Point England Development Enabling Bill

I want to speak to the title clause. Point England Development Enabling Bill—well, what is in a name? There is no clue in the name of this bill that helps you to understand the level of anger and cynicism and disenchantment that this bill has created in the community of Point England. Is there anything wrong with development, with housing, as set out in the bill? It is a bill about development. No. Everybody in Auckland understands that we desperately need to build more houses. People want to see development, but they do not want to see it at all costs. The fact that Auckland needs more houses built, that it needs more development, as this bill purports to deliver, is not some kind of alibi for every madcap hare-brained scheme that Nick Smith comes up with, and that is what this bill is.

Is there anything wrong with “Enabling”? Well, apart from the fact that the bill cuts across the Reserves Act, and the Resource Management Act, and the established legislative democratic processes designed to give communities a say about developments that are happening in their communities, and trying to ensure that the right questions are asked about the environmental effects of the proposed development—apart from that, there is nothing inherently wrong with a development project. In fact, I would argue that if the Government and Nick Smith had gone about this differently they could have done the enabling of this project. They could have pursued the development ambitions for this 12 hectare patch of land that we are talking about, without actually poisoning the well of public support for this project.

What is more, there is nothing wrong with an enabling bill that seeks to deliver up a patch of land that can be used as commercial redress in a Treaty settlement. There is nothing wrong with that at all. As speaker after speaker in this Chamber has pointed out through the course of this Committee stage debate, there is widespread respect and understanding for Ngāti Paoa and their aspirations to settle their Treaty settlement and move ahead, to build a platform at Point England for their people to have a marae, to have a place that they can call their own, and, actually, to build an economic base.

So there is nothing wrong with those things, those ideas that are all inherent in the title of this bill, the Point England Development Enabling Bill. But Nick Smith has, as he has so many times before, made a pig’s ear of this project, this Point England Development Enabling Bill, which had—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): I am going to sort of warn the member that just repeating the name of the bill over and over again gets to the point of being repetitious. It is a very narrow debate—the debate on clause 1—following a full Committee stage. So I am going to ask the member to confine himself to relevant matters, and I warn him there are not many.

Thank you, Mr Chairman. In relation to “Development Enabling” in the title, what the Minister has done with this bill is to take precious parkland at Point England away from a local community that treasures that parkland and strongly believes that that parkland at Point England is needed not for development but for future generations. It is a community that is very aware that under the intensification plans of the Tāmaki Regeneration Co., it is going to have an extra 20,000 people living there, right across the fence from the recreation reserve, as it is now. That is why there is a level of cynicism and disenchantment about this bill.

I want to say also that it is an enabling bill for Treaty settlement legislation that will follow in this House. Labour has made it very clear—in fact, we have put it in writing in our minority view, as part of the commentary—that we will support Ngāti Paoa’s Treaty settlement process when the Treaty settlement bill comes to this House because we are part of a cross-party consensus in this House that holds Treaty settlement very dear. This is an enabling bill. It has some objectives that on the face of it sound worthwhile—

I am happy to take a call on the title and commencement of the Point England Development Enabling Bill. It has been an interesting debate to be part of, and I want to reflect on the title that this bill has been given and possibly some more appropriate titles that could apply to it. I would suggest that it could be called, quite appropriately, the Point England (Sir Robert Muldoon Memorial) Bill because this area, of course, is in the former Tamaki electorate, and contained within the bill are some of the kinds of centralising tendencies that we saw from that National Party Prime Minister, such as a willingness to override democratic norms, to override community voices, and to override due process.

In the debate that we have heard in this Committee stage on this bill, it has been raised time and time and time again that there could have been a better way through this bill and that with a willingness on behalf of the Government to sit down and negotiate and look at all of the options, we could have achieved something really good for Point England here. We could have achieved something really good for Point England that met the objective that all of us share to have a sustainable, enduring, and just Treaty settlement for Ngāti Paoa—and I do not think there is a member in this Committee who does not support that—and that could meet the objectives of supporting the Point England Reserve, which is right here in the title, and that is what we should be focused on. That is what we should be focused on.

That reserve has protections under legislation that this Parliament passed in the Reserves Act, and one of the key features of this bill is that it fundamentally changes Point England Reserve. It strips away the existing protections that that reserve has under the Reserves Act, and the core protection in the Reserves Act that the reserve has is the right for the benefits of that reserve to the local community to be paramount. Instead of going through a process to determine that, as we would usually have done under the Reserves Act, this bill, the Point England Development Enabling Bill, enables development on that reserve—development that may very well be contrary to the interests of that reserve and the community that it serves. So it runs entirely contrary to the treatment of reserves in this country under the Reserves Act. Enabling residential development on a precious piece of public open space—as this bill does, and as is reflected in the title of this bill—is simply unacceptable and inappropriate.

Let us return again to those first couple of words in the title, “Point England”. We have heard from the Minister in the chair, Nick Smith, time and time again through this debate that, supposedly, this is a reserve that is not particularly valuable and whose amenity is limited, and we have had the canard about the cows, supposedly. Well, actually, we have heard from submitters and we have heard from members of the community that this is actually an incredibly valued reserve. They have submitted and they have emailed and sent us some pictures. These photos show the land, supposedly, that the Minister does not think is of value to the community, but here we have kids in the triathlon and we have people playing kilikiti, and of course we had submission after submission talking about the ecological value of Point England Reserve.

We had senior ecologists from the Auckland Council saying that at the very least, before we go down this track of revoking the reserve status of a piece of reserve land that has significant ecological value, and in particular—[Interruption]

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I am going to interrupt the member, but I am doing it to warn the Minister in the chair that, by both hand gestures and comments, he is reflecting on my chairing and that he is to cease.

We heard from Auckland Council that because of the ecological value that is inherent in the reserve—and it is also, of course, one of the things that is protected in the Reserves Act and is stripped away by this bill—there should at the very least have been an ecological assessment to determine whether the development that is enabled on this site by this bill is appropriate, given the flora and particularly the fauna that is on that site, but through the course of this debate we have not heard any substantive response from the Minister on that point.

So I very proudly stand here with the Labour Party to say that the title of this bill is entirely inappropriate, that this bill itself is not something that we should be supporting, and that Point England Reserve is a valued reserve and it is not a site that is appropriate for development. What we know, of course, is that there is ample opportunity for development in that community. It is currently slated for 20,000 additional homes under the Auckland Unitary Plan. The way that we do good quality development is to plan it, have democratic input, and then support it with high-quality, public open space. We do not do it by ram-raiding the high-quality, public open space in the first instance. In fact, contrary to the principles of good development, this bill, which carves up a valued reserve, compromises good quality development in the future in Point England. Thank you.