Parliamentary Debates (Hansard) - New Zealand Parliament

3664 Local Government (Auckland Reorganisation) Bill 16 May 2009
Motion agreed to.
House resumed.
Speaker Recalled
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Rick Barker): Mr Speaker, the Committee has asked
for you to consider the matters that I have ruled on and for you to make some decisions.
It extends from an amendment in the name of Charles Chauvel to insert a new Part 9,
“Protection of Public Assets”. In his amendment Mr Chauvel wants the bill to reflect a
register of assets that should be protected in a variety of ways. That is not the issue here.
Subsequent to that, the Labour Party moved a range of amendments—I have not
counted them, but they are substantial—to amend Charles Chauvel’s part. Objection
was taken to those amendments and I was asked to rule them out, and I invited
comments from both Labour and National on them.
It seems to me that it gets down to a particular issue, which the Clerk has raised with
me, that the bill before the House is a public policy bill. It is not about establishing
rights for individuals. The Clerk’s view of this bill is that although the amendments are
consistent in form and could stand in legislation, they have to have some form of
consistency. However, I did not think that was a turning point, because this House has
passed legislation before that has been inherently inconsistent—like the liquor
legislation and so on. I did not see that as a particular test. The particular test that I did
put weight on was that these amendments would give private individuals and businesses
in particular areas rights or interests that would not be available to the general public of
Auckland, and that, therefore, the amendments sought to be about private interests and
not public interests.
The bill is about establishing public policy for Auckland—it is a public policy
decision. On that basis, I ruled the amendments as being out of order. There are many
other points that could have been made in submission, but I am sure representations will
be made by both National and Labour on those other particular points. That is the
summary of the position as I see it.
Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Labour—Hutt South): I raise a point of order, Mr
Speaker. The first point I would like to make is that I think the process that was
followed by the Chair in calling for members’ comments on this issue is a good process.
Unfortunately, I think we have reached a point where we do not agree. The decision
goes to the question of whether these amendments are frivolous. We have had
acceptance that they are not vague; in fact, they are very specific. They do not lack
form; we have had acceptance that they can be written into the law. The Chair of the
Committee has indicated that in his opinion these amendments are not appropriate
because they give private rights to individuals. We could have a debate about that
matter. They are not private, transferable rights. If someone leaves a street, he or she
does not take those rights with them. There is not ownership of rights. But if I were to
have that debate, I would be getting into the substance of the debate.
That is the problem with the Chairman’s ruling. He has actually got into, in making
his ruling, a view on the merits of the amendments, rather than whether they should be
ruled out under the areas that are very well outlined by McGee on page 379. My
submission to you is that no one has made the case that these particular amendments are
frivolous. Given the tests that have been applied in this Chamber by Chairs today—in
parliamentary terms, or during the last 4 days in temporal terms—these amendments
could not possibly be frivolous. A whole series of date changes and a whole series of
name changes have been accepted by the Chairs, which, if one were applying a frivolity