Resource Management Reform Bill

This debate is on clauses 3 to 121 and schedules 1 and 2.

I rise to speak in the Committee stage of the Resource Management Reform Bill, taking note of the parts and the clauses that the Chairperson has identified for us to refer to. This bill is the start, as we know, of the Government’s assault on the legal protections of our environment. This is actually the second time a resource management reform bill has been presented to the House—it is clearly the midway point for the Government’s reforms—and we would like to register our strong opposition to the general direction that the Government is taking in resource management, while acknowledging that this particular bill in front of us, the Resource Management Reform Bill, is not the worst of its efforts. Certainly, we will be seeing more of its efforts as the year goes on.

The Minister for the Environment has already signalled that she intends before the end of the year to bring in the next stage of the Resource Management Act reforms that this Government is undertaking. It is with some trepidation that we anticipate that bill coming forward.

The purpose of this amendment bill is to try to make some of the provisions of the Resource Management Act more efficient. To that extent, we have never had a problem on this side of the House with moves in that direction. Anything that makes it more efficient is to be welcomed on all sides. But, unfortunately, this goes somewhere quite different.

I am concerned about a number of parts of the bill. I wish to traverse those over a period of time in this, the Committee stage. But let us just back up a little bit and go back to the purpose of the bill, which is to amend the Resource Management Act, to make a number of changes to its processes. It will also impose a 6-month consent time frame for medium-sized projects. As I have said, this is phase two of a series of Government reforms, with even bigger ones coming. But one of the things that this bill does in particular is to fast track the Auckland Unitary Plan. It also includes new regulation-making powers that enable the Environmental Protection Authority to have cost recovery powers and require local bodies to carry out specific environmental monitoring.

This bill is, again, another power-grab, as we see it, of the Government, because one of its most significant component parts is its ability to override local government and local communities in terms of making, through their elected officials, decisions about their own immediate environment. Although there must always be national standards—and the Government has much work to do in the establishment of national environment standards and policy standards—it is also important that there is sufficient balance in the proposals so that local authorities are not disenfranchised or are not ignored or overridden. In this respect, there are a number of points that we will make in the course of the Committee stage that relate to Auckland in particular.

One of the things that I wish to address in the first instance are the provisions in Part 1 of the bill that relate to tree protection. In fact, the Environmental Defence Society today put out a statement saying that it urged regional and district councils to urgently consider the implications of this bill on their indigenous biodiversity and protective functions. The most obvious of these are the issues around the protection of trees.

The opinion of the Environmental Defence Society and, indeed, the opinion of the Labour Party is that this bill is not sufficiently protective of trees that require protection. It is improved from the bill as it came to the Local Government and Environment Committee, and I wish to acknowledge the Minister in that respect. She listened to and consulted the select committee around this issue in particular. So the bill is a little improved as a result of that, and I commend her for that. However, it is marginally improved in that when it first appeared before this House it required, as I think I have said before in the context of this bill, every tree virtually to have a name and a birth date and a christening ceremony in order to end up being a protected tree. What we have now is a provision that allows for clusters of trees, groups of trees, and lines of trees to be recognised for protective purposes, but they are still required to be identified section by section, address by address.

If a local authority has not geared itself up to make this kind of protection plain, then it will be very difficult for trees to be protected where they are seen to be in the public domain, where they might be lines of trees up the east coast of Auckland or vast tracts of native bush in the west of Auckland—which, fortunately, are already protected by thoughtful legislation that the previous Labour Government brought in. But it will be more difficult to register trees as protected, and that is a real concern to us. Here we have a movement towards the rights of owners of properties to cut down trees if they are not designated as protected trees, regardless of their environmental contribution. So if a tree actually holds together a hillside and prevents moisture runoff in a way that protects downhill properties, then that tree affects not only the owners of the property but the owners of properties beneath it. There are communal responsibilities in this respect, and, in our view, this bill does not do sufficient to allow local authorities to declare that whole regions, areas of planted trees, are protected for environmental purposes and for community amenity purposes.

This is the start of our concerns around this bill. We will not be supporting it, because we do not believe that in this case it gets the right balance between individual property rights, community amenity values, and environmental protection, and it also does not get the balance right in terms of the Government’s powers to reach in over the top of local authorities and reverse or prevent things that they are doing in the name of development. This is only the first stage of where the Government is going this year with Resource Management Act reform.

Debate interrupted.