Public Finance (Fines Collection Costs—Budget Measures) Amendment Bill

Members, we now come to clause 3 and this is the debate on clause 3, “Principal Act”. The question is that clause 3 stand part.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to ask the Minister a number of questions about this Public Finance (Fines Collection Costs—Budget Measures) Amendment Bill.

The questions that I would ask the Minister—and I am hoping here for a bit of a back and forth—are whether he considered in the introduction of this legislation, and, in fact, in the consideration leading up to the introduction of this legislation, the fact that—the last time that I checked—back in 2016, the average amount of spending that occurred at a local government level in the OECD was approximately 11 percent per the local and central government proportions—sorry, the average was 30 percent in the OECD. But here in Aotearoa New Zealand, we have less than half of that, at approximately 11 percent. This is something that I’ve heard the Minister talk about quite a lot—the fact that we need to see more resourcing for local government in this country to be able to meet the challenges of the crises that it is facing and the infrastructural deficit.

So when it comes to the fact that this bill will increase the proportion that central government can take back from local government, when it comes to the collection of these fines, I want to know whether the Minister had any consideration for the fact that local government is currently starved of resourcing and funding and whether he looked at any other potential avenues to support them with revenue generation.

Those are questions for the Minister, and I would hope that we can open up a bit of a back and forth here.

Could we please hold that question to clause 4, because the “Principal Act” is, basically, all around increasing the percentage the Crown retains from the amount of fines recovered. When we get into clause 4, we talk about the local authorities there, so if we could just hold that question.

I move, That debate on this question now close.