the Labour Government the whole time referred to it as the holiday highway and stood in firm opposition to it. Why is that road not open? The road should be open now. It was open temporarily when we had the weather events and the flooding, because it was a safety issue when we had people trapped in Northland. The best thing that we can do for the people of Northland is to open that road and it’s better for the economy and it’s safer. So I want to know why this Labour Government hasn’t already got that road open. It should be open; one that they stood against.

Kāinga Ora, Housing New Zealand, the wrecking ball—I want to support Housing New Zealand, Kāinga Ora, because, actually, they’ve got a very important job and an important role to make sure that we can provide the housing that we all want to for Kiwis in New Zealand. But Kāinga Ora are a wrecking ball through communities at the moment. I’ve had two incidents in the last 12 months. One in Weir Lane, where Housing New Zealand came in and decided it was good to put Mongrel Mob associates in there. People felt like they were under siege in their own homes. It impacted the retailers and it had a massive negative effect on the community. Then they came into Bonair and they decide that it’s a good idea to come in and buy a piece of land where they’re going to deliver 37 social houses, and try to avoid consulting with the community. So we had to get involved in that. That’s been stopped, thankfully. But Kāinga Ora are showing their true colours by actually not just forgetting to consult with the community but actually trying to purposely avoid that consultation.

And then we’ve got crime. In the last four years, we’ve seen the Hells Angels move into, and buy, commercial property in Silverdale and set up a pad. We’ve had aggravated robberies. We’ve had ram raids. I had a meeting organised by Destination Orewa and Hellen Wilkins, our business association, two weeks ago with our Police Area Commander Matt Laurenson. He was surprised to hear the feedback around the frustration on the 105 line, the fact now that there’s underreporting with retail crime because it’s happening so regularly.

I had the manager of the Whangaparāoa Mall call me two days ago saying that he’d just handed in his resignation. We had the 55-year-old trolley boy out of New World there that was threatened with a knife by juvenile offenders. He said he can’t deal with it any more. I have a public meeting next week in my patch, because we’ve had so much—we’ve had assaults and intimidation and disorder at the Silverdale bus station.

We had the weather events where we learnt very quickly that we couldn’t rely on either central government or the council to actually have a proper response for us. I want to acknowledge Roger Small, our Acting Area Police Commander. I want to acknowledge Matt Laurenson, the Acting District Police Commander. I want to acknowledge Shaun Pilgrim and Don McErlich, our local police chiefs, Andy Everiss from St John’s, and Faron Turner from Surf Life Saving, who all came together. We came together and we recognised very quickly that we had to go to a local response to those weather events, and that’s what we did. We set up a local command and control centre at the Silverdale Fire Station. St John’s brought in their mobile command and control centre, and we pre-positioned inflatable rescue boats and surf lifesaving assets up there, which meant that we had the right people at the right time in the right place. And it worked. But we had to take it back to a local response.

I want to talk about Penlink. I was a young 17-year-old shepherd working on Whiti station when the first stake went in the ground for Penlink. And this Government who has come out and made the announcement that they are going to build it—it still hasn’t started. Two lanes! Two lanes is not acceptable. It has to be a four-lane Penlink. It is ridiculous. Anyone that understands and knows the area would know that it has to be four lanes, and it’s just cutting corners. Nothing has happened. Nothing has been delivered. It’s frustrating for me because in 2017 I got buy-in and sign-up from my Government at the time to build a four-lane Penlink. It would have already been well under way.

The only piece of serious infrastructure that’s been delivered for us is from Pūhoi to Warkworth, and that was started under a National Government. We have had nothing poured into the electorate other than, under this Government, an increase in crime, social issues around Kāinga Ora, and no serious infrastructure having been delivered at all into the electorate.

So there’s a clear choice. There’s a clear choice this year for the country. Do we want to continue down that pathway or do we want to have a change?

Thank you so much, Mr Speaker. I am absolutely delighted to take this call as the member of Parliament for Ilam. Before I get into the nitty-gritty of my speech this afternoon, I just want to highlight and celebrate the fact that the University of Canterbury, which is undeniably the very best university in the whole of Aotearoa New Zealand, is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. In order to celebrate, its offering 150 Te Kakau a Māui scholarships to students, primarily from low-decile schools in Te Wai Pounamu—full scholarships, for the entire duration of that student’s degree. The first 150 have been allocated, but if anybody is interested in applying, please do reach out. And, equally, if anybody is interested in making a donation, a substantial donation to the very wonderful University of Canterbury, can I direct their attention to the vice-chancellor, Professor Cheryl de la Rey, who will be more than happy to talk with them.

I’ll move on to the issue I’m going to be talking about this afternoon. I’m going to talk a little bit about students, but primarily how they fit into the electorate in terms of housing capability. One-third of our electorate in Ilam are renters—one-third of households; that’s 8,000 households—and many of those households in the very wonderful surrounds of the University of Canterbury are students. Labour has, in fact, made great strides in helping renters get a fair deal. We’ve limited rent increases to once a year. We’ve introduced healthy home standards and banned unfair letting fees.

This is really personal for me because two of my daughters have recently been students. One of them was a student before I entered the House as the member of Parliament for Ilam, and when I was going around the properties that she was renting—and she was a great tenant—she and the other young people, like many students in the very wonderful University of Canterbury, are responsible tenants who really looked after their properties and gardens. But I have to tell you that some of the properties that they were living in were appalling, covered in black mould, not even meeting basic building standards, and they were afraid to complain because at the time the no-cause termination policy for tenancies was in place. They didn’t want to complain because they thought that they might be on the receiving end of a no-cause termination which would flick them out into the community with nowhere to live. It was very hard at the time, post-quake, to actually find somewhere to live because housing stock was so limited.

The National Party plans to reintroduce no-cause evictions, which will cause families who’ve been in their homes for many years potentially, paying their rent on time—great tenants, tenants like my daughter and her colleagues—and with children settled in school, to be evicted for no reason except on the whim of the landlord. I have to say that we know that there are many fantastic landlords in the electorate, but some are not so great. It surprised many people that 33 percent of households in Ilam were renting households. But it also surprises people when they hear that we have the second-largest social housing area in Christchurch. I’m so incredibly happy to have 34 new warm, dry homes for people in need—social housing homes, mostly two-storey, one to five bedrooms—just around the corner from my electorate office, and they are one of many planned in Bishopdale, Bryndwr, and Burnside. There are 114 new, warm, dry units planned across 14 sites, replacing 39 older units.

In Christchurch, this Government has delivered 1,821 additional public houses, whereas under the previous National Government, before 2017, Christchurch had a net loss of 341 homes, and National planned to sell off another 2,500 State houses, a policy, incidentally, that was enthusiastically supported by the then city councillor and now leader of the Opportunities Party, Raf Manji—just by the way. Can you imagine the mess we’d have been in if those 2,500 houses had been lost to our housing stock? I’m incredibly proud to be part of this Government, which has actually increased the number of houses in my electorate.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. West Auckland has a problem: successive Governments have broken the deal that Westies like me thought they had with their Government—that is, you pay your taxes, you pay your rates, and you get good infrastructure; homes and businesses and lives are protected from flooding, and we don’t have sewage on our beaches. That’s the deal we thought we had. But the deal’s broken. Those networks simply can’t cope with the housing growth we’ve had over the past 20 or 30 years: 387 waste-water overflows alone in Henderson Creek, and 241 in the Whau Creek in the year to July 2022. After the terrible floods and storms of January and February 2023, I imagine those numbers would be much, much worse for this year. Waka ama paddlers, rowers, multisport clubbies, water skiers, and the kids swimming off the pontoon at Taipari Strand are all exposed to unacceptable health risks as a result of those waste-water overflows.

I want to acknowledge the work of Alan Clist, Peter Nelson, and the RiverCare group, which is highlighted to Auckland Council and to Watercare and is pushing to bring forward the necessary upgrades to the waste-water network to minimise the number of overflows that are currently occurring and stopping us from enjoying our awa. Around 311,000 people call West Auckland home. That’s 70,000 more than in 2006. All of those people have an expectation that their homes and their lives will be safe from flooding. That’s why I want to acknowledge the work of Lyall Carter from the West Auckland Is Flooding group. He’s been advocating, and the group’s been advocating for people displaced by floods and storms in January and February, and driving for rates relief for people and rapid action by council and by Government to give them certainty that they can either return and rebuild or that they will be able to leave those properties and receive adequate compensation.

I also want to acknowledge the work that Michael Coote and Kent Xie do as part of the Friends of Harbourview, bringing the community together to restore wetlands and provide habitat for the endangered fern bird which lives on Te Atatū Peninsula. It’s the tireless work of these community advocates which shows what can be done and, if councils and Governments held up their end of the deal, imagine what we could do to support growth, housing, and deliver a better environment. These long-term problems can be solved with better public policy and bringing forward the funding to fix our infrastructure investments. That’s what I’ll be campaigning for in 2023.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m very proud to work hard to serve my North Shore community. It’s a special place to live, with great local businesses, yet, frustratingly, we have, of course, seen a high number of crime issues in our area, including ram raids. There have been ram raids on jewellers in Birkenhead, and vape stores and dairies in Hillcrest, and other examples, including students being robbed of a significant amount of cash by offenders who went to great lengths to impersonate police.

As the local MP, I stand to speak to this to acknowledge the issues that my community face, but what is important here is the response to crime in our community and how further incidents can be prevented from taking place, and that is what we need to talk about. I’ve particularly been impressed and grateful at the work that the New Zealand Police are doing locally to catch offenders when these issues take place, and the work that they’re doing locally to prevent crime in our area. This has had a tangible impact on our offending rates. However, we need to lock in and sustain this progress, and we need to continue to introduce innovations in combating crime and keeping people safe in my community, making our communities safer with the roll-out of state-of-the-art tools and training to front-line police staff.

I receive regular briefings from our local community policing team in Glenfield and the area commander, and it is important to note here that police staff numbers in the Waitematā district are up 15 percent—that’s a 15 percent increase—since 2017. That has enabled my community and the New Zealand Police to re-establish community policing teams across the North Shore and the Kaipātiki, Northcote, and across to Takapuna as well. People like having their local community constable in place and present around the community, and they’ve also, in modern day, extended this service to our online community. Police actively investigate every ram raid and the issues and incidents that we have had locally, and work hard to hold offenders to account.

I’m pleased about the work being delivered in the community, including better street lighting, CCTV systems installed by the Birkenhead Business Association, and the support being put in place to strengthen glass and to install street bollards and fog cannons into our local shops. This is work that has been put in place through the double investment from this Government into the retail crime prevention fund, and then some.

This year, the police commenced a nationwide roll-out of the tactical response model. To be clear, this is important because it’s not the armed response teams in place; it’s the tactical response model. Smart policing can anticipate dangerous and high-risk situations before they arise, and we need more focus on community programmes that we see locally to support youth justice.

While there has been a small increase in police proceedings against children in 2021-22 compared to 2020-21, the numbers show that high-risk children with complex needs are committing much of the offending. Those youth are who we need to continue to work with to reduce their offending, and, yes, they are young people impacting my community when it comes to ram raids.

I want to acknowledge not only the work that is ongoing in my community but the youth programmes that have been established out in West Auckland and in South Auckland, because it’s not just young people from my community that choose to do ram raids locally; it’s an Auckland-wide challenge that we’re trying to overcome. This work is difficult work. It’s tough work that we are all trying to get on top of. But I believe that the work we’re doing with young people is working and that it has to work, and we need to focus on long-term solutions while we deal with the day-to-day challenges that we’re seeing. This includes the decline in youth offending through programmes like Kotahi te Whakaaro, which has seen only 27 of the 147 children engaged in the programme reoffend. That’s an important piece of work that is supporting not just individuals—children and young people—but their families too, and, as the local MP, that’s what I stand for, for long-term challenges.

Before I call Mr Penk, I’d just indicate that there will be seven unallocated minutes at the conclusion of Mr Penk’s speech, provided he goes his full five minutes, in which case I will then open the floor to bids. Chris Penk—starting now.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a call on this, the local issues debate. It’s a fine innovation, I think, of this House and the opportunity to speak about issues that are near and dear to our hearts as local MPs and list MPs based in the area too. Speaking as the MP for Kaipara ki Mahurangi—the rural north, north-west, and west Auckland—I’d be remiss if I didn’t make my contribution something along the lines of infrastructure that has not kept up with population growth in those areas. More particularly, I want to raise, for the attention of the House, the issue of transport infrastructure. It’s not the only example of where additional attention, planning, and indeed investment is needed, but it is perhaps the most obvious one—and it would be, I suspect, the one most frequently raised with me in my office, by some margin.

Within the transport space, we could choose the infamous Hill Street intersection. We could look a bit further north on the way to Wellsford, namely the Dome Valley route. That route was recently beset by a slip, notwithstanding that a huge amount of money was recently spent, and goodness knows, plenty of road cones and time and energy, and disruption in the service of seeking to upgrade that road along other lines. We could also look across to State Highway 16, State Highway 1, or indeed further north to the Brynderwyns, where, as another member has pointed out, constituents from my electorate heading north—and, of course, Northlanders heading south—require that access to safely traverse that arterial route that is the motorway north. But, actually, I’ve decided to focus on a particular issue that relates to the area of Kūmeu and surrounding areas in north-west Auckland. It is to do with the fact that notices of requirement have been set in motion—or sent out—with letters sent to households advising that certain works are contemplated, and I’ll get into the detail of that shortly, if I may, because this is the crucial bit.

We’ve got a so-called rapid transit corridor in the area, which, from my perspective, is the wrong project, the wrong place, and the wrong time. We’ve also got an alternative corridor—so called—often referred to as a “Kūmeu bypass”, where the whole north-west area of Auckland will benefit from the fact that they will have an opportunity not to go up the main drag that is deeply and highly congested on that main arterial route which is known as the main road, but also State Highway 16 through that heavily populated part of the world. So the problem is that we’ve got residents—by which I mean households but also businesses—who have received letters to say that works will take place at some point at an unspecified time. It’s unclear to the people who have received those letters how they might be affected, or whether land will be required to be acquired from them in a “willing buyer, willing seller” arrangement, or perhaps compulsorily acquired under the Public Works Act. So there’s a lack of clarity, but also, more fundamentally, the issue is that these projects haven’t been funded. They are not certain either as to timing or even necessarily whether they would go ahead, and you can forgive the cynicism when you think about the longevity of these projects as projects that have been discussed but not yet delivered, or even indeed subject to detailed planning.

So for some years now—and I think it must be at least three years—residents in the area have received letters which sit on their property file, form part of the knowledge about what is affecting their property, and say that land may be required for the alternative highway. Well, this is unacceptable, because this is hanging over people. They’re not able to sell the property except with the sword of Damocles hanging over the potential buyer. They don’t know if they can make good decisions to remain in the area and attend local schools—which is another story for another day—and so forth. So for people to be in limbo to this extent without the certainty or without the ability to be bought out, really, frankly, isn’t good enough. When you place that in the context of a lack of delivery—and, yes, that’s been a longstanding issue; it’s not a recent phenomenon, and I don’t seek to make a partisan issue of it in that sense—but the reality is that the people of north-west Auckland as well as further afield—but I’m focusing on this particular aspect today—have been very poorly served. They have been rendered uncertain and fearful in some cases about what may happen to them. We need to get on and provide them the certainty. We need to build the infrastructure, if it’s to go ahead, and put these people out of their misery.

Can I just indicate that maths has never been my strong point. There’s actually only going to be a three- to four-minute call. What I will do is: ACT were actually shy one minute—they’re owed one minute—so I will halve this call. So it is 1½ minutes for ACT and 1½ minutes for Mr Glen Bennett.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m proud to stand for Christchurch East. It is an area that is still slowly rebuilding after the quake. We still have potholes in our areas. You drive around our local street and sometimes you may actually disappear in these potholes. We have not had these fixed for so many years. It’s not an exaggeration; in some areas, they are that deep. It is amazing that we have not been able to get these repairs done.

We have huge numbers of people moving into our area because there’s been a huge influx of building within that Christchurch East area, which is great, because we have a mixed-medium sort of houses. But our roads still need repair from quake. We’ve been spending so much money around putting 40-kilometre zones and red paint on our roads. I would like to see those roads fixed before we try to drop those speeds. We can’t do that speed anyway, otherwise we’ll end up with flat tires or our rims stuck in those potholes.

So, Mr Speaker, thank you for giving me this opportunity to speak on behalf of my Christchurch East people that are having problems, still, to this day, of getting around our roads within our lovely electorate of Christchurch East. Let’s hope we don’t have too many rains, because these holes will open up even bigger during our winter months, and it will be interesting to see if trucks fall into those holes.

Kia ora, Mr Speaker. I stand as the MP for New Plymouth, a wonderful part of our country. Recently I was at Ōwae Marae, which is a significant marae in our region in Taranaki. It’s the home to Sir Māui Pōmare, a member of this House and also a significant doctor in terms of championing the health of our nation, of our globe, of indigenous people, and of Māori. I was at a dawn service just recently, for the opening of the new wharekai, Ko Tamawahine, which, with support from us as Government, with support from our communities, we were able to build a brand new, state-of-the-art wharekai facility.

This is more than just a place for eating, for sharing, for manaakitanga; this is also a place for civil defence. The awesome thing about it was they were able to come together and not just look at what this would mean for the marae, not just at what this would mean for that community around food and hospitality but also what that means on a day like today where the rains have opened in Taranaki. There is a base there in Waitara that can support the local people all around that part of the country.

I am grateful for the passion and drive of the people of Ōwae Marae and the community of Waitara for ensuring that they have a state-of-the-art facility that will host not only Prime Ministers and musicians from all around the world during World of Music, Arts and Dance but will support tangi, it will support kōrero, and it will support our community in our region. Mr Speaker, thank you.

Motion agreed to.