My councillors and I have put together a comprehensive plan for this city – we still have great work to do. We are committed to holding rate increases down to below 4%; we have infrastructure plans in place including massive sewage main upgrades, roading and bridge projects– a new aquatic centre; new libraries, new areas for people to live in the city; new environmental plans that we are putting in place. We have got the mixture right.

Here's the thing – democracy is about relationships. I lead a healthy functional council and we don't always agree on every issue but we get things done.

Why choose me – I have proven that I have established strong relationships with all the key players – the council, the chief executive; local business; the national government; social services and community groups. I am a good facilitator and leader.

Why should you vote for me – well because I have spent the last three years developing some extraordinary relationships. First of all I run a functional council – this is in complete contrast to the ECan council. I have a great relationship with the Council's CEO and staff and this is vital to ensure progress of community goals.

Most importantly central government understands us – they have brought into what we are trying to do as you can see from the amount of money they are now pouring into Christchurch - $41M towards the convention centers; half a billion for new roading projects in Christchurch city; money for a new athletic centre money for the AMI Stadium – we have in two years got more money out of central government than I believe other councils have in over a decade.

We have brought the rates increases down to a survivable, sustainable level.

When I took office those rates were increasing about 9 to 10% per year, now for the next ten years the average increase each year will be around 3.9% just a little bit above inflation.

We are the only council in New Zealand to have earned a AA+ Standard and Poors rating for its 10 year plan – this is higher than all other New Zealand Councils, many governments and most banks – this was given due to our careful management of the Council's money.

By carefully reviewing our operating costs and cutting back in some areas. The big shift is a programme of conservative borrowing for growth projects.

What we have done is to say when a project has a life that spans a generation or more, today's ratepayer should only pay for the bit they use. As the city grows new ratepayers pick up their share of the costs for the bit they use. We borrow to cover the difference and it is paid off by the new ratepayers as they join the city.

Well I am glad Jim is not my accountant, because one of the rules that governs what we do is that we can only borrow in areas where there is a capital component, which will be later paid back by growth.

We are only borrowing money for capital projects. I am very happy for Jim to come into my office and show him our books.

We do not borrow for operating costs. The only area that we are borrowing is for projects where there is a lot of future capacity and rather than ask today's ratepayers to pay three times for a project once to build it – once to build a fund to replace it and once to maintain it so it never needs replacing – what we are saying is you should not pay for that future part – we borrow that money and let future generations pick up that share of the cost.

That is not possible – believe me the groceries are being really well looked after. You must be aware that there are strict rules in place and again I welcome Jim or any citizen of Christchurch to go over our books with me.

The groceries are being paid for out of rates and the only thing that we are borrowing for is for capital projects to accommodate the future growth and needs in our city.

Here's the thing -If we are developing a project for today, but has additional capital for the future what we are saying is that future capacity should be paid for by the future generations as they move into our city. We operate under very strict guidelines – we only borrow money for capital projects.

I would welcome Jim to give me an example of an area where the council has borrowed money for items that were operational and not capital?

I want to be really clear on that issue - the rents for the tenants only went up by 7%.

We increased the rent by 24% with the knowledge that 95% of our tenants receive a 70% government subsidy on any rent increase they got. So the real rent increase for virtually all our tenants was only 7%.

When times are tough ratepayers should not be forced subsidise the maintenance of social housing. The changes proposed would have made the social housing sustainable in the long term, rather than the council ending up with a huge maintenance bill for neglected properties in the next decade.

We have turned around a looming $50 million housing deficit at no cost to ratepayers and initiated an accelerated upgrade and housing replacement programme for city tenants

The big picture is that we have a clearly defined policy that rates will never be used to subsidise council's housing properties.

The sad part is that housing for our city's most vulnerable had not been properly funded. When we inherited the housing portfolio at the beginning of this term there was a 50 million dollar deficit sitting out in front of the council in five years time.

Previous councils had historically under collected rent – mainly for political reasons to keep the rents at a low level. But there was a cost to that – there were 100s of council flats that were not properly maintained and costing a fortune to heat, with rotting carpets – let me be clear - council was becoming a slum landlord.

I acknowledge that there were some tenants did not qualify for the 70% discount and our strategy was to work with those tenants on a case by case basis and we were confident that we could work out a way forward with them.

There are things I would have done differently. I am frustrated that on some decisions we have not taken the people with us.

We have not explained carefully enough the reasons behind some of our decisions. I understand that some people think we have been a secretive Council - I get that. But all my decisions have been about putting Christchurch first and getting the best outcome for this city.

This council has tried really hard to have a no surprises approach to its decision making. As part of that we've based our decisions on strategies that we've fully consulted on, but on some occasions we have had to act quickly and some people have seen that as acting in secrecy.

If the people of Christchurch re-elect me I will make sure we explain more clearly what we are doing and why we are doing it. That is an absolutely priority one for me in my second term as mayor. We should be making decisions armed with the views of the people of this city. That's the only way you get robust decisions. Not everybody will agree with everything we do but people should never feel shut out of their council. I'm not satisfied with where things stand at the moment on that score.

It wasn't done in secrecy it was just done very quickly – probably too quickly and I regret that. You don't always have the opportunity of time to go and consult on every single decision you make.

This was a crucial decision in the context of building a strong inner city community. Ad hoc big box development could have permanently changed Christchurch's CBD, and taken control away from the community. We had to protect those key central sites for inner city revitalisation.

One point I would like to make is that all our decisions, including this one are part of the strategic vision set out in the council's Long Term Council Community Plan or LTCCP. We carried out extensive public consultation before this plan was adopted by council.

Essentially the LTCCP sets out the activities and services that the council intends to provide for a period covering a minimum of 10 years.

It saddens me that we have not done a better job of selling our long term vision to the Christchurch community – we can do a much better job of this.

You might remember the Office of the Auditor General was called in to investigate the decisions and I welcomed that. They concluded that there was nothing at all wrong with the process council went through and it was entirely in keeping with the local government act.

If you look at our council and compare it to any of the other major metropolitan councils in New Zealand you will find the meetings we hold behind closed doors sits at the same amount as other councils- we are not a particularly secretive council – we are a council that is determined to get things moving that are in the best interests of the city. We have moved quickly in some issues that have been contentious – that's because we are ambitious for this city and all our decisions are based on what's best for Christchurch.

The cost of purchasing the event outright was considerably less than the cost of royalties over five years. The event itself has been exceptionally successful in Christchurch, bringing many visitors, and an independent economic analysis reports that the event has brought over $30 million to the local economy, that is a lot of extra income into our city over two years. It is income at the time of the year when there used to be nothing happening on the local calendar, and let's not forget the event took place during a recession.

It is local skills that make this show so successful. However the city had tried to stage its own show in the past. I think around $500,000 was spent on trying to get a garden show off the ground and we have had private shows and unfortunately they were not a great commercial success.

We now have a show in our city that from the critics' point of view is already one of the top five flower shows in Australasia.

We could not have got this event for a couple of hundred thousand dollars – the bids that we were competing against were compelling. What we decided is that if we are going to invest in this show we do not want to build it up and then lose it (much like the Nelson Wearable Arts Show) so we capitalised – we said we will give you $3M but you must sell us the rights so we have it forever and we buy the management rights and have the exclusive use of the management team for up to 10 years.

We were backing the Canterbury University. The University is central for a vibrant city and important for our young people's future – of course we are going to back their ideas. It is what is driving so many areas of our local economy so of course we would support the University.

They came to us and said we want to build a national conservatory for music at the Arts Centre. The University said to financially make it work they needed council to lend them money.

Christchurch City Council is the highest credit rated council probably in the Southern Hemisphere – we are a double A plus – Standard & Poors that is higher than most banks and higher than a lot of countries. The University asked us if we would use our credit rating to help them leverage a low cost loan to help them afford to build the conservatory.

For the council it wasn't about the site or the building it was about the principal of whether we would support our university or not with this concept. Consistently I said from the start of this project – whether it is the right site and whether it is the right building that is for the resource consent process.

The issue for our council was - are we going to support the University or not – it was as simple as that. The rest of it was between the Arts Centre Trust and the people who opposed it.

Let's step back and look at the bigger picture – firstly Christchurch City Council is the most generous council in the whole of New Zealand by tens of millions of dollars. This city this year is giving more than $30M in community grants.

People need to understand this - the grants are comprised of two portions. More than half of the money for community grants comes from the council's fixed investments the other half comes of rates. We have got over 11,000 ratepayers who have asked us for assistance to get a rates rebate of more than $500 to help them with their rates cost in the last 12 months.

We thought that it is better for the people of Christchurch in these difficult times to minimise the impact of rates on many of the vulnerable people who are ratepayers. We thought that the one and a half million dollars less that we asked for community grants was better left in their pockets than taking it out and spending for them.

Next year the community grants spend goes up from $30 M to $31M and it stays at that level for the next ten years. We are an enormously generous city, but you can't keep sucking money out of the ratepayers' pockets.

Right now I am enjoying working with the National government.  As a city we got nothing out of the Labour government. They didn’t give us money for the stadium – they said they would; they didn’t give us money for the rents – Jim said he was going to get that.

From the National government we have got $15M for the AMI stadium, we have probably $500m towards new roading projects they are probably going to give the city $40m for an expansion of the Convention Centre; we have just got $3M for a high performance sports centre at QE2; this is a government that is actually generously investing in our city.

The appointment of commissioners to Environment Canterbury was disappointing, but necessary. ECan had been a dysfunctional organisation for many years, dominated by infighting and with an inability to complete core tasks like regional the water plan. The commissioners should be able to make rapid gains at ECan for the people of Canterbury.

I supported the review of a failing organization and sought real progress on halting the degradation of aquifers and rivers, whilst calling for provincial consensus around options for water storage and irrigation to grow Canterbury GDP and jobs.

I am one of 10 mayors in the province each of whom believes passionately in this province. What everyone agrees on is that ECAN was not doing its job.

One of the key issues was that in 20 years Environment Canterbury had still not completed a regional water plan – in the meantime our lowland rivers are running dying; our aquifers being over allocated and our lakes dying day by day. Something needed to change and ECan were unable to bring in the changes.

So for years people including labour MPs, Jim Anderton as Minister of Agriculture and many others said something has to change. Finally the government decided to do something- the Mayors were concerned that the government might back off as it is a controversial issue. So each of Canterbury's mayors wrote a personal letter to say look here are a number of issues. We did not ask them to remove the councillors – we wanted the government to know that right across the province there was a level of concern.

The buck stops with the leadership and that is the councillors. If you recall before the government stepped in ECan's governance body had descended into what looked like an internal civil war. Kerry Burke had been overthrown; they had a new Chair; Labour MP Brendan Burns had asked the government to intervene because of alleged conflicts of interest. Frankly and sadly they were a mess.

I agree we have lost some democracy in our city – there is no doubt about that – but what is more important that we get it back as soon as possible with an organisation that has been reset and focussed on the most important single task that they have to protect the quality of our water; to protect our water and to ensure that there is water available to help up grow our local economy in a sustainable way.

This city has to have a future and if we don't grow our economy then all of the things that you and I take for granted – hospitals, schools. Roads, recreational activities, environmental programmes, sports ground and libraries all of those things will collapse.

Look there are great people at ECan and personally I admired a number of the councillors but collectively the system was broken.

I would much rather have not had to put my hand up on this issue – but that is what I am paid to do – look after the best interests of the people of Christchurch. I had a choice I could stand back and pretend that nothing was wrong or I could have the courage, along with the other Mayors of Canterbury, to put my hand up and day something needs to be fixed. And nobody disagrees that something had to be done.

I am calling for democratic elections before 2013.

I have always felt that we have to develop a sustainable rural economy in this province and to have this you have to have a sustainable water supply.  What we are all trying to work through is getting the balance right and being able to farm sustainably and better using the water that we have in this province. The most important point is that we must protect our water supply – there can be no compromise.

You can’t avoid the issue – we need to solve the issue of water storage. I support the process.