Resource Legislation Amendment Bill

Clauses 1 and 2 are the title and commencement clauses of this bill—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Order! I just got into a bit of a roll and forgot myself. The question now is that clauses 1 and 2 stand part.

Important pieces of legislation like this do not have an opportunity to be redrafted and changed so often. I believe this is the first real amendment of this legislation in at least 25 years. They are big changes, but they are changes that, on this side of the House, we, in large part, do not agree with. We believe that the opportunity has been missed, not only by the Minister who is responsible for this piece of legislation but by the Government, to take and make some meaningful change to this piece of legislation to address some very important issues in and around our environment and, importantly, in and around building some houses for New Zealand.

The Government has been quick to blame everyone else but itself when it comes to its complete and utter lack of movement around housing. But I think we need to look at the lost opportunity with this Resource Legislation Amendment Bill. One can only come to the conclusion that this has been a lost opportunity for us to seriously do something about planning rules, to make sure that the houses that New Zealand seriously needs are provided. Nick Smith has to take the blame for that. The Government has to take the blame for that. As we get closer to election day, we will find out that the Māori Party will take a lot of blame for that too.

To stitch up this deal—a wafer-thin majority for a piece of legislation that should have had broad-spectrum appeal across this House, to make sure it got there to do the important things that this Government needs to do to address the housing shortage—the Government went for a dirty old last-minute deal with the Māori Party to get it through with a one-vote majority. And it made some controversial changes that I think, in the end, the Māori Party will regret making because, as was exposed in the words of the Minister himself last night around the definition of the word “crop”, the Māori Party has signed up to something thinking it has got a golden egg and it has got nothing but rotten eggs. That is the reality of this piece of legislation for the Māori Party.

I am looking forward to the campaign, and I bet my Māori colleagues on this side of the House are looking forward to the campaign, when they can take it to their communities that the Māori Party sold itself short to have a short-term win that will end up being a loss for them in the long run. So those members have done the deal and the Government has done the deal to make sure that this piece of legislation can get a slim majority in this House, but let us be fair: it does not achieve anywhere near what this piece of legislation should have achieved when it gets reviewed after 25 years of being enacted.

I remember when Nick Smith, about 6 years ago, stood next to a pile of planning documents—

💬 Hon Dr Nick Smith: 2 years ago.

2 years ago. Oh, it feels like such a long time. It has been 8 long years—ha, ha! He stood there and said he was going to do something about the Resource Management Act. Well, I guess he can claim that he has done something, but he has not done anything significant or of substance in this piece of legislation. What we are looking for is leadership from this Government to do something that will really help the families of New Zealand in one of the biggest issues that they have now, and that is being in a home, being able to afford a home, being able to have a home. This piece of legislation, sadly for the public, does nothing to be able to advance that.

That is a massively lost opportunity and, 6 months out from an election, I think the Government needs to be held accountable, and it will be, because if MPs like me are getting the influx of emails into their in-box from people who are saying “In the past, I’ve voted National, but because they’ve done this deal and they’ve pushed this legislation through in the manner that they have”—because it promised something significant, but it has not delivered—this Government is going to pay the electoral price for that. So it is going to be very interesting to see what happens over the next 5¾ months and to see how the Government will be held accountable for its lack of action in the biggest issue as we go into this election—that is, housing.

We were hoping for something much more significant in this piece of legislation to deal with the housing crisis in New Zealand. Nick Smith not only is the Minister for Building and Construction but is also the Minister responsible for this bill. He had a once-in-a-25-year chance to do something significant, but he let it slip through his fingers, and people know that. People know that he could have got broad-spectrum support around this House if he had given each party a bit of something. But he chose just the one party, and that party has been sold a pup. I suggest the Māori Party rings Fair Go, because exactly what has happened is that it has been ripped off.

💬 Hon Ruth Dyson: Mr Chair.

💬 Eugenie Sage: Mr Chair.

💬 Hon Ruth Dyson: Go on.

Make your minds up.

Ha, ha! Thank you, the Hon Ruth Dyson. It is incredibly disappointing. I do not think I have heard one contribution from any Government member other than the Minister. I think that is just symbolic of the whole process for this bill, which—

💬 Hon Members: Shambolic.

“Shambolic”, New Zealand First is saying, and I certainly agree that that is a term I would also use, because the select committee process was dominated by the Minister and, obviously, either backbench members have been cowed into not speaking or they are totally uninterested. I think the fact that this major bill, which amends five different pieces of legislation, including the Resource Management Act (RMA), the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environment Effects) Act, the Conservation Act, the Reserves Act, and the Public Works Act, is going through this Parliament with a majority of one vote, and yet the principal Act—the RMA—went through this Parliament unanimously in 1991. It is shameful that the Minister has pursued such a divisive course with this bill, has totally failed to engage with Opposition parties on the concerns that we had and the suggestions that we made for changes, and has just simply steamrollered ahead with a whole lot of changes that I suspect the Property Council and its members will be very happy with because of the very permissive provisions around subdivision—which meet its interests—and the provisions that undermine the public’s right to actually have a say and to help contribute to well-informed decisions.

The Government is passing this legislation by one vote, and the risk there—and the very palpable risk—is that the new Government, come September, will pass legislation that completely overturns this bill. So we have flip-flop lawmaking because the Minister—even though he talks all the time about collaborative processes—fails to engage in any collaboration around our major environmental laws. Schedule 1 of this bill has a whole prescriptive process around how councils should engage in collaborative processes, yet the Minister does not seem to have read that and has certainly not applied it to one section of the development of this bill—just completely steamrollering it through.

I endorse the comments of Kris Faafoi in terms of the Māori Party. It has given the Minister and the Government the numbers they need to pass this legislation, and yet it has failed to recognise that, other than through the iwi participation arrangements, the opportunities for iwi and hapū to participate in normal resource consent decisions have been shafted by this bill. The Māori Party has failed to recognise that Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 281 in Marama Fox’s name deals only with crops and that that does not cover ryegrass and, potentially, it may not cover trees, on which Scion has been experimenting, with the genetic modification of pine trees. There is no assurance that councils will be able to continue to prevent areas having GMOs established in them through things like ryegrass and tree crops, because the bill has got a requirement around constraining the Minister’s regulation-making powers only around GMO crops, not around GMO pasture or GMO trees. So the Māori Party has given up a huge amount and is claiming that its SOP justifies that.

Minister, this legislation will be unwound. It is a bad bill that goes to the heart of the principles of the RMA and the EEZ legislation. We are campaigning in the next few months to get into Government and to ensure that we have a major review of the RMA, so that we continue with the principles that are there in Part 2 but that we do not have all this undermining of good decision-making by cutting out the public and increasing the Minister’s powers to dictate to councils and to override local democracy.

I want to talk about clauses 1 and 2 because they are not very accurate, when you look at the title, for example—the “Resource Legislation Amendment Bill”. It should be called the “Resource Legislation (Compromise-ation) Bill”, because that would actually be a more descriptive term for what the bill does and does not do.

It does compromise the Resource Management Act in so many different ways, and New Zealand First has especially sought to emphasise the iwi participation agreements—and that includes the Māori terminology that has been inserted in the bill as well in relation to that—and all the related provisions of that. These permeate the entire bill, from one end to the other, and if you look at my amendment, it is a long list of the many and various ways in which the iwi participation agreements and all those related provisions actually do permeate the bill. We in New Zealand First say this. We say that that compromises the entire bill because it means that one section of the community is given rights that other sections of the community do not have, and the presumption is made that the Treaty of Waitangi provides a rationale for doing that.

But the truth is that the Treaty of Waitangi gives no such right to Māori iwi to have those special rights—none at all, none whatsoever. So where this came from I do not know, except I do know one thing. I know why it is in the bill. It is not necessarily because the Government itself wanted it; it is because the only way it could get this legislation through Parliament is by securing two votes from the Māori Party, and the Government was willing to compromise the whole bill in order to get what it wanted through. So this is a dirty little deal done behind closed doors in that way so the Government could get what it wanted and it has been willing to accommodate all these rather ridiculous totally unnecessary provisions that the Māori Party has sought, which compromise the entire bill.

It is not only that. Far from making the Resource Management Act (RMA) less complicated and creating less bureaucracy, those provisions create an entire new level of bureaucracy that was not in the Act before. So the Minister’s claims that this is fighting bureaucracy are totally vacuous. Not only that, it creates more expense. We will not know for some time what those greater expenses will be, but there is no doubt in my mind that it will cost a lot more. So the real effects of those iwi participation agreements will not be known for some time, but the New Zealand public will see it time after time as they look at plan changes, as they look at consents that go through the system. They will see it and they will react and I can tell the Minister right now—and the Government—that it will not be a positive reaction.

The fundamental problem that the Government has got with this bill is that it has failed to take the public with it. You only need to look at the magnitude of the objections that came in during the consultation process. Of all of those submissions that came in, by far the overwhelming number of them were against the provisions in this bill.

In my last minute, can I go on to a couple of other things. The powers of the Minister to override plans—regional and district plans—are much greater than the Minister claimed. He claimed “No, don’t worry. It’s very limited.” But, in fact, when you look at what is there, the word “amendment” is used in one section, which shows unmistakably that the Minister can require amendment of plans, not just take things out. That sort of executive power is unnecessary, it should not be in the bill, and there is a lot of objection to that amongst the members of the public.

Finally, on GE crops I agree with what other members have said about that. The Māori Party has simply been hoodwinked over that. It thinks it has achieved something by the amendment that Marama Fox put forward. The truth is she achieved nothing, did not even define the term “crops” properly, and that is another way in which the whole bill has been compromised. This bill will have to be repealed.

I am trying to recall the last time it was that this Parliament had voting together the ACT Party, the Green Party—I think I have just about ruled out pretty well every opportunity that has happened before—United Future, New Zealand First, Labour. Is that all of them? And on the other side there are National and the Māori Party. You would think that with something as important to New Zealand, and as widely supported across the political spectrum over the last three decades, the Minister would think “We’ve got a problem here.” But the Minister is content, having done a sleazy little deal with the Māori Party—and that is the only way you can describe it—to get this legislation progressed by just one vote, the narrowest of possible majorities.

I thought that vote might go last night when Marama Fox of the Māori Party described what “crops” meant in her deal with the Minister. Unfortunately, the Minister described to the Committee what “crops” meant in the bill, and they were really different definitions. The Minister said “crops” is about vegetables or cereals or fruit, and Marama Fox said “No, no, ‘crops’ is that, but also about ryegrass and pine trees.” One of them is wrong, and, actually normally I would say it will be Marama Fox because she is new to the House and she is not in charge of the legislation but, actually, given the track record, I bet it is the Minister who is wrong. But that will be the first case that is taken to court.

The Minister said that this is reducing bureaucracy and reducing litigation. The first case to be heard in court will be over the definition of “crop”, and Pure Hawke’s Bay, which has been assured by Marama Fox that it includes ryegrass and trees—I think she will be calling them as a witness. They were party to the process of discussion. They were party—not directly but involved in the discussions to give quality advice—and they have been let down. I think Marama Fox will be pretty grumpy—and I have seen her being quite grumpy in this House. Be afraid, is all that I could say to the National Government, because you should not trick members whose votes you are relying on. It is just wrong.

The National members are wrong about another thing. They are saying that this flawed bill will fix the housing crisis in Auckland. They say that is the point of it. Nick Smith is often up on his feet, quoting how many houses are being built now compared with how few houses were being built during the time of the Labour-led Government. He is wrong. Let me give you a couple of examples, Minister. In 2004—the Resource Management Act (RMA) was going then—the number of building consents issued over the whole country was 31,423. The number issued last year was 29,970. Which of those two figures is bigger? That is correct—the 2004 figure. In Auckland, where we know we have got the worst housing crisis in the country but it certainly has spread to other places, in 2004—again, when the RMA was operating—12,115 consents were granted; last year 9,930. Which of those two figures is larger? Correct—it is 2004.

So the idea that these changes will fix anything is wrong, and the idea that the RMA in these areas is causing the problem is just wrong as well. The figures show that the Minister has made a big mistake. That is what the select committee heard too. That is what the select committee heard, day after day after day. It was not from fringe, tree-hugging groups, not from groups that anyone in this House would say were extreme, but from a wide variety of organisations that made submissions, including Local Government New Zealand, including regional and district councils—Mr Chairman? [Bell rung]—including developers such as Fulton Hogan, including Fonterra. Are these fringe groups? They included airport owners, the New Zealand Law Society, and every environmental non-government organisation. They all opposed this legislation. It is a bill that it is going to make it harder to get things done, not easier.

The Māori Party had an opportunity, using their votes, which cause the majority in this legislation, to make a difference—to make a difference not just for Māori but to make a difference for New Zealand. Huge power they were wielding with the Minister and instead they crumbled for a con. I would be pretty upset if I were them and I hope they are, because they do not deserve to be treated like that.

The point that I have been making throughout other parts of the Committee stage of this legislation is that this carries on the trend of the last 9 long years of a National-led Government of reducing a citizen’s right to have a say in what happens in their area. I have had a recent example in my own electorate where an asbestos dump has been allowed in a residential area.

Can you imagine it? Just a street—you drive up it, there are houses on either side, and there is now an asbestos dump there. The independent hearings panel that approved this did so on a non-notified consent application and specifically referenced the 2009 resource management changes, and said the onus on councils had been completely tipped on its head, that it was now no longer expected that councils notified; it now was expected that councils did not notify, unless there was a really, really strong reason for them to do so. Having an asbestos dump in your street was not a good enough reason.

That is what the Minister for the Environment and his National Government colleagues, backed by the Māori Party, have caused in New Zealand, when previously we had effects-based legislation, which of course could always be improved but it was widely supported and understood in this Parliament and outside. Water conservation orders have been undermined. The Minister has significant rule-making powers, powers of appointments to the Environmental Protection Authority—extensive powers for it, now, which it has not had in the past.

I just want to make one final comment, and it is not on the frustration that most people—bar one—in this House feel about this poorly thought-through, shonkily dealt with legislation, and that is that I find the commencement stages to be of real interest. No longer do we have an Act that comes into force on X date; we have an Act that comes into force on three separate dates. That is in “Commencement”, under clause 2.

As if this legislation is not confusing enough—nearly the entire bill has been rewritten by the Local Government and Environment Committee, bits have been added, and a huge number of amendments have been discussed during the last sessions of debate. So “Subpart 2 of Part 1 … and Part 4 … come into force on the day that is 6 months after the date on which this Act receives the Royal assent.”—that is good—“Subpart 3 of Part 1 … comes into force on the day that is 5 years after the date on which this Act receives the Royal assent.”, and “The rest of this Act comes into force on the day after the date on which this Act receives the Royal assent.”

As if the deal was not bad enough; as if the flawed logic to this bill was not bad enough; and as if the process, which has been pretty mangled in this House, was not bad enough, we have three separate dates in the commencement clause of this legislation, which is just going to layer on confusion and frustration.

You had an opportunity, Minister, to really make a difference in this space, to really improve the Resource Management Act, to get all the experts together, get their identification of problems agreed, get their solutions agreed, and this Parliament would have gone forward with some willingness. It does not matter which political stripe the Minister is wearing; if we did a proper process and got agreement, we could really have made a positive difference. Instead, what we have done is we have seen a regression in our progressive resource management legislation, added an opportunity for resource management lawyers to make big money, and denied the public their right to have a say into what happens in their community.

I am happy to take a call on clauses 1 and 2 of the Resource Legislation Amendment Bill. Can I start with sharing a couple of documents that I received today from the Guardians of the Aquifer from Hawke’s Bay. One was dated 15 November, raising an issue with Minister for Māori Development, Te Ururoa Flavell, around drinking water versus drilling for oil and gas. In this letter it highlights where the Māori Party’s position was, back in November, on new section 360D, inserted by clause 105. Clearly, for many people around this country, the broad-based powers of the Minister have been a very contentious issue raised by many submitters. In this letter it urged the Māori Party to vote against 360D. In fact, in this letter it acknowledged that the co-leader of the Māori Party Marama Fox actually helped write its submission, which was an interesting piece of background.

But if I take the Committee back to the election in 2014, another letter was written to the Minister for Māori Development, Te Ururoa Flavell, raising the very important issue of fracking in the Hawke’s Bay and, probably, around the country. In this letter they ran a questionnaire that asked members of Parliament to answer two questions that the Guardians of the Aquifer asked. The questions went like this: “Certain locations and regions [in New Zealand] should be excluded from hydraulic fracturing. Among them are catchment areas for drinking water. Additionally, tectonically stressed areas, or regions with a combination of artesian ground water and migration pathways (faults), should be excluded from hydraulic fracturing operations.” There were two questions that members or political candidates were asked to answer. The first question is: do you agree with this statement?

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I am just going to ask the member to, fairly soon, relate this letter and the discussion around it to the detail of the bill.

Yes, I will, Mr Chair, and—

💬 Hon David Bennett: Come on. Sit down if you can’t do it.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Who said that?

💬 Hon Ruth Dyson: David Bennett.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I probably should have stood up in order to speak rather than advising the member like that, but I do not need advice from David Bennett of that type.

Thank you, Mr Chair. So the two questions: do we agree with this statement or disagree? It was circled “I agree”. Will your party support such exclusion zones? Again, “Yes” was ticked. That was signed by Māori Party co-leader Te Ururoa Flavell. The point I am making is that if it was not for the Māori Party, this bill would not be making its passage through this House. I have just shared with the Committee two documents where both leaders of the Māori Party have come up swinging really strongly for communities like the Guardians of the Aquifer in the Hawke’s Bay.

Nobody wanted this bill, and it was only the two votes of the Māori Party that ensured that Nick Smith, the Minister for the Environment, got this bill through the House. It is clear that a secret deal has been done with this Government outside the select committee. We have been debating this bill quite rigorously for the last two evenings, and I thought we would have had a bit more around what has been compromised in this bill.

After months of sustained pressure from Opposition parties and high-profile campaigns run out of Hawke’s Bay, the Māori Party has proposed amendments that exclude genetically modified organisms. But when we look down and examine the Māori Party, particularly the member’s own Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 281, it was raised that her understanding of what crops covered and what we got from the Minister himself were two different things.

There is this promise being made by the Māori Party members to all people, particularly those in the Hawke’s Bay, around what they have gained not only for iwi around the country but, clearly, for people passionate about the environment. What has been exposed in this House through the debating of this bill is that they have walked away empty-handed.

The other letter—and I will not go into it, but I have got it here and am happy to table it in the House—is the statement from the Māori Party that it was the iwi leaders group that was also instrumental in providing, was very instrumental in informing the Māori Party. So if we peel this back, the Māori Party has not only identified its own fault in the SOP around making it really clear what crops were for our organic growers in the Hawke’s Bay and in Northland and in Auckland, but also thrown the iwi leaders group chairs under the bus by naming them as being very, very close to the Māori Party and coming up with that SOP. We also, unfortunately, heard that Pure Hawke’s Bay, which is a reputable organic growers group in Hawke’s Bay, also was thrown under the bus by the Māori Party when Marama Fox last night indicated that it was its wording that went into her SOP. We all know that we all have relationships with different people—they help inform us as politicians. But one thing we do not do is we never throw those sources or those relationships under the bus.

It is going to be an interesting time. As this bill passes its final reading in the House, the Māori Party members will be held accountable—they will be held accountable—for their support of an absolutely flawed bill. They will be held accountable for the actions that they have taken. We look forward, when we go on the campaign trail, to them defending their position in supporting this bill, and the so-called gains, which we have uncovered are not gains at all. They have actually sold out. They have sold out organic growers in this country. They have sold out iwi Māori. They have sold out councillors. They have sold out developers. And they will be held accountable as we go on the campaign trail, which is coming up shortly.

This is a terrible bill. All the way through we have made it really clear on principle and on parts of the bill that do not protect our environment, as we all understand the Resource Management Act was originally made for. We have now turned the tide. We have gone from protecting our environment and into economic development, at all costs. There are no checks and balances in this bill. I do not commend this bill to the House. It is going to be a very strong issue as we go into the campaign this year. Nick Smith and the National Government, along with the Māori Party, will have to stand and be accountable for these actions.