Source: New Zealand Parliament – Hansard
CHRIS BISHOP (National): Thank you, Mr Chair. Picking up on the comment that the Minister just made, which is that this is not about local government reform, well, that’s true in one sense, but that’s not what many people think. Certainly, I sat through many of the submissions from local government representatives to the Environment Committee, and I think my colleagues Scott Simpson and Barbara Kuriger would agree that one of the recurrent themes from local government—Local Government New Zealand, the peak body, and a whole range of other councils—was that this is a surreptitious, stealthy way—those are my words, not theirs—of reorganising local government.
We’re now going to have these regional planning committee superimposed over the top of councils. Contemporaneously, or at least simultaneously, we have the Government’s plans around three waters, which Simon Court has just referred to. Interestingly, when the bills were introduced, it was three waters across the big four mega entities, and literally whilst the current bills we’re talking about were at the select committee that got changed to 10. And we’ve had this quite absurd scenario in which Parliament has legislated for a bunch of different things and, barely before the bills were even signed into law, the Government has had to introduce more bills to Parliament to fix up the three waters reform process, and we’ve gone to 10.
We’ve got that going on at the same time that this is happening, and to make matters worse—another layer—we’ve got the future of local government reform—
CHAIRPERSON (Greg O’Connor): Just let’s stick with Part 4. You are contextualising, but let’s just move towards Part 4.
CHRIS BISHOP: It’s very material, Mr Chair, because it goes to the point that Simon Court made but also the Minister’s response, in relation to how this is not around reorganising local government. I just put it to the Minister that all of these reforms are disconnected from each other, and that’s actually what the select committee heard right the way through. I’ll just give you an example: we had the Mayor of Selwyn, who said what I just said. Plus, you’ve got Kāinga Ora, which has its own regions. It’s a mess—it’s a mess.
So I put it to the Minister: can we be confident that the 15 bodies established here are actually going to be the final group of bodies that we end up with? It does seem to many people—including, I think, many people on this side of the Chamber—that we have a very discombobulating reform process here. And, actually, there’s an argument that it would be better to do all of it at the same time rather than in bits and bobs and create enormous problems along the way.
Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): There are mixed views within local government on this. As I’ve already quoted you, the former Minister for the Environment says this is a good idea in respect of the region that he’s in and is the mayor of part of. There are many other mayors and councillors in different parts of the country also supportive. The local government steering group have been supportive. They’ve put additional protections relating to statements of community expectation, which we’ve already covered. But it’s not just the councils that support it; I quote from the submission from the Property Council: “The Property Council has long championed the need for resource reform and supports the action taken by the Government to reduce the number of plans from 100 to 15 and introduce regional spatial strategies which seek to plan for 30-plus years. We commend the Government and officials for producing the Natural and Built Environment Bill and the Spatial Planning Bill.” The numbers changed from 15 to 16, but you can see that there are development interests as well that support the move down to 15 plans. There is no hidden agenda here in respect of local government reform.
