Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill

Tēnā koe, Mr Chairperson. I say before we start that it was very enjoyable having you in Te Tai Tokerau to show you the Marsden Point oil refinery and to learn what your party really thinks about climate change. However, that is for another time.

I want to focus on three elements before my colleagues contribute. The first is notification, the second is the coast, and the third is the decimation of the trees. No more tōtara, no more rimu, no more pōhutukawa; all we will find in a National-dominated Tāmaki-makau-rau is puha and wīwī. I want to know why Government members are spending all this time on developing a super-city but are unwilling to give the authority to the super-city to generate rules, plans, and safeguards for the resources of that particular area. They are insistent on carrying on with this. It looks like a “ninny State”—a nanny State development out of the National caucus, much to the detriment of our people in Auckland.

However, let me come back to notification. Notification is referred to in one or two of the Supplementary Order Papers, and the reason why we are very, very reluctant to allow this to go unchallenged—and why we will not be agreeing with this particular provision in the context of the Committee debate—is that this is the first opportunity New Zealand neighbours and residents have to know about a proposed activity. We are entrusting far too much to the bureaucracy of the local government as to whether a matter is of a minor character. Once people lose that opportunity, they lose goodwill, and people feel that they are being denied a key part of what resource management married to social democracy means: a chance to have an influence through a guided process—not a gilded process but a statutory process. That chance has been removed. There has been a presumption that this bill is neutral. We would have preferred to see that citizens could rely on the fact that where an activity is proposed they will receive notice of it. It is highly likely that that activity will not have a deleterious effect on them anyway—

💬 Hon Tau Henare: What?

I shall repeat the word “deleterious” for Mr Henare because it has further to travel in order to educate him. However, that is another matter.

That is why we will focus on the area of public notification.

I move on to the matter of the coast. The Minister in the chair, the Hon Dr Nick Smith, has had experience of this issue. I am really looking forward to hearing him explain how we account for stripping away from this area of the law any reference to the putative owner of the coast. Admittedly it is in the context of stewardship. The Minister has told us that the preferred model he presents in this legislation is a focus on rules, on effects, and on the regulatory responsibilities. But who owns the coast? The Government will not give it back to the tangata whenua, and now it does not even want the Crown to hold it. It is almost as if ownership is floating around in some sort of ether. The public of New Zealand, for public weal purposes, need to know that the Government of the day is prepared to intervene and make a decision on such matters as whether a proposed project or activity ought to occupy that part of the coastal environment. That decision is not made just as to the ability of us to understand the effects; it is made as to whether New Zealanders through the agency of the Crown are comfortable with that portion of our environment being exclusively occupied for a given commercial purpose. That provision has been stripped out. We would like to see that provision not only restored but possibly enlarged so that we know, as we move through these treacherous waters as to the Māori claims and the takutai moana, that the Crown is not absolving itself of its Treaty responsibilities and its obligations to its Treaty partner.

I come back very briefly to the matter of the trees. The issue has become very vexed and unfortunately members on the Government side of the Chamber have decided that Aucklanders cannot be trusted to come up with a solution. That is a bad decision, and we will have more to say about it.

The environment spokesperson for Labour, Mr Shane Jones, identified a number of issues that Labour wants to debate in the Committee stage. I think he has done a pretty fair measure of identifying the controversial issues: the issues in respect of trees, the issues in respect of notification, and the issues in respect of the ministerial veto that we are removing in respect of coastal consents. I am looking forward to the debate over the next 5 hours as we canvass some of those issues.

I want to go straight to the issue of trees. When the environment spokesperson for Labour, Mr Shane Jones, gave his second reading speech his very first comments were that 50,000 resource consents for New Zealand were too many and we need to have fewer. I agree with him. If we ask officials where there are a whole lot of meaningless resource consents that cost a whole lot of money and achieve absolutely nothing, the answer has to be tree trimming. Let me give members the numbers. We have 5,000 resource consents per year for people who trim trees. Do members know what the most remarkable fact is? That number is for only eight of our 86 councils. There are 5,000 resource consents per year so that people can trim a tree. Does this Parliament really distrust ordinary New Zealanders so much that if they want to trim a tree over 3 metres in height they need to get an arborist’s report and lodge the resource consent with their council? The council official has to consider the consent, visit the tree, and check that it is a proper resource consent. And 97.6 percent of them are approved. Members opposite say that this legislation will result in a chainsaw massacre and that the beautiful landscapes of Auckland will be lost. Well, I have just had lunch with the Mayor of Christchurch. Do they have such rules in the Garden City? No, they do not. Are there fewer trees in Christchurch as a consequence of not having these nanny State rules? Of course there are not.

Then there is the argument from Labour. I have to say that I particularly enjoy the contributions from “Mr Triffid”. You see, he has gone out publicly—

💬 Hon Steve Chadwick: I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. His name is Mr Twyford.

I was interested to note that Mr Twyford was a member of the Local Government and Environment Committee. I would have thought, with all his comments criticising the Government, that there would be some comments in the select committee report from Labour about urban trees. I searched through all 221 pages. Surely, if Mr Twyford has the time to call public meetings, and to put out press releases attacking the arrogance of the Government, there should be a comment from him in the select committee report on urban trees. But there is not a single sentence—not a word—from Labour in the report. I think that speaks volumes about the ineffective Opposition members. They make a huge deal out of urban trees but when they had the opportunity in the select committee—

💬 Hon Member: Nothing!

Not only was there nothing in the report, but they voted for the provisions in respect of urban trees. Labour members should get their act together. If they really believe that people should need a resource consent to trim a tree, they have learnt nothing from the last election.

💬 Hon Steve Chadwick: Trim or chop?

The law right now, and for 9 long years of the Labour administration, is that if people in Auckland want to get a tree trimmed, they have to get a resource consent.

Then the members were saying that this is a case of Parliament overruling Auckland. Well, what did the Auckland City Council submit to the select committee? The Auckland City Council submitted to the select committee that this provision was ineffective and inefficient, and that we should pass this provision to change it. Members opposite are saying that we are overruling the views of Auckland. Do they think we have come down in the last shower? The real motivation of the members of the political left around this issue is that they do not trust homeowners. They basically believe that good old Auckland homeowners should not be trusted with their clippers. They are a real threat to mankind with their tree trimmers, and unless we get them to get approval of a council official, then they should not be able to use them!

Yes, there has been a pretty active campaign. The Arboricultural Association and a number of the commercial players in Auckland have been very critical of the provision in this bill, and I do not blame them. You see, for the 5,000 resource consents per year that are required for these tree provisions, the average cost of getting a council report from an arborist is a bit over $400. People then have to use one of those businesses. They cannot go out there themselves. They cannot chop down or trim their own tree. Is it surprising that the arborist businesses of Auckland would not want this provision? They have employed a flash Wellington public relations consultancy to advocate the cause for them, and I simply say that this Parliament needs to get some principles right.

The principle in this bill around urban trees is actually very straightforward: if a council wants to put controls on the trimming or the removal of a tree, it has to talk to the homeowner. Is that not a radical concept? If the council wants to put a restriction on the capacity for a person to be able to trim or remove their own tree, they should talk to the person who owns the land. I think that is a very reasonable provision. If we look at the provisions of this bill, we see that there is 2½ years in which councils can identify trees. I had a discussion with the Mayor of Timaru, which has a beautiful landscape with a large number of trees. Do members know what that council did? It advertised for people to put forward the trees that they thought were worthy of protection. I think that is a pretty smart approach, and I encourage the councils of Auckland to do what councils in every other part of New Zealand have done and actually identify the trees and the groups of trees that warrant protection; there certainly are some. It can be done quite effectively and result in the proper protection of trees in Auckland without the bureaucracy that we are proposing to replace with this bill.

The last point I want to make on trees is that I have seen pictures in newspapers of people in reserves saying that the trees are at risk of being cut down, or of people saying that trees along the main streetscape of Auckland are at risk. No, they are not. This bill deals only with trees on private land, and actually it is about a reflection of property rights. It is the view of members on this side of the Chamber that if one owns the property, one has a legal right to trim a tree or to remove it, as a general rule, unless it is a tree of sufficient significance that it is properly listed in a plan, and one has had an opportunity to be consulted about that listing. It is a straightforward provision that makes good common sense. It will reduce hugely the bureaucracy around tree trimming, which needs to change, and I urge the Committee to support it.

The whole process around the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill has been rushed and slipshod. It came to the House later than the Minister promised, and he was in a big hurry to get it through. The Local Government and Environment Committee sat for a lot of hours to deal with it, and the Green Party is the only opposition here. The Labour Party and every other party in the House except the Green Party is supporting this bill. I think that people who are listening need to know that that is the case.

The first evidence that this bill was rushed and slipshod was the interim report of the expert panel from which the select committee asked for assistance to determine whether the drafting in fact reflected the policy intention. The panel advised us—actually, in quite strong language—that the bill as it stood then would not simplify and streamline the Resource Management Act but would complicate and confuse it, which is what we in the Green Party have been saying since the beginning. The bill adds many pages to the Resource Management Act, and that is hardly simplifying and streamlining. It puts a lot of words in where there used to be few. It does not clarify; it confuses.

The Greens asked the expert panel to work with officials, and they did, under great time pressure, and they substantially changed and improved the drafting of the bill. However, there was not time to do it properly. What do we have now? We have the 44-page Supplementary Order Paper 39, which amends clauses from the beginning of the bill all the way through to the end, and, among other things, completely replaces new Part 6AA, inserted by clause 91. New Part 6AA was in the bill as it was amended by the select committee, and then, under the advice of officials, who have presumably cleared it with the Minister, in the Committee the Government has completely rewritten and replaced Part 6AA in the Supplementary Order Paper. In the reported-back version of the bill we can see that the whole of Part 6AA is underlined as new, but now we have another replacement of Part 6AA. In the space of a couple of weeks they decided they needed to do it differently again. The meaning of those changes is not possible to determine overnight. I do not know. I have looked at the two texts side by side, and they seem to bear little resemblance to each other. We have to take the Minister’s word that there is no substantive policy change there.

This reminds me of a series of speeches made last year by the then Opposition spokesman on climate change, who relentlessly attacked the previous Minister for climate change on the basis that he had introduced a Supplementary Order Paper to the legislation that set up the emissions trading scheme that was extremely long and made a lot of technical corrections. When we compare the two we will find that, proportionally, this Supplementary Order Paper is larger in relation to the bill it amends than the one that the previous Opposition spokesman on the environment attacked the previous Government for. So I am looking forward to an explanation from Nick Smith as to why, now that he is a Minister, it is OK to bring in a Supplementary Order Paper—

💬 Hon David Parker: Under urgency.

—under urgency, that is so large in relation to the original bill when that was not OK last year for a bill that was opening new ground and dealing with new technicalities. Parliament has dealt with the Resource Management Act lots of times. The courts are familiar with it, councils are familiar with it, and Parliament is familiar with it. There should be much less reason to have to change it all at the last minute than there was last year.

I want to speak now about the question of notification. Notification is how one gives effect to the fundamental premise of the Act—that people have a right to be involved in discussing the changes that others want to make to the environment where they live. There have always been two grounds for a notification. One is the effect on the environment, where everybody has some right to have a say, because we are talking here about the natural environment, the resources we and future generations depend on, and the other is the right to have a say on something that may affect one’s property rights as a near neighbour. The Resource Management Act has always had two tests for notification.

This bill changes the wording yet again. The rules on notification have been rewritten so many times that I sat in the Local Government and Environment Committee saying that it was impossible to know just what these changes would mean in practice. The one thing they will mean is that all the case law will be chucked out and the courts will have to start again and define all the various terminology because the tests have changed.

I had just reached the conclusion that, apart from destroying existing case law and requiring it to be rebuilt, there was not a lot of change of meaning in the bill as we reported it back. But, hang on, now the Minister has announced a Supplementary Order Paper that raises the hurdle higher for notification so that fewer applications will get notified. The bill as reported back said that a council must notify an application only if the application may have adverse effects on the environment that are more than minor. The Minister has now changed those words to “will have or is likely to have”, so a council now cannot notify an application unless it is pretty sure that the adverse effects will be serious. If the adverse effects are unknown but could well occur, the council is not allowed to notify; therefore it does not get any evidence from anybody else in the community as to what those adverse effects might be. So the bill will shut out key information that, if it is not brought to the Environment Court, never goes in front of the judge and never gets considered in the decision making. We have already had a lift in the threshold from “less than minor” to “more than minor”; now we have “may” becomes “will” and “likely to”. So if a council has any doubts at all about the seriousness of the effects, it must not notify.

The Minister came to the select committee and met with us. I appreciated that, because Ministers often do not do that with select committees and their bills. He told us that under the changes to notification he did not expect fewer applications to be notified. What he was trying to do was to cut the paperwork for the council. However, yesterday he told a briefing of other parties that he did expect fewer public notifications under this changed wording. Obviously, the Minister has had another turn against the rights of the public in the 2 weeks since the select committee reported back. The other thing that the notification provisions do is put councils beyond the reach of judicial review of their notification decisions, by making it clear that they have absolute discretion as to how they interpret terms like “minor” and “very likely”. In the past there have been some appalling council decisions on notification. People have come home and found huge holes in the section next door that they did not know were going to be dug, multi-storey buildings going up, and huge areas of trees removed. I fought hard in previous years to get an amendment accepted that would give effect to what the Environment Court itself has said, which is that challenges to bad notification decisions should be heard by the Environment Court, not by the High Court. The High Court can consider only matters of law. It has no expertise on the facts. The Environment Court is a court of expertise on the facts; it could deal with them very quickly. We got that into section 115 of the 2005 amendment Act, but with a provision that it would not come into force until it was brought into force by Order in Council. Successive Governments have refused to bring it into force; I suspect that was always the intention, anyway. This Government tried to delete the clause with this bill, but we got that changed. It is still not in force, so one can still challenge notification decisions only by going to the High Court, which is hugely expensive. No ordinary person can afford judicial review, and therefore it will not happen.

So we should expect more cases where the bulldozers move in before the neighbours have any inkling the development is happening, and where the bush is felled and the coastline is altered without people’s input because the council could not be sure that the adverse effects would be more than minor. When that happens, expect to have no recourse to legal challenge to those council decisions. I want to end with an example. A 15-house subdivision in Waitakere was not notified although it directly bordered 17 neighbouring properties. One neighbouring resident was not aware of the consent until she came home and saw 2,000 square metres of exotic and native trees and bush being cleared from the site right next door. The consent stated that there was no need for notification, as all effects were deemed to be internal to the site, despite a new road, earthworks, bush clearance, loss of shelter, privacy, and birdlife, and destruction of an ecologically significant stream on a neighbouring property. We are going to see a lot more of cases like that as, with every amendment that goes through the House, notification is tightened.

Less than 5 percent of applications are notified now. I would like the Minister to say whether he thinks that should go to less than 4 percent or less than 3 percent, or just where the ultimate destination is; or are we heading for the kind of State where developers can do what they like, and the public be damned?

It is a pleasure to speak in the Committee stage of the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill. I would not use the words we heard from the previous speaker, Jeanette Fitzsimons, to describe the way the bill has gone through the House; I would use the words “thorough”, “totally engaged”, “committed”, and “diligent” to describe the Local Government and Environment Committee’s work, and the conduct of each and every member of it. I am surprised. The fact is that the Greens do not like the bill; they have said so from the beginning. That has always been acknowledged. It was not a matter of contention or debate. We approached the whole thing as everybody working together, and I am sorry that they wish to downplay the activities of the select committee and sell its work a little cheap. I am sure that the previous speaker did not really intend to do that, because we met regularly and we met often. We discussed a wide range of activities. A lot has been said about trees, and I will speak about them in a minute. We also heard from some serious, committed, diligent people from councils. We heard from the Porirua City Council that 90 percent of the consent applications they receive are not in a state ready for processing. This was echoed by other councils. The interesting thing in the whole approach to this bill was the level of support we received from councils, planners, and people who are involved at the coalface.

According to planners I have spoken to, the changes to notification will save huge amounts of time because of the freedom from needlessly writing reports to justify why they have not notified a particular application.

💬 Hon Shane Jones: It’s democracy!

That is right. This is democracy. The bill is neutral on the issue of notification. It does not impose restrictions and it does not prevent notifications from being made. The honourable member opposite, Mr Jones, who was very good to work with on the select committee, talks of democracy, but it is sometimes hard for people to see the wood for the trees. That is an appropriate phrase to use in regard to clause 52. Trees will not be put at increased risk as a result of clause 52.

It is interesting to note that as a legislator one gets a lot of attention from lobbyists. Just a scan of the emails I have received in the last week would make interesting reading for someone from outside Parliament. I have been getting about 150 a day.

💬 Hon Shane Jones: Thousands!

How are they interesting? I will tell the member how they are interesting. I have been getting two sorts of emails. Half of them tell me I should be smacking kids, and half of them tell me I should be hugging trees. I like to think that it is the other way round. In fact, I misread some of them and I became confused. I thought they said that I should have an approved contractor for smacking. I guess that used to be the role of schoolteachers. All of these emails have been coming from Auckland. I do not think, from a casual analysis of them, that a single one has been written by people who are worried about trees that they own being at risk under this new law. That is not the case. They all say that they are worried about what will happen to other people’s trees, or about what other people will do to their trees.

I cannot quite see why a change of law will result in—[Interruption] My colleague across the Chamber says that Husqvarna shares are going through the roof. Developers have not been cutting trees down. They have not been clear-felling. Developers have been getting consents. Very few applications are denied. What will change? I will tell members what will change. The $1.8 million that Devonport, or North Shore City Council, spends on processing applications might be used for other purposes. It might be used for planting trees. There is a novel thought! Instead of using all that money to get people to ask if they can trim a tree, councils could use the money to plant a tree—if they could find nurseries that supply substantial trees.

I planted substantial trees in Devonport, which was mentioned before.

💬 Hon Shane Jones: Flagstaff Hill!

No, no. The Chair is ringing the bell; I will not take a long call.

💬 Hon Gerry Brownlee: Please do!

That member would like me to. Very well. The Leader of the House has asked me to, and that is kind.

💬 Hon Gerry Brownlee: I am leaving now, of course.

Ha, ha!

I planted a row of poplars in Shoal Bay Road in Devonport between my house and the houses of two neighbours. It was not very many years before the poplars were huge. They grew beautifully and everyone commented on them, but then they blocked the drains between us and our neighbours, and a sewerage pipe, as well. They were the most inappropriate species of trees to plant in that particular place, so down they came. No permits or consents were required. At the same time, my wife and her friends suggested that it would be nice to have double flowering cherries and peaches on the berm down the middle of Shoal Bay Road. The community bought the trees and we planted them. The council said it would help maintain them,

💬 Phil Twyford: Where is this going?

Those trees are still there. They will not be cut down; everyone likes the trees. Why do members on the other side of the Chamber seem to imagine that everyone hates their trees? They love them. Give them a chance.

To echo the opening comments of the Minister for the Environment, I say that one wonders whether the Opposition has learnt from the last election. People wanted change, and they particularly wanted change to the Resource Management Act.

💬 Hon Steve Chadwick: The trees will be chopped down instead of protected.

They will not be cut down instead of protected. I have yet to hear—and I look forward to hearing it in the next 4½ hours—any solid reasoning why this cutting-down business could not be done presently. Thank you.

I will take a call relating to the changes being made to notification in the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill. I do not think that the previous speaker, Chris Auchinvole, was right when he said that the legislation somehow creates a neutral position, and I would be interested to hear from the Minister on that. In reading the bill afresh it seems to me that it removes the presumption in favour of notification, so that there is now a presumption the other way, in favour of non-notification. That means that instead—

💬 Chris Auchinvole: Why do you say that, Charles?

—because it is on the face of the bill, I tell Mr Auchinvole—of the council having to notify an application except in certain circumstances, a council will now not have to notify an application except in particular circumstances. That is what we call a reversal of the presumption in favour of notification. Under the current provisions of Resource Management Act resource consents, they are to be notified unless a consent authority can establish one of three things: that they are satisfied the effects will be no more than minor and approval of the affected parties is obtained; that the application pertains to a controlled activity as defined, in which case public notification is not required unless a rule, a plan, or a proposed plan requires it, but notice still has to be served in those cases on an affected person; or that the relevant plan specifically states that notification is not required.

As I read new clause 68, I see that it will repeal existing sections 93 to 95 and substitute new sections 93 to 95F. Under clause 68 the proposal is that the process for notification be altered so that the following three things occur: the presumption in favour of notification of resource consents comes out—it is gone. So the bill has no general presumption in favour of notification, as is the current position. The threshold for when public notification is required is changed, in new clause 68, when the effects beyond the immediate environment are “more than minor”, and the threshold for affected parties is raised when effects on them are “more than minor”, and those are the words in the bill. The bill, in new section 95A, changes the requirement to notify if the “adverse effects of the activity on the environment may be more than minor;”, but as amended by Supplementary Order Paper 39 the requirement is if “the activity will have or is likely to have adverse effects on the environment that are minor;”. That is a significant change. It means that the requirement to notify an application is significantly confined.

The changes to the notification process that I have just outlined cannot help but reduce public participation under the Resource Management Act, because the threshold for notification is set higher. That will inevitably lead to fewer resource consent applications being notified. It was interesting to see kids from Tawa College up in the gallery before. I was out in Tawa last month at a community meeting, and the changes to the Resource Management Act, particularly the changes proposed around notification, and the changes that make it more difficult to access the Environment Court, are a real concern to people. People are worried about losing their ability to have a hearing in the Environment Court over local issues that matter to them, and that is something that this Parliament should be very, very concerned about and very, very slow to support. We are lowering the ability of the public to have a say on the adverse effects of an application, and Labour cannot support those sorts of proposals. They significantly undermine the ability of local communities to participate in decisions that affect them, and this proposal in particular—to remove the presumption of notification in favour of non-notification—increases the thresholds for notification. It is an inevitable way of doing things; if we do the one, we get the other. It clearly undermines the ability of the public to participate, and members on this side of the Chamber simply cannot support that level of undermining.

I want to respond to a couple of the points that have been made. The first of those is in respect of the timetable and the intent of the bill. I know it may be a novel concept, but the Government is doing what it said it would do. We said we would introduce a bill to streamline and simplify the Resource Management Act within our first 100 days in office, and we did. We also said we would pass that bill into law within a period of 6 months, and we are doing so. I am surprised that other members in the Chamber are criticising us for doing exactly what we told the electorate we would do.

Mr Charles Chauvel made a thoughtful contribution around the issue of notification. He raised a point that was also raised by Jeannette Fitzsimons of the Green Party. It is a very important point around the thresholds for notification. It is proper that the Committee debate those. In Supplementary Order Paper 39, in terms of adverse effects that may be more than minor, my intention is to remove the words “may be” and substitute the words “likely to be”—and I ask members to remember that the consents I am talking about are the minor, small ones that are on the margin as to whether they should be notified. We do not want council officials having to spend huge amounts of time trying to work out what is minor, so we are saying in the Supplementary Order Paper that those consents are minor or likely to be minor. We are quite deliberately providing a bit more cover for council officials in that regard.

Other members have given examples, but let me give the Chamber an example. There is a real shortage of early childhood centres in my electorate. There are children who cannot get into an early childhood centre and get an early childhood education. I do not think there is a member of this Chamber who would not say that parents living in central Nelson need to have a place for their children to get an early childhood education.

I have an application from a person to build an early childhood centre. The council said that all the neighbours agreed. The neighbours said they wanted to have the children around. But the people six doors down said there would be increased traffic flows in their street, and they insisted on the right to be notified. So the council officials asked what the current law says. The law says that a consent needs to be notified if it has an effect on other people. Well, the early childhood centre will have an effect on that street. I would argue it would be a minor effect, but it will have an effect.

Now, the impact of all of that and of the old law was that it cost the development of that early childhood centre an extra six months in time and an extra $20,000. Who do members of this Committee think will pay the $20,000? It will not be the fairies. There is no money tree. It has to be paid for by the parents of those children. So in this debate about notification, I make no apologies for saying that the effects have to be more than minor in order to justify the cost, the time, and the expense of notification. That is all the Government is saying with respect to these provisions. It is my view that the extra wording that has been developed with Local Government New Zealand—that is, in terms of effects that are or are “likely to be” more than minor—simply gives councils a little bit of room to apply some common sense. If there is anything that we need to get into the administration of the Resource Management Act, it is a good dose of common sense, because right now we are adding too much in cost.

The last point I want to make is that there is a balance to be struck between a level of public participation and the costs and delays because of that participation. In response to Mr Chauvel, I say that the Government makes no bones about the fact that we are shifting that balance. If public participation is to be the only criteria under which we run this Act, we will be relaxed about the fact that it took 17 years for some consents and a very long time for many others.

I want to start in this debate by making some general comments, because I think in all the detail we do miss some of the general points about the Resource Management Act. I think the Resource Management Act is one of the most maligned, misunderstood, and misrepresented Acts in our country. It has been attacked repeatedly, over and over, by vested interests. It has been subjected to absolutely vitriolic attack by those who want to advance the interests of developers, and so forth, yet the Resource Management Act exists to protect our environment.

There are two fundamental principles of the Resource Management Act. One is protection of the environment, and the other is public participation in decision making. Those are the two fundamental planks of the Resource Management Act. In the midst of the debate around red tape, cost, and so forth, I think we forget that the Resource Management Act is one of the primary bulwarks to protect the New Zealand environment on which we all depend. It is about protecting our land, our water, and our wildlife.

I think we also take it for granted that this is New Zealand—clean, green, and 100 percent pure. We forget that the reason why we have any kind of protection in our country is that community groups have been able to use the Resource Management Act to protect their local environment. As I travel around Aotearoa New Zealand, time after time it is community groups, it is hapū, and it is iwi who find themselves in front of consent panels and in front of the Environment Court, doing the hard yards to protect the environment of our country. Yet we have an Act that changes the balance. It changes the balance against the community so that it is harder for the community groups, the people, the not-for-profit groups, and the volunteers who do the work to protect New Zealand’s environment, day in, day out and year in, year out. These are the people who come before the Environment Court and get vilified, often by National and others, because they dare to stand up for the environment. They dare to clog up the courts, as it is told, because they dare to stand up for this country.

The Government of the day has now decided it needs to tilt the balance against the volunteers, the iwi, and the hapū of our country, who constantly stand up to protect the environment. The Government wants to change the balance against those voluntary groups, in favour of those who want to destroy the environment. That is what the Government is trying to do with this legislation. It is undermining the fundamental purpose of the legislation, which is environmental protection and community participation.

When we look at New Zealand and at our economy, we see that it is highly dependent on being clean, green, and 100 percent pure—more than most other places. In fact, it is built on the work that all of those not-for-profit groups and volunteers have done. We have built our economy on their backs. The people who have protected our environment are the people who underwrite and have formed the foundation for the New Zealand economy—the environment. This applies to every economy in the world because every economy, of course, is entirely dependent on the environment. But it applies to New Zealand in particular because we have decided to build our entire brand—as the Prime Minister calls it, the “master brand” of New Zealand—on being 100 percent pure, clean and green.

Those people who protect the environment now have a much harder job doing what they do best, which is looking after our country. This bill changes the balance against them. As the Minister quite rightly said, it is restricting community participation. Yeah; that is exactly right. It will make it harder for the non-governmental organisation sector and harder for community groups to do their job. In the Green Party, we think that is disgraceful.

I think we need to appreciate, as well, that if we were working against a backdrop of dramatically improving environmental performance, if we had biodiversity that was going through the roof, and if we had a background of environmental performance whereby we were getting better and better, year after year, then we might have some argument. But the reality of Aotearoa New Zealand is that we are seeing a decline in biodiversity. We are seeing a decline in the quality of our rivers and lakes, we are seeing a decline in the environment that underpins everything else, and here we are, weakening the law that is designed to protect the environment. We are seeing a decline in the environmental standards, the biodiversity on which we all depend, and that underpins the New Zealand economy. National, ACT, and the Māori Party so far, and Labour, are all voting for a law that weakens environmental protection.

Why would we weaken environmental protection, when the reality in our country is that we already have a declining and degrading environment? Why would we vote for a law that weakens the power of community groups to protect the environment? Why would we do that, when we already have declining environmental standards?

We need to address the broader picture, which is the ideology that says New Zealand is bound up in red tape; that somehow our country is completely bound up in red tape. I have in front of me the World Bank Group’s report Doing Business. This report ranks economies all around the world on the ease of doing business. The most recent report Doing Business 2010: Reforming through Difficult Times put out by the World Bank Group covers June 2008 through to May 2009. The easiest country in the world to do business in, and the one that has the least red tape, is Singapore, which I am not sure we really want to model ourselves on in all respects. The second easiest country in the world to do business in is New Zealand.

When we look at the international comparisons done by international bodies looking at the ease of doing business in the world, New Zealand is the second easiest place to do business. So all this rhetoric about how it is really impossible for New Zealand business to get ahead because of all the red tape falls flat, when we look at an independent report—rather than just an ideological position statement, as comes out from the Government so often—done by the World Bank Group where New Zealand comes out as the second easiest place on the planet to do business.

If we dig into the report a little bit deeper and look at some of the detail, we see a section called “Dealing with Construction Permits”, which looks, in particular, at obtaining a resource consent, obtaining a water consent, obtaining a building consent, and getting an inspection from the district council. If we look at those categories, they all go to inform the overall rating that New Zealand has as the second easiest place on the planet to do business. New Zealand ranks fifth on the planet for dealing with construction permits, which includes all of the resource consent permits and the water consent permits. When the ideological position is put forward that New Zealand is bound up from top to tail in red tape, I ask people to look at the evidence rather than listen to the ideological positions that are coming out of the Government.

In fact, when we look at New Zealand’s performance, one of the reasons we perform so poorly in terms of protecting the environment is that we are not using regulations properly. Where are the national environmental standards? Where are the national policy statements that were always supposed to be part of the Resource Management Act, and that were a key part of protecting the environment? If we put up those “terrible” national policy statements and national environmental standards, we would be told that we are generating more red tape and more regulation. Those kinds of regulations provide consistency for business and protect the environment, and they were always assumed to be an essential part of the Resource Management Act framework.

If the Government wants to put energy into developing national policy statements and national environmental standards, then the Green Party will stand alongside them, as long as they improve environmental standards rather than set a maximum, more of which we will talk about later. At this stage we have this so-called streamlining bill, which seems only to be reducing environmental standards, thereby making it harder for community groups to protect the environment. It will make it harder for community groups to do their job and to do what non-governmental organisations have done for years in our country, which is protect the environment on which our economy and our quality of life depend.

Why is it that we have this ideological position around red tape, and all the evils of red tape? Where are the Bluegreens in all of this? The member for Auckland Central is voting for a bill that will result in the loss of tree cover in Auckland. Why are the Bluegreens standing behind a bill that will weaken the Resource Management Act? Fundamentally, that is what this law does and what it is designed to do—weaken the Resource Management Act.

I also ask the Bluegreens to look at the membership of the technical advisory group that formed this bill to start with. There was one—at least one—environmentalist on the technical advisory group; I give you that. But the technical advisory group membership was dominated by those who were not out to promote environmental protections; they were there to do the opposite.

I will make a quick point in response to Mr Norman regarding the fact that bureaucracy often holds up good environmental progress. A good example is Akaroa, where it has taken 2 years to get a resource consent around water treatment.

The other point I will make is around trees and clause 52 of the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill. We have heard a little bit about that clause today. I acknowledge the stance the Greens have taken on this issue, but I also acknowledge the temporary tree-huggers, the Labour Party. Those members failed to put up a minority report on this issue. I have concerns about the legislation but I am pleased we are having this discussion. I believe that the current system of tree rules in Auckland is fraught, that councils are spending excessive time on this issue, and that many individuals are spending excessive money on resource consents for trees. The question that needs to be asked is not about politicking, but about how we fix this. I believe that it is reasonable for individuals to be able to prune and trim their trees, so that is quite a positive change that will be made as a result of this bill.

However, I have a specific concern about tree scheduling. I want to ask the Minister in the chair, Nick Smith, and I would like him to take a call on this, how the people of Auckland can have confidence that between now and January 2012 high-value trees and bush will be adequately protected via tree scheduling. I think there are some benefits in respect to the Auckland governance reforms in that there will be fewer systems in place. There may be one team, if you like, that will be responsible for tree scheduling; I think that is positive. It is also positive that the Auckland governance reforms are coming into place because I think it will be easier to do scheduling. I invite the Minister for the Environment to take a call on that matter.

The member for Auckland Central, Nikki Kaye, raised quite an important point. The Labour Party has not yet learnt the degree to which it alienated the voters of Auckland Central. You see, Labour lost that seat for the first time ever—the first time ever—and I would be happy to bet the best bottle of Nelson wine that Nikki Kaye will be returned at the next election. Every member has been impressed with the way in which Nikki Kaye has represented that community. I am happy to bet with any member of this House that she will be returned at the next election because of that effective representation.

💬 Hon David Parker: I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. I cannot see how that in any way relates to the Committee stage of the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill. I ask that the member be called to order.

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): I thank the member for those comments. There was an interchange earlier on, and the Minister is responding to those. However, I will ask the member to come back to the essence of the bill.

The member had a very sensible question, and that was how we can be sure that the councils of Auckland, particularly given the scale of change that Auckland is involved in, will get on and do the sensible thing, and, like every other council in New Zealand, schedule both groups of trees and individual trees that warrant protection. It is a good question.

💬 Phil Twyford: They’ve already said they won’t.

They actually have not said that, and I would be happy to take up Mr “Tryford” in a moment. The issue that, I think, in a sensible way forward—

H V Ross Robertson: I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson.

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): I know what the member will say. I say to the Minister—and it has been brought up before—that the member he is referring to is Mr Twyford. I ask that the Minister respects his name, either calling him Mr Twyford or Phil Twyford, but not any other name.

I am happy to get Mr “Tryford’s” name right.

H V Ross Robertson: I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. The member has been here for a considerable number of years. He should be aware of Speakers’ rulings 27/6. In reality, he did not say Mr Twyford’s name correctly. He mispronounced it again. I suggest he have another go. It is rude and unacceptable.

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): I understand. I have asked the Minister to reflect on that, and to use the member’s correct name.

The question that has been asked is what process we can put in place to ensure that the Auckland councils sensibly address this issue. I think there is quite a sensible process, and I would be happy to take up the challenge from the member for Auckland Central. There are powers that I have as Minister for the Environment around the issuing of directions to councils. I am reluctant to use them, unless councils will not do what I think is sensible and what this Parliament would expect. My intention would be to write to each Auckland council and ask them to set out their programme of work for identifying the trees of significance and that should be specifically, by group or individually, listed in their district plans, and to require those councils every 6 months to report to me on the progress they make.

I will make a couple of points about this issue. One of the really important things members opposite need to recognise is that from 1 October these councils will not have to spend millions of dollars, and will not have all sorts of staff tied up, with the 3,000 consents a year required for tree trimming. As of 1 October, that will no longer be required. The message I have for Auckland councils in response to the concerns that have been raised by Nikki Kaye is that the resource processing all those tree-trimming consents should be redirected, so representatives of the councils can get out and talk with people in the neighbourhoods and communities about what sorts of trees should be protected. This could happen over lunch, for example. I spoke with the Mayor of Timaru about what happened there. The first thing the council did was to invite the residents themselves.

💬 Hon David Cunliffe: A member of the National Party.

I do not think so. It is interesting that David Cunliffe always goes down that line.

💬 Hon David Cunliffe: I think so! Ask Jo Goodhew; they are good friends.

I will simply address the issue. The Timaru council advertised and asked people to bring forward trees to be considered for protection. Within a period of 12 months it had brought together a sensible schedule of trees that should be protected. If the good city of Timaru can do it—in fact, if 75 councils around New Zealand can do it—then why is it that Auckland cannot? I am interested in a contribution from a member.

The last point I will make is a very simple question that I would like members on the Labour benches to address. The select committee received submissions on the tree protection rules. The Labour members have deeply held concerns that it is the end of the world for Auckland trees. Why, then, in this 250-page report from the select committee, did Labour members vote for the changes in the tree protection rules, and why is there no word in the report of any concern about those changes?

💬 Phil Twyford: It’s in there.

Oh, it is in the report! Well, I have actually checked the minutes. The minutes of the select committee show that the member who interjected, Phil Twyford, actually voted for these provisions.

The Minister who has just resumed his seat, the Hon Nick Smith, said he had read the commentary on the bill and found no reference to Labour members’ concern about changes to the tree protection rules. The commentary on the bill makes the point that not all of the committee supported the prohibition on blanket tree protection. I will read from the commentary: “On balance most of us supported prohibiting blanket tree protection rules in planning documents. A number of us, however, regard clause 52, as amended, as unsatisfactory and would have preferred a more comprehensive solution for protecting urban trees.” There it is; there is exactly what the Minister said was not there. The Minister has not even read the commentary from the select committee. He has made that same reference twice.

I will return to some of the other serious issues in the bill—firstly the Environmental Protection Authority. I encourage the Minister to build up the capability of the Environmental Protection Authority with the Resource Management Act. In 2005 the Minister, with me and Jeanette Fitzsimons, was on the select committee that considered the previous major amendment to the Resource Management Act. We were somewhat dismayed at the quality of some of the drafting and some of the suggestions that came forward. With respect to the officials, there have been similar concerns about some of the amendments that were put forward for the legislation that went to the select committee this time. That is a matter of concern. I know that the Resource Management Act is a complex document, but there is a need for more capability within the Ministry for the Environment in respect of what is its core legislation. The fact that the ministry needs to do better in that regard is pretty clear from some inadequate drafting and advice in respect of both pieces of legislation. I am not making a political point here, because the last time it happened was under a Labour Government; this time it is under a National Government. There is a need for better understanding within the ministry of the detail of its own legislation. If it does not have such understanding internally, then it needs to contract it in.

The second point I will make is in respect of notification. I agree with comments that have been made by Jeanette Fitzsimons and Charles Chauvel. The Supplementary Order Paper that has been brought forward today dramatically changes the notification rules from those that were reported back. Until now the version of the bill that came back from the select committee stated that if there may be an adverse effect that is more than minor, then it had to be notified. Notification is the prerequisite to public involvement. If people do not know about something, they cannot submit on it.

According to the version that was reported back to the House, people have to be notified if there may be an environmental effect that is more than minor. The wording now gets changed so that it has to be proven to the satisfaction of the consenting authority that there will be an adverse effect that is more than minor, or there is likely to be such an adverse effect. Rather than it being a case of there may be an environmental effect that is more than minor, there now has to be a probability that there will be an environmental effect. Councils will be advertising and notifying fewer applications as a consequence. Therefore, people will not be informed of more applications that may have an adverse effect than was the case previously. That is a very significant change, and I am surprised that it has been done late by way of a Supplementary Order Paper. Again, that amplifies the point I made earlier in terms of capability within the Ministry for the Environment on Resource Management Act matters. It is a poor change, and it is something that I would like to see overturned in the future.

There are some good things in the bill, which I acknowledge. There is always a need for housekeeping legislation. Again, I repeat the point I made that this legislation is vastly improved compared with its first reading version because we have restored rights to appeal on the merits against plan changes, which were absolutely essential changes. If it had not been for that change, Labour certainly would not be supporting the bill, with reservations.

I will make two other references—firstly to the Minister of Conservation’s power. Under the existing law, if an application is made that affects land above the high-water mark, that land is generally owned by somebody, and the owner of that land has the right to say that he or she does not want that happening on his or her land. The owner effectively exercises a right of veto. The owner or occupier of land has an effective right of control to say “No, not here. It’s not right. It might be permitted under the plan but I don’t want it.”

Under the prior legislation, in respect of areas that are in the marine environment, they are not owned by private landowners. That right of veto is effectively held on behalf of all New Zealanders by the Crown. That is how it should be. The Crown deals with that through the Minister of Conservation having a right of veto and being able to say, on behalf of the Government, the Crown, and the people of New Zealand, just as if he or she was a private landowner, “No, it’s not going to happen here; we don’t think it’s the right thing.” Of course the Crown should have the right to do that; it is one of the responsibilities of the Crown to look after the wider public interest in respect of areas that are being managed for public purposes by the Crown.

The existing rights are constrained. That was shown clearly by the marina decision that the Minister relied upon in saying there was a need for change. In fact, in relation to the marina decision, it was found through a High Court review of the Minister’s discretion that in that case the Minister had incorrectly exercised his discretion. There is no shame in that; sometimes these mistakes are made. But it showed that the system works, because there was not an inappropriate withholding of consent.

💬 Paul Quinn: Abuse of power.

The member says it was an abuse of power. No, it was a mistake, according to the court. It was not some sort of machiavellian abuse of power. The Government’s response is to say that there should be no power of veto on the part of the Crown. I fundamentally disagree; the Crown is effectively the de facto owner—not an owner in the foreshore and seabed sense—controller, or protector of those spaces on behalf of the public. The Crown should maintain that right. There are ways in which the mechanism could be improved. I agree that those decisions should be taken earlier in the process, rather than waiting until the end of the process when someone has spent a lot of money on planning and probably spent money on engineers, consultants, and resource consent applications, only to have the Minister say he or she cannot do it. I do not think that is good process. The Minister’s decision ought to be brought forward to earlier in the process. I would willingly agree to that. The Minister’s discretion ought to be retained so that the Minister, on behalf of all New Zealanders, can veto inappropriate developments in the coastal space, just as I can veto inappropriate developments on land that is under my ownership or control. I have a Supplementary Order Paper to that effect—to retain the veto—and I hope that members of the Committee support it.

I will also make reference to the tree provisions. We heard Nikki Kaye wringing her hands and saying there is a terrible problem here. I am one of those people who think the existing law goes too far in the absolute prohibition on removing trees, including pruning. The Greens have put forward an amendment, which is supported by Labour, that deals with that issue and allows pruning. The Minister represents the current situation as prohibiting the cutting or pruning of all trees. It does not do that even now. A minimum size applies before that rule applies. In any event, the Greens’ amendment is sensible.

There is a degree of overregulation now, which could be remedied through the Greens’ amendment. It permits pruning but states that local authorities that want to control the cutting down of all trees over a certain size can do so. If councils want to do that, why should they not be able to? If people disagree with those plan provisions, they can appeal to the Environment Court. If the Environment Court disagrees with them, they can strike it out, as it often does with other inappropriate plan provisions. Why does the Minister feel the need to control that by way of central government limitation of the powers of councils under the regional district plans? It seems to me to run in the opposite direction of the one that the Minister in the chair, the Hon Dr Nick Smith, says that he is in favour of, which is to delegate these proper powers to councils to exercise. The Labour Party will be supporting the Greens’ amendment—

💬 Jeanette Fitzsimons: It’s just a nanny State.

It is a nanny State response; I thank Ms Fitzsimons. It is an overreaction. Having said that, I agree that there is currently a degree of overregulation, but the Greens’ provision fixes that. Nikki Kaye pretends that she is interested in the issue, but she will not even vote in favour of the Greens’ amendment. They are crocodile tears. She turns up to public meetings, says that she shares the public’s concerns and that she remains concerned, and then she does nothing about it. She had a staged little comedy act with the Minister in the chair about how it will not be that bad, but she will not vote in favour of the Greens’ amendment.

I will make two responses to the contribution from Mr Parker. The first interesting thing in his speech was that he said he accepts that the current tree rules are an overkill and should be changed. He also said in respect of the other area on which he focused his speech that he does not necessarily think that the law as it relates to the Minister of Conservation’s veto is right, either. Well, is it not interesting? Labour had 9 years in Government to try to fix these bureaucratic problems with the Resource Management Act—

💬 Hon Members: How long?

The Labour Government had 9 long years and it did not do it. When National becomes the Government and gets on and fixes some of these problems, Labour members get into the exercise of trying to niggle over an area where they say the reforms are inappropriate.

I will deal firstly with the coastal permit veto that is available to the Minister of Conservation. Let us look firstly at the powers the Minister of Conservation has. The Minister of Conservation has the power to write the New Zealand Coastal Policy Statement—the rules that relate to the coast for the whole country. The Minister of Conservation has the power to approve or not approve every regional coastal policy statement. That is the Minister’s second lever. The Minister’s third lever is being able to appoint the people who sit on the decision-making panel. That is the third power the Minister of Conservation has. The Minister’s fourth power is to submit to the hearings committee on any restricted coastal activity. Beyond that, the Minister of Conservation also has the power to appeal. The Minister has five powers, and members opposite say that the Minister needs the power to veto, as well.

Let me deal with the veto. I have checked the numbers. During my period as the Minister of Conservation there were about 280 applications in relation to restricted coastal activities. People lodge a consent application, and a whole lot of evidence is heard at the committee. Often those hearings take weeks, if not months. The decision goes off to the Environment Court, which potentially hears a whole lot more evidence. When I was the Minister of Conservation, in not one single case did I see merit in changing the decision on a consent application, but going through the process added, on average, 6 months to it.

In fact, I say to Mr Parker that since 1991, when the veto was put into law, there have been only two cases in which Ministers have used the veto—only two.

💬 Hon Members: So why is it a problem?

The members ask a very good question, and if they can wait I can give them the answer. Why is it a problem? I will tell members why. It adds approximately 6 months on to the process.

💬 Hon Steve Chadwick: Does that matter? It protects the environment.

Labour members say it does not matter. Actually, that is the problem. Members opposite do not seem to understand that time is money. An extra 6 months on the process does matter, from our point of view.

The other reason is an important constitutional point. Members on our side of the Chamber believe that it is proper that Ministers write laws and proper that they make rules and approve plans, but it is not proper for Ministers to overrule decisions of the Environment Court. Let us be real here. How much time do members think Ministers spend considering resource consent applications in relation to the coastal environment? The reality is that the Minister will receive, on average, about two applications a week. On average, each of those applications will have spent 5 or 6 weeks before a hearing.

💬 Hon David Parker: Oh, rubbish!

No, it is true.

💬 Hon David Parker: No, it’s not.

Well, the truth is that if we take the Whangamata example, I say to Mr Parker, the reality is that it was a 9-week—

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: That’s not a typical example, at all.

Mr Mallard says it is not a good example. Do members know why? It is because the previous Labour Government got caught out. The High Court of New Zealand found that the previous Minister of Conservation, Chris Carter, broke the law. Chris Carter broke the law. One of the reasons for this provision is that a large number of New Zealanders said that it is not fair. It is not fair.

💬 Paul Quinn: Abuse.

My colleague said it was an abuse, but I would go even further than that. Let us read what the High Court said. The High Court said that the powers of the Minister are nothing like what Mr Parker said they are. Mr Parker said that the Minister of Conservation is exercising the powers of the landowner. He said that if the landowner wants the power then he or she can have it, but the landowner does not have to have the power if he or she does not want to have it. The High Court decision makes very plain that the Minister’s powers are incredibly narrow.

💬 Hon David Parker: You’ve already said that.

Well, let us go through it, because Mr Parker and Mr Chauvel think they are the great judicial brains of the House and that we mere engineers cannot have a view on such things. I ask members to read the decision of the High Court, because it shows that the powers of the Minister to overrule the consent process are so incredibly narrow that, frankly, they are worthless. If we are serious about simplifying and streamlining the Resource Management Act, then the power of the Minister of Conservation to overturn a decision of the Environment Court—which is not provided in any other part of the Resource Management Act, nor should it be provided here—is not needed.

The final point I will make is that removing the ministerial power to veto is what we promised to do. I know that Labour makes promises and does the opposite thing, but National said we would remove the ministerial veto, and we are delivering on that promise.

Jeanette Fitzsimons said this morning that the Government cannot disguise the fact that the true purpose of the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill is to remove the obstacle of public participation from the path of developers wanting to make their money at the expense of the environment and the community. That is absolutely clear. That is the underlying intention of the bill. The intention has been disguised by good words and so forth, but the hundreds and hundreds of submitters on the bill are very well aware that that is the true purpose of the bill.

One of the ways to remove the obstacle of public participation is through the notification provisions. The Government is tightening up the notification rules so that councils will have to notify affected parties about a development only if the effects “may be more than minor”, whereas previously councils had to notify affected parties if the effects “will be more than minor”. That might seem to be just a minor quibbling over words and not of great significance, but I assure people listening to this debate that the changes to those words are hugely significant. Some people have already predicted that they will effectively make non-notification the norm. Non-notification is virtually the norm already, because 95 percent of resource consents are not notified. Only 5 percent were notified under the previous rules, and now that they are being tightened up I predict that very few developments will need to be notified.

It is a very subjective rule, and councils interpret it differently, but I can say that when I was a councillor on the Wellington City Council for 8 years, lack of notification was the most common issue that I had to deal with in my constituency. People would wake up one morning to find a development going up next door. I well remember hearing from a guy in Hataitai who had woken up one sunny morning and looked out of the window to see his neighbour with a wheelbarrow. When he waved at him and started chatting to the neighbour he discovered that a huge building—a three-storey dwelling—was to go up outside his house without his being notified. A few months later all he could see out of his enormous windows was a great big concrete wall 1 metre away. That was a non-notified development. I could tell members numerous examples of what I had to deal with as a city councillor.

An enormous building is going up in Oriental Bay that was non-notified. It has had a huge impact.

💬 Paul Quinn: That’s where you live, isn’t it, Sue?

Yes, it is. The building can be seen from this side of the harbour. It has had an enormous impact on the environment. It was not notified. Non-notification is going on and on. A 15-house subdivision was not notified in Waitakere, although it directly borders 17 neighbouring properties. All of those examples happened under the existing rules, but now that the rules are being tightened up I warn people that non-notification will effectively become the norm.

I will use the example of cell towers in order to warn New Zealanders what will happen when this legislation goes through and non-notification effectively becomes the norm. When I was a city councillor I sat on many hearings about cell towers, all of which had to be publicly notified. There was always a consent process. I remember the meetings in Ngaio and so forth, and there were days of hearings. The telecommunications companies decided that it was very irritating and annoying to have to spend all those hours going through hearings, so they lobbied the Government. First of all, a provision was passed that stated that provided the land that is designated for telecommunications purposes was in a district plan, then telecommunications companies could build cell towers on that telecommunications land as of right. Then the companies went round councils, getting all sorts of areas notified as telecommunications land so they could build cell towers on it as of right. But then they wanted to make it even easier for themselves, so they lobbied the previous Labour Government and got the so-called national environmental standard rammed through Parliament last year—an “environmental standard”, what a misnomer! The standard allows cell towers to be erected, effectively, on every telephone pole in New Zealand as of right.

The Green Party stood here in this Chamber and tried to oppose that Draconian provision. We tried to warn New Zealanders, we did action alerts, and we said “Wake up New Zealanders! You are going to wake up in a year’s time and you are going to look out of your window and find some cell tower being erected outside your house.” Nobody listened, and the media ignored us. But what has happened? The provision went through last October, and now, I can tell members, not a week goes by without my getting emails from distressed New Zealanders, from all over New Zealand, who have woken up to find cell towers being erected outside their homes.

I was at a public meeting in Point Chevalier last week, and there have been public meetings in Papakura. A woman spoke at the Papakura meeting and said she had woken up to find she had eight cell towers just across the road from her home. She is extremely distressed about it, as are people all over New Zealand. People are asking me how this happened. They are asking how it can be that we need a resource consent to do minor alterations on our homes but telecommunications companies can erect some huge cell tower outside our homes without requiring any resource consent or notification of any kind. Of course, the answer to the question is that the previous Labour Government, with the support of National, rammed through the standard that allows these cell towers to be erected as of right. We will have to revisit the issue in this Parliament, because it is causing such distress around New Zealand. I hope the Local Government and Environment Committee will address the issue, because we have several petitions on the issue before the committee.

I use that example as an illustration; that is what will happen when this legislation goes through. People are going to wake up, as so many of the people in Wellington, and I am sure other places, have already done, to find that these huge developments are taking place and will have an enormous impact on neighbours and on neighbouring properties. Those people will find that they have never been notified of the developments.

I assure National members that as more and more people find it happening and ask how it has happened, the explanation will be that it is because National, with the support of Labour, has rammed through this resource management amendment bill and has tightened up the notification rules to the point where notification is no longer the norm. More and more people will then realise what has happened in the House—what is happening here today—and they will realise that Jeanette Fitzsimons was absolutely right: the purpose of the bill is to remove the annoying obstacle of public participation from the path of developers who want to make their money at the expense of the environment and the community.

The issue of notification is a huge issue, and hundreds and hundreds of submitters were concerned about it. They recognised its implications, and there will be great distress in the community when they realise what has been done by tightening up the notification provisions even further. Thank you.

I am pleased to speak in the Committee stage of the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill. One of the things that I think has been missing is the focus on the fact that it is a simplifying and streamlining bill.

We have had a lot of debate about trees, which might be of interest to some of the Aucklanders, but other councils around New Zealand have adequate protection for trees—protection that works. Cambridge is a town of trees; it has fantastic trees. It does not have blanket tree protection, but it has the most beautiful trees in the country. The Taupō District Council, which is also part of my electorate for obvious reasons, does not have blanket tree protection.

I will turn this debate, therefore, towards the issues that actually matter to the majority of New Zealanders—the majority of New Zealanders who wanted a National Government because we promised them we would deliver changes to the Resource Management Act. And that is what we are doing: we are delivering a promise that we made to New Zealanders.

I will address the comment the Green Party made that we have rammed through this legislation. I am, quite frankly, disappointed with that. The Local Government and Environment Committee worked together very, very well. We had a great discussion and we made several changes. As a result of discussion on the first draft of the bill and the submissions, we have had many, many changes. We have had healthy discussion and healthy debate, and there have been significant changes from the first draft of the bill. We have come to a good position, and of course Labour thinks it is a great bill, as well. Labour members voted for it. They did not bother to put into the report as a minority report any comments they have said in the House today, because, inherently, they agree with the position.

I will come back to what many New Zealanders are interested in with regard to the Resource Management Act, which is its simplifying and streamlining. I will put in a plug for hard-working New Zealanders who want to build a garage on the back of their property, who want to extend their existing house, or who—though how dare they, if they are in Auckland—might want to trim a tree. It is actually those guys who will have huge benefit from this legislation.

I will give members the example of my brother. He wanted to build a fairly simple extension on to his house. We would have expected the resource consent to be back in 20 days. But because he had not done this before, he went to the expense of getting a planning consultant to advise him on the process, and to make sure that he came out with a successful resource consent at the end of it.

💬 Hon Member: How much did that cost?

Oh, no, it was not really about the cost, initially. It took 7½ months.

💬 Hon Members: How long?

It took 7½ months for a resource consent for a minor addition to his house. That is the sort of thing I am talking about. When New Zealanders are out there listening to this debate, they want this bill passed, because they do not think it is good enough to wait for 7½ months for a resource consent. They know, unlike some of those members on the benches opposite, that time is money. Let us say that my brother had a builder lined up to do those extensions and was ready to go. But all of a sudden that builder did not have work because the council had not been able to process that consent for 7½ months. So some of the measures that we have put into place in this bill that I will focus on are about improving the processing of those consents.

There has been a lot of discussion about tree protection, but what about some of the other measures? In terms of the notification of resource consent applications, the Minister has explained it. There has not been a change in the policy, in terms of the Supplementary Order Paper; there has been further clarification that the presumption has been neutralised. It has not been changed in favour of non-notification; it has been neutralised so that the presumption is not on notification. That alone will save council officers months of time on processing consents, because they will not have to justify something that does not have to be notified. Currently, they waste time having to write reports to justify 95 percent of the consent applications that will not be notified anyway. This Government is focusing on getting rid of that waste, and this measure is the sort of thing New Zealanders are looking for. The guy who wants to build a garage on the back of his property or who wants to put on an extension to his house will not be sitting there waiting for months.

We also know that important strategies have been put in place for improving housing in this country. They have been brought in by our good Minister of Housing. We want those houses built. We do not want people sitting around waiting for months and months for houses to be built. That is exactly the sort of progress that this Government is focusing on.

We are not doing this at the expense of the environment. I am a particularly proud member of the Bluegreens organisation in the National Party, and Taupō is hosting the Bluegreens forum next month. The Bluegreens are an important part of National, so it is absolute rot that the Opposition would have people believe that National is not into environmental protection. This legislation gets the balance right so that we are able to best protect the environment and still manage—

💬 Hon Shane Jones: What part of you is green?

I am from Taupō. Has the member considered the Taupō electorate and its extensive tourism appeal because of our clean, green—

💬 Hon Shane Jones: Labour policy.

Not at all. National has a very strong blue-green movement and that is why we are getting this balance right. We have sought advice from an experienced technical advisory group, we have had great discussions in terms of the select committee process, and we have got the balance right to make sure that the hard-working New Zealanders who want to make changes on their own property can do that without spending months and months bogged down in a council process.

The other thing that we have not heard a lot about today is the number of submitters who came out in favour of the changes we are making because they know it will be a significant improvement on what we have now. We had close to 900 submissions.

💬 Hon David Cunliffe: They haven’t read one.

Does the member want a bet? We had close to 900 submissions, in boxes this high. Our hard-working team on this side of the House reads the select committee papers. We read the submissions, we took them on board, and we were able to make changes from the first draft of the bill to make sure that we ended up with something that is great.

The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): I am sorry to interrupt the member. Interjections are permissible, but we are getting to the point where there is too much discussion from the cross benches.

One thing that we are doing to improve the resource consent process that will have a big impact on the little guy who wants a resource consent—and I am speaking for such people—is to limit the ability of councils to stop the clock. Basically, it means that they will not have an endless stop-the-clock process, where they can draw out the amount of time they take to process a resource consent. If the expectation is 20 days, then councils on most occasions should be adhering to that expectation.

We have also introduced in this bill a complaints process and a discount fee for consents that are processed late. We think that is fair. In business practice, if one does not deliver something on time, then the customer should not suffer. In this instance, that is what we are talking about. If the council has not processed the consent in time, then the customer who has applied for it should get a discount. We had a great discussion in the select committee and I do not think anyone disagreed with that point. In this Chamber we have spent too much time focusing on issues such as trees.

Another point, which the Green Party was particularly supportive of, is that we are increasing the fines for those who break the law. For those who breach their resource consent, we have increased the fine to $600,000. That is far more in line with what those people should be paying, and this measure is part of National’s commitment to the environment. So I will not sit here and listen to conversations where it is claimed that National is not for the environment, because that is rot. Here we have a $600,000 fine for a serious breach of a resource consent for companies, and a $300,000 fine for individuals who breach resource consents. That is really important in terms of getting the balance right in this legislation.

We have streamlined decision making. We have improved the workability of the Resource Management Act and we have streamlined the consent process.

I congratulate the Minister in the chair, Dr Nick Smith, on taking so many calls on the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill to put his perspective to us and to help clarify some situations, but I am concerned about the removal of the Minister of Conservation’s decision-making powers in respect of coastal consents for restricted coastal activities. I was Minister of Conservation for only a year, but in that year I recognised that the public of New Zealand felt a sense of security because of that role of the Minister of Conservation. That role is repealed by clause 20. I think a feel-good factor was there about the Minister of Conservation being the activist and the protector on behalf of New Zealanders as a last resort. It gave New Zealanders a lot of confidence that the Minister would exercise that role; it was not used with gay abandon, as the Minister for the Environment said it was. There were only two cases in which the role was exercised, but I believe it is absolutely critical to have it there.

I ask Dr Smith what we heard from Local Government and Environment Committee responses to the repeal made by clause 20. Eighty-three percent of submissions felt opposed to it. I think that says a lot about New Zealand. As well, 76 percent opposed changes made by clause 83. I think this shows that New Zealanders do not feel comfortable with this change. Just having those powers there was a means of protection for all New Zealanders that they were comfortable with.

I picked up another issue when I was the Minister of Conservation, and that was the overlapping issues with the Foreshore and Seabed Act. Many were still disaffected, particularly in the Whangamata marina case, about protection aspects of land that were subjected to a Treaty claim. I think we need to look at that issue very closely. One cannot look at the Resource Management Act just on its own, take away the powers of the Minister of Conservation, and think that solves the problem. It will leave a legacy for iwi with cases that they are really unsure about. Within some common-sense applications regional councils are over-exercising their powers without oversight of the Minister of Conservation, but under the jurisdiction of another Minister—the Minister for the Environment. That really worries me. I think that power of veto was wonderful. It was not abused; it was exercised with due constraint. We may have got it wrong on the Whangamata decision, but in the end the working through showed that the issue there was process. We always said that the process needed to be clarified. When this bill was first put before us in some rushed state we said we should look at the UK model, where the Minister of Conservation is involved at the front end of the process for restricted coastal activities. That model works. But the Government is simply taking away the powers of the Minister of Conservation. I think it is a very sad day for us all in New Zealand.

The Minister in the chair also mentioned national policy statements and the Coastal Policy Statement. One piece of work that I was particularly proud of was the work that Judge Shonagh Kenderdine got moving on the Coastal Policy Statement. I can remember when the Minister in the chair was the National spokesperson on the environment. He asked me several times in the House what had happened to the national policy statements. Well, I ask Dr Smith what has happened to the Coastal Policy Statement. We quite rightly said that the report should come to an incoming Government, but that was in November. What has happened to the report from Judge Shonagh Kenderdine, which she prepared with very learned people who went around the country working on the Coastal Policy Statement? Where is that report? Why is that thinking not factored—

💬 Paul Quinn: It’s coming.

It is coming? Here we are, considering simplifying the Resource Management Act, and we do not even have a major implicating instrument, which is either a national policy statement or the Coastal Policy Statement. I think that is very dangerous. We obviously have to wait until phase two of the reforms, and that is where the process itself really concerns me.

We all said in our opening speeches that the Government wants to simplify and streamline the bill. We did not have problems with that. There are many aspects in the bill, and the previous speaker was particularly bitter about the fact that we worked on so much of this and got it right. But we agree with the Greens and Jeanette Fitzsimons that we have unduly complicated and confused the processes. I think the powers of the Minister of Conservation are now absolutely complicated and confused. The Minister in the chair talked about five steps in which the Minister of Conservation has a role in terms of restricted coastal activity. What does that simplify? Is that what the Minister has done in terms of simplifying? I say to Dr Smith that other models could have made it so much simpler. I think he has made the role of the Minister of Conservation unduly complex, and it will confuse applicants when it comes to activities that protect the coastal margin. We know that in New Zealand if we do not show due process and care for the coastal margin, especially with the impact of climate change and also with development pressures moving along the coastal margin, these restricted activities will become more and more fragile, and will require greater protection. I believe that the role of the Minister of Conservation in relation to restricted coastal activity should have stayed in the Act.

I remain very concerned about the overlapping implications on the Foreshore and Seabed Act. This bill gives us no assurance that the processes will be clarified, streamlined, or simplified. As a Minister, I saw that that was particularly an issue for Hauraki. I think it is wrong to remove that power of veto of the Minister and say that five steps will assure the public of New Zealand that the coastal margin with restricted coastal activities will be protected environmentally. It makes it unduly complex. Overlapping regional councils all coming together to work on one plan is great, but the Minister of Conservation is informed only at the end of the stage, not right at the beginning. I think that is a big mistake.

It is a privilege to stand again to address members on the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill. My previous oration this morning on the issue of trees was cut off somewhat; one could say it was truncated. I would like to return to that subject. As the Minister observed, we need to apply a good dose of common sense in the Resource Management Act, and I think that with the broad cross-party support we have received on this issue, we are getting it.

Clause 52 of the bill, which deals with the general protection of trees in the urban environment, has occasioned much correspondence from the community, mirrored by the debate in the House. The major urban area affected by clause 52 is Greater Auckland, where a number of councils have general tree protection rules. There is a school of thought that clause 52 will countenance widespread rapine and plunder of our precious urban arboreal resources. What is it about Auckland and those who live there that should occasion such concern? As an MP who is resident in Auckland and fortunate to have his office in the green and leafy electorate of Epsom, I feel I must stand and speak on behalf of those residents who wish to trim or remove a tree on their property, without the time-consuming and expensive process of seeking a consent. This Government believes that citizens who own their properties should be able to do just that.

Are those good residents, as I asked this morning, all vegetal Visigoths? Are they philistines of Philodendron; plunderers of pōhutukawa; pillagers of pūriri; or castrators of kauri? I suggest that they are not. Are those good people ravagers of Rhododendron; topplers of tawa—

💬 Hon Shane Jones: I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson.

The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): I hope this is a serious point of order.

💬 Hon Shane Jones: As a descendant of the proud Ngāpuhi tribe, I cannot let that remark go unchallenged.

The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): That is not a point of order. The member is interrupting the speech.

💬 Hon Shane Jones: Castrating a kauri, for goodness’ sake! What next?

The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): Please sit down.

We have heard from the Hon Shane Jones that we are not likely to see any castrators of kauri in the far north. I am relieved to hear that. I put it to the Committee that neither are we likely to find them in Auckland City. Will people take an axe to every akeake within sight? I respectfully submit that they are not likely to, and they will not.

What is it about the good citizens of Auckland City, North Shore, Waitakere, and Manukau City that causes them all to be portrayed by those opposed to this amendment as rabid pillagers and plunderers, who are straining at the legal leash of section 76 of the principal Act? I remind members that clause 52 is designed to amend that section, which is apparently the only restraint on the lust and naked greed that would otherwise see people sacrifice huge numbers of prized, significant specimen trees on the altar of Mammon. Are the good citizens of Auckland, North Shore, Waitakere, and Manukau City any more likely to act in that manner than the worthy burghers of Christchurch, Hamilton, and Wellington?

💬 Jo Goodhew: And Timaru.

And Timaru, thank you. I respectfully suggest that they are not.

Ninety percent of New Zealand cities do not have blanket tree protection laws, yet all communities face developmental pressure to a greater or lesser extent. Four of New Zealand’s largest cities, as we have heard—Wellington, Hamilton, Timaru, and Christchurch—do not have such blanket tree protection. There is no endemic problem with regard to the loss of urban trees in any of these cities. Indeed, it would not have escaped the attention of anyone in the Chamber that Christchurch enjoys the sobriquet “the garden city”. These reforms are about pulling back on expensive and unnecessary bureaucracy. We have had some concern raised about the Bluegreens. They reinforce National’s blue-green principles that being pro-environment does not equate to being pro - red tape. We find it unacceptable that concerns about minor projects, such as trimming and removing a small tree, can cost more than the projects themselves.

As a case in point, about 5,000 of the 50,000 resource consents that are applied for every year are for tree trimming or removal, as we may have heard earlier—5,000, which is almost 10 percent. Very few of these consents are declined. However, this process is estimated to cost Auckland City almost $2 million. “How much?”, we might ask. It is $2 million, which could be used to treat stormwater or, perchance, could be used to purchase small parcels of urban land dotted throughout the community that could become treed, or that are treed already.

To reiterate, I say the consent process for trimming or removing trees costs individuals and ratepayers considerable time and money, although it shows few benefits. This Government believes these costs are unjustified. Thank you.

I rise to speak after that entertaining interlude. There is a saying in Māoridom: “When one tōtara falls, another one stands.” But in the Opposition, when one tōtara falls, another building is built. After hearing Cam Calder, I say that his speech was very entertaining. We know now why it took such a long time for him to have another speech.

I want to go back to a speech made by a colleague of the member, the member for Taupō, Louise Upston. She talked about getting the balance right. If getting the balance right means we have a top-heavy model weighted in favour of developers, at the expense of public participation in the Resource Management Act, she can have it. I know that there are a great many more people in the Taupō community who have very real concerns about the way in which the changes to the Resource Management Act are weighted in favour more of developers and less of the community, public participation, and certainly iwi and hapū input into decision making.

I listened to the Minister’s previous contribution and I say that one thing is for sure: under the previous Labour Government, when it came to the Resource Management Act, the ability of the public to have input into the consent and planning process was never under threat. It was never under threat, and there was no misunderstanding about it. But what good ideas did we get from National members in their 9 long years in Opposition? Their ideas were to gut the Resource Management Act of any public participation in the resource management process, limit notification, and make it really hard for appeals to happen. We have to ask ourselves whether this is the track that this country, which we are proud to call a clean, green nation, wants to go down. I suspect not, because many submissions were heard during the first tranche of Resource Management Act amendments, and many submitters supported the retention of a high level of public input into decisions made in their local community.

We talk about limited public notification and minor adverse effects. Minor adverse effects are a matter of perspective, and a lot of smaller communities said that a lot of things that were happening in their backyard were of real concern to them, and the only way they could have a say was through greater input into the public process. When we talk about limited notification, in fact a lot of submissions said that people were very concerned about that move. Indeed, only 5 percent of consents are notified, so why change something that is not broken, and why limit the ability and the opportunity of communities—good, thinking citizens, who are concerned about preserving the quality of life in their communities—to have a say on what is happening in their backyard?

A fine example was raised with regard to minor modifications and housing improvements. But let us go to the other end of the spectrum where earthworks are happening that are significant to many communities. There are major earthworks where trees were being cut down on the corner of Grey Street in Hamilton by a developer who had no regard whatsoever to the interests of the community, and who would have rather stumped up with the $50,000 fine than preserve the quality of life and the green space within that part of the Hamilton City community. There are real issues for Māori landowners who, under a minor works umbrella, have seen that, in order for a lines company to clear space under, say, fallen lines, they have actually had another major road ploughed through the middle of their land. That is not minor; those landowners consider it to be very major. When we talk about minor adverse effects and when we talk about raising the threshold of notification, we have to look at a range of examples and not just at the one pointed to by members of the Government. We say that there are works happening under the label of minor adverse effects that need to be notified and that the public should have a say on, because, from the perspective of the local community, people are concerned about the impact on their quality of life and about what is happening in their community.

Again, I say to the Minister that many, many submissions on the issue of limited public notification said that there was really no need to change it—only 5 percent of consents are notified at present. What is the real intention here? It comes on the back of not listening to submissions on Auckland governance, on the back of not listening to a public referendum where a lot of people have spoken, and on the back of ramming through a number of amendments. Clearly the public sentiment has been to ask why we should change some of those things that do not need to be changed. The Minister really needs to provide greater clarity, because on the surface of it, the way in which these types of amendments are moving are weighted more in favour of developers’ interests rather than public input and public participation in the decision-making process. Again, I say that the Minister has taken a number of calls on the bill, and it is important to clarify those things, just so that there is no misunderstanding about what the second tranche of Resource Management Act amendments might foreshadow.

On the issue of Whangamata, one can hardly say that all the issues around it were an everyday type of scenario. But I want to provide my perspective, because it was this issue that, in many respects, provided probably one of the most difficult ranges of interests, and they were not all given equal weight in the consideration of that application. It was the interests that were promoted by Hauraki iwi Ngāti Hako and Ngāti Hei, and endorsed by the Hauraki Māori Trust Board, around really simple things such as that, if there were to be a marina in that space, it would significantly impact on our customary fishing interests, specifically the gathering of pipi in our pipi beds. It was very simple. But the weight of those interests against big development interests with a lot of money behind them was lost in the white water, so to speak. There was never really a sense from local hapū that the severity of their concerns about major impacts—protecting the pipi beds, protecting the natural habitat, and concerns for the moko skink in that area—was ever taken into account.

On the question of retaining the role of the Minister of Conservation, those powers have rarely been used. Why get rid of them? They should be retained for the public interest, and, more important, for the interests that exist amongst hapū with regard to some of the issues that are never really given much weight in the Environment Court, because hapū do not have the resources to have the technical support to provide the level of intensity in their argument within the Environment Court context. I want to support and endorse the contribution made by my colleague Steve Chadwick on the issue of retaining the role of the Minister of Conservation. She makes the good point that now, since the Foreshore and Seabed Act, in Whangamata the car park space, in a strict sense, would be considered as foreshore and seabed area. If we take out the role of the Minister of Conservation, who protects the public interest there? If customary interests are yet to be determined, who then fills that space? Where customary interests have not been determined, I do not think it is the Minister for the Environment. In fact, it should be the Attorney-General. In my mind there needs to be further thinking about how the gap that has been created should be rightly filled by the best person or position. I would say it should be the Attorney-General with regard to the foreshore and seabed space, to ensure that the opportunity for the customary interests of hapū to be claimed can be held, and the space can be preserved in the meantime for the rest of the public. That is the best way. We cannot assume, I say to the Minister, with respect, that the Minister for the Environment is the best Minister to preside over decisions on questions of that nature.

On that front, again I would argue strongly that this role has not been used very often, and there are obviously very specific limitations on the way in which the Minister of Conservation can make decisions. The court said that the process appears to have let the former Minister down on the Whangamata issue. However, let us not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Let us have another look at the implications of the issues of the space that we are talking about, especially when it comes to the foreshore and seabed. I think the Minister needs to revisit the question of who fills that gap. With respect, I do not think it should be the Minister for the Environment in a carte blanche way. In fact, I would petition the Minister strongly to do an assessment and scoping of the various lands that are captured in that domain, and ask for advice to ensure that the Attorney-General be considered as the most relevant person to fill the space, if it is not the Minister of Conservation.

I want to respond to a couple of the points that have been raised by Nanaia Mahuta in the Committee stage of the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill. Firstly, regarding the issue of the Minister of Conservation’s veto or capacity to overrule the decision of an Environment Court, I put to the Chamber this scenario. Let us say that we had an application that was heard before the Environment Court. The local iwi come along and say that the application will have an adverse effect on their pipi beds, the Environment Court says that they are right, and it turns down the application. In this scenario let us say that the Minister of Conservation was my good colleague Chris Auchinvole, and he said “No, I’m a keen fisherman and I’m going to overrule the Environment Court. I’m going to let it go ahead.” He would be the very first member to scream foul. I say to the member opposite that that is what the law says.

My challenge to the members on my left is this: why do they not trust the Environment Court? There is no other part of the Resource Management Act where Ministers make decisions on individual consents, and members on this side of the House say that we trust the Environment Court. The sorts of issues that the member has raised should be properly dealt with in that court.

💬 Hon Nanaia Mahuta: I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. Will the Minister take a question?

The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): That is not a point of order. You cannot interject like that.

💬 Hon Nanaia Mahuta: I seek leave for the Minister to take a question.

The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): No, you cannot do that. It is a debating point. The member can interject, but if the member who is speaking does not respond then that is the end of asking the member to take a question.

I have a very simple question for members of the Labour Party. Why do they not trust the Environment Court? It is a very simple question. We trust the Environment Court in respect of hydro developments, major transmission projects, and huge roading projects, so why would Parliament take a different view and not trust our Environment Court judges to make proper decisions without political interference in the area of the coast?

The second point the member raised was that this bill was all about developers. In fact, Russel Norman went one step further. He said that this bill is an attack on the voluntary and community spirit of communities all over New Zealand. Let me give member a very practical example of why members on this side of the House support this bill. I have a letter here from Mr Peter Grant. He is the treasurer and a life member of the Mercury Bay Tennis Club—one of those rampant developers! Do members know what that awful tennis club wanted to do? It wanted to build a volley wall for its community. To apply for a 2-metre high volley wall at the Mercury Bay Tennis Club—and I have a photo of it that I would be happy to table—it lodged a consent with the Thames-Coromandel District Council, and the council said the club had to have a resource consent. Do members know how long that took? This application was lodged in July last year. How long do members think it took for the Mercury Bay Tennis Club—one of those rampant developers out there—to get consent to build a volley wall for the children of Mercury Bay and Whitianga? The club lodged its application on 11 July, and it finally got consent on 17 February. But there is a byline. Do members know how much it cost the Mercury Bay Tennis Club to get a resource consent for a volley wall in Whitianga? It cost $2,200 to build, but the cost of getting the resource consent was $2,564. Is Mr Norman telling me that that is a voluntary and community group that is being attacked in this bill? I say to that member that that is the sort of bureaucracy that is driving ordinary New Zealanders mad.

Communities and members want to do the right thing. They want to make a positive difference for their communities, and members on this side of the House are saying that it is examples like that that show why we need this bill and why we need to take a practical view of how we deal with resource consents.

The Greens have put forward a number of Supplementary Order Papers on the notification provisions of the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill, and I would like to run through them so that members will be able to support them.

I ask members to turn their attention first to Supplementary Order Paper 43. It removes altogether clause 68, which makes the changes to notification. Basically, these clauses have become a mess. It is confusing. It is not at all clear. We know that it somewhat raises the bar for notification, but it is very unclear how it will be interpreted. It is creating a legal mess. We should go back to the position we had earlier. It was not ideal, but at least we were getting some case law around it, and it was better than what we have now.

That brings me to some comments made by Louise Upston. She talked about people having difficulty getting resource consents to build a garage. Most garages and house extensions need a building consent but they do not need a resource consent. It would have to be an unusual kind of garage—one that shades people’s sunlight, encroaches on the boundary or bulk and location requirements, or whatever—to actually need a resource consent. People certainly would not be notified beyond the immediate neighbours. So it is a very bad example. I give members an example of something of much greater impact that does not get notified, at all: an open-cast coal mine in the Waikato. An open-cast coal mine was regarded as having effects so minor that it did not need notification, at all. I ask members to try that next door!

If Supplementary Order Paper 43 fails, which I am sure will not be the case, we have Supplementary Order Paper 45. It clarifies that in a case of limited notification, where the restrictions on who gets notified are quite narrow, an organisation representing the public interest when there is an impact on that public interest by the development should be regarded as affected persons. Because the definition of “person” under the Resource Management Act makes it clear that organisations are persons under the Act, we would think that an organisation representing the public interest would be a person affected anyway. But some have argued that only natural persons can be affected in the sense of the Act and that, therefore, organisations representing the public interest could be excluded from the limited notification provisions. That is why we have said, for the avoidance of doubt, that these organisations should be regarded as affected persons. If that organisation is the tennis club and water quality is being affected, then it would not qualify. But if the local environment group has done work on water, and water quality will be impacted, then it ought to be notified.

Supplementary Order Paper 45 also omits new section 95D(a)(ii), inserted by clause 68, which has the peculiar effect of saying a person “must disregard any effects on persons who own or occupy—(ii) any land adjacent to that land;”. So people can cause effects on their immediate neighbours, and they do not get notified, but people cannot cause effects further abroad. That seems to be bizarre, and we propose that that new section should be omitted altogether.

Supplementary Order Paper 43 removes clause 131, which is the clause that repeals the right, under section 274 of the Act, to join an appeal brought by another party. I dealt with this issue somewhat in my second reading speech, where I said that the ability to join an appeal brought by somebody else will never be needed by a large developer with full-time lawyers. They will be in there right at the beginning. The people who need section 274 are the people who are holding down jobs and looking after families. They are volunteers, they are part-time, and they just do not see the deadline coming up in time to get into the original case in front of the council. Therefore they lose their right to appeal. As the law stands, section 274 allows them, when someone else appeals, to join that appeal and to bring their information and evidence for the benefit of the court in order to make a better decision. I quote the case of the Cypress mine appeal, where the Buller Conservation Group, under section 274, joined as an interested party the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society, which had appealed. They were able to fund a lawyer, an ecologist, and a landscape architect, and that helped the environment movement produce a well-rounded case in that appeal.

The Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society, and groups like it, sometimes use that ability to join a case. In this case a national environment group brought an appeal, and then the local group was able to join that appeal and bring its local knowledge. Local knowledge is really important in a case like this. I have already mentioned in my second reading speech the case of the local people who knew that the land on which a mining tailings dam was built was unstable and would slip. Unfortunately they were not listened to, even though they got as far as court, and the land was unstable and slipped, and it cost $20 million. The mining company might wish that it had listened at that stage to the local group. So we believe that section 274 adds a useful provision to the Act and should not be repealed.

If all of this fails, finally we have Supplementary Order Paper 44, which clarifies that even if section 274 is repealed, a person representing some aspect of the public interest that is affected by this case can appeal against the case. I recommend those Supplementary Order Papers to the House.

I will talk about trees. We do not have laws on murder because we think every good citizen of Auckland will go out and murder people. We do not have laws against theft because we think most people are thieves. We have those laws because there are a few who might be. Likewise, we do not need tree protection laws because we cannot trust the householders of Auckland; we need tree protection laws because in Auckland, above all other places, a lot of infill development is going on whereby developers buy a section they have no real connection with, do not intend to live on, and have no attachment to, in order to build as many apartments as they can fit on to it, and the trees are in the way. This is a totally different situation from a person with a beautiful magnolia in his or her front garden, who is unlikely to chop it down. That is not who this rule is for. We are talking here about the areas that have the most intense development pressures. Of course we are not losing trees in Christchurch! Developers are not trying to cram multiple apartments into every tiny corner of Christchurch. It is not growing at quite that rate. We have those pressures in a few parts of the country. Councils can use this tool in the public interest where it is necessary to have some control over trees in those areas that are being densified quite fast.

The Minister for the Environment said there were 5,000 applications per year to trim trees. If the Minister is right, then what he is saying is that all of those 5,000 cases would not have had to happen if he had accepted my amendment, which excluded trimming trees and allowed a blanket protection only for felling, removing, or destroying trees. But the Minister would not accept that amendment, at all, despite the fact that it would have dealt with those 5,000 applications, which he said were about trimming trees. My suspicion is that roughly half of them were about trimming trees and roughly half of them were about felling trees, but in either case it would have dramatically reduced those compliance costs.

In addition, councils could delegate the decision to an officer on site who goes out, visits, and makes an assessment. The officer says yes, signs the piece of paper, and says: “Off you go.” There is no need for the mass of paperwork that goes on at the moment. It could be done very quickly and simply. It is just a matter of having a check. The scheduling will create very much greater compliance costs because every single tree scheduled is open to appeal by people who do not want it scheduled. The council will be tied up in a nightmare of compliance, red tape, cost, and paperwork trying to get its schedule, and most councils simply will not try.

Self-sown or planted, raised and nurtured by the landowner or growing up naturally through the canopy cover above. Growing over dozens of years, sometimes hundreds of years, sometimes thousands of years, they emerge to provide shelter and shade. They provide stability for our soils, they prevent erosion and slipping. They fertilise, they attract rain, they hold moisture, they provide beauty, wilderness, amenity, and view. They refresh our souls as well as our waters. Trees. They are slow to grow, quick to go.

At the heart of the debate lies this paradox. There are two competing views of the ownership of these things called trees. On the one side is a party that believes that ownership is entirely individual and entirely temporal, and therefore every individual should have the ultimate right to cut them down. On this side we have a party that believes that trees are part of our birthright that we give to other generations, and are also something that we own collectively as well as individually. In recognition of that broader view, some communities around New Zealand have joined together to agree rules that everybody in that community should stand by in the way that they either protect, or decide to chop down, a tree. Clause 52 amends section 76 of the Resource Management Act to prohibit any rule in a district plan from providing for the protection of any tree or group of trees in an urban environment. It is an act of prohibition against any community deciding that there is a common interest in maintaining those trees. Clause 151 requires any council to remove rules from the district plan by 1 January 2012, conveniently after the next general election, which probably explains why the Government has brought in a Supplementary Order Paper that at least scores the unrestricted trimming of a tree immediately on the passage of this bill, before the next general election, just in case National does not win it.

Here we come to another fascinating political point. In the life of any Government there are some key moments, moments when in its arrogance it puts its big boot right in the organic matter, and this is one of those moments, just as it was on adult and community education cuts, and just as it was when the public decided that it was revolted by Rodney Hide’s minimalist vision of a local government agenda. On this issue inboxes are clogged with hundreds and hundreds of emails from Aucklanders who say that it is not the Government’s right to override their democratically elected councils that have put in place rules that the majority stand for. Here is the problem. This is an active override by central Government over local democracy, from a party that campaigned against the nanny State! This is the chainsaw State, the bulldozer State, driving its way through local government rules. It is the party of liberty crushing bottom-up democracy—go figure! That is what these tree provisions are really about.

This is a bill that was supposed to streamline and simplify, but whose only solution to the trees issue is to create a mountain of bureaucratic red tape by requiring that every tree or—maybe, just maybe, especially if Lynne Pillay’s amendment goes through—group of trees has to be individually scheduled by the council, creating a trail of paperwork and further consultation. They say the blanket rules are too bureaucratic so we are going to get 100,000 little individual rules for each tree. One of the members opposite raised the subject of Timaru. I grew up not far from there. That is the kind of place where, if people are driving along an empty country road and see another car, they wave because they never know whether it is the last car they will see. It is not hard to protect an individual tree in Timaru; there are not too many of them. But it is a totally different scenario in Waitakere, where I now have the privilege of living. In Waitakere, there are hundreds of thousands of trees. It is completely impractical to do individual scheduling or even small group scheduling of trees, and many properties and many dwellings exist in the bush.

There is a ridiculously inequitable state of affairs in these clauses, because they apply only to urban trees and urban councils. That says that rural people—is that because they vote National more often—must love their trees more or would be more sensible. Is that the hidden agenda here? Why should urban people not have the right to join together through a democratically elected council and protect their native flora? It does not make any sense, it is inequitable, and it is unnecessary because streamlining is an operational matter. It does not need to be a legislative matter. If it is, the Greens have an amendment that quite rightly allows for improved trimming and provides for on-the-spot consenting processes, and we believe that there is a lot of potential there to find a good middle ground. We are not opposed to streamlining, but we believe that these provisions take the Act in the opposite direction.

The legislation is unethical. It manifests an extreme individualism. It says “The tree on my property is mine alone. It doesn’t matter if it took 200 years to grow. It doesn’t matter if I am a blink in the eye of the life of the tree. It doesn’t matter if as well as being on my property it provides shade or stability for the properties beside me, above me, or below me on the hill, and it doesn’t matter if removing it might cause erosion or a slip. That does not matter. It does not matter if it is part of a view. It doesn’t matter if it is part of a line of pōhutukawa along the coast. That does not matter, because it is mine alone.” That is the kind of individualism that ordinary New Zealanders do not buy into.

Labour will be vigorously opposing these tree provisions, and we will be moving three amendments to remove or reduce them. Phil Twyford will be moving amendments to strip those offending provisions from the bill because they are wrong and they should go. At the very least, they should be deferred into the second tranche of the Resource Management Act reforms so that the Government has time to properly consult. If National is a party of consultation, then let it be true to its word. I will be moving an amendment to exempt the Waitakere Ranges Heritage Area, established by this Parliament not a year ago after 30 years’ work and supported by 81 percent of Aucklanders, according to Colmar Brunton. That should be akin to a reserve or a conservation management area, and that should be exempted for very, very sensible reasons from the operation of those clauses, if they stand. If the Government rejects both of those two, I call on the Minister to state whether he will support an amendment on behalf of Waitakere City by Lynne Pillay MP. They are technical amendments that hold the Minister to his word that it is not an individual tree but a group of trees that can be scheduled, if scheduling must occur.

I come to the fundamental point that the trees of west Auckland are a community resource as well as an individual resource. There are far too many homes on properties of less than 4,000 square metres that are reticulated that are surrounded by trees. In fact, the only area on some properties that is not treed is the physical area of the house. The rest of it is solid tree cover, and scheduling every tree is a nonsense. At best, it is a bureaucratic nightmare; at worst, it is a deliberate con. That brings me to National’s Auckland MPs. Nikki Kaye goes around the tree groups and says that she will help. Either she knows she is powerless and she is not being frank, or she has an overblown impression of the Minister’s willingness to listen. Either way, it is vacuous; she has delivered nothing. Paula Bennett would not return the phone calls of the Waitakere City Council. She presents herself as a defender of west Auckland, yet she is selling it down the river. Tim Groser could not be bothered because he is overseas. Pita Sharples could not pick up the phone. In his case, I understand there may some family reasons, so we will cut him some slack on that. But I call on Māori Party members to be the kaitiaki of the trees, not just talk about it, and vote with Labour if they can get over themselves and long-past history, and support these amendments.

That was an extraordinary contribution from David Cunliffe. It was wrong in fact, wrong in process, and wrong in philosophy. Let me go through each of the issues. The member opposite said that there is no provision except for individual tree protection. That is wrong. There is absolute capacity for groups of trees to be identified for protection through the proper process. All this bill does is ban blanket protection rules across the district.

The second error I want to mention, which I find extraordinary, concerns amendments. Where are all the amendments that Labour members moved at the select committee when they heard submissions on this bill? I do not think a single amendment was put forward at the select committee. [Interruption] Mr Twyford has said he has strong concerns. He was on the select committee. Was he asleep? Was he not there? Why did Labour members not move a single amendment at the select committee when these detailed provisions concerning trees were being dealt with? They have completely let the side down.

Let us turn to the issue of philosophy. I will explain very simply the philosophy on this side of the Chamber. In an extraordinary backwards flip the member David Cunliffe is saying that somehow the changes we are making are an attack on liberty. Let me very simply explain for the member the principle that applies here. It is perfectly proper for Parliament to define something as simple as a person’s property right. Probably the most important asset that New Zealanders own is their little quarter acre, and it is the proper business of this Parliament to define the limits and the extent of people’s rights around their little quarter acres.

💬 Hon David Cunliffe: No limits under this Minister!

The member opposite keeps interjecting and saying that there are no limitations. That is simply untrue, and it is below what I would expect of a front-bench member of the Labour Party.

Members on this side of the Chamber say that is an absolute right—and David Cunliffe gave a speech about a huge tree that has been growing for 200 years—for a community to identify a tree, or group of trees, in its district plan, and there is nothing in this bill to stop anybody from properly recognising those trees.

I say to the member that if the council wants to adopt a rule of that sort, then it should talk to the property owner. Is that not a novel concept? It seems to me that it is a novel concept for members on the Labour benches to say that if people have a tree on their property and the council wants to protect it, the council should talk to them and consult them. Is that a radical notion? Is that something that this Parliament and its members cannot grapple with?

Perhaps I should read, for the benefit of Mr Cunliffe, this contribution from Mr Bill Ralston. He says: “Before Christmas I decided to get rid of an ugly, stunted, exotic box elder tree at the bottom of my garden that was strangling a native nikau and a couple of other palm trees. The guy who does our garden brought around an arborist who told me he could not fell the damn thing without a resource consent. I wrote a cheque and several weeks later a man from the Auckland City Council with a clipboard came around and stared long and hard at the offending tree. Yes, he would recommend we could cut it down. More weeks passed and eventually a long document arrived from the Regulatory Planning Department of Auckland City Environments saying we had been granted consent. The tree feller came, cut it down and removed it in 30 minutes.”

Bill Ralston said he was very pleased that the National Government is going to pass changes to end that sort of nonsense. He went on to say: “I will never again have to apply for a Resource Consent to trim my garden, the council will not have to spend many hours pondering my botanical behaviour, and the ratepayers of Auckland will not be wasting hundreds of dollars every time someone in this city wants to do some gardening”.

I also draw Mr Cunliffe’s attention—

💬 Hon David Cunliffe: How many emails has the member received in favour of whacking down trees?

Well, the member Mr Cunliffe asks about emails. That is an interesting question. I never—

💬 Hon David Cunliffe: He has to read his media trainer’s emails.

The member should take a big deep breath for a moment. I draw his attention to the New Zealand Herald poll. What did the poll say about this issue this week?

💬 Hon David Cunliffe: How scientific was that?

Well, that member, who has just been talking about the number of emails I have received, is not prepared to accept a poll from the New Zealand Herald. I have to tell the member that it is as simple as this: the vast majority of New Zealanders do not believe they should have to get a resource consent to trim their trees.

I look forward to campaigning in 2011 and saying that a vote for Labour is a vote for a nanny State and a vote to go back to the nonsense we have tolerated for 9 years, as has been demonstrated by the poor old citizens like Bill Ralston, who had to go through a 6-week performance to get resource consent to trim a tree.

I want to refer to Supplementary Order Paper 43 in the name of Dr Russel Norman. Part of this Supplementary Order Paper deals with security for costs. Security for costs is something that concerned many of our submitters, but we believe that a lack of knowledge about the process increased their concern unnecessarily. The Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill does reinstate security for costs. Many community groups were concerned that this provision may exclude them from participating in environmental decisions. But when the Local Government and Environment Committee reviewed court decisions from the past, we felt that the judges had used their power with discretion and that genuine environmental groups with genuine concerns would not be disadvantaged.

It is important to note that the Environment Court has always had the ability to award costs in appeal proceedings, but the power of the court to require security for costs has varied. Security for costs is the deposit of money or security to meet the possibility that the party will be unable to pay costs that may be ordered by the court should the case be unsuccessful. In the period 1996-2003, although the Environment Court had this power it was rarely used. Database searches could find only eight times when security for costs was required, whereas nearly 1,500 cases went before the court each year. Contrary to common perception among many of the submitters, the practice of requiring security for costs in the Environment Court does not kick in automatically upon the lodgement of an appeal. A party, usually the party whose resource consent decision is being appealed against, first has to apply to the court for an order for security for costs.

When it had the power to require security for costs, the Environment Court exercised its discretion according to a range of factors. The general principles are set out in rule 61 of the District Court Rules 1992, and the interests of both the appellant and the applicant are to be considered. Factors that are considered include the strength or merits of the plaintiff’s case, the conduct of the parties involved, public interest factors, and an assessment of the financial resources that are available. Given that the court already has case law in place and it has been considered to work well, we did not see a need to specify criteria for additional consideration in this legislation. I repeat: we do not think that environmental groups or individuals with a genuine issue need to fear this amendment. It is there to provide a balance at the court’s discretion, and I believe it is needed. During the submission process we did see firsthand evidence of an environmental group that felt it was OK—in fact, it felt it was its right—to dissolve the organisation and walk away from its responsibility when court costs were awarded against it.

We believe that the new bill, in allowing the ability to require security for costs at the court’s discretion, provides a good balance. We hope that as groups get to understand the process and see it in action, they will conclude that they have nothing to fear and everything to gain from participating in environmental decision-making. Therefore, I suggest that we do not support Dr Russel Norman’s Supplementary Order Paper.

I will begin by saying that I think the Resource Management Act has been a very good Act. It is very easy to find examples of where things have not gone right. One can always dig those up. The Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill has to make sure that red tape is cut. However, will it work? I think we have to look at the situation as it is. People came to the select committee hearing and made their submissions with passion. I was disappointed that I was not able to sit on the committee very often because I was on the Auckland Governance Legislation Committee that was sitting at the same time, dealing with Auckland issues.

I want to talk about what is going on in Manurewa in regard to this bill. If someone wants to build one of these things called a bloke’s shed and it happens to be going up against the boundary, that person will run into real conflict. The resource consent cannot be gained very easily. I understand that, and I want to see things change. The reality is that the people who administer the Act at the moment are the same ones who will be in charge of this new Act, once it passes through the House. We have to change those people, and I think that is the real problem. We have to change the way these people see things. When someone asks to have a bloke’s shed built on the back of his or her section, up against the neighbour’s property, these guys see that there is at least 3 months’ work in it for them. Of course, it is not made easy. I hope that these things will change quite considerably. I think the Act itself has been fairly important, in terms of making sure that developers do not run roughshod over the assets of a community. The environment is very, very important.

I want to tell members about a situation in Weymouth. Two macrocarpa trees are growing right on the boundary of someone’s place. They are not beautiful trees, and the next-door neighbour wants to get rid of them because they are blocking the light and making the property damp. But the person who lives about eight houses down the road thinks they look pretty good, and then the debate starts and the council ends up taking sides. I do not want this bill that is before us now to start a chainsaw massacre.

💬 Chris Auchinvole: It won’t, George; it won’t.

I think it very well could, and I think we have to be careful about that. When we see how some people in Auckland will do anything to clear a bit of land to build on, we have to be very careful. Auckland is even better than Christchurch, as far as a city with trees goes. There are some wonderful places in Auckland. But people get passionate. Remember One Tree Hill, when it used to have a tree? People became very emotional when the tree was cut down. Aucklanders love their trees. Of course, we would be remiss if we did not make sure that people cannot go out there and just chop down the tree. We cannot say to people: “Well, that tree has been there for the last 100 years. It’s going to stay.”, and have them reply: “No, it’s not. I’m going to chop it down. It’s my tree.” We most certainly do not want that to happen.

It is interesting that at the moment the chief executive of the local council has more say over the tree than the person who owns the land that the tree is on. However, there are people in our community who are not responsible, who do not care what their neighbours think, and who do not care what the wider community thinks. We do not want to let them get their chainsaws out and hack down every tree, because they do not like them. Councils are notorious for putting so much red tape in the way of people. I have a case in Manurewa at the moment. It took the council 26 years to notify a person that a fence was the wrong size.

I will speak briefly about notification issues, because those are some of the issues in the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill. I will talk about a particular example of how the notification processes are already far too weak. The example I wish to address is around a piece of bush that used to exist in the South Taranaki ring plain. It was called the Parihaka bush. This is an example of why the current regime around notification is far too weak, and why it is a mistake to weaken it further, as the Government proposes to do with this bill.

Parihaka bush was about 10 hectares of remnant forest and a remnant swamp, or wetland, and it sat in the South Taranaki ring plain. Members who know the South Taranaki ring plain will know that outside the Taranaki park, very little native vegetation is left. According to the ecological assessment done on the area, about 1 percent of the original native vegetation is left in the South Taranaki ring plain. Parihaka bush existed previously; it was about 10 hectares. Tawa, rewarewa, miro, pukatea, rimu, māhoe, pigeonwood, tree ferns, and about 20, 30, or 40 different varieties of ferns, trees, and shrubs existed in this area. It was a very important local piece of vegetation. It also had the Waitotoroa Stream, which had water of reasonable quality in it because of the bush that existed around it.

Parihaka bush was in the middle of a dairy farm—and there is a family story about this. New farmers basically wanted to bowl the bush in order to do a dairy conversion. They wanted to take it out; they wanted to get rid of it. They went to the South Taranaki District Council, which told them they would need a resource consent. The farmers, being of the same mind as the National Party and the ACT Party, thought that that was an outrage. They said something like: “How dare they! It is our land. How dare we have to have a resource consent in order to bowl the last 10 hectares of native bush left in an area where 1 percent of the native vegetation is left? It is our land. How outrageous it is that we should have to have a resource consent in order to bulldoze bush!”. So the farmers started bulldozing it anyway. They said: “Bugger that! We don’t believe in this Resource Management Act stuff. The National Party tells us all the time how bad it is, and we subscribe to that, so we will get the bulldozer out and start bulldozing the bush.” They started on the bulldozing before someone found out and the council sent someone around to assess what was going on.

The council intervened and had an ecological assessment done on the bush. It found out that the bush was a 100-year-old piece of bush that was tremendously important in terms of the ecology of the region. One would think that the council, at that point, would have said the farmers could not bulldoze any more of the bush. In fact, one would think that it would fine them for bulldozing the bush without obtaining a resource consent. One would think that would be the logical conclusion. Instead, the council looked at the ecological assessment, which showed the bush was tremendously important, and it obtained a recommendation from council officers, who said the council should not give the landowners a resource consent, because that would only reward them for bad behaviour, and it would be a bad thing to do anyway. The council then said no, it would give the farmers a resource consent. Not only did the council say it would give them consent to bowl the rest of the bush but also it said they did not have to notify the proposal. The council decided not to tell anyone about it. The farmers had a non-notified consent for the bowling of the rest of the 10-hectare bush, but they left some parts of it.

This is the current situation. The Resource Management Act is already so weak and unable to protect the last remnants of natural vegetation from dairy conversions that this clearance of the bush went ahead. In the bill before us the Government proposes to weaken the notification provisions further. This is the reality on the ground in New Zealand today. This is what is going on outside this House. We hear the rhetoric from National and ACT about the evil Resource Management Act and how it does terrible things, but the truth is that we are losing biodiversity rapidly, because the Resource Management Act is too weak. We need provisions to protect biodiversity on private land. That is essential if we are to protect the remnants of biodiversity. There are farmers right across New Zealand who protect biodiversity. They have Queen Elizabeth the Second National Trust covenants put on their land, they protect biodiversity, and they would be appalled by the actions of these farmers in knocking over this important remnant bush. They do not support that. But in this case, the farmers got away with it. They did it and it was not notified, and that is why we have to strengthen the notification provisions, not weaken them.

In acknowledging the work that has been done at the select committee, let me say to the presiding officer that I acknowledge and recognise the important part he, too, plays in the debate.

This legislation will be dubbed the chainsaw massacre legislation, because it opens the way for people to be able to remove trees that they do not like. Many of us know the importance of a tree. As an electorate member of Parliament I have served Papatoetoe for the previous 22 years, Ōtara for 13 years, and Ōtāhuhu for just under 1 year. I can imagine some of the great trees that exist in Papatoetoe. I can envisage places like Kolmar Road, and also Wallace Road, where we have some wonderful oaks. Some of them overlap, and I can see some overzealous people now using this legislation to be able to remove those trees if they do not like them.

The Government is overreacting. Labour was accused of being a nanny State Government. We can now turn the tables and say this Government is a nanny State Government. This nanny State Government is putting forward this legislation and overreacting, using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. In Auckland, where population pressures are increasing, our small areas of vegetation are under great pressure. Six out of seven Auckland local councils have general tree protection. The Environment Court accepts the approach, declaring in favour in 2002 of an argument that general tree protection rules were necessary to achieve the purposes of the Resource Management Act. Clause 52 of the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill will undo that tree protection.

It is not just my Labour colleagues or my Green colleagues who oppose clause 52. If we look at the New Zealand Herald, the headline on 7 September reads: “Tree law change aids ‘sneaky’ choppers”. I will quote from the article: “Homeowners whose trees are illegally chopped down by neighbours will no longer be able to count on council help once a proposed law change likely to become final this week is passed [into law]. The owner of Auckland’s biggest tree consultancy predicts more neighbourhood spats if the law scraps protection for trees of a certain height or size—and councils will no longer be able to step in. Stacy Colyer, whose Greenscene company is often called in to help with disputes, said there would be an increase in court cases over who owns large trees on boundaries.”

Although one can accept the need to simplify and streamline the Resource Management Act, I have found from experience that much of it comes down to the training of individuals in councils. It comes down to staff training, and being able to handle applications for resource consents.

Mr Colyer is concerned about clause 52. He says it means that in urban environments only trees or groups of trees that are specifically identified in a schedule of notable trees to a district plan in a reserve are protected by the Reserves Act. He says, and he believes, that some simple operational modifications could have been implemented to deal with the problem, rather than act in a way with the legislation and with what it is intended to do.

Mr Colyer has a lot to say. Some of what he says I agree with, and I think the Minister should take some notice of what is being said. We know that trees are important for the environment. We know that there is urban sprawl in Auckland. We know that there will be a time when those people who are developers will want to remove the trees. They will use any opportunity they can to ensure that that happens. If we look around at some other countries that have environmental legislation we see the importance of trees and why they are there. In a lot of the countries, vegetation, wildlife, and birds are affected by a lack of trees. As urban centres become more intensified, the challenges facing the Government are greater.

We have spent a lot of time in this Chamber over the last few months debating the Auckland super-city, and an enormous effort is going into creating governance structures for Auckland. But what do we find? Before the ink is even dry on the second super-city bill, this Government—this nanny State Government—is already intervening in a heavy-handed way to take away the powers that local government uses to govern its own communities. I think it was the Prime Minister who said that local decisions should be made locally. The Associate Minister of Local Government will be able to confirm that comment, because I have heard him repeating the same idea over and over. But what is happening? The Government is coming over the top with its big boots on, and overriding the powers of local government.

I quote Mr Chris Dempsey, who is one of several hundred Aucklanders who has emailed me in the last few days. He says: “Firstly, if the National Party would really like to place such a prohibition on enacting policies within district plans, then I invite the National Party to write the district plans for every TLA. As I pointed out in my submission to the select committee, for central government to interfere, nanny-like, with how TLAs reach decisions and make policies about things that are important to them, then the obligation is on the Government to do the work for the TLAs. The National Party cannot pick and choose. Either the party abides by its beliefs that the local communities know what is best for them, or it doesn’t.” I think Mr Dempsey makes a very good point.

It is worth asking why six out of seven Auckland councils use the general tree protection rules. Why do they? I have some answers. It is because those rules protect trees, and because the alternative—listing and scheduling those trees—is impractical and expensive. It is also because democratically elected councillors going about their work, and implementing district plans after considerable public input, find that those rules are actually the most effective tool open to them for protecting trees. Does that mean anything to National? No, it does not. There has been a lot of debate this afternoon about whether this is a strange Auckland phenomenon. Why should Auckland rely on these rules when the rest of the country does not?

I invite members opposite, and the Minister, to reflect a moment on why it is the case that six out of seven Auckland councils use these rules. Could it be anything to do with the population density in Auckland, where 1.4 million people are crammed into a little isthmus? Could it be anything to do with property prices? Could it be anything to do with the intense development pressures experienced in our country’s biggest city? I invite the Minister to take a drive along the motorway from Fanshawe Street towards the Harbour Bridge, and to look up at the cliffs of St Marys Bay. And members should not worry because the Minister is not driving; he is sitting in the back of his limousine. He will see there that rogue developers in the past have taken a chainsaw and cleared the cliff-tops in order to be able to provide a clear view for their clients. That is the kind of development pressure we face in Auckland; Aucklanders know that.

The existing general tree protection rules have not prevented every mishap of that kind, but they have prevented many of them. Nikki Kaye, the member for Auckland Central, will have to explain to the good people of Herne Bay, Freemans Bay, and St Marys Bay why the cliff-tops will lose their pōhutukawas after the bill is passed. I have news for the Minister. Once the clause is passed there is no safety net. It will all be over; there will be nothing left to protect the trees of Auckland. Councils have made it very clear that they will not be individually listing trees in anything like the volume that is needed and in a way that currently protects those trees. It is a crazy, expensive, impractical, and bureaucratic approach to solving the problem.

When the Minister spoke early in the day he was completely disingenuous in claiming that 5,000 resource consents every year were needed to deal with the trimming of trees. This debate is not about the trimming of trees, but that is what the Minister said. Already in the select committee Labour members and Green members have made it very clear that they are not opposed to lifting some of the restrictions around these provisions, but the Minister has rejected a compromise proposal that would have made tree trimming a non-consented activity.

I want to challenge a number of the quite ridiculous notions that have been put forward again about the issue of tree trimming. Let me just flick through a few of them. Essentially, Labour is arguing that unless councils love trees we will not have trees. It is a bit like arguing that people would not paint their houses unless there was a council law that required them to paint their houses. Actually, people do paint their houses. They paint their houses to look very nice. It makes the community look good. But does that mean that our Parliament and our councils have to have a whole lot of rules, regulations, and Acts of Parliament to ensure that people paint their houses? No, it does not.

💬 Hon David Cunliffe: You’re the one with the mandate override.

I say exactly the same to the member who is continuously interjecting. Labour members essentially do not, at heart, trust New Zealanders. That is the heart of the issue. They say to them that we need a nanny State Government and nanny State councils to introduce blanket rules, because nobody is capable of making decisions about their trees unless there is some bureaucrat who is able to give them consent or not.

Then another extraordinary argument was put forward, which was that on 1 October we will see a massacre of trees. I say to any member of the Labour Party that I will bet them the best bottle of Nelson wine that their tree massacre comments are utter rubbish. Will the member Phil Twyford take me on? He is silent. He is absolutely silent. He knows that his claims are ridiculous. Then the member said that this debate is not about having to get—

💬 Hon David Cunliffe: I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. The member knows that the implementation date of the bill is 2012. Would it be possible to re-offer the bet—

The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): That is not a point of order. The member knows that it is not a point of order. The member has been here a while. The member is on the front bench. The member has raised a debating point as a point of order in order to interrupt someone’s speech. It is a free-flowing debate. I like it for that reason. People are having a robust debate. Let us continue, please. That is a message to all members.

The members opposite say that it is nothing to do with tree trimming. It has everything to do with tree trimming, because for the 9 years that Mr Cunliffe was in the Cabinet room 5,000 New Zealanders each year had to get a resource consent to trim their trees.

💬 Phil Twyford: We support tree trimming.

Well, the question I ask members on that side of the Committee is what they did about it. What did they do about the frustrations of the New Zealanders who, for 9 long years during the course of a Labour Government, had to get a resource consent to trim their trees?

The answer is that the nanny State Labour Government ignored the concerns of those New Zealanders and required that they get a resource consent for the purpose of being able to trim their tree.

The other extraordinary point is that those members claim we are overriding the wishes of councils. The Auckland City Council, which is the largest council to be affected by these provisions, has made a submission to the Local Government and Environment Committee and stated that the rules do not work and that it supports the bill and the changes. I ask how it is possible for Labour members to argue that we are overriding councils, when the largest council to be affected by the changes supports the changes.

Another point I would make is to do with the quite pathetic point put forward by Labour that this Parliament has no right to consider what powers councils should or should not have. That is nonsense. It goes to the core of the responsibilities of this Parliament to define which things it is proper for councils to be able to do, and which things it is proper for councils not to be able to do. Government members say that if citizens want to trim their trees, then they should not have to get resource consent, and councils should not be able to require them to. We say further that if the Government wants to limit the powers of councils to be able to put rules in place without consulting with landowners, then it can. I know that land ownership is not a concept that weighs heavily on members of the Labour Party. All we are saying is that if a council wants to protect a tree or a group of trees, there is a very simple provision in this law. It simply says that if councils want to protect a tree or group of trees, then they should talk with the landowner. Is that such a novel, unusual concept? If councils want to pass a rule that directly impacts on a person’s property, then they should talk to that person. They should consult people.

💬 Phil Twyford: The member knows it won’t happen.

The member opposite says that cannot occur. Well, I ask Mr Twyford how it is possible that every single council supports this, including Christchurch. Let me go through the list: Palmerston North, Napier, New Plymouth—

💬 Phil Twyford: Christchurch hasn’t added one tree in 10 years.

Let us take up that point. The member makes the claim that the Christchurch City Council has not protected a single tree in 10 years.

💬 Phil Twyford: Not one extra; not one extra in 10 years.

Oh, well let me tell the member what happens. The Christchurch City Council—and I had lunch today with Mayor Bob Parker—points out that—

💬 Hon Darren Hughes: Who paid?

Is that not typical of the senior Labour whip? All he is concerned about is that pathetic point. Here we have Parliament debating an issue that is costing millions of dollars, and the great intellectual contribution from Darren Hughes is to ask who paid for the lunch. Well, if that is as good as Labour members’ debate gets on this bill, then I can be assured that people will not be voting for a change of Government for a very long time.

I want to deal with the issue of the trees in Christchurch, because the truth is this.

💬 Phil Twyford: There are fewer of them.

No, hundreds of trees have been protected in Christchurch, and I will tell members how. Again, this is an area where Labour members are ignorant of the law. Every time a resource consent is applied for, as a condition of that resource consent, many councils properly require the protection of trees. That is—

💬 Hon David Cunliffe: Why is this member the only one talking from the National side?

Are the members of the Labour Party not truly pathetic? When I do not take calls they complain, when I do take calls they complain, and they try to interject to the point that I cannot answer the questions from the member. I will come back to the issue. The Christchurch City Council has protected hundreds of trees in the last 10 years. The member is incorrect.

💬 Hon David Cunliffe: He hasn’t scheduled a single one.

Well, Mr Cunliffe asks whether the council has put them on the schedule. I am not sure that the public actually cares whether they are protected as a consequence of a condition of a resource consent or whether they are scheduled. From the public’s point of view, their concern is whether the tree has been protected.

The last point I would make is that Labour members have claimed—and we have just heard this from one of them—that a neighbour would not be consulted about the removal of a tree. Well, I will give those members some news: under the current provisions the neighbour is not consulted either. In all those 5,000 resource consents per year in Auckland to either trim or remove a tree there is not a single case where the neighbour is required to be consulted. What is more, in 97.6 percent of the cases the consent is granted.

The Minister in the chair, the Hon Dr Nick Smith, is clearly not listening to what this argument is all about. This clause is being held up by the Government as some sort of trophy for cutting red tape and bureaucracy, and also as a promotion of individual and property rights. I see the Minister is looking attentive. I ask whether he can explain to the Committee how the requirement of councils to identify trees in groups or individually throughout the whole of the Greater Auckland region is not bureaucracy. The task would be hugely time-consuming, expensive, and complex, and it would be impossible to carry out effectively and efficiently.

Now the Minister is saying that he wants a progress report from councils every 6 months. Under the new one city, we will have Len Brown as the mayor, and after a few months he will ask what is going on, as his budget will have been absolutely blown-out on identifying and protecting trees. The hard-working council workers—those who have kept their jobs—will say that they are going out to meet all the property owners and have a nice cup of tea with them and a jolly good chat, but that there are thousands and thousands of them. The council workers will say that they have not got through them all or identified all the trees, but that they are talking to them. That is where the expense is. When the Minister next takes a call, I would like him to explain that point very clearly, because I think that he talked about having a cup of tea with property owners—

💬 Hon Dr Nick Smith: I’ve never said that in my life.

—or having a good chat with them.

💬 Hon Dr Nick Smith: I never said it.

If the Minister goes to Waitakere, I am sure that the property owners there will ask him whether he would like a cup of tea, and they will ask the council workers that. But the reality is that the process will take huge, huge amounts of time.

So many Aucklanders from right across the region, from every city in the Auckland region, have sent piles and piles of emails. They have held meetings, they have written to MPs, and they have telephoned MPs. I am proud of my west Auckland colleagues and my Greater Auckland colleagues who have listened to the people and are running the argument here. I have to say that not one National MP from Waitakere has answered those people’s calls or listened to them. My colleagues are the people who are there to represent westies. The people who have contacted me and my colleagues have not just been critical. They have offered sensible solutions and proposals, such as expanding the exemption list to include exotic trees, increasing the list of notable trees, and removing tree protection from areas that are low in character. All of those suggestions fell on absolutely deaf ears and were completely disregarded by this Government, which is a Government that talks about central government not being nanny State. Yeah, right!

The irony of it is that the councils and community groups throughout Waitakere are working really hard at the moment and are putting considerable resources into identifying the cause of the disease that is killing many, many kauri in the ranges. Why bother? I ask why they are bothering to go to all that trouble when any individual under his or her individual property rights can cut down the tree anyway. Why are they putting in that time and resources? When the Waitakere Ranges Heritage Area Bill was in its early stages, and it was supported by the vast majority of westies, Nick Smith rode into town, and did he ever whip up a storm! “Confiscation by stealth” is what he said. The minority of people who believed him were so inspired that they got signs made that said “confiscation by stealth”. Just like his leader—

💬 Hon Dr Nick Smith: Stop making it up.

The Minister says that he did not say it. Is the Minister saying that he never said that?

💬 Hon Dr Nick Smith: That’s correct, I’m saying you should stop making it up.

The Minister said he never said it.

💬 Hon Dr Nick Smith: You should stop making it up.

OK—just as his leader said “socialism by stealth”. Did anyone in Waitakere have their land confiscated by the enactment of the Waitakere Ranges Heritage Area Act? Absolutely not.

I hope that my amendment will not be necessary, because of the Green Party’s amendment and the amendments of my colleagues—my very good colleagues, who have put great amendments on the table. I hope the Government will support those amendments. In the event of that not happening, my amendment—and this amendment was requested by the Waitakere City Council—seeks to enable councils to identify trees in a more achievable, less bureaucratic, and less red-tape sort of way. If that can happen by way of a map, then it will not be easy, but it will certainly make the provisions in section 52 more achievable. I hope that my amendment is not necessary, because I hope the amendments that give more protection to trees will be carried through the Committee.

It is ludicrous to hear not only the Minister but many MPs compare Timaru with the pressures of Auckland development. I have been to Timaru; it is a fabulous place, but we can in no way compare the development and the population pressures in the Auckland region with that of Timaru. A third of the country’s population is in Auckland. The pressures of development are astronomical. One of this Government’s many slogans has been about allowing local people to make local decisions.

💬 Hon Tau Henare: That’s right, we’re going to make a local decision.

That is right!

💬 Hon Tau Henare: If I want to chop my tree down, I’ll chop my tree down.

I say to that member to speak out again. Yet central Government is taking that right away from—

💬 Hon Tau Henare: If I want to prune my trees, I’ll prune my trees.

I say to that member, Tau Henare, to speak out again. Central Government is taking that right away from locally elected councils and citizens who want to ensure that trees and our environment are protected. We all know that trees reduce urban pollution, stabilise soil, give shade and privacy, and are integral to the well-being of our communities. The reintroduction of many species of native birds, and the well-being of tūī and wood pigeons, happens because we protect trees in our environment. In Waitakere the trees on private land are vital—

💬 Hon Tau Henare: What wood pigeons? You killed them all 100 years ago!

They may not have them in Te Atatū. The trees are on private land and they are vital to ensure a buffer between an urban area and the regional park. Any schoolkid in New Zealand can tell this Government why tree protection is so important in urban areas. Those same students had got their heads around climate change, and were doing meaningful projects and tackling climate change when this Government was still a climate-change denier. My property in Titirangi—[Interruption] It is the weaving of the tree roots that stabilises the soil on the bank that it stands on. If the council did not have the time and resources to get around to my place and put it on the list—because thousands of properties, as we all know, need to be done—and if I had decided that it was my individual right to cut those trees down, what would be at risk? At risk would be beautiful trees that are hundreds of years old, and the erosion of not only my property but also my neighbour’s property. There would be very serious problems, including landslides and potential flooding, to say nothing about the risk to birds or the ghastly blot on the landscape.

Before the Waitakere Ranges Heritage Area Act, the Waitakere Ranges were being really cut away at. The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment referred to the axing of those trees as “death by a thousand cuts”. The implications of clause 52 being enacted would lead to just that, but it would be across the whole Auckland region—“death by a thousand cuts”. I urge the Government and the Minister to take heed of the speeches, and to support the amendments that are before the Committee.

That was such an extraordinary contribution from Lynne Pillay that I just have to respond. First up, she claimed that kauri in the Waitakere Ranges are at risk. What total garbage! Not one tree in the public areas of the Waitakere Ranges is affected one iota by the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill, which is before the Committee.

The second point I make to the member is to ask why, if Labour is so opposed to clause 52, every Labour member of the Local Government and Environment Committee voted for it. If the bill will bring about the end of the world as we know it—

💬 Hon Member: Death by a thousand cuts.

—and “death by a thousand cuts”, as Lynne Pillay has said, why did every member of the Labour team on the select committee vote for it?

Thirdly, Lynne Pillay wants me to respond quite specifically to her amendment. It is truly “Einsteinian” and truly intellectual. It will really stretch the limits. She wants to change the wording in the bill so that councils can schedule or provide for trees in plans and can use maps. That is a good one! I have to advise the member that I am legally advised that her amendment will have absolutely zip effect, and that it is perfectly possible within district plans—

💬 Lynne Pillay: Then pass it—support it.

The member says we should pass her amendment. She says we should pass an amendment that will do absolutely nothing. I do not know whether she has noticed, but if we look at any one of our district plans what do we see?

💬 Hon Members: Maps.

Maps. So I am not sure whether the Government will be choosing to include an amendment that provides for maps, although I reassure the member that councils will continue to be allowed to have maps in their district plans.

A further point I will make, which is about something that seems to have focused the mind of the member, is about how councils will be able to make provision for the protection of trees in the process that is used by 90 percent of councils. Let me make it very plain for her. With great relief, on 1 October Aucklanders will no longer have to apply for resource consents to trim their trees. As a consequence, I am advised that the work of about a dozen staff and about $2 million of resource will no longer need to be applied to that meaningless function. The staff will no longer have to do that work. I think everybody—homeowners and others—will be relieved about that change.

I simply ask that rather than those council staff members doing that meaningless task they do a worthwhile job—that is, get round their suburbs, their beautiful areas of Auckland, and whip around with a very simple device, a locator, and find out from the council plans where those significant trees are that we really should be protecting. I have confidence that they will get on and do that.

The last point I will make is that Lynne Pillay and others have quoted a number of arborist businesses that are desperately opposed to this provision. Well, of course they are. When people are required to get an arborist’s report to be able to trim or remove a tree, the average cost for them is over $1,000. I am advised that those businesses at the moment are earning over $5 million a year from the current requirement of the law. Are we as a Parliament surprised that those businesses would like the law to remain the same? I am not. Of course they want that to be the case, but the decision for this Parliament is not about the interests of those arborist businesses. They are not of concern to me; what concerns me is—

💬 Phil Twyford: What about all the citizens?

—exactly—the ordinary citizens we are empowering through this provision. But where I think Mr Twyford and I differ is that he says that citizens will protect their trees only if there is a busybody bureaucrat from a local council telling them that they have to look after their trees; members on this side of the Chamber say that the vast bulk of Aucklanders value and want to protect their trees and do not need a nanny State Labour Party or a busybody bureaucrat telling them to do so.

This is the first time that I have intervened in this debate. I will address some general issues in the first instance pertaining to environmental protection and sustainable management as they are involved with the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill. I may address some specific issues later pertaining to ministerial powers of coastal protection.

The stated purpose of this amendment bill is to simplify and streamline. “Simplify” means to make something less complicated and easier to understand, reflecting a characteristic belief on the part of this Government that New Zealanders are inherently unable to comprehend anything that may approach a complicated level. “Streamline” means to shape something so that it can move as effectively as possible through liquid or gas. The purpose did not say anything about red tape. The Minister for the Environment, in sponsoring the bill, noted in his first reading speech: “Over the nearly 18 years since the Resource Management Act became law, there has been growing criticism across all sectors about the slow and costly plan preparation and consenting processes.” He warned: “Decision-making processes … must become more efficient.” The bill, he exalted, would provide a timely support to measures to stimulate the economy. He concluded that “stronger tools for managing anti-competitive behaviours and new consent pathways,” were required.

My main contention is that the bill represents the Government’s rather distorted view of reality. The Government, since its election in November, has essentially conveyed two mantras into this House. One mantra is that we need to balance economic opportunity with environmental responsibility. The second mantra is that we have to remove the nanny State. Those two mantras inform this Government’s approach to pretty much everything. It brings the mantras with the claim that it has an electoral mandate to articulate them. It sees the Resource Management Act as a central strut of this Government’s implementation of that philosophical orientation.

That approach suffers from several mistakes, both of logic and of political judgment. The logical mistake is the following: the economy and the environment are not separate and discrete entities that can be balanced. There is only one thing; there is only the environment. That is the reality. The economy is simply human activity within the environment. If humans display such hubris that they can pretend to live and grow outside the environment, they will perish. If humans display even a lesser amount of hubris, and think that they can engage in economic activity and then tend to the environment separately and subsequently, they will suffer. To use the jargon that even the erstwhile Association of Consumers and Taxpayers can understand, the economy is a subset—that is to say, it is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment.

The second mistake is a political mistake: the belief that the nanny State is the central threat to the New Zealand people. What arrant nonsense! It is true that Labour developed a reputation for being a nanny State, and I think it indeed befitted the assertive leadership of 9 years of the previous Government. It got a belly laugh in the course of 2008, and a negative vote in the November election. What about the rest of us? How are we best described using similar imagery? The erstwhile Association of Consumers and Taxpayers is best described as the robber baron State: those who wish for unbridled freedom to make excessive personal wealth. National is best described as the cowboy State: those who wish for freedom to desecrate, then modestly pretend to clean up the environment afterwards.

I stand to speak to Supplementary Order Paper 47 in the name of my colleague Te Ururoa Flavell, which inserts new clauses 5A and 5B into the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill. These amendments are critical to strengthening requirements for all persons to uphold the Treaty of Waitangi in the implementation and administration of the Resource Management Act. We will be putting forward these Supplementary Order Papers; I will speak to them now.

The House will no doubt recall the advice of Sir Robin Cooke in 1990 on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. He said of the Treaty: “no matter precisely how it should be categorised in law, it has taken on in fact a vitality and a potency of its own … it has become part of the essence of national life … it is a foundation document. It is simply the most important document in New Zealand’s history.” The amendments we hope the Committee will support today are in essence the commitment to uphold the Treaty as simply the most important document in the land. The amendments address the concerns of whānau, hapū, and iwi that resource management appropriately reflects obligations under the Treaty of Waitangi.

Currently, section 8 of the Resource Management Act 1991 requires that the exercise of functions and powers under the Act take into account the Treaty principles. These three words—“take into account”—are part of a suite of concepts and phrases that constitute the menu of Treaty clauses in legislation. Other legislation includes phrases such as “to give effect to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi”, as in section 4 of the Conservation Act 1987; “to give particular recognition to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi”, as in section 10(o) of the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind Act 2002; “have regard to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi”, as in section 4 of the Crown Minerals Act 1991; and “Ensure … full and balanced account is taken of—(iii) The principles of the Treaty of Waitangi;” as in the preamble to the Environment Act 1986.

The Government has a responsibility to uphold the Treaty relationship and tangata whenua rights. Throughout the select committee process there was a very strong theme in the submissions from Māori that the Crown guaranteed to protect the special relationship between tangata whenua and their landscapes and natural environments through te Tiriti. The Government has agreed that the Treaty of Waitangi is the basis of resource management law and practice. The Māori Party was extremely pleased to be able to safeguard the Treaty provisions earlier on in the process of the bill.

We propose these changes now in light of feedback from the select committee stage, in order to strengthen the provisions. We propose a new clause 5A to the effect that this Act now binds the Crown in respect of “The Treaty of Waitangi relationship between hapū and iwi Māori, and the Crown.” We also propose to add new clause 5B, which repeals section 8 and substitutes the following: “In achieving the purpose of this Act, all persons exercising functions and powers under it, in relation to managing the use, development, and protection of natural and physical resources, shall give effect to the Treaty of Waitangi (Te Tiriti o Waitangi).” We look forward to the debate as we introduce these provisions to strengthen and uphold the Treaty of Waitangi.

I rise to support my colleagues in calling for the removal of clauses 52 and 151 of the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill. Labour has always opposed those clauses. It did not vote on the clauses; it voted on the bill as it went through, part by part. I also rise in support of the hundreds, if not thousands, of people who have written in and have been in contact with us to oppose clauses 52 and 151. I spoke at a meeting last week in Grey Lynn, in the heart of the Auckland Central electorate, and my colleagues David Cunliffe, Russel Norman, and Phil Twyford were also present. People were opposed to, angry at, and very saddened by the fact that many of the trees in their area were going to be removed.

💬 Phil Twyford: Were there any National MPs there?

My colleague asks, interestingly, whether any National MPs were there, and the answer is no, there were none, unfortunately. People were disappointed that National MPs were not there, because they wanted to tell them what they felt about clauses 52 and 151—that they did not want them. Essentially, those clauses remove the council’s right to put on a blanket ban to protect trees.

The question, and it is a fundamental one, is why central government is telling councils what they should and should not do. What is wrong with councils being able to respond to their own communities and put in tree protection legislation that fits their local communities? Six out of seven Auckland councils currently have blanket tree protection. Rodney District Council removed it in 2000, but put it back in 2007. Why? Because popular opinion said that it was the best way to protect trees. Now, either the councils are stupid, or they do not understand good tree protection—or are they doing what works best for them? We have to ask ourselves that question.

Auckland is different from much of the rest of the country, and my colleague Phil Twyford mentioned some of those differences. Auckland contains one-third of New Zealand’s population. It is a high-density population, and the demand for development is more acute than in any other place in the country. There are development pressures. The extra value placed on a property that has a view after the removal of trees is way above what we would find in any other place in the country. Auckland has a high rainfall and young soils. It is hilly, and those hills are very susceptible to erosion. That is why its councils prefer to have blanket protection for trees. Trees protect the environment that is so precious to Auckland.

💬 Hon Dr Nick Smith: Why does Auckland City Council oppose it?

Auckland City Council could change it, if it wanted to. Manukau City Council is for it, North Shore City Council is for it, and in 2007 Rodney District Council voted it back in. Why is this Government talking about removing it? I do not understand it.

💬 Phil Twyford: Nanny State.

It is not a nanny State; it is a “ninny State”. It does not make any sense. The alternative is to schedule individual trees. Members should think about the bureaucracy that is involved with individual trees, or even groups of trees, as suggested. Members should think of the bureaucracy it will take in order to be able to do that for each of those trees, or groups of trees. It is time consuming, it is bureaucratic, and it is costly. Members should think of the litigation that will be involved when somebody arrives at somebody’s property and demands that their tree be scheduled. What will their reaction be? They may not want it to be scheduled; they will appeal it. There will be an enormous amount of litigation, which councils will have to fund. As my colleagues have said, it is a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

I am not going to talk about trees, although, as members of this Committee know, I am a passionate believer in trees—particularly endemic species of trees—being saved.

I want to talk about the very serious matter of the removal of the Minister of Conservation’s decision-making powers in respect of coastal consents for restricted coastal activities. I stand in support of the two Supplementary Order Papers that have been put up by my colleague David Parker and Rahui Katene from the Māori Party. They have both said, and rightly so, that it is very important that the Minister of Conservation, in representing the public interest—the Crown ownership of our coastal space—has the ability to exercise that judgment on behalf of the people of New Zealand.

I feel well qualified to speak on this matter. For 3 years, from 2002 to 2005, I was privileged to be Minister of Local Government. Indeed, the current Local Government Act stands in my name. I was also Minister of Conservation between 2002 and 2007. During that time, as Minister of Conservation, I signed off many significant coastal activities. Some of them I declined—for example, at Whangamata. It is very important. I know that the Minister in the chair, the Hon Nick Smith, who is responsible for this legislation, has also served as Minister of Conservation and will have exercised the responsibility of judging what impact a significant coastal development would have on the unique landscapes, the biodiversity, and the coastline itself.

One of the things that defines us as New Zealanders is the coast. Ask any Kiwis what they love about our country and they will inevitably mention the landscape, and almost always the seascapes. No part of our country is more than 90 kilometres from the ocean, so the beach and the coastline are very important to New Zealanders. The coastline, as many members know, is under increasing developmental pressures. It is under pressure from residential and commercial development, aquaculture, and intensification of population. All of those are impacting on the decision making of local government. I think that retaining the ability of the Minister of Conservation to give guidance to local government in the consent process is absolutely critical.

The New Zealand Coastal Policy Statement is the only planning document local government has to guide it in its decision-making process. When I became Minister I asked for that policy to be updated. We have gone through a long process. Dr Jo Rosier, a planning lecturer at Massey University, updated the Coastal Policy Statement. We then set up a team of four experts to look at her recommendations. Interestingly enough, the current Minister of Conservation has postponed the report of that committee. The report of that group of experts guides the Minister of Conservation in giving guidance to local government. It is about protecting our unique coastline. It is about giving guidance to local authorities. That has all gone in this change in the legislation before us.

I think it is amazing that Nick Smith is the Minister responsible for this legislation. He has spoken to me personally about his pride during the time he was Minister of Conservation and his love of the environment. He is weakening the protection of our coastal areas. For the New Zealanders of the future, that could be an enormous liability. One of the things I regarded with great pride about being Minister of Conservation was the legacy that we leave for future generations, whether it is in biodiversity protection; whether, in my case, it is the 360,000 hectares we added to the conservation estate; or whether it is the 17 marine reserves I created as Minister with the support of my colleagues. That sort of stuff lives on for future generations. Protecting our seascapes from inappropriate development is an absolutely critical thing to do in Government. It is a responsibility for future generations. Nick Smith is weakening that ability by removing from the legislation—

💬 Dr Russel Norman: Mining! Don’t forget the mining.

The Green Party co-leader brings up mining.

I am truly gobsmacked that Labour would put Chris Carter on his feet to defend the ministerial veto on coastal consents after the way in which he abused his powers in the previous Parliament as Minister of Conservation. In one foul act he destroyed confidence in the law and actually created the constituency in which this bill occurred.

Let us just go through the history of what occurred with Whangamata. Environment Waikato dealt with the resource consent on that marina. It received hundreds of submissions, and it heard submissions. The decision was appealed to the Environment Court, the Environment Court heard evidence for 6 weeks, and then the Environment Court judges made their decision. Then what happened was that a few of Chris Carter’s Labour mates, particularly Bob Harvey—

💬 Hon David Cunliffe: Why is this relevant?

I will tell him why this is relevant. It is because we are removing the ministerial veto on coastal consents over decisions of the Environment Court because of the way that Chris Carter abused the law. Is that what I said? No, it was what the High Court of New Zealand said in overturning his abuse of the law. You see, the High Court found out that a few of Bob Harvey’s mates went around the back door and sent him some quite appalling emails. They were people who had not bothered to submit before the council committee. They were people who could not be bothered with going to the Environment Court but thought they could get around it and with subterfuge affect the process by being able to overturn the decision.

What was even more interesting was that the Environment Court considered the matter for 6 weeks. How long did Mr Carter take to overrule the decision of 6 weeks of consideration in the court? It took less than a few hours. I simply ask Mr Carter and other Labour members why they do not trust the Environment Court. Why does Mr Carter not trust the Environment Court? You see, what members on my side of the Chamber are saying is that we have faith in the Environment Court, and we do not think we should retain the power to overturn decisions of that court. Effectively, Labour members are arguing that they do not trust the Environment Court and that they want politicians to be able to veto those decisions. I think that is appalling. I make a simple point to Mr Carter. I wonder what the attitude of Labour members would be if a coastal consent, an application for a marina, a marine farm, or a big port, went all the way through a resource consent hearing, and went to an Environment Court hearing, and a National Minister said that even though the Environment Court said no to the consent, National says yes. I will tell members what would happen. Labour members would be crying foul from the rooftops. I bet every member of the House—and, frankly, every member of the House knows it in his or her heart—that that is exactly what would occur.

That is why we ask, from quite a principled point of view, why Ministers should overturn decisions of the Environment Court. We say they should not. We say that when Chris Carter vetoed the decisions of the Environment Court he actually brought both politicians and the judicial process into disrepute. That is why that provision should come out of the law.

I will respond to the point the Hon Nick Smith made. We are not saying that Ministers should reverse the decision of the Environment Court—

💬 Hon Tau Henare: Yes, you are.

No, we are not. The Minister’s decision to veto is a different decision. It is not the same decision as the Environment Court’s; it is a different decision. The Environment Court’s decision, as the Minister in the chair, the Hon Nick Smith, has already acknowledged, is severely constrained as to its breadth. The Minister’s decision is not the same decision as the decision of the Environment Court. But there are some situations in which the Crown, through the relevant Minister, in this case the Minister of Conservation, should have the right to veto developments in coastal space.

💬 Hon Dr Nick Smith: Veto the court?

No, not veto the court; veto the right to develop coastal space. It is a different thing. Lots of things are permissible on my land under the Resource Management Act that I, as an owner, none the less say I do not want and will veto. That is the same position the Minister of Conservation is in, within a limited jurisdiction—

💬 Hon Dr Nick Smith: That is not correct.

It is. It is a limited but real power of the Minister of Conservation to sometimes say “No, I don’t think this is in the public interest.” That is the responsibility of Government, but this Government is saying “No, that’s all too hard. We never wanted to be involved in those decisions. We don’t think there is ever a case for the Crown, as the guardian of these areas, to say no.” The Government is going to devolve that decision to someone else and not have to take responsibility for it. That is what the Minister is doing; he is abrogating his responsibilities.

I will turn to another issue. We have a 45-page Supplementary Order Paper here for the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill, and we are not really sure what some of it means. A 45-page Supplementary Order Paper was dumped on us, with no tracked version to show the effect of it on either the Act or the bill. We have had substantial criticisms about the legislation—not from people whom the Minister might like to criticise as being lightweight but people like former judge Peter Skelton. I did a lot of work in the environmental field in the 1980s. I can say that Judge Skelton, who is now retired, was the best judge I ever appeared before. He is widely respected. He is now—or was until recently—an adjunct professor of planning law, so he went on to a distinguished academic career.

Peter Skelton turned up to the Local Government and Environment Committee and said that the bill was poorly drafted. I do not totally blame the Minister for its poor drafting because I think there are some institutional problems that lie behind it, which also vexed the previous Government and are yet to be sorted. Peter Skelton criticised the drafting of the bill and said that it did not achieve its policy purpose because it was so complex, so otiose, and so poorly drafted that even things that it was supposed to achieve are sometimes not being achieved.

He was not alone in that view; a few other people were of that view too. Through the intervention that was led, in part, by Shane Jones, one of my colleagues, the select committee, with the approval of the Government—and I thank Government members for that—agreed that it should harness the efforts of a group of experts, including retired judge Peter Skelton, to try to sort out some of those problems. They did sort out some of those problems, but they have not had a chance, any more than we have, to have a look at these 45 pages of new drafting. So how can we have any confidence, as we deal with the bill under urgency, that we are not actually making things more complex and creating more problems rather than fewer?

I will give one particular example. We have had the very important change of wording in the notification provisions brought to the Chamber just today in a Supplementary Order Paper. There is a fundamental change of onus from consent authorities stating that there may be environmental effects as a result of an activity, to environmental effects having to be proven to exist or to be likely. The effects have to be probable rather than possible. That is a big change in the legal test. We have not had any advice from the group of experts as to whether the Supplementary Order Paper is properly drafted, even if that is the policy intent.

I will mention another thing. New section 95D, as inserted by clause 68 of the bill, states that when assessing whether the adverse effects are minor, one “must disregard any effects on persons who own or occupy the land in, on, or over which the activity will occur; or any land adjacent to that land;”. I spoke to my colleague Jeanette Fitzsimons, who is very learned in these matters—and I do not think I am a complete prat on these matters. I cannot find in the legislation the other provision that is meant to go with that one and that deals separately with the effects on the land itself and the adjacent land. I am told by Jeanette Fitzsimons that she thinks that somewhere there is an alternative provision that deals exactly with that point and that deals with the effects on the land on which the activity will occur or the adjacent land.

The difficulty we have in the Opposition is not just the difficulty of finding our way through this complex amendment bill; we now have 45 pages of amendments, including amendments to this particular clause, which is fundamental to notification and therefore fundamental to whether people learn through notification about an application that might affect them or the environment, and we do not know whether they have a right to participate in the process.

The test to be applied by the councils is being changed, and there is a lack of clarity as to what happens if one is an owner of land adjacent to where there is activity. If a person is an owner of more distant land, it is clear what the test is now. We might not agree with the test, and we might think it has been forced upon us late in the process through a Supplementary Order Paper under urgency, but in respect of adjacent land we are less clear. So I ask the Minister to clarify that situation. He may well be able to do so with advice from officials. The provision may be unaltered from the original Act. That may well be the answer, but it is very difficult for us to know, and I think it is unreasonable for us to have to deal with these matters on the floor of the Chamber when the 45-page list of amendments ought to be referred back to the select committee so that the select committee, including members of the Opposition, can get the benefit of hearing from advisory experts like retired judge Peter Skelton and so we can make sure we are getting the legislation right.

The Resource Management Act is the cornerstone of environmental legislation in New Zealand, and we ought not to be amending it on a wing and a prayer. We know from the Minister that he is driven by the promise he made to have this legislation in the House within 100 days and passed within 6 months. I say to the Minister that we will forgive his not meeting that deadline. It is more important to get the legislation right than it is to preserve the Minister’s dignity about the promise he made for it to be passed within 6 months.

I remind the Minister of the comments he made in respect of the emissions trading legislation. He put exactly the same accusations to the previous Labour Government—and we were not proceeding under urgency, the Supplementary Order Paper was smaller, and we had provided tracked changes to the bill in order to show the effects on it of the amendments. None of those protections is available to this Parliament today, and I think it is an abuse of our processes that the Minister is proceeding in this way.

During the Committee stage there is often a point where it is useful to start to gather together some of the rebuttal that comes across the Chamber. The Minister said earlier that he was gobsmacked. I might observe that if he were my child I would be tempted to change my vote in the referendum. He was using several porkies that, I think, he knows were never true. He has accused the Labour Opposition of opposing tree trimming. That is just ridiculous. Labour supported it in the select committee, and we support it now. We have said two things. We said, firstly, that it would be useful to have a definition of “trim” and a definition of “fell”, because I would not trust that Minister not to cut something from 50 metres to down to 2 metres and call it a trim. So some guidelines would be helpful. He said that the Labour Party supported clause 52 in the votes at the select committee, which was ridiculous, because it was a part by part vote. We were never given the opportunity to vote for or against the clause. What we did do in the select committee’s report was clearly reserve on the point and clearly show that we disagreed with that matter.

💬 Hon Dr Nick Smith: No.

That is absolutely true. But the Minister’s furphies go on and on. He has used the argument that very few tree consents are declined, and, therefore, substantial expense is incurred for little benefit. What he has failed to tell the Committee is that, as an overall percentage, a higher rate of general planning consents are passed than tree consents. So by the logic of his argument we would not have any planning processes at all because it is all a waste of time when most are granted. The second point is that the Minister has omitted to tell us that many of the ones that were passed were modified and passed in modified form, and that, therefore, the process is not only real but valuable. He said that no tree rules exist in 90 percent of councils, so there is no need to have them all. There are two problems with that.

💬 Hon Dr Nick Smith: No—no blanket rules.

Yes—no blanket rules. The first problem with it is that all areas are not the same. The reason the district councils surrounding Waitakere wanted Parliament to pass the Waitakere Ranges Heritage Area Bill was that the pressures of development on the boundary of the bush were uniquely strong and acute in that area, and that is why this House only last year, by majority, voted that bill into law. Having put that bill into a correct format with the Resource Management Act, it is an abomination that this House would now reverse its own decision of not even a year ago and gut the provisions that allow it to be implemented.

I remind the Minister that, in respect of the trees provisions, 81 percent of Aucklanders and 77 percent of Waitakere residents in an independent Colmar Brunton poll said they supported the Waitakere Ranges Heritage Area Act, and they wanted greater protection for the trees in them thar hills. That is exactly why I am putting forward an amendment that treats the Waitakere Ranges in the same way that the Minister is proposing to treat conservation management areas and reserves, which is simply to say that it is a special case, and the general prohibition on blanket tree provisions should not apply because it is impracticable to schedule every tree. I welcome the Minister to come up to Titirangi and go around and schedule every tree—we can barely see the ground for the canopy cover. The only clearances are where there are actual dwellings amongst the forest, and it is ridiculous to suggest that it is a streamlining measure to schedule all of the trees there. It may be physically possible in the extreme, but it will cost the Waitakere City Council an arm and a leg in time, money, and attention. It will cost the residents of my city a huge amount of bother at a time when Rodney Hide is running a minimalist agenda and saying that councils have no place in environmental protection at all.

Does the Government not talk to itself? How can it be that Rodney Hide says in his Cabinet paper that councils have no role in environmental protection, yet this Minister says councils have to schedule every individual tree?

💬 Hon Dr Nick Smith: No, I don’t.

Oh, well—or group of trees. But if he is going to use the group line, why will he not accept Lynne Pillay’s amendment, which removes the word “specific” and makes clear, for the avoidance of doubt, that groups of trees can be scheduled together? It does no more than that. The Minister tried to make a crude joke by saying “Ha, ha, ha! District plans already have maps in them, so there’s no need to have an amendment that allows them to schedule using a map.” Well, that is simply childish. Of course it is helpful to use a map. It is absolutely essential. If the Minister’s word is to be taken—and he is an honourable member—then it is essential to be able to use groups, and maps are part of that. I ask the Minister to confirm for the Committee whether he will consider this again.

The bottom line with this—and there are many, many hundreds of emails that I dare say we will want to table before this is over; many hundreds of emails make the point—is that this Minister has got it wrong and this Government has got it wrong, and they will pay the price. The last bastion of hope for Aucklanders is the fact that the felling provisions do not take effect until 2012, and there is a little event near the end of 2011, which will give Aucklanders the opportunity to make sure that clause 52 is never operative. When Labour wins the election in 2011, with our colleagues in the Green Party—and no doubt the Māori Party will change horses by then—we will suspend the implementation of that provision and have a new review so that Aucklanders can have a say in their own future. So I say to ladies and gentlemen out there in listener land that if they do not like clause 52, and if this jackbooted Minister tries to steamroll it through Parliament without further consultation, and refuses to put it in the second tranche, they have one chance to stop it in 2011.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. It is about the member’s language. He talks about jackbooting legislation. This legislation was introduced in February. Members opposite had an opportunity at the select committee—

I say to the member—

💬 Hon Dr Nick Smith: It’s a point of order.

The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): Well, I want to rule on it, and I have 15 seconds, so I will. There is quite a distinction between referring to legislation and referring to the Minister. In my interpretation of what the member did, he did cross the line. So I rule that comment out of order.

Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m.

I stand to speak to the Māori Party’s amendments to clauses 20, 83, 83A, and 133, which relate to the removal of security for costs and the reinstatement of ministerial veto for coastal permits. I will, firstly, talk to the detail around the removal of security for costs. This amendment reinstates the provisions of the principal Act whereby the Environment Court does not have the power to order a party to give security for costs. As a member of the Local Government and Environment Committee I recall that many submitters were opposed to the repeal of the provisions preventing security for costs. It was their view that the repeal of the provisions may limit public participation in resource management decision-making to those able to raise security.

The provisions in the current Act reinstated the powers for the court to require security for costs from appellants. The idea was that this move would limit the number of vexatious and frivolous objections to applications for development. What it means in practice is that before a group can take a case against a company, the group would need to put up whatever money the company determines the court proceedings will cost it in lost time, production, etc., as security for costs. Claimants then have to sign that they are able to put up the money, before the case can go to court.

I recall that for my auntie Eva Rickard, in the case she brought against Tainui in 1995, the security for costs that Tainui named was $1 million. That is a classic case of environmental injustice. We all know there are already significant costs for whānau, hapū, and communities in taking cases before the Environment Court. I recall a case brought against the Exide Technologies battery recycling factory in Pētone by the local community, which cost approximately $35,000 before it even got to court.

In many respects, security for costs is a way of restricting and preventing people’s right to challenge development. It is yet another way of shutting up the public and marginalising the poor. Corporations that fund developments have the financial means to fight through the Environment Court for years, whereas hapū and communities may not be able to afford even to get to court. The other key issue is that a judge can already throw out a case and order costs if the judge thinks the case is vexatious. So the Māori Party’s amendments will reinstate the provisions of the principal Act whereby the Environment Court will not have the power to order a party to give security for costs.

The second issue dealt with under these amendments relates to the decision-making powers of the Minister of Conservation in respect of coastal permits. The amendments reinstate the decision-making powers of the Minister of Conservation in relation to coastal permits for restricted coastal activities. The bill before the Committee amends the Resource Management Act 1991 in respect of restricted coastal activities by repealing the section that allows the Minister of Conservation to make the final decision on the issuing of coastal permits, after receiving a recommendation from the Environment Court.

Clause 83A substitutes a new section 119A, which stipulates that the court’s recommendation is the final decision and that the coastal permit commences on the date of the decision or on such later date as the court determines. Members will recall the fracas that erupted over this issue in respect of the Whangamata marina. Well, if the bill goes through unamended, it could all be on again. The amendment put forward in the bill will have a retrospective effect, which means that the court’s recommendation made on 26 October 2005, in respect of the Whangamata marina, operates as a legal coastal permit, regardless of the actions of the Minister of Conservation in declining to grant the coastal permit for it. It is important to remind ourselves that the Government has a responsibility to uphold the Treaty relationship and tangata whenua rights, which were upheld in respect of the Whangamata marina. As we know, Hauraki iwi were not listened to by the judicial process but were listened to by the Minister.

The Māori Party believes that it is not appropriate for the Environment Court to make final decisions on resource management. It has no responsibility to uphold or recognise a Treaty relationship and tangata whenua rights. Judges cannot be held accountable in the same way as a Minister. Again, as a member of the Local Government and Environment Committee I can say that many submitters, including Māori, were opposed to this amendment. It was their view, a view we share, that a ministerial power of veto remains important to properly protect the coastal environment. So our amendments to clauses 20, 83, and 83A reinstate the ministerial veto for coastal permits.

Before the dinner break I offered a broader, philosophical view of the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill, and I was disposed to describe the different philosophical orientations of our parties using the imagery offered to us by National over the last several years in criticising the Labour Government for developing the nanny State. I am wont to extend that imagery to characterise the rest of us, and I do so with a view to throw light on where we differ at a basic philosophical level and where, in practical terms, it comes to mean different decisions at the margin of political judgment. I recalled that the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers is best described as the robber baron State, while National, which makes up the Government, is best described as the cowboy State as it wishes to assert ultimate freedom to desecrate, if necessary, in the name of economic growth, with scarcely, at most, a modest concern to clean up the environment. I believe that mistake will be recognised within the first 3-year term of this Government. Cowboys riding high in the chaotic rodeo of New Zealand polls do get thrown, sooner or later—and I think sooner rather than later.

If we turn the same spotlight of imagery upon ourselves in the Green Party, how are we best described? I can think of no better description than that we embrace the concept of a holistic State; we wish for a holistic inclusion of all human activity in harmony with the environment. That is the philosophical difference that motivates us, as opposed to National, and it prompts us to oppose this amendment bill in its current form. To us the environment is paramount and it must be protected. This central assertion does not, in any way, preclude the development of a healthy and vigorous economy, a vigorous economy based on innovation, productivity, and, yes, efficiency. But it does preclude strip mining the proper protection of the environment, which we believe this bill runs the danger of doing.

All parties agree that there needs to be a Resource Management Act that reflects the recognition of the need to protect the environment. In practical politics we differ at the margin between economic growth and environmental protection. At the margin is where our fundamental differences in philosophy are displayed. If in doubt, National and ACT would engage in economic growth, even where the environment is in danger of damage. So, I believe, would Labour when tempted. If in doubt, the Greens would desist from a proposed economic project on the basis of the precautionary principle strictly applied. That is why the Greens oppose this bill. These differences strike at the overarching issue of our times—that of sustainability. We believe that our approach results in a sustainable planet and a sustainable nation. We believe that the National and Labour approach—the Nat-Lab—results in a planet that is sliding dangerously to irrevocable depletion, climate instability, and potential political strain.

I now ask where, in all of this, are the Bluegreens.

💬 Hon Clayton Cosgrove: Who?

That is a good question. Where are the Bluegreens? Let me offer a series of statements from National’s Bluegreens. The first statement states: “clean air, clean water … ought to be achievable in New Zealand within one generation.” Who got us into this mess? National prides itself on having had the reins of power for the majority of the last 50 years. Who got us into this mess in the first place? The second statement states that New Zealand “rivers, lakes and streams [should be] swimmable, fishable and in good ecological health … groundwaters [should be] drinkable.” I ask members who got us here. Who got us into this mess? The third statement states: “Attractive, liveable cities that are easy to get around are hugely important both for quality of life”—correct phraseology—“and [for] economic competitiveness.” Well, that must explain the extraordinary roading expenditure that we are now facing.

The Committee has probably gathered by now that Labour members are against clause 52 of the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill.

💬 Hon Member: But it is worth repeating.

It is worth repeating. So disgusted are we by this expedient, tatty clause that this evening I will propose an amendment by way of Supplementary Order Paper 40, which has been tabled. I shall mention briefly that there are two parts to the amendment. One is to omit clause 52, and the other is to omit clause 151. The effect of the amendment would be to delete the prohibition on the use of general tree protection rules. The intention is that this change would allow the Government time to meaningfully engage with Aucklanders and local communities on appropriate modification of the tree protection rules.

I want to comment on the many interventions that we have had from the Minister for the Environment this evening. I think disingenuous is probably the best description I can find for the comments of the Hon Dr Nick Smith. That is his name is it not, the Hon Dr Nick Smith? Is that the correctly pronounced name? [Interruption] Yeah. He repeatedly and insistently characterised Labour’s position on this provision as being against the trimming of trees. We have made it clear throughout the select committee process and during today’s debate that we are not against the trimming of trees. We have made it very clear that we support the expected Green Party amendment that would make the trimming or pruning of trees a consent-free zone, and that remains our position.

The Minister, in fact, rejected out of hand the Green Party’s compromise proposal, which would have seen trimming removed from the rules, and would have introduced a quicker, easier, and simpler procedure for homeowners who wanted to obtain consent for the removal of trees. The Minister rejected it, yet he came to the Chamber this afternoon, all puffed up, and repeatedly said that the intention of the Government, against our opposition, was to deal with tree trimming.

There are a couple of points that the Minister has returned to over and over again through the afternoon and evening. The first one is property rights. He clearly is of the view that this issue is about an assertion of the property rights of landowners. I will read an email from Sue Roff, who describes herself as a National Party supporter: “It has come to my attention that many believe in property rights. I know I do, and I agree with the right of a person to do what they want with their land, but large trees are a resource that affect everyone. Consider if I want to put in a septic tank. Why do I need a consent? Do I not have property rights then? Because the contents of the tank could leach into the groundwater, and this would affect everybody. Well, the value of large trees are the same. They affect everyone: our birdlife, groundwater, drainage, physical well-being—the list goes on. I have trusted the National Party all my life, and now trust they will do what is right.” Well, I say good luck, Sue.

Another email will be of particular interest to the member for North Shore. It comes from Roger Donnell, who is fearful that the Government will “throw the baby out with the bathwater.” He has an interest in this matter because he lives in Wilcox Bush on Beach Road. He tells the story about the intention of a developer to subdivide the next-door section. He writes: “We were originally approached for approval of the subdivision concept, but did not approve it because of the possibility of damage or destruction of the trees on the property, which include a 400-year-old puriri. Since then the Government has changed and all has gone quiet. We suspect it is simply to wait for this bill to be passed so that the bulldozers and chainsaws can move in and destroy the existing bush.” The member for North Shore might like to get back to Roger Donnell, because I think he deserves an explanation if clause 52 is passed this evening—and I suspect it will be, unfortunately.

That last letter conveys the accurate sense that if this ban on general tree protection rules is implemented, there is nothing standing between Aucklanders and the destruction of some of our most treasured trees around the city. If that happens, the National MPs on the other side of the Chamber will have to do some explaining. They will have nowhere to hide, including Ms Nikki Kaye.

I want to deal with the issue that has been raised by Mr Phil Twyford and with the misinformation he is spreading. He is spreading simple propaganda. I say that because he quoted an example—and I was listening carefully—of a 400-year-old puriri. The concern was that the tree would not be protected. Well, I suggest to Mr Twyford that he read the bill carefully and think of the obligations that rest upon the various councils up until next year and upon the Auckland Council thereafter.

It is inconceivable, I suggest, that a 400-year-old puriri would not be designated by a council, because that will effectively be the obligation of councils from hereafter. Certainly, there are blanket rules at the moment, but there will be new rules following the passage of the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill. We on this side of the Chamber have a reasonable expectation, and I know that the Minister of Conservation will be writing to councils and setting out the expectations of the Government in terms of the responsibilities of councils to designate, firstly, individual trees of special importance—and a 400-year-old puriri clearly fits into that category—and, secondly, groups of trees.

I will deal with the second issue as well, because I think it gets to the heart of the concerns of the people who have written to me and, indeed, of other members of the Committee. As I understand it, from both reading the report of the Local Government and Environment Committee and talking to the Minister, councils will have the power to designate discrete areas, particularly on the coastal fringes, which are common throughout much of Auckland, particularly around the North Shore, where there are pōhutukawa, puriri, karaka, and other native trees.

Without question, the coastal fringe is hugely valuable to our community, and much of it is in private hands. The groups of trees will be able to be designated by councils. That is actually what landowners in those areas will expect to be the case. They will, of course, also expect to be able to appropriately prune and trim those trees. So I suggest to the Opposition members that their scaremongering has been fundamentally misleading, because there are ample powers on the part of the seven councils currently, and the single council that will exist from September next year, to designate the important trees and, significantly, the groups of trees that represent ecosystems.

I have taken a particular interest in this issue because I am the member for North Shore and because I happen to live on the coastal fringe. I understand the significance of these issues, and I know the feelings of the communities. I suggest to members of the Committee, and, indeed, more broadly to the community, that there are ample powers in legislation for councils to act responsibly and to ensure the protection of unique heritage trees, which are usually native trees, and, more significantly, ecosystem areas that are covered by the concept of “groups of trees”.

It is also important to recollect that we are talking about privately owned land, so reserves, council-owned lands, and land owned by the Department of Conservation are all fully protected. That is not the issue in question, yet many people are of the contrary view. It is my view that councils, acting constructively, using the powers of this legislation, and with the encouragement of the Minister of Conservation, will, over the next 2 years before the provision comes fully into effect—because that is the final point—ensure that they take up the responsibility to protect the heritage that we in Auckland expect to be protected.

I rise as an Auckland MP to speak against clause 52 of the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill, and to speak in support of my colleague Phil Twyford’s Supplementary Order Paper 40 on this matter. I think it is really important for particularly the Auckland MPs across the Chamber to think very, very carefully about what they are doing here. An overwhelming number of the people in the city in which we live oppose clause 52, and they do so not because they are silly and are subject to scaremongering; they oppose it because they have very genuine concerns that the removal of the blanket protection will see the removal of large numbers of trees from Auckland.

In the area in which I live, if one climbs up Maungakiekie and looks out, one sees a large number of trees. It is a very green and beautiful part of Auckland. That has not always been the case. Recently I was in the Onehunga Community House, where there are some old photos of that suburb. There was a period of time in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and even the 1960s when it did not look like that. More recently, we have added trees back into our urban environments, and that makes a very real difference to all of us. It makes a difference in terms of what our environment looks like, and it makes a difference in terms of the quality of our standard of living. There are native birds back in our cities. That may sound corny, but I know that in the street I live in there are now many tūīs that were not there 15 years ago, or even 10 years ago.

Large numbers of trees could be removed. That is the risk the Government is taking. The Government is trying to assure us that it will not happen, but it is very interesting to note that the New Zealand Herald environment reporter yesterday talked about what might happen to protect trees. Her view is that Auckland City is clearly saying that it will not go through a complicated process of listing all of the large trees that are currently protected, and that it will be up to individual landowners. The property on which I live has many large trees, and, as it happens, I would want to protect them, but not everybody will have that attitude. It could be that we sold our property and that the next people who came there felt that they should cut those trees down. Are we prepared to take those risks? I think the Auckland members of Parliament opposite need to think about this very, very seriously, because if that is the result, they will be blamed.

As I said before, the people who are saying these things are not scaremongering. They are not fools. I will quote members another North Shore example. Adrienne Grace says that many trees will be cut down as soon as this bill becomes law. The reason she says that is she knows, as do many Aucklanders, that there is very real pressure from developers. Developers will be able to clear-fell a site and they will not have to replace any lost trees through replanting. If my own property were bought by developers, they would want to knock down the trees so that they could put more buildings on it. Adrienne Grace says that the development pressure is so great in the Auckland region that there will be increasing numbers of sites with little or no tree cover for shade, screening, or visual amenity. Any trees planted will be of a size that it will take decades for them to provide the functions provided by the trees we have now. As a result, New Zealand risks losing the international clean, green image it has worked so hard to promote, and tourism could be negatively affected.

As Adrienne Grace said, and as the New Zealand Herald environment reporter said yesterday, listing or scheduling trees in the district plan, which is the only permissible means of protecting trees, is costly, time consuming, very limited, and insufficient. Along with many Aucklanders, she is very apprehensive about this. What that says is that the Government is pushing this measure through without listening to the people of Auckland. The current provision has worked well. The fact is that six out of the seven local authorities are quite happy with it. It is clear that some things could be fixed. A very real compromise has been put on the table by Jeanette Fitzsimons. That is what we should be looking at, so that the people of Auckland have some assurance that we are not going to see the wholesale destruction of trees.

Tēnā koe, Mr Chairperson. Tēnā koutou. Much as I love urban trees, people seem to have got quite obsessed about that issue. I think there is a big picture here, which includes urban trees, that we need to reassess. It is about the actual future of the sustainability of the entire nation. In 1991 my colleagues and I came down to Wellington from Hauraki-Coromandel to participate in a round-table discussion on the resource management law reform process. We did our best at that time to fight for the protection of our natural resources and heritage. We were very worried that section 5 in Part 2 was too weak in its so-called balancing of the environment versus the economy, because the entire Western World—and more—was obsessed with protecting the economy from any real environmental accountability. So we lost the so-called balancing act on water, soil, and air, and these fundamental sources of life are so much more polluted now than they were in 1991.

The Resource Management Act, far from being a major brake on pollution, has been fairly weak and at times downright facilitative of inappropriate development, but it is way better than nothing the way it is and it does not need some of these changes, especially in terms of community participation and decision making around resources. This so-called streamlining of the Act has done nothing to rebalance the power inequities between paid lawyers and experts versus volunteers from hapū and community groups. As a former environmental mediator under the Resource Management Act, I have every sympathy for people struggling to get consent to build a garage, but that is not what this bill is about, or even what the problems are. If we want to improve the Resource Management Act then we should train the councils and the consenting authorities to work with alacrity and respect for communities. We should not pretend that a large, wordy, and unwieldy proposed reform of the Resource Management Act is fixing that issue. The Resource Management Act as it stands barely holds the line on natural resources, and I totally endorse the comments of Dr Russel Norman and Jeanette Fitzsimons that the degradation of the environment means the degradation of the economy. I also add that the issues of citizen participation are vital and that this bill seriously undermines those rights through increased costs even to participate in hearings.

My own experience with the Resource Management Act includes 15 years as a lay advocate in the Environment Court, and 5 years as a Resource Management Act mediator. I have also had some very interesting days on the Local Government and Environment Committee in its consideration of this bill. At the select committee hearings there were so many submitters who reminded me of my own experience. They came to our committee very well prepared, with heartfelt submissions about the need for expanded notification, not a reduction in notification. As a new member of Parliament and a very inexperienced member of a select committee, I was astonished by the fact that hardly anybody asked them any questions, except me, because I have literally been those people. I have spent my life trying to communicate about resource management matters with people with power who can hardly be bothered asking any questions. What is more, no one else on the select committee when I was there seemed to have actually spent a lot of time being a submitter. These members had never experienced being intimidated by judges and hearings panels, let alone having costs awarded against them or their group, unlike many members of the Green Party, who have lived the resource management issues. Members can call us masochists, if they like, or public-spirited citizens, but we are better equipped to critique the Resource Management Act than many people who have limited experience of being on the submitters’ side of the table. It is a shame that so many submitters were not actually listened to, even if they were heard.

I also rise to express support for a number of Supplementary Order Papers from the Māori Party, particularly those of Te Ururoa Flavell in which he talks about the need to change section 8 and strengthen the recognition of tangata whenua rights under Te Tiriti o Waitangi. I also want to support the Supplementary Order Papers that refer to the security of cost issue and the role of the Minister of Conservation, and many other members have spoken eloquently in the Chamber today about the importance of those issues. Time after time I have been at hearings where people have been at a disadvantage, and this law puts them at a greater disadvantage. I cannot understand how we will serve environmental decision-making and resource management decision-making if people are at a greater disadvantage because of the threat of costs. At the select committee a number of people said that very few judges will implement those provisions. That is not the point. The point is that small community groups considering whether to go to the Environment Court do not want to be intimidated by the fact that they could be awarded security for costs. As a member of an organisation that was awarded more than $22,000, I know that threat is real.

This is one of those interesting occasions—in fact, we had one in the last bill that was passed under urgency—when there is general support for a bill but the parties are divided on a number of issues. Being a Cantabrian I cannot speak on the issues that will affect Auckland by the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill with the authority of Mr Twyford, who is an Aucklander, but some of those issues on which the parties are divided are heritage and the nature and environment we live in.

I note with interest that the former Minister in the chair, the Minister of Defence, Wayne Mapp, was good enough in the previous bill to also take the chair. It was a finance bill, and National rolled up the Minister of Defence, whose name is “Paris Hilton”, I think. We call him that from time to time—affectionately, I must say. For the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill, we got the 25-pound howitzer out, and the Minister of Defence again took the chair. He has now become what we call the Sonny Bolstad, for those of us who are old enough to remember him, of the New Zealand Parliament. Members may ask who Sonny Bolstad is. He was the New Zealand axe champion for many, many years. He pre-dated me. I have not picked up an axe. Occasionally, in politics one has to.

Chopper Mapp came out. He is an Auckland member, and his solution as a supporter of the big end of town is to just mow down the trees, Operation Desert Storm style. He is the Minister of Defence, after all.

💬 Hon Dr Nick Smith: Give us a break.

The Minister in the chair, Dr Smith, says “Give us a break.” Well, if anybody needs a break and a wee lie-down, it is him. We know that for a variety of reasons. We know that Dr Mapp has the developers’ interests at heart. If National gets its way, through the force and tyranny of the majority, it will be possible for developers to come in, mow down all the trees, build 20 or 30 boxes, and vote for Dr Wayne Mapp, the Sonny Bolstad of Parliament.

We have proposed a compromise in Supplementary Order Paper 40, as I understand it, to allow people to do some surgical tree doctoring and a bit of trimming of their trees. If they want to go further than that, they can get an expedited consent from the council and away they go. National wants to push through its Draconian measures. National is the party that said it was against red tape and against bureaucracy and that it wanted to cut cost. We know that given that there will be massive opposition to the wholesale flattening of the natural environment within Auckland, if Wayne Mapp has his way, that opposition, in itself, will create further bureaucracy.

I will quote from the New Zealand Herald, which states: “Each tree must be assessed, mapped and described, a consultation process carried out, and a possible court appeal defended at the end.” Those who are in favour of the other option—or, in fairness, perhaps even an extreme option the other way—should use their constitutional rights to try to hold back the tide. Dr Smith, who has said he is the champion of mowing through the bureaucracy and cutting down the red tape, ought to take a breath and have a wee think about this situation. I think there is a moment in Parliament when we can promote a compromise. A logical compromise has been put up. I think we all agree that the status quo was a wee bit over the top, but Labour has put up a compromise that I think is relatively balanced.

I say in this short call that we have again an illustration of the extremes in politics: those who are prepared to promote a compromise and find a balance between development interest in the big end of town and protecting the natural environment, and those like Dr Mapp who would be out there with the axe and the grindstone, sharpening it up and mowing down trees. He has the flat-earth philosophy—

💬 Hon Shane Jones: Rhinestone cowboy.

My colleague says Dr Mapp is a rhinestone cowboy. Rhinestone? I do not know. Cowboy? He may be. Being an Auckland member, Dr Mapp has a simplistic view of the world if he thinks that that sort of flat-earth philosophy should run. It is not just about the big end of town and about those who provide big dollars doing big developments; it is all about those people who actually want to protect their environment and have a balance in life.

I ask National in a bipartisan way whether perhaps now that Dr Smith is in the chair and Wayne Mapp is on the benches it might consider our proposition.

It is extraordinary that we get this flamboyant rhetoric about the mowing down of trees and Draconian measures from Mr Clayton Cosgrove. I invite Mr Clayton Cosgrove, an MP from Christchurch, to reflect on whether he thinks Christchurch is a Draconian city. The truth is that Christchurch, a city that prides itself on being called the Garden City, does not have any of these rules.

I want to point out to Mr Cosgrove an interesting thing around the issue of development. I suspect that he knows absolutely nothing about this area of law. A number of Labour members have made the extraordinary claim that if somebody applies for a resource consent, this means that he or she will be able to bowl the trees away. Let me tell members exactly what happens in Christchurch. People apply for resource consents involving blocks of land with trees on them, and every year the council provides protection under those resource consents for hundreds and hundreds of those trees—that is what it does. That works perfectly well, and anybody who thinks there will be a chainsaw massacre—

💬 Brendon Burns: Different quality of people there.

I ask my colleague Brendon Burns from Christchurch whether there is a great chainsaw massacre, as the evil people of Christchurch try to take advantage of a law that Labour does not want to be imposed on other parts of New Zealand. Of course there is not. The provisions of the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill are not Draconian. There will not be any wholesale flattening of trees; there will be a bit of common sense applied.

The situation is as simple as this. From 1 October, one will not need resource consent in Auckland to trim a tree.

💬 Grant Robertson: Nikki Kaye’s not cheering!

Absolutely, National members are cheering. The second thing is that over the next 2 and a bit years, the council will be able to put the bureaucratic effort that is going into processing a whole lot of resource consents for tree trimming into identifying the really significant trees in Auckland that deserve protection. Members on the Labour benches have said that this means the council will have to individually catalogue every tree and apply through the system for it to be scheduled. What total nonsense that is! Every council around New Zealand that has gone through this process—and I note the member for Palmerston North is having a chuckle—does it through its plan, and it does a large number of trees in a group, by neighbourhood. That is how councils should do it under this legislation. I really think this is a case—I ask members to excuse the pun—of Labour not seeing the wood for the trees.

I have found it extraordinary in this debate that there are huge changes set out in this bill to the way in which we consent to major pieces of infrastructure, so that we can get on and build the electricity, water, and transport infrastructure for New Zealand, and we have not heard a squeak from Labour about that, albeit those reforms are very significant. I simply say the Labour members should put their money where their mouths are, and to make my day by promising that they will reverse these changes. I tell those members that that will guarantee this Government a further term. If there was a reason that Labour was rejected by voters, it was that New Zealanders were sick of the nanny State laws whereby ordinary Kiwis had to spend hundreds of dollars on getting a resource consent to trim their trees.

I rise to speak to Supplementary Order Papers 48 and 50. Supplementary Order Paper 48 proposes to insert new clause 21A into the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill. This amendment focuses on the transfer of powers from councils to hapū and iwi authorities. At present, hapū and iwi authorities are not empowered to initiate the consideration of a transfer of powers. Our amendment will allow hapū and iwi authorities to request a transfer of powers for them to manage their lands, water sites, wāhi tapu, and other taonga when they determine that they are better able to meet the purposes of the Resource Management Act. Local authorities are required to give full consideration to the matter, including completing a comprehensive evaluation of the request for transfer. They are required to report on the evaluation, and to make the report publicly available. We would hope that whānau, hapū, and iwi would include section 33 of the Resource Management Act, the provision pertaining to the transfer of powers, in their iwi management plans, and promote it to their respective councils.

The context of this amendment is simply that regional councils have shown an absolute inability to protect harbours from pollution, foreshores from coastal erosion, and seabeds from marina developments. I give the example of Waikawa Marina in the Marlborough Sounds, which is powering ahead with its development proposal, regardless of the adverse impacts on the local hapū, the local community, the biodiversity, and the wishes of the many people affected. We absolutely believe that whānau, hapū, and iwi could do a much better job in respecting and protecting their lands, water sites, wāhi tapu, and other taonga.

I draw the attention of the House to the current Regional Policy Statement for the Wellington Region as a good case study to substantiate our position on the transfer of powers. The policy statement explicitly facilitates a transfer of powers with the added commitment of providing assistance to the transition, as long as there is a formal request to trigger it by the iwi. The provisions were written into the policy 3 years ago and provide us with a very strong basis for this amendment. Chapter 4 of the statement, entitled “The Iwi Environmental Management System”, states: “The Wellington Regional Council, in consultation and partnership with tangata whenua, will investigate opportunities for iwi management of resources and opportunities for joint management, where appropriate.” It goes further in subsequent sections, to state that it will “support tangata whenua to administer transferred powers, functions or duties, where appropriate.” It will also “support iwi to prepare iwi management plans, where appropriate, and where iwi wish to do so.” These are great initiatives that “focus on improving opportunities for iwi management of resources and on formal recognition of the role of kaitiaki. These methods are consistent with a partnership approach to resource management, as required by the Treaty of Waitangi, and the transfers of powers provisions of the Act.” These initiatives provide us with an excellent context within which we put forward these amendments, which we are proud to present to the House today, and which we hope will be supported, including those to clause 91 relating to the projects of national significance, boards of inquiry, and appeals to the High Court.

Our Supplementary Order Paper 50 introduces a number of amendments to new Part 6AA, which deals with proposals of national significance. As a result of this amendment, boards of inquiry will be required to include a representative appointed by mana whenua. They will also be required to seek the advice of mana whenua on any matter being considered, and to reflect that advice in any decisions and recommendations they make. Any draft and final report produced by boards of inquiry will be required to be sent to mana whenua and any other relevant hapū and iwi authorities. Finally, the Supplementary Order Paper removes the limitation applied to appeals, so that appeals against decisions based on merit can be brought before the High Court. These amendments are necessary to ensure that local government acknowledges the authority of mana whenua.

We believe that it is desirable that there be robust and accountable work practices by local government and regional authorities when working with mana whenua. We are also committed to establishing effective strategies for engaging Māori communities and advancing Māori representation. These amendments fulfil these aspirations by ensuring that at least one member must be a representative appointed by mana whenua under new Subpart 3 of new Part 6AA. There is also provision to ensure the involvement of any other relevant hapū or iwi authorities.

This amendment and, indeed, all the amendments we have put before the House today are one way that the Crown can demonstrate active protection of article 2 of the Treaty of Waitangi—the rangatiratanga rights of hapū and iwi Māori. That seems to me as good a reason as any to support them.

The debate has gone on for a long time concentrating largely on trees. I thought it might be useful for the Committee to look at some other aspects that will change with the passing of the excellent Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill.

Picture, if you will, Springfield in Canterbury—the original sleepy hollow. It is a lovely little town, which I have the pleasure of driving through and stopping in a couple of times a week on the way home. Springfield has some cafes, an excellent hotel, a garden shop, and a few things like that. It is a really nice place. But it has that distinctive name, Springfield. A couple of years ago—it might have been 3 years ago—the producers of the television programme that I believe is called The Simpsons, which I do not watch myself, decided to send a concrete doughnut to every town called Springfield. They sent one to this sleepy little town in Canterbury, and, gosh, it was really popular. The town put it up on the side of the road. Tour buses stopped, everyone was photographed beside it, kids loved it, and all the local businesses enjoyed it. It really went well.

When the 3 months were over, the town was told it had to get rid of it. But the people, the community, of the town—one of the small towns that, we heard, need representation—said that they would like to keep it. Transit said the town could not keep the concrete doughnut by the side of the road, because it would immediately cause accidents. The town said that it had not caused any accidents for the last 3 months. Transit said that was because it had been given a permit, but a permit could not be given for it now, because it would cause accidents. So the town put it in the local park. The council said that the town must apply for a consent. The community asked why. The council’s response was “because”. The community said that it was a statue in a park, and that it did not need a consent. So the council engaged a consultant.

This is how the story has been related to me. I find it hard to believe. I hope I am not misleading the Committee, but several people have told me this was exactly the case. The council got a consultant to look at the doughnut in order to give it a definition, and the consultant said it was a building—it was a house and it must have a permit. The people said that they did not want to get a permit for it as a building. The council told them to remove it. But they could not remove it because they did not have a permit to remove it, and they could not get a permit to remove it because they did not have a permit for it in the first place. The council now intends to apply for the consent itself. An objection has been lodged by someone, who wants to take the council to the Environment Court. This goes on and on. I am told that so far the cost has been established at $20,000. This is not what the Resource Management Act was ever intended to do, but this is what it is doing. We need this bill to change it. Thank you, Mr Chair.

I seek the call to cover just a couple of issues, one of which is the trees. I think we need to address the trees rather clearly. The other issue is the role of the Minister of Conservation.

One of the things I think is a paradox about the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill and what it proposes to do is that it is once again the Beehive telling Aucklanders what they can and cannot do. Aucklanders, through their councils, voted to have blanket tree protection rules. That is called democracy; they voted in democratically elected councils, and those councils decided to have blanket tree protection rules. It seems to me that the Beehive, the National-ACT Government, is saying to Aucklanders that it does not care what they think. It could not care less that democratically elected councils wanted blanket tree protection rules. The Government says: “We do not care. We say you are not allowed to do it.” In effect, with this bill the Government is introducing a maximum environmental standard. It is saying to people that they cannot have an environmental protection standard above this level, they cannot have blanket tree protection rules, and they cannot have a standard to protect trees, even though democratically elected councils want to implement a standard. Central government and this Parliament, assuming this bill goes through, are saying to people that they are not allowed to have those rules.

The Green Party has put forward a proposal to try to find some way through this paradox, but it has been rejected by the Government. We have a Supplementary Order Paper on it, as well. There is a very sensible compromise. First, we should allow the trimming of trees. We should not have a blanket rule against trimming. Secondly, when councils give consent for the removal of a tree, they should do it at the tree itself. People would not have to go to the council or have some kind of elaborate hearing; it would be done at the tree itself. Thirdly, there should be national guidelines so that there is some consistency around these rules, because one of the issues has been consistency around the rules. Fourthly, the process should be free. Mostly it is free now, but in some places it is not. I think that is a very sensible compromise, which allows the democratically elected councils of Auckland to maintain their blanket tree protection rules, but takes away some of the unnecessary bureaucracy.

That very sensible compromise, which was put forward by Jeanette Fitzsimons in the Local Government and Environment Committee and is partly in an amendment that the Green Party is putting forward tonight, has been rejected by the Government. Instead, National’s bill means that where councils wish to protect trees on urban land, they will have to schedule individual trees or groups of trees for protection. That is massively bureaucratic. If we take this move seriously, if we accept the Government’s argument that it actually has the objective of protecting trees, then it is still massively bureaucratic. The Government is talking about schedules to district plans that will be hundreds of pages long, as councils schedule and identify each individual tree and each group of trees. It is massively bureaucratic. In effect, the bill takes the evil red tape from the hands of those people who are trying to cut down trees and puts it in the hands of the councils that are trying to protect trees. This move is so bureaucratic that it will be very difficult for councils to use those rules to protect trees.

I also think it is worth noting the comments from various Auckland councils and elsewhere that they will not schedule trees against the wishes of landowners. That means that once these current rules come off, councils that wish to schedule protection for any tree on private land that they view as very important will not be able to do so if the landowner says that he or she does not want that tree to be scheduled. That is what councils have told us. So it is a sham for the Government to say that councils can use this mechanism, when the councils say they will not use this mechanism to schedule trees. If councils try seriously to do this, even where they are willing to override individual landowners’ consent in order to try to do it, they will end up with an immensely bureaucratic process. It will be immensely expensive and time consuming. It will result in district plans with hundreds of pages of schedules to protect trees.

Finally, there is another issue relating to trees that I would be very interested to hear the Minister’s views on. It is to do with the changes that we are making to when plans take effect. Plans will take effect only after the decision on submissions has been made.

A few points have been raised by Dr Russel Norman and I think it is important to put the record straight. The first point is that he questions the right of Parliament to decide what the Resource Management Act can be used for. I was here when the Resource Management Act was passed in 1991, and I can tell members that the entire Parliament at that time would have been flummoxed if it had realised that in the future, almost a million Aucklanders would be required to get a resource consent to trim a tree. It is absolutely proper for this Parliament to tell councils what the limits of their powers are under the Resource Management Act, and that is exactly what we are doing this evening.

The second thing that members are completely overlooking is the reverse effect of these laws. It is interesting that I have had letters—and I know that the Local Government and Environment Committee heard this evidence—from nursery staff who said that people tell them that they want to buy only trees that will grow to less than 3 metres. Why do people do that? Well, if their council has a law that says they will lose control of their property if the tree grows to more than 3 metres, then it is not surprising, I say to Russel Norman.

💬 Dr Russel Norman: It’s 8 metres.

It varies from council to council. But what homeowners do is to say that they will not plant a tree and lose control over their property, or else they will buy only a little tree.

The underlying proof of that is that if these rules work, what we will expect to see is Auckland having a whole lot more trees than cities that do not have these rules. In reality, in Palmerston North, in Napier, in Nelson, in Christchurch, in Dunedin, and in Wellington, is there any evidence to support the contention from Russel Norman and the Labour Party that there are a whole lot more trees in places that have these blanket tree rules? The answer is no. The third point I would make—

💬 Hon David Cunliffe: Christchurch hasn’t scheduled one tree.

The member should let me make the point. Let us see whether Mr Cunliffe is prepared to live up to his claim. I would have a bet with him for the best bottle of wine that either of us can find that Christchurch has protected hundreds of trees. [Interruption] Oh, now he is changing his tune. The truth is different, and I will swear on the Bible with regard to that. I had lunch only today with the Mayor of Christchurch, and he has pointed out that hundreds of trees have been protected, so this is just another example of the deliberate misinformation that comes from members like Mr Cunliffe on this issue.

The last point I will make—

💬 Hon David Cunliffe: I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. It is a fine line for the Minister to argue the case, and it is another thing to question the integrity of a member by saying that I had changed my story. I had not. The point I had always made is that there has been no new scheduling since the lifting of the blanket rules.

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): That is a debating point, and there is no confusion on this.

The last point I will make is to do with a contradictory comment from Russel Norman. He said that the same councils that want to pass blanket protection rules over everybody’s property without any consultation are not prepared to use the plans to identify and consult with landowners about scheduling individual trees or groups of trees. Well, I have never heard such an illogical, silly argument in my 20 years in this Parliament. If councils are prepared to ride roughshod over everybody’s trees, then I ask Russel Norman why they would not be prepared to use the powers that we will provide for them to protect those individual and specific trees, which occurs in every other part of New Zealand. I say to members that these sensible provisions will see those very valued trees protected, but they will get rid of the bureaucracy of requiring thousands of resource consents for trimming a tree.

In the brief time available to me I will respond to the complaint from the Minister in the chair, the Hon Dr Nick Smith, that we have not referred to call-in powers, which he sees as being so significant. The reason is that it is all smoke and mirrors. There is no meaningful change to call-in powers in the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill.

I will illustrate why this matter is being oversold by the National Government. National members complain that there is an infrastructure deficit in New Zealand. You know, spending on motorways in New Zealand doubled under the previous Government. It went up hugely. All of those projects were consented under the Resource Management Act. Public transport funding increased tenfold, including some enormous projects like the Northern Busway, which was consented under the Resource Management Act. New hospitals from Bluff to Kaitāia were consented under the Resource Management Act. New schools from south to north were consented to under the Resource Management Act. A tenfold increase in transmission expenditure, up from $50 million to $500 million, was consented under the Resource Management Act. New power generation projects—many years ahead of the demand growth—were all consented under the Resource Management Act. Some of those projects were consented through the call-in processes that the Minister was involved in updating while on the Local Government and Environment Committee with me back in 2005. There was a doubling of telecommunications expenditure between 2004 and 2008, from $700 million per annum to $1.4 billion per annum. That was all consented under the Resource Management Act. Some of it was called in.

The idea that economic growth will take off as a consequence of these small changes to the call-in process has always been a myth. That is why we have not focused on it in this debate.

I seek leave to table an email from Scott Langley to Nikki Kaye and others, entitled “Save the Trees”: “Dear the people I stupidly voted for last year, I am writing to express my concern about the impact of”—

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Leave is sought for that. Is there any objection? There is objection.

I seek leave to table an email from David Herkt to Nikki Kaye and others that says: “I also watched one of the National MPs hacking down mangroves at Whangamata …”, etc.

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Leave is sought to table that document. Is there any objection? There is objection.

I seek leave—

💬 Chris Tremain: Point of order—

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): We are on a point of order at the moment.

💬 Chris Tremain: He was taking a new point of order, Mr Chairperson; we have finished the last point of order.

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): We are currently on a point of order. I am hearing the Hon David Cunliffe.

I seek leave to table an email from Juliet Yates to Chris Carter: “I am writing to you on behalf of the Tāmaki Drive Protection Society—

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Leave is sought to table that document. Is there any objection? There is objection.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. The Hon David Cunliffe is seeking to table documents, and is then reading parts of the emails. I do not think that that is appropriate; it is outside the Standing Orders.

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Thank you for that point. The member should just table the document and not explain in depth what is in it.

I seek leave to table an email from Owen Young, an architect with 35 years’ experience.

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Leave is sought to table that document. Is there any objection? There is objection.

I seek leave to table an email from Ben Zimmerman of Greenscene on clause 52 of the bill.

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Leave is sought to table that document. Is there any objection? There is objection.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. The Business Committee reached an agreement in good faith that the debate on the Committee stage of this bill would be limited to a period of 3 hours.

💬 Hon Members: 5 hours.

A period of 5 hours, I am sorry.

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): I thank the member—

No, Mr Chairperson, there is an important point of order here, and I ask you to hear me out, please. Mr Cunliffe, who is a senior member of the House, is choosing to seek leave for the tabling of a whole lot of very minor documents in order to effectively stop the progress of the Committee of the whole House. If you as Chairperson are going to allow that, then any party of this Committee could resort to the same tactic and could have all its members take up the whole time of Parliament by simply seeking leave to table irrelevant documents. I think you need to give a ruling about this tactic, which has been adopted by Mr Cunliffe, and whether it is an appropriate use of the Standing Orders, particularly given the agreement that was reached by the Business Committee for a time-limited debate on the Committee stage.

Mr Chairperson, in reaching your considered ruling on this matter I ask you to take into account two factors in particular. Firstly, the procedure that I am using is entirely provided for by the Standing Orders, where any member has the right to seek leave to table a document. It falls within the guidelines of the Business Committee. These are not press articles or media statements; they are private communications not otherwise available to the Committee. Secondly, you will recall that I consulted the Chair about when it would be an appropriate time to table these documents, and the advice I received was not to interrupt the debate, because a pre-allotted time had been allocated. Therefore I am taking the only opportunity available to me to table these documents. In the interests of facilitating the progress of the Committee, it may be that I can reach a compromise with the member opposite, Dr Nick Smith, to table these documents in groups of like submissions rather than as individual ones. I ask you to consider that offer.

The debate was time-limited. The debate has concluded, but that does not stop someone tabling documents after the debate has concluded. The debate concluded on time at 8 p.m., so points of order can be raised and documents tabled after that. I ask the member, in good faith—as he has just indicated—to group the documents he wishes to seek leave for, so that we can progress to the next stage.

Mr Chairperson, I thought it would be inappropriate to unreasonably detain the Committee, because there are a very, very large number of like communications that the Committee ought to have available to it. In this particular sample in my hand I have over 250 documents. I therefore seek leave to table as a group two like submissions from the New Zealand Arboricultural Association, opposing clause 52.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Rick Barker): Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? There is none.

Documents, by leave, laid on the Table of the House.

I seek leave to table three like submissions from Lisa Sanderson, Angela Little, and David James, opposing clause 52.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Rick Barker): Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? There appears to be none. The documents will be tabled.

Documents, by leave, laid on the Table of the House.

I seek leave to table four like submissions from Atkins and Otley, Felicity Barnes, Nigel Bartlett, and Lisa Benson opposing clause 52.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Rick Barker): Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? There is objection.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. I seek your guidance. Unfortunately it was the previous Chairperson who made the comment to the Committee that if the documents being tabled were already part of the business of the Committee, then there would be no necessity to table them. Like other members of Parliament, I have received a number of emails over recent days, and I am of the opinion that, in fact, these documents have been sent to all members of Parliament and have therefore become part of the correspondence that has entered into their business as members of Parliament. I seek your guidance, therefore, on whether these emails are already parliamentary business, and on whether it would be unnecessary, and perhaps trifling with the business of the Committee, to table them all.

I will answer the matter quite directly. The member has been seeking to table documents; people have the right to object to them. I am not sure exactly what the contents are. The member has said that he will facilitate this process occurring quickly. The member appears to be doing that. If the member is trying to trifle with the agreement he has made, then we can intervene at that point. If the member is going to expedite the process, I welcome that.

Thank you, Mr Chairperson. I seek leave to table nine similar emails from a range of members of the public who object to clause 52. They were not sent to all members of the Committee

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Rick Barker): Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? There is none. The documents can be tabled.

Documents, by leave, laid on the Table of the House.

I seek leave to table a spreadsheet of the remainder of the 250 emails received by my office in respect of objections to clause 52.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Rick Barker): Leave is sought to table a spreadsheet. Is there any objection? There appears to be none.

Document, by leave, laid on the Table of the House.

I seek leave to table the balance of the 252 emails that my office has received in the last 24 hours objecting to the passage of clause 52.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Rick Barker): Leave is sought to table 250 emails. Is there any objection? There appears to be none. They will be tabled.

Documents, by leave, laid on the Table of the House.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Rick Barker): We now move to the substance of the matter.

The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 47 in the name of Te Ururoa Flavell be agreed to.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. I think when you read out the details of my amendment, you said that it had the effect of omitting clause 151.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Rick Barker): No, I said “to omit clause 52”.

Did you? My amendment has the effect of deleting clauses 52 and 151.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Rick Barker): I understand that the amendment to clause 151 is a separate amendment.

I did not realise that. Sorry, I thought they were together.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Rick Barker): I say to the member that because the amendment is in the member’s name, if the member thinks there is an error in the way in which the amendment has been referred to in the Committee, then the member should say so immediately. To raise a point of order after the vote creates some difficulty. Never mind, we have moved on.

The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 41 in the name of the Hon David Cunliffe to clause 52 be agreed to.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. I wish to raise a serious point of order and ask for your indulgence. It is a leave motion, but I need to provide some context for it. During the debate in the Committee stage the Minister alleged that Labour had voted for clauses 52 and 151 in the select committee. We explained that we were opposed to both of those clauses but that in the select committee, of course, the voting had been on a part by part basis.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Rick Barker): I ask the member to pause here. Is this a point of order about some offence to the Standing Orders, or is this simply an explanation to right the record and, therefore, a debatable matter?

No.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Rick Barker): Well, I hope the member is going to come to some offence that has been created and caused to the Standing Orders.

Yes, Mr Chairperson. Notwithstanding the decision of the Business Committee to take the substantive motion on both parts as one motion, I seek leave in light of the earlier discussion for the votes on clauses 52 and 151 to be held as a separate vote so that Labour’s opposition to those clauses can be recorded.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Rick Barker): That is clauses 52 and 151. Leave is sought for that purpose. Is the Committee clear on that? Is there any objection? There is objection. Therefore, the question is that Parts 1 and 2, schedule 2, and clauses 1 to 3 as amended stand part. All those of that opinion say Aye, of the contrary opinion say No. The Ayes have it. Is a party vote called for? No party vote is called for.

💬 Dr Russel Norman: Party vote.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Rick Barker): I asked whether a party vote was called for. I got silence and I then moved on. I just say to the member that once the Chair has declared a vote and it is disputed, the member who wishes for a party vote should call for the party vote immediately.

💬 Dr Russel Norman: I did, Mr Chair.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Rick Barker): I did not hear it. I am sorry.

A party vote was called for on the question that Parts 1 and 2, schedule 2, and clauses 1 to 3 as amended be agreed to.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Rick Barker): Before I declare the result I just say to Dr Norman that I am sorry I did not hear the call for it. That is one of the reasons why it is important that there is quiet in the Chamber when a vote is being conducted, because very often voices do not carry.