COVID-19 Recovery (Fast-track Consenting) Bill

I move, That the COVID-19 Recovery (Fast-track Consenting) Bill be now read a third time.

Can I thank officials who’ve serviced the Ministers, the select committee, and the House. Can I thank the select committee for their work and also the House for the debates so far tonight. I think it’s just about all been said. I’m not going to say a lot more. We’ve not long ago heard the second reading speeches and we’ve dealt with the detail through the committee stage. I think it should be clear that this fast-track consenting bill is part of the Government’s response to support New Zealand’s recovery from the economic and social disruption caused by COVID-19.

The bill will bring forward many job-rich projects to proceed earlier than would have been enabled under usual RMA processes, thereby getting people into jobs far sooner. Processes are sped up. Environmental protections are retained as are Treaty protections.

There are three tracks. The first is listed projects. There are 11 separate projects, plus a group of papakāinga projects. They range from water storage to housing developments to road, rail, cycling, and infrastructure projects. The listed projects will create an estimated 1,700 jobs located from Kaikohe in the north to Queenstown in the south. And this is just the start, because in addition to that first track, the second track are additional projects that can be put through to a panel by Order in Council. The third track is permitted works enabled by certain agencies to be carried out on existing infrastructure without the need for resource consent. These generally smaller works will be undertaken by the New Zealand Transport Agency and KiwiRail Holdings. But there was also an ability to add local authorities and certain other agencies to that list by way of Order in Council.

This bill is a short-term intervention to stimulate the economy. Therefore, the new Act will self-repeal two years after enactment. It’s a direct response to the specific situation caused by the pandemic. And I commend the bill to the House.

💬 Erica Stanford: Mr—

The question is that the motion be agreed to—

💬 Erica Stanford: Mr Speaker? Sorry—

Those of that opinion—

💬 Hon Member: She called.

Oh, Erica Stanford.

Sorry.

💬 SPEAKER: Louder.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Pleased to take a call in the third reading of the COVID-19 Recovery (Fast-track Consenting) Bill. While we do support this bill, and I think that’s been made abundantly clear, we do want to make the point that this is a massive wasted opportunity. What a lack of vision this Government has for this country. And it doesn’t bode well for their plans of economic recovery post - COVID-19. The 11 projects listed in this bill only deliver us directly 1,700 jobs over 11 projects. The Minister had the ability to give us real economic value, and what we got was cycleways chosen over things like Dunedin Hospital, the Katikati bypass, the Mount Victoria Tunnel duplication, the Belfast to Pegasus motorway—all voted down today and not even considered. And there wasn’t even anything in Canterbury, those poor people down in Canterbury. The long-term economic value of a cycleway under the Harbour Bridge compared to a motorway, bridges, renewable energy projects—the Minister couldn’t tell us today why these projects that have limited economic value were chosen over much bigger, more visionary projects that are going to deliver this country the economic value that we need to get through COVID-19. The fact is that it was the National Party that tried to inject the vision into this bill through our Supplementary Order Papers (SOPs) that were unfortunately voted down today.

But as the Minister said today, and has said before, he doesn’t want to choke the system, indicating he knows there are a lot of good projects that can go forward to help us get through the COVID recovery. But instead of building capacity to allow us to put these projects through, all we get is 11 measly projects. What a complete waste.

We heard from the Minister in committee stage that he didn’t consider other projects, that they didn’t even ask questions around other projects or how the economic benefits might stack up—say, a cycle path versus a motorway. The biggest economic challenge of our lives, and it looks like this Government has done some pretty sloppy work and no economic analysis.

Even though they only had 11 projects—even though they only had 11 small projects—they still managed to stuff it up. The single biggest water storage project that is most important to Northland, and they couldn’t even get themselves together to get that right. The issue up there was the Ngāwhā Dam. All they did was consent, when the bill was brought to the House, for a hole in the ground not to be filled with water for potable water for Kaikohe or for horticultural projects. Then, finally, the truth came out. Why was that the case? Why was it just a hole in the ground? Well, the Minister made it very clear in committee stage. The problem was the Greens. Minister Sage, earlier in her contributions, said that the National Party doesn’t understand MMP. We understand MMP very well. MMP gives us a hole in the ground, a water storage project, a hole in the ground with no water. That’s what MMP gives us.

💬 Hon Member: Doesn’t even make sense.

Doesn’t make sense at all. Here’s how MMP has been working for the Greens. They swallow dead rats every day: Kermadecs, Campbell Island, cameras on fishing boats, and now this bill.

💬 SPEAKER: Yeah, and staying with this bill. Third reading.

With this bill. The Greens vigorously opposed any Resource Management Act changes, but they still have voted for this bill today, or they will be voting for this bill today, which goes against everything they believe. And when they did flex their little bit of muscle, they said no water in the Ngāwhā Dam. But the Government went ahead and they managed to get that in anyway, with our help. But I have to ask the Minister: why did he not come to us and ask us in the first place to help him get that across the line? Because you know what? There is no way that we would have left Kaikohe without any water; we would absolutely have backed him up in that case. But he didn’t come to us instead of just playing politics.

In the interests of time, I’ll skip forward a bit. But what I want to say is that the penny finally dropped for me in this debate that we’ve been having today. That was that acknowledgement of the fact that the Greens held up Ngāwhā; the penny dropped. That’s why we ended up with 11 relatively small-scale projects that aren’t going to deliver much economic value to this country. It’s the Greens. That’s the problem with this Government: they can’t get themselves together, they can’t collaborate and talk and get better projects, more projects in this bill. I actually feel a bit sorry for the Minister. He probably did actually look at some of the really good projects that we wanted in some of our SOPs, but he couldn’t get them across the line because the Greens held him up. It was made very evident in the Ngāwhā Dam example. It’s exactly why they couldn’t fill that dam full of water, and we had to come to the rescue in that.

That doesn’t bode well when it comes to projects in the future that get referred that have anything to do with the coastal and marine area, because the Minister for the Environment and the Minister of Conservation have to agree. Well, we’ve seen quite clearly that that’s not going to happen. So if there are any projects that are going to be referred in the coastal or marine area, I doubt very much whether or not those are going to go ahead.

This, as I said, is a massive missed opportunity. It has a huge lack of vision, there are a lack of projects to drive our economy to get us through COVID-19 recovery, because this Government can’t get themselves together to get us through. And it doesn’t bode well for the future economic recovery with these guys in charge.

With all of that said, I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m pleased to take a short call on the COVID-19 Recovery (Fast-track Consenting) Bill.

Erica Stanford, the previous speaker, talked about all of these projects, and National have given us a lot of exercise during the committee stage, bouncing up and down to do party votes. The proposals they put forward, including the four-laning of highways, without any assessment of effects, is exactly the sort of ad hoc lawmaking that National in Government was renowned for.

To the previous speaker, there were 24 projects which were put forward by Government agencies for listing in Schedule 2 to be on the fast track in the bill. Those projects were assessed against the purpose of the bill, which is to create employment and to be within the context of sustainable management. So they were assessed against the purpose. They were assessed against the criteria that the Minister must use when he or she refers a project to an expert consenting panel, and of those 24 projects, 12 were found to meet those criteria and, therefore, they were put in the bill. So it was a measured process, not the quick process that the National Party was proposing during the committee stage.

It is a mix of transport projects—road and rail, ferry, and cycling projects—and that water supply for potable water for Kaikohe. These will provide employment, but the Green Party was concerned, as were many submitters, about some key issues: public participation, and the constraints on that; climate change; and the environmental bottom lines and safeguards. So I really commend the work of the Environment Committee for responding to submissions, and the Minister for responding to our concerns, which have been articulated throughout the development of this bill—doing what a constructive Green Party has always done in Government, which is seeking to improve legislation. That work, that negotiation, and the work of the select committee have resulted in changes to the bill which have strengthened the references to Part 2 in relation to the expert consenting panel, which have increased the organisations which are invited to provide comments to the Minister in terms of the fast-track one, and which have also strengthened the references to preventing greenhouse gas emissions contributing to climate change—so making a stronger reference in the bill to climate change.

The challenge for any promoters of projects for the fast track will be that they recognise that dealing effectively with natural resources and planning effectively means doing a thorough effects assessment and knowing what natural resources we are dealing with in order to assess effects and then plan and design the project to avoid those. There was one project in Christchurch on the Ōpāwaho Heathcote River some years ago. There’s a big loop on that river through Woolston that meant that floodwaters go more slowly to the sea, so the engineers thought they would do the Woolston Cut so that floodwaters would go more quickly. They didn’t assess the fact that the saltwater wedge would go further up the river. That led to a much greater tidal influence, it led to the banks crumbling, and it led to trees dying because of that saltwater influence. So the engineers, by failing to take into account basic ecology, then had to build the Woolston barrage to prevent the water going that quickly to the sea.

So nature needs to be taken into account. The Greens have worked to strengthen the environmental safeguards in this bill. There are still issues that we have concern over such as the fact that it’s not councils that are making decisions, but it’s the expert consenting panel, and the restrictions on public participation, but throughout, we have worked constructively to improve this bill. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. In the third reading of the COVID-19 Recovery (Fast-track Consenting) Bill, we’ve spent a busy few days mostly involved in Zoom meetings but also meeting face to face each day—I think about Sunday—to get this bill back to the House, and some constructive changes have been made.

National is supporting this bill. My colleague has raised some very valid reservations around the bill. I just want to raise one reservation I have around this bill, and it is the expiry date of the bill, which is two years from when the bill gains the Royal assent. We did discuss in the committee stage, quite comprehensively, essentially, the pipeline and the process by which applicants for referred consents would go through the panel process and on through the consenting process.

The question that I have—and I didn’t adequately get an answer from the Minister—was that two years is not a long time, and given that the Minister indicated that the panel and the chair of the panel would need a fair amount of time to get processes set up, well, how long will that take? Will that be six months? That then leaves 18 months’ time for this panel to consider what could be—and the Minister acknowledged that he did not know how many consents, which does not give a long period of time by which the Act expires. Of course, there is a provision in the soon-to-be Act which allows for the consenting panels to continue their work until the consents that are in hand are dealt with. But I just wonder—and this side of the House wonders—whether the two years was just the right amount of time, because bills of this sort, or this bill in particular, was modelled on the Canterbury earthquakes legislation and the legislation which came as a result of the Kaikōura earthquakes.

This type of legislation works. We know it will work. It will get constructions going—get construction; pardon me, it’s getting late. There will be jobs. It will provide a very strong signal to particularly smaller communities that things are getting moving again. For that reason, if nothing else, I commend David Parker for his work on this bill, and we are very happy to support the bill to the House.

This is a very common-sense bill, and New Zealand First commends it to the House. Thank you.

Mr Speaker, thank you. The running theme throughout this debate has been that the Resource Management Act (RMA) is broken.

Tim van de Molen: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. Does it say split call then, Mr Speaker?

💬 SPEAKER: The speaking order is at my discretion.

It’s all right. He was a whip after I left, so I didn’t get to train him, sorry.

The running theme running through this debate has been how the RMA is broken and how we haven’t had the opportunity in the past to consider legislation which properly—

Tim van de Molen: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. Thank you, Mr Speaker. I understand the speaking calls are at your discretion, in proportion to the representation in the House.

💬 SPEAKER: Yes.

Tim van de Molen: And so a 10-minute call, in this case—I am unsure how that relates to the representation in the House.

💬 SPEAKER: Sorry, the order of speaking is something which there is some general guidance about and which I generally take account of. But, in the end, who I call is at my discretion. I have called Jami-Lee Ross for the five-minute call for which he is entitled.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. The running theme throughout this debate is how the RMA is broken. In times of crisis such as this, and when we’ve had other economic events and natural disasters, it hasn’t been fit for purpose, and so Parliament has come through and decided to have special pieces of legislation to deal with projects that we want to fast track as a Parliament and that Governments want to fund intensively to get running. For that reason, it appears as though there’s going to be unanimous support for this bill tonight.

The issue, though, is the Government could have gone a lot further. The Government should have had more projects in this bill to fast track. I don’t buy the Minister for the Environment’s answer that he gave in the committee, which was that the process would be clogged up if too many projects were put in there. In fact, the Government was the gatekeeper as to which projects got in there. The number one priority, apparently, for this piece of legislation for transport for Auckland, is the SkyPath project across the harbour bridge. Now, I don’t know what the other members in the House think, but, as an Aucklander, I’m of the view that there are many other important projects. In fact, the Government’s own Auckland Transport Alignment Project agreement with the council, the Government’s own land transport programme that they have, has many, many projects which are of higher value and importance to Auckland that should have been considered in this legislation.

I’m also very disappointed in the way in which the select committee and the committee of the whole House kept swapping back and forth with regards to the Treaty clause that’s in this bill. Now, I realise that we had some interesting discussion earlier in the evening, but the situation we ended up in was that the first bill that came in, as introduced by the Minister, had a very strict Treaty clause which meant panels had to make decisions consistent with the Treaty of Waitangi. The Environment Committee changed it, loosened it, put it back in line with the RMA. The Minister then put up a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) which would again flip the Treaty clause back so panels would have to make decisions consistent with the RMA.

It turns out that the New Zealand First Party was opposed to the Minister’s SOP. Now, normally, in situations where the New Zealand First Party and the National Party are opposed to a Minister’s SOP, that SOP would have died—that SOP would have failed. I was expecting a sensible decision to have been made whereby we would be debating a bill right now that would have a Treaty clause in line with what the RMA is.

But it turns out the National Party was voting down in their numbers, and, although a majority of the members in the House, by normal strength, would have been able to defeat the SOP, we now have a Treaty clause in this legislation which I think is too strict and I think, actually, will lead to some issues when it comes to appeals, because, now, appeals on points of law can be made by interested parties if they’re of the view that the panel made a decision that was not consistent with the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi.

Normally, under the RMA, decisions have to be made where account is taken of the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi—relevance to them is considered. But, in this case, under this bill, we now have a set up—because one party in the Parliament was voting down earlier tonight—where we will have a Treaty clause which leads to the ability for appeals to be made which could actually slow down the very projects that we want to see.

I also want to say that I do support the arguments that this is too short in time frame. The two-year expiry period should have been longer. The very fact that we’re doing this in this way is highlighting the fact that we need better RMA legislation. It highlights that when the Parliament and when the Government wants to see things fast track, we always have to go and pass a special piece of legislation. Well, now we have a special piece of legislation. We have the ability for the Minister to add more projects on. It sounds as though they are more ambitious and they do want to see more projects added on. But why only have the short two-year period? I heard Ron Mark in an earlier debate say that it could be considered where a Parliament in the future may decide to extend that two-year period out to a further five years. It should have been five years in the very first place.

But the Government’s doing the right thing. They’ve got legislation which is going to fast track infrastructure. I hope they seriously fund important pieces of infrastructure over and above what they’ve got in the bill so far, because, as it stands, it doesn’t show the type of ambition that they’ve shown in previous projects in the past.

I do want to say to Eugenie Sage: the projects proposed in our SOPs were good ones, often were costed, and often were looked at already.

I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Here we are, late on a Thursday evening, discussing this bill, a bill that represents a missed opportunity, unfortunately. We saw some fantastic Supplementary Order Papers (SOPs) brought forward through the committee stage, and I would like to commend the Minister because, actually, he engaged wholeheartedly throughout that process—quite a few hours. I do want to acknowledge that effort, and the officials for their work on it as well. Having said that, it was a shame that we didn’t see some of those SOPs put forward, in particular the extension of the Waikato Expressway to Piarere—a fantastic project, a missed opportunity—but I’m sure we will have that opportunity again in the future. So I commend this bill to the House.