Know Your Validating Legislation

Kaipara District Council has been sacked. Commissioners appointed to fix the mess. And their latest initiative - validating legislation is in the public domain. This is a Local Bill. No public discussion or consultation occurred.

Now that the Commissioner's famous Bill to fix everything is public, it is time it was examined. The explanation in the bill says this: 

The Kaipara District Council acknowledges that a number of irregularities occurred in the setting and assessing of rates in the financial years relating to 2006/2007 to 2011/2012 (inclusive). This has raised questions about the validity of those rates.... Some of the rates in question relate to the capital and operational funding of the Mangawhai EcoCare Wastewater Treatment Scheme....The Council considers that it is desirable to address the rating irregularities and legislation is the only means by which the rates can be validated and any penalties payable on any outstanding rates can be validated.

You can read the Bill for yourself. It can be downloaded here. In fact it is an incredibly interesting read because it carefully lists many of the mistakes the council made over the last 6 or 7 years. If you want to make a submission then it helps to read it. The timeline for submissions isn't known yet. 

But to give you a flavour, Section 15 of the Bill, which will become law if passed by parliament, says this: 

15 Validation of rates assessments Despite the failure of the Council to set out some of the information required by section 45(1) of the Rating Act, the Council's rates assessments for the 2006/2007, the 2007/2008, the 2008/2009, the 2009/2010, the 2010/2011, the 2011/12, and the 2012/2013 financial years are valid and declared to be and to always have been lawful.

This is tough to take. It's like saying, these rates assessments were lies, but we'll make them true with this law. 

Commissioner Chairman Robertson has said, that this is a one-off situation that has to be addressed and there is no other way. But the government has done absolutely nothing to improve the supervision of councils and its recent changes to Local Government law remove most of the requirements on councils to consider the well-being of their communities when they do things. So all of the councils up and down the country who are ignoring the law as it stands now know they can carry on ignoring the law, because if Kaipara can get away with it on this scale, so will everyone else. This Bill sets a terrible precedent, not just in Local Government, but for the future of democracy.