Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill

on behalf of the Minister for the Environment: I move, That the Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill be now read a second time. The Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Act established the streamlined plan-making process, including an independent hearings panel to hear submissions on the proposed plan. This is intended to result in faster delivery of a high-quality, operative Auckland Unitary Plan. The Auckland Unitary Plan is critical to achieving the city’s proposed growth targets, as well as planning land use, critical infrastructure, and housing supply.

To recap briefly, the purpose of the bill is to provide more flexibility to the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel to help ensure that it can deliver its recommendations on the proposed Auckland Unitary Plan to the Auckland Council by the statutory deadline of 22 July 2016. The panel has made good progress. However, hearings on site-specific matters, which are of high public interest due to their impact on individual property rights, are due to begin in January 2016. The panel has indicated that the expected increase in workload as a result of these hearings poses a risk to meeting the statutory deadline.

It is critical that the hearings panel is able to continue its good progress and make recommendations to the council by the deadline. In order to achieve this, the bill has three main components. First, the bill reduces the quorum required for hearings sessions from three members to two members. Secondly, it is going to allow an increase in the possible number of appointed hearings panel members from seven to 10, excluding the chair. Thirdly, the bill will enable the hearings panel to make its recommendations on the proposed Auckland Unitary Plan in stages after hearings are completed on a particular topic, rather than in one final report.

To support these policy changes, additional amendments are required. First, the bill creates a requirement for the Minister for the Environment and the Minister of Conservation to consult with the Auckland Council, the independent Māori Statutory Board, and the chairperson of the hearings panel prior to appointing additional or replacement hearings panel members. Secondly, the bill clarifies that the hearings panel may hold hearings sessions concurrently and that an additional chair may be appointed for the purposes of chairing a hearings session when the chair is unavailable due to their chairing a concurrent hearings session. The bill validates any hearings sessions that were held concurrently prior to this clarification being made. Finally, the bill validates 28 February 2014 as the closing date for submissions on the proposed Auckland Unitary Plan.

I should also say that there is a minor and technical amendment required to fix an error in the drafting of the principal Act relating to the procedural requirements—

💬 Chris Hipkins: Wouldn’t have happened if this Minister had drafted it.

—for the filing of appeals on questions of law with the High Court. What was that?

💬 Chris Hipkins: Never would’ve happened if you’d drafted it.

Well, that is very kind of the member to say so. It would never happen in Wellington either, because nothing ever happens in Wellington in terms of local government reform.

💬 Chris Hipkins: His chances in Rongotai aren’t looking any better now.

Well, that is a remarkably perceptive insight by the member from Rimutaka at 11.35 tonight.

I want to reiterate that the first Auckland Unitary Plan is of national importance, and the success of the submissions and hearings process is critical as it could set a precedent for similar planning approaches throughout the country; probably not in Wellington. I commend this bill to the House.

Just to begin with, the Minister glossed over a number of areas, talking about clarifying and validating. The Government is clarifying that you can hold the sessions concurrently, but he glossed over the fact that it has in fact been doing that without that explicit authority for months and months. This is a cock-up that is being fixed up. So let us call a spade a spade and a cock-up a cock-up in this, and not gloss over it.

The Minister also glossed over the fact that the Government validated February of last year as the closing date for submissions. Well, that is a long time ago. That was another cock-up. Then he did acknowledge that it fixed an error in the main Act about procedural requirements for the filing of appeals on questions of law with the High Court. That is a third cock-up.

The reason I raise these things is that these mistakes have been made in the legislation we are fixing tonight, but we are fixing this legislation at 20 minutes to midnight after sitting since 9 o’clock this morning, and without the benefit of a select committee process. Is there any better way to continue stuffing up legislation than doing it in the way that the Government is doing it tonight? A wise Government would learn from its mistakes. This Government is simply repeating its mistakes.

This is the second reading. During the second reading, normally we would rise to our feet to discuss the submissions that we have heard from members of the public and experts in the area. We would discuss the consideration that the Parliamentary Counsel Office had given to the drafting and the errors that the Parliamentary Counsel Office would have found in the legislation and would have corrected before reporting back to the House. We would talk about the hours of analysis that the select committee had put into the legislation. None of us can do any of that tonight because that process was not followed.

The question I have to ask the Government is: when Nick Smith could announce the details of this legislation on 16 September, more than 2 months ago, why did this Government not get its act together and have the first reading of the bill at that time so we could have honoured the democratic principles of this House in giving the public the right to be heard on it?

I have heard members of the Government and the ACT Party tonight singing the praises of a democratic process where there is the opportunity to be heard. They were talking about the hearings that this bill is legislating for, but they did not acknowledge that they were totally contradicting themselves in supporting legislation that forbade the public—blocked the public—from being able to make submissions on it.

It is bad process to have urgent legislation. I accept this legislation needs to go through before Christmas. I agree with the Attorney-General that it will be a good thing if we could get these hearings processes operating effectively so that the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel can meet its statutory deadline and report back and we can get a unitary plan in place that will allow for better planning process and better resource management process. I agree with that. But it was not necessary to ram this thing through in the middle of the night and not allow the public to have its say.

I listened with interest to the ACT member, because he was damning the process that his predecessor from the ACT Party, in the same electorate of Epsom, had put in place and he did not see the contradiction. And then the ACT member said: “We’ve got to have a change in the unitary plan process so we can remove the rural-urban boundary so the city can move out.” But the city cannot move up. The city cannot intensify. It cannot become more compact.

I listened to the Productivity Commission and Murray Sherwin and his team yesterday, and they said: “Why have we got a problem with the availability and affordability of housing?”. He said: “If you create a situation where the city can neither move out, nor move up, there is only one thing that gives, and that is prices.” We have a crisis in availability and affordability because we have blocked the city from moving either out or up. It should not be an either/or; it should be a both/and.

The unitary plan will be about having a more compact city, and I agree with my colleagues from the Green Party on that. And, inevitably, because the population of Auckland is going to increase by a million in the next 30 years, it is going to have to move out as well. I, of course, would argue that it is good to allow that city to move out, but only, however, if you have got the infrastructure in place to make that happen.

I was down at the Karaka Lakes subdivision the other day and I drove by Pōkeno—I drove by Pōkeno. There are huge, huge developments there—I am sure that you would recognise them, Mr Assistant Speaker Tisch—but what is not there is any infrastructure to support those people. A huge percentage of the people in Pōkeno are going to be working in town, but we have got a motorway that is already clogged, we have not got a railway line that is sufficient to meet the needs, and we do not have a busway. So if the Government is going to allow this growth to happen—and the growth will happen—then, for heaven’s sake, let us get a unitary plan. Let us not only get a unitary plan that puts infrastructure in place, but let us get a Government that is committed to ensuring that we have the infrastructure so that Auckland can grow without losing the quality of life that that city offers to its people.

I agree with what Scott Simpson said. I thought it was very big of the member for Coromandel to acknowledge that New Zealand cannot succeed if Auckland fails.

💬 Scott Simpson: That’s right.

That is absolutely right, and I agree with the member. We are on the same path on that.

I have to say that I disagree with the point made by my friends in the Green Party that this is about taking power away from local government. Auckland Council is in favour of this—absolutely in favour of this—including people like Penny Hulse, who has done so much work in actually getting this unitary plan going forward. David Kirkpatrick, chair of the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel, is also in favour of it. If I believed that the changes being made would diminish the quality of the hearings process I would not be recommending to my colleagues that we support them tonight, but I have seen no evidence that the changes that are being made do diminish the quality of the scrutiny of the submissions. In fact, I believe that they allow that panel to get through its work more effectively.

Auckland desperately needs to have a proper planning process. It desperately needs a planning process that can ensure the sustainable development of housing and business not only in the urban environment but also for the rural area and the marine environment. The unitary plan covers all of those things. It will be good to have a unitary plan—one plan for what is, effectively, one city—instead of the complexity and the fragmentation that existed, and still exists right now, actually, because of the old structure.

I want to come, lastly, to a comment that Nick Smith, the Minister in charge of this bill, made about it. He said “This bill is needed to maintain the momentum of lifting Auckland’s housing supply …”, and he also said that this bill is needed because the legislation allowing for special housing areas is going to run out. Well, I commented on that in the first reading—the latter point. Nick Smith has set a target of 39,000 houses. The special housing area was his big initiative to achieve that target.

💬 Sue Moroney: How’s that going?

The goal is 39,000 houses, and Sue Moroney says: “How’s it going?”. Well, we have reached just over 100—102, actually. I have not got my calculator here to see what 102 is as a percentage of 39,000, but it ain’t much—it ain’t much, and we are not going to get there.

So I want to challenge the Minister in charge of this bill about this bill actually doing what he says it will do, because it is not going to hugely affect the supply of housing and the problems of availability and affordability. For 7 long years the housing crisis has been ignored. The Government has ignored the impact of speculation. Only in the last few months have we had the brightline test. The Government has ignored the problem of the affordability of infrastructure for housing. It has ignored the market failure of the slow-down in building houses after the global financial crisis. It could have built houses then. It could have avoided this problem, but it did not.

So my message, finally, is that the unitary plan—if it is done well—will help, but it will not do it on its own. The Government needs to do much more.

It is a pleasure to take a very brief call in the second reading debate. Even though it is late at night, the member Phil Goff, who has just resumed his seat, has used the opportunity this evening to twice run his lines through for the campaign launch that he will be giving on Sunday, 22 November. I commend him for running the practice lines. I think they are helpful. I think that they are good lines, and he will, no doubt, get some traction with them. He makes a good point, I think, about how important it is to the regions and to the provinces—and, in fact, to the entire country—for Auckland to succeed.

This piece of legislation will ensure that the hearings process on the unitary plan actually goes more smoothly than it has. It will be more efficient and more effective. Members across the House have, I think, given a very good account of the purposes of this bill earlier on in the first reading debate, and I want to just also endorse the comments made by the Hon Phil Goff when he was addressing the Green Party. I would also endorse his comments, and suggest that maybe the Green Party might like to, at second reading, reconsider its position because Auckland Council does want to have this legislation passed and it would be a good and useful thing if the Greens did do that. I commend this bill to the House.

It would be nice in this stage of the bill’s progress through the House to be reporting back on select committee deliberations. It would be nice to be sharing the advice of officials. It would be nice to be reflecting on public submissions. But, sadly, we are not going to have that opportunity tonight, and it is an irony, as Phil Goff said, that the passage of this bill through the House, which is about ensuring proper public participation in the planning process for Auckland, is being—

💬 Ron Mark: You stole my line.

And Ron Mark said it as well, I think—or he is going to. It is an irony that this process denies people the right to have a say. It denies this bill the scrutiny that it deserves at select committee. It is a bill that is about public participation in the planning process. It is a bill that is, at least in part, about fixing the defects of another bill that was earlier pushed through under urgency. The National Government never seems to learn the lessons from its mistakes. My colleague Su’a William Sio pointed out that so much of the Auckland legislation that was put in place to establish the super-city was pushed through under urgency, and so much time has been spent cleaning up the messes that were made by the rushed and chaotic processes around that law.

Why is the unitary plan so important to Auckland’s future? Well, it makes the critical zoning decisions. It includes the rules on the urban growth boundary and the introduction of new land into the supply, and all of the rules on height and density that will have such a critical impact on the pipeline of new construction—new urban development and, particularly, housing. Given the importance of development in housing supply to fixing what the rest of the country has come to think of as the “Auckland plan”, it is critical that the unitary plan is of high quality and that it is signed off in a timely way. What I think is interesting is that the critical outcomes of the bill that will make a difference to the supply of new land and housing in Auckland are the rules about the urban growth boundary and about height and density.

While the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel has been beavering away hearing public submissions and deliberating on those two essential points, it is worth noting, I think, that the National Government’s views about density have been evolving and have been moving. I thought one of the most odd chapters in this whole process was the then Minister for the Environment, Amy Adams, actually sitting up at night writing a huge submission as the environment Minister to the hearings panel on the Auckland Unitary Plan, because the Government recognises that getting it right in Auckland is not just of critical importance to the people in those neighbourhoods where particular zoning decisions or consenting decisions are made; it is actually of national importance. If we do not improve the responsiveness of the housing market in Auckland to demand and if we do not build more affordable housing and the kinds of the types of housing that people want in places where they want to live, then we will never ever fix the Auckland problem.

But the great urbanists of the National Party, Bill English and Nick Smith, spent years during the tenure of this Government railing against the compact city and basically saying that unrestricted sprawl—getting rid of the urban growth boundary—was the only way that Auckland could move forward. That was their view, and I have heard them say it in this House a dozen times if I have heard it once. But to be fair, they have moved—they have moved. I think it is probably the work of the Productivity Commission and it is talking to people like the Property Council that has made them realise that good cities must have an element of density, otherwise they will never produce affordable housing and they will never produce a livable environment that people actually want to live in.

National has moved so far that earlier this year the Prime Minister issued an edict and said that Aucklanders must get used to living in apartments. I do not know whether the prime ministerial memo has been sent out to the National Party apparatchiks on the Ōrākei Local Board and in the leafy neighbourhoods of Kohimārama, Epsom, and Parnell that the Prime Minister wants to build apartments. Not apartments in Hawaii, not apartments in London, or maybe in St Stephens Avenue, Parnell, but I do not know whether the good people of Remuera and of Epsom—certainly David Seymour is not happy about the idea of apartments and density in Epsom. I do not know whether those good people have received the memo from the Prime Minister that he wants to build high-rise apartments in their neighbourhoods. I think that if he gets his way, they are not going to have much of a say in that process.

This new-found enthusiasm for intensification has recently seen National Party acolytes on Auckland Council enthusing over an expensive study by Ernst and Young and Cameron Partners advocating a multibillion-dollar sell-off of Auckland Council’s assets, including building houses on the Remuera and Takapuna golf courses. So I look forward to the good citizens of Takapuna and Remuera—

💬 Hon Phil Goff: What do the local members say about that?

Ha, ha! I want to know what the local National Party acolytes in Remuera and Takapuna think about their own people advocating building houses on the Remuera and Takapuna golf courses, because I think that I would like to be a fly on the wall when that particular discussion is had.

Nick Smith, the Minister for Building and Housing, justified, in talking publicly about the introduction of this bill, that it was very important that this legislation was passed quickly, before Christmas, not only so that the unitary plan recommendations could be made back to Auckland Council before the deadline but because he was worried that otherwise it would not be passed and completed in time for next year’s council elections—I think that is probably a good idea—and he also tied it to the expiry of the housing accords legislation.

In a way, he is quite right that the unitary plan will have a major impact on fixing the Auckland housing crisis. There is no doubt about that, but, as Phil Goff pointed out earlier this evening, it is a very long bow to suggest that the expiry of the housing accords legislation will have any impact at all, because the legislation itself has not had any impact. As the New Zealand Herald reported recently, only 102 houses have been built in the 96 special housing areas established over the last 2 years under this Government—96 special housing areas and only 102 houses. It is not a very good batting average, and it is a singular failure of this Government’s housing policy and its much-hyped attempt to actually increase the supply of housing. It has done everything but take meaningful action to fix it. As Phil Goff said, it failed to tackle the role of property speculators in the Auckland housing market. It failed to actually build new houses that people can live in.

Bill English and Nick Smith have been talking about the Resource Management Act and blaming Auckland Council for the last 10 years. Since they were in Opposition they have been blaming the Resource Management Act for the high cost of housing in Auckland, but they have done nothing substantive to reform the Act and the way that councils operate within the Act—the way they set the planning rules. They are truly the hollow men on this issue. Actually, the draft unitary plan that this bill seeks to facilitate is the first real bit of reform of the planning rules in Auckland. It is the first attempt, actually, to use urban growth boundaries in a smarter way—to avoid having them driving up section prices. It is the first real attempt to liberalise and free up density and height rules so that more houses can be built in places where people want to live. Unfortunately, this Government has not pulled its weight. It has been all talk and no action when it comes to reforming the planning rules, but Labour is supporting this bill because we believe the unitary plan will make a difference.

When we talk about Auckland housing these days, the two Phils come down to the House—Phil Goff and Phil Twyford. From Phil Twyford, we got what we always get, which is an angry, bitter tirade about how much he does not like Nick Smith and how much he does not like all the Ministers in the National Government. From Phil Goff, we got a campaign speech because that is what we get from Phil Goff these days—campaigning for the mayoralty of Auckland. As my good colleague Scott Simpson said, he should have put an authorisation statement on those speeches. They were political advertising. It was actually not a bad speech from Phil. This is a sensible—

I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. The time has come for me to leave the Chair.

Debate interrupted.

Sitting suspended from 12 midnight to 9 a.m. (Thursday)