Address in Reply

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Mr Speaker, can I commence my contribution in this Address in Reply debate by congratulating you and your fellow presiding officers, who are going to adjudicate over the proceedings of this Parliament, the 54th Parliament, in, I’m sure, a very adequate and capable way. We know on this side of the House that you will bring dignity and grace to this office in a way that maybe some have thought was lacking in the past.

The good people of Coromandel are looking forward to a wonderful Christmas and summer period, and part of the reason that they’re looking forward to a wonderful Christmas and summer period is because it will be the first summer Christmas period in four years when we hope to have an uninterrupted peak visitor period over the summer break. We had two summers interrupted by COVID, and then, of course, last year, after Cyclone Hale and then Gabrielle, we incurred massive infrastructural damage to our region. But I was delighted to spend time with my colleague the Minister of Transport and also with the Prime Minister last week up at the site on State Highway 25 where the new bridge that will reopen this week to connect both sides of the Coromandel Peninsula together will allow for the summer that we have not been able to have for so many years.

People may be wondering why it’s so important to the Coromandel. Well, it’s simply this: that ours is an electorate that has a very summer orientated economy. Some of the local businesses on the east coast of the peninsula conduct something close to 80 percent of their annual revenue over that two- or three-month summer period, and if they don’t have access to the tens of thousands of visitors who will choose to holiday in the Coromandel, then they simply don’t have any capacity to make up that lost revenue during the course of the rest of the year. So Coromandel people will be very much looking forward to what we hope will be a good, long, hot, dry summer.

But the good people of the Coromandel electorate suffer in the same way that all New Zealanders do from the cost of living crisis, from the impacts of high and continued inflation, and they also represent very much what has come to be known as the squeezed middle. The good people of Coromandel are representative in so many ways of so much of what we see in other parts of the country: too much crime, too many ram raids, and gang thugs invading the streets of Coromandel town, heaven forbid, in a way—lawlessness of which we haven’t seen in this country before in my lifetime and I hope that we won’t continue seeing. Because I know that my colleague Mark Mitchell is going to do a terrifically good job as the Minister of Police and he will continue to bring a new focus on law and order and on the basic decency that is required of a neighbourhood, a community, or an area like the Coromandel.

This new coalition Government has been in office only for a few weeks, but already it is making very good advances on its 100-day plan. Already, last week, we passed a range of legislative initiatives that are aimed, amongst other things, to first stop the bleeding. That’s really the primary function of the legislative actions that will be taking place this week in the Parliament, because we know, on this side of the House—our coalition partners and all National MPs—that the spending over the last six years has been profligate—no respect at all for taxpayers’ money; a spend-tax-and-be-damned Government that has befuddled the New Zealand economy for six years, and now it’s going to take an awful lot of work—hard work—to turn the ship around.

In fact, ahead of us, we have a massive turn-around job. But I’m very convinced and very supportive of the fact that under the prime ministership of Christopher Luxon we will get that turn-around job that we need as a country. And we’ll get the country back on track. We’ll get the Coromandel back on track. We’ll get regional and provincial New Zealand back on track. We’ll get our urban centres back on track, because ours is a country that has so much potential, so much opportunity, so much unmet potential for the future, not only of our generation but of the generations that will follow us. We have in this debating chamber an obligation to do the right thing for them.

So when we passed legislation last week to refocus the work of the Reserve Bank on controlling inflation and working on their single objective, that was a good thing. It means that the result of that will be that New Zealanders will benefit from a lowered inflation rate sooner than would otherwise have been the case. And when we think for a moment that the economy in New Zealand shrank in the last three of the four quarters that we’ve had, we get a sense of the dilemma and the financial drama and risk that the country currently is in.

I was personally very, very pleased to see the bold decision made by Nicola Willis to curtail the Picton - Cook Strait ferry project that had just blown completely out of control and was representative of a State agency, KiwiRail, who just bowled along and expected the new Government to continue writing the blank cheques. Well, that kind of profligate spending has to stop. So not only was that a good decision in terms of the New Zealand taxpayers, but it was a good decision in terms of sending a very clear message to the governance body and the senior management at KiwiRail that, actually, they do have to be more accountable for the taxpayer funding that provides the money that they need to continue to do their job.

But what’s more important, I think, from that decision about the Cook Strait ferries is actually the message that it sends to other Government departments and other Government agencies: the buck stops, and there needs to be a much greater respect for taxpayers’ spending. Labour Ministers in the previous administration were committing literally billions and billions of dollars to projects that had massively insufficient due diligence and that were lacking in clear documentation or a sense of purpose about what they were doing. Well, we want to change that. Not only do we want to change it, we are going to change it, because every single dollar that a Government or a Government department or a State agency spends is a dollar that has been earned by the hard work of New Zealanders, and that money has to come from somewhere.

Gone are the days when a Labour Government—a socialist Labour Government—can merely just borrow and print with gay abandon and never take any impact on what it means for hard-working New Zealanders. Socialists don’t like it. They call themselves, these days, progressives, but, actually, they’re just good, old-fashioned socialists. For the sake of my new colleagues who may not have heard me say this before, socialists and socialist Governments really only have three policy initiatives that they apply to every single issue. They either want to ban it, tax it, or make it compulsory; often, they want to make all three. Those are the only three policy initiatives that any socialist Government has: ban it, tax it, or make it compulsory.

We have a much greater faith in the logic and the understanding and the passion and the initiative of New Zealanders to have a brighter vision for the future of the country than anyone on that side of the House, sitting opposite, could even begin to imagine. We aren’t going to be constrained by narrow, socialist thinking. We do have faith in New Zealanders’ ability to be inventive, to be entrepreneurial, to have faith in the work that they create and the jobs that they create, the businesses that they create. Ours will be a Government that encourages and doesn’t vilify businesses. We want to make sure that businesses thrive and grow, because thriving and growing businesses lead to a thriving and growing economy that leads to greater employment that leads to a greater prosperity. Because on the Opposition benches—where they are back, some would say, where they belong—we know that their ideals simply don’t match the aspirational objectives of most New Zealanders. That’s the result that occurred in the election in October.

I am delighted now to be working with coalition partners who share our common objective and goal for the future of the country. It’s a goal that is full of vision, of hope, and of aspiration, unlike the six years of stifling, borrowing, and spending that we’ve had, with no accountability for taxpayers’ money. We will be a Government for all New Zealanders, whether they happen to be in the beautiful Coromandel or the Taranaki - King Country, or indeed any other part of New Zealand.

So I want to conclude my contribution in this Address in Reply debate by extending a warm welcome and invitation, for as many people who want to, to come and visit the beautiful Coromandel. Come and spend some summertime—and, more importantly, some summer money—in the beautiful Coromandel. You’ll receive a very warm welcome and we’ll get the Cathedral Cove open sooner or later. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Well, on the line of thought from the previous speaker, the Hon Scott Simpson, can I say I’m very pleased to be standing here as the member for Dunedin, a new role for me. I’m very pleased to have that. And, of course, Dunedin did have the best summer in the country last year; I’m hoping that it will have it again. It’s another fine place to come and visit. But of course Dunedin is most lively when the students are in town, because both the university and the polytechnic are so important for Dunedin. So one of the things I’ll be working on in this term with my colleague, Dr Deborah Russell, is the funding of that tertiary sector.

Also, of course, if you were driving through Dunedin any time recently, you will have seen both the out-patients and the in-patients buildings of the new hospital rising out of the ground. They are giant, giant structures and are so important for this city and the region. Again, that is something that I will be working on: making sure that that build continues and does not in any way become a public-private partnership.

Now, of course, like many places, Dunedin has a number of social issues but it is a very creative and wonderful city. So I’m very pleased to be the representative for it and to work with people on all those local issues.

But here, really talking in the Address in Reply about the Speech from the Throne, I can tell you that I am worried—very, very worried.

Hon Chris Bishop: Oh, cheer up.

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: I say that as the spokesperson for the environment—and I’ll be talking to that Minister soon, no doubt, about his drastic and unnecessary and backwards legislation.

But in the Speech from the Throne and statements that we’ve had from various Ministers—we’ve heard statements about blind frogs and the need for more mining from Ministers—we got awarded the “Fossil of the Day” on the first day at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP)—on the first day—

Hon Chris Bishop: You guys got it too!

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: —and it was for a brand-new policy. It was suggested in the Hon Melissa Lee’s speech that it was because of something that the previous Government had done, but it was very specific to this Government: reversing the oil and gas ban. It was very specific for that, and that is not something that I am proud of. Nor am I happy about last week—that we were sitting in urgency to do three stages of a bill on a clean car discount that is set by regulations. Could have been changed by those regulations, but no: we spent all of last week debating that.

Of course, what a terrible thing that is. We have signed up to emissions reductions. We have emissions reductions plans and there was one thing that was working: the Clean Car Discount. Now, as of 31 December, it’s scrapped. We heard today the Minister of Transport could not answer the questions put to him about how we are actually going to reduce emissions. We’ve already decided the next Budget; what is the emissions reduction plan going to include if you just scrap everything to do with active transport and public transport and clean car discounts? It’s very disappointing.

Then, of course, we hear today in question time and also in the Speech from the Throne that the national policy statement on fresh water—“Oh, we don’t want water to be swimmable anymore.” That’s all I can take from the answers that we got today, “We have no aim for water to be swimmable; we just want people to use that water as much as they want.” Now, it’ll be interesting to see what changes are made, but they were very disappointing answers from the Minister today.

Then we’re going to have, today, legislation up to repeal both the Spatial Planning Act and the Natural and Built Environment Act. This is very interesting because both sides of this House have been talking about, for many years, how the RMA—the Resource Management Act—has been failing, and it’s been failing on both the big fronts: and that is the environmental outcomes, they have degraded; but also the efficiency of the system, that has got worse as well. The way the RMA has worked is that everything really comes down to fights over resource consents, and that is inefficient.

So we know that in any planning laws, there’s always going to be some trade-offs in that planning space. People are going to have different points of view about whether a landscape should be protected or if we should have wind turbines on that landscape. There’s always going to be difficulties with planning legislation, but we do need it. What we had done with the Spatial Planning Act and the Natural and Built Environment Act was much better long-term planning for our infrastructure. So, to be clear, in the 30-year time period, we could say, “Right, what areas are going to grow or might grow, where is it suitable, where are we going to need to move away from because of climate adaptation? OK, let’s get those people who are involved with that infrastructure—so central government as well as the local governments—to plan for growth in areas that we don’t want to be growing into.” That was the Spatial Planning Act.

Then we had the Natural and Built Environment Act, and one of the main parts of this was to set environmental bottom lines very clearly. Yes, to have some more national direction as well—that was something that was always anticipated for the RMA but didn’t come for many, many years. But also—and this is a critical point—to move all the GDP in the system that happens at the consents phase, to move that up the chain; to move it into the regional plans or into that national direction so that when someone is coming to work out whether or not they might want to undertake an activity or a project, they can see that clear direction, that this is an area that, say, might be affected by climate change. So no, don’t build new houses in that area; that might be prohibited. But in these other areas where the infrastructure is already there or it is soon to be upgraded, then yes—yes, you can do that. You can do that, maybe within some constraints, like what in the RMA is called a restricted discretionary activity or controlled activity, where there’s listed items that the decision makers can make conditions around on your consent and have some controls. But otherwise, yes, you can do that. Much more certainty for businesses, much more certainty for councils, and to enable those councils within a region to work with each other.

In my career as a resource management lawyer, a lot of my time was spent working for one council, having to appeal another council’s decision. That was the legitimate way that those councils could talk to each other, through appeal documents. So if you take out all those steps and all those different plans and have the regions making one document for the entire region—or the councils; not taking out the district councils and making the regional councils in charge—having all those councils work together, then that is a lot more efficient.

I keep hearing from the other side that they are interested in efficiency, they are interested in business, they are interested in cutting red tape. Yet all this is doing is going back to the system that we know does not work. It makes no sense.

In addition, the changes that we made to the Natural and Built Environment Act—and I say “we”; you were on the select committee—included, of course, being stronger on climate change, both enabling more mitigation, so ways that we can reduce emissions, and also being clearer about not building in hazard zones where we know that there’s going to be climate adaptation problems.

So it’s very disappointing that these bills will be repealed today. Hopefully, they won’t be repealed. Hopefully, the Minister opposite will see the light and work with parties to improve that legislation—all legislation can always be improved—and to amend it in a way that gives comfort to some of the National Party’s concerns. Those concerns that I heard in the debates on the bill were around the use of new phrases leading to more litigation; hearing some submissions on renewable electricity, which were then addressed in the bill; and that more things were going to be centralised. These are all things that could lead to amendment rather than repeal.

I am hopeful, though, on one area, and that is in waste. The previous Government did some very good work on waste, getting ready for some new legislation, and I am hopeful that the new Government will take up the work in terms of waste minimisation. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

I move, That this debate be now adjourned.

Motion agreed to.

Debate interrupted.