Urban Development Bill

I move, That the Urban Development Bill be now read a third time.

This bill enables a new type of urban development to be undertaken in New Zealand, one that will transform communities and improve housing options; access to jobs, green spaces, and amenities; and the quality of the environment. The bill sits alongside wider system reform, such as our comprehensive review of the resource management system, with a focus on the Resource Management Act (RMA), and the Urban Growth Agenda.

Last year, this Government established Kāinga Ora with a mandate to initiate and enable urban development that is well-designed, people-focused, and ready for the future. In my second reading speech, I spoke about how the Kāinga Ora—Homes and Communities Act was an expression of a commitment to roll up our sleeves and tackle long-term problems, to work with the private sector and community organisations to fix problems that have accumulated over many years and were ignored for too long, and to be an enabler of development, and partnering with the private sector, with local government, and with iwi. This bill provides the tool kit for this work. It recognises that central government should have a much stronger role to play in the urban planning system. Central government should be an enabler of urban development that creates communities where people want to live, work, and play.

The complex urban development that needs to happen in our larger towns and cities struggles to get ahead because we need to change the ways that we develop our urban areas so that our cities can thrive and everyone can have a place to call home. Traditionally in New Zealand, really for the last century, our cities have developed by turning neighbouring countryside into suburban streets and homes. Now, that kind of horizontal expansion out by cities is still important, but we know that we need to intensify our urban environment. The second-generation growth in our cities—that is, urban intensification—is often too complex for the private sector to do on its own. These projects require work on network infrastructure, fragmented land titles, balancing different interests, and creating high urban design standards, and often all of that together, on top of the myriad of different statutes that govern urban development, creates too much risk and uncertainty for the private sector to lead these kinds of projects.

This legislation is about having a public agency—Kāinga Ora—that can partner with the private sector, with iwi, and with local government to de-risk these projects so that people will invest in them and make them happen. Now, this is before a developer needs to deal with misaligned processes and decision-making, restrictive planning rules that too often stop our cities from growing up and out, slow consenting, difficulties in amalgamating land title, and challenges around building or changing network infrastructure—or getting the commitment to build the infrastructure and the funding of development activities.

This bill addresses the barriers to complex development by creating a streamlined process that gets decisions made upfront in an integrated way, and it will enable large-scale developments to happen much more quickly. It represents a new way of doing urban development. Specified development projects that are set out in this bill are the kind of complex projects that, by and large, New Zealand has not undertaken. These projects have a scale that means they have the potential to transform our urban areas and deliver desperately needed housing and infrastructure.

The bill enables specified development projects in two main ways. The first is by creating an integrated decision-making process to reduce the risks of complex urban development projects by bringing together multiple interdependent development processes into a single approval process, without losing important checks and balances. The second is by equipping Kāinga Ora with a tool kit of development powers that it can use to overcome the barriers faced by transformational urban development projects, such as planning constraints, old and ageing infrastructure, and limited funding and financing for urban development. Each of these tools is designed to address one of these barriers, and using them together will enable multiple aspects of the urban environment to be changed with greater certainty, speed, and integration.

I want to return to this idea of Government being an enabler of development. A key feature of Kāinga Ora’s urban development tools is that they can also be used by others to deliver specified development projects through a joint venture or through delegation. From the moment we started developing the policy and the drafting of this legislation, it was always our intent that the specified development projects would be joint-venture vehicles. The special powers exercised by Kāinga Ora, but the development led, crucially, by partnerships between iwi, between local government, in places like Auckland, Panuku—Auckland Council’s development agency—and private sector developers. It’s not our intent that by inserting central government into this space, we displace the private sector or the other key actors—iwi and local government. It is our view that this legislation should be an enabler, and it’s my hope that developers will come forward, that councils will come forward, and that iwi and others will come forward with proposals to use this legislation to lead large-scale urban development projects.

It’s also my response to the Opposition’s concerns that this legislation is not doing enough to support the private sector to build. Private developers and local authorities can use these tools and the streamlined processes to deliver specified development projects. But it’s essential that the special powers are exercised transparently and accountably in a democratic way by Kāinga Ora. In addition to that, this urban development legislation does not sit on its own; the National Policy Statement on Urban Development, gazetted today, will remove restrictive planning rules that stop our cities from expanding up and out, creating an artificial scarcity of land, and will free up heightened density rules that stop the city from growing out, effectively rationing floor space. The national policy statement also removes rules that add unnecessary costs to housing development.

Our joint spatial planning work with local government in the six high-growth metro centres means that, for the first time, local authorities are planning ahead. They’re making room for growth instead of trying to stop growth, working within a 30-year time horizon and collaborating with multiple councils in a region and with iwi. We’re lining up Government agencies to provide an all-of-Government approach in the spatial planning partnerships so that schools, hospitals, and transport infrastructure is coordinated and integrated.

The RMA review, led by the Hon David Parker, is working on more fundamental change to our urban planning system, but I want to point out to members that the fundamental review of the RMA wouldn’t necessarily fix the kind of challenge that this legislation is designed to deal with, and that is the inherent complexity of large-scale urban development projects. The Infrastructure Funding and Financing Bill is also another step towards fixing a broken funding and financing system to support urban development by allowing the private sector to finance essential infrastructure to support more housing being built.

Together, all of these measures mean that this Government is delivering generational change to urban planning and urban development. We recognise that the housing crisis is a failure in public policy. It has many causes, but the two chief amongst them are a broken system for funding and financing infrastructure and a highly restrictive planning system that stops our cities from growing. It recognises that the housing crisis is a failure to ground urban planning in economics and a failure to insert central government into a space which has been left to local authorities on their own for too long.

This has been a long process, but we’re almost there, and I want to thank all of the stakeholders, the officials, who’ve contributed to this work: people in the Clark- and English-led Governments who did policy work on the creation of an urban development authority, the Productivity Commission, all of the industry bodies, the advocates, and the community groups who contributed to the policy process. I also want to thank the officials for all of the work they have done in bringing this bill to the House. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a little dispiriting to hear the Minister Phil Twyford offer his view that he has no faith in the Resource Management Act (RMA) being worked up by his colleague the Hon David Parker, as he said only a couple of minutes ago here in this House. The Minister expressed the lack of faith in his colleague and the lack of faith in a major piece of work being undertaken by his Government, which has been signalled right from the get-go of this unfortunate term of Parliament. We have yet to see any result, but, even before we have seen any proposals from Minister Parker, we hear Phil Twyford—and I’m just not quite sure what title he has these days; it’s shifted a little. Oh, urban development, there we are—urban development Minister. I think it is his number four role—slightly smaller and smaller each and every time. But to display such a lack of faith in his own Government Minister colleague’s RMA reform does not bode well for that policy process—to admit in this House that even the RMA, he said, and I paraphrase, couldn’t deal with the complexity of large-scale projects that are the intended beneficiaries of this Urban Development Bill and its processes.

Therein lies the problem with this whole piece of work, this whole suite of bills that this Government has brought to the House and has signalled that are being brought to the House. It is a chocolate box. It is a pick and mix of processes that developers, individuals, can pick from in order to undertake any kind of housing, roading, or infrastructure work in New Zealand. Is that a step forward? Not in my view. If you want to undertake a large and complex development, go ahead: you go for the Urban Development Act. If you are a small developer, go ahead: go for the COVID-19 fast-track RMA Act—or its precise name. If you need funding, no problem: go to the Infrastructure Funding and Financing Bill process, which is also going through the House. If all that fails, no problem: David Parker is bringing forward RMA reform. He’s well advanced in his work—

💬 Hon Scott Simpson: He says.

—he says—but the Minister certainly hasn’t released the independent report on the RMA that we’re all looking for.

So what is it to be if a developer seizes Tauranga in its sights and wants to undertake some large-scale complex development which involves roading, it might involve some commercial properties, it might involve infrastructure, water, waste water, all of those things? No problem—all it has to do is to make an application to undertake—

💬 Hon Shane Jones: What’s the name of this bill?

Ha, ha! Well, for Shane Jones’ information: Mr, Jones, this is the Urban Development Bill that we are discussing today, and we are in the third reading. I’ll say it again: we’re in the third reading of the Urban Development Bill.

I’ll actually just address some of the problems that this side has with this Government. It’s not just the RMA reform which is a chocolate box pick and mix selection; oh no, we’ve got the Provincial Growth Fund, don’t we? No plan, no idea, and a bit afraid they’re going to lose places like—well, their place in the House. So their solution is not a plan for all this; their solution is a pick and mix, a chocolate box of little dollops of money spread liberally around the country where they want the votes. But I digress.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): Just a little.

I just want to pull a quote from Phil Twyford around the second reading of this Urban Development Bill—Shane Jones—and I quote from Twyford: “This bill gives”—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): Please refer to members by their correct name.

—“Kāinga Ora the tools and the mandate”—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): The Hon Jacqui Dean.

—“and the duties to initiate”—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): The Hon Jacqui Dean.

—“facilitate”—I beg your pardon?

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): You knew I was talking; you carried on talking. That’s very disrespectful. You will refer to the Minister by his correct name, not just his surname.

I thought I said “Minister Twyford”.

💬 Hon Member: No, you’ve got to say “the Hon Phil Twyford”.

I beg your pardon, Madam Speaker—the Hon Phil Twyford.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): That’s better.

So Minister Twyford wasn’t acceptable? Just as a point of order.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): That’s correct; it’s not his name.

OK. Thank you. So speaking from the second reading, the Hon Phil Twyford told the House that this bill gives Kāinga Ora the tools and the mandate and the duties to initiate, to facilitate, and to undertake a special type of complex transformational urban development. We’re talking about projects that entail the building of whole new communities on a scale that would deliver thousands—thousands—of new dwellings. Where have we heard that before? Where have we heard the promise of thousands and thousands of new dwellings in this house?

💬 Hon Members: KiwiBuild.

Of course it is; it’s KiwiBuild. The Hon Phil Twyford is the author of the KiwiBuild project for building thousands and thousands of homes; he has utterly failed in that regard. To date, he has built around 400—a fail. That record, the Hon Phil Twyford, does not give rise to any confidence on this side of the House that this Government has any ability to fulfil the promise of the Urban Development Bill.

I leave the House with one last thought—not entirely just for this bill—to note that the Hon Phil Twyford has just dropped a new National Policy Statement on Urban Development today. In the context of this Urban Development Bill, it matters, because what this new policy statement on urban development provides for is that tier 1 cities—that’s the big ones—will now not be able to set building height limits of less than six storeys in city centres, and—this is really interesting—they will end minimum car park requirements. So how does that fit in with the consultative, enabling nature of the provisions in the Urban Development Bill? It doesn’t. Once again, here is this Government being entirely prescriptive. It knows what it wants. It wants urban density. It wants to go up, and it wants to get very, very dense.

This Urban Development Bill process is lengthy. It is costly. It is no improvement on the RMA. We look forward to seeing some proper real work on the RMA. We do not support this bill.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, and what a pleasure it is to speak this afternoon on the Urban Development Bill. Can I say that I know—let me digress a little—that on that side of the House, they do secretly support this, because I know several of their members have come to me saying, “What a fantastic piece of work. It’s about time.” I know when I read through this, they absolutely love it. I know the good people of the East Coast sitting up there will say, “We love this too.” So there we are.

This is a fantastic bill, because what it does do is—and I am surprised, because I know the member has a local government background, has experience from local government, and this is the near-perfect piece of legislation as part of a suite of legislation to help local government and other partners bring about housing and infrastructure in their communities. It fast tracks it through and brings about the transformation that, actually, only documents talk about. I always see lots of documents in council buildings which talk about the fantastic planning that could happen, should happen, but doesn’t happen.

This is the bill that’s going to make the transformation a reality, because what it does is it brings about all the nuts and bolts to put in place a community, new communities, a whole lot more easily than can be done right now. I know, representing Wellington South-east, we have corridors from the Basin Reserve up through to Newtown there that would benefit 100 percent from this type of legislation, led by Crown entity Kāinga Ora, who would facilitate this in partnership with the local authority and those partners already in place, and there are two. Despite that side of the House saying that there’s development right now under way being brought to some disrepute—and I was talking to that developer, and he’s well under way. That’s the sort of person that will bring about practical and just real change to the housing market. I know that the Wellington City Mission, too, is planning a major development for transitional and emergency housing. Players are already in this space wanting to make a difference. This piece of legislation makes that happen, and it makes it happen a whole lot more easily than it happens right now.

I’m not going to talk too long, because this is just too good to be true and I want to see this through. I want to see this enabled and enacted so those on the ground wanting to build more homes for Kiwis right across New Zealand, particularly in our urban communities, can just get on with it. I commend this bill to the House.

Well, thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s interesting to follow Paul Eagle, a man who we could tell, as a House, didn’t really have his heart in it. He’s far more interested, I think, in thinking and planning about his urban development, which is, ultimately, to become the mayor of Wellington City, and he’ll be doing it, I’m sure, as soon as he can extricate himself from the Labour Party caucus, which won’t be very far away.

We heard earlier on from the Minister the Hon Phil Twyford, in this debate, a sort of apologetic justification, a rationale, for the establishment of this urban development State agency that he wants to establish under this piece of legislation. The apology that he made was that he didn’t have faith in his colleague the environment Minister, the Hon David Parker, in achieving the kinds of reforms necessary to the Resource Management Act that would facilitate sensible, long-term, intergenerational urban development planning in New Zealand, and that has been lacking. That planning has been lacking.

In fact, the last National-led Government had established a process to develop a range of urban development authorities, but, no, true to form in their standard, old-fashioned, socialist ways, a Labour-led Government, instead of giving free enterprise and the private sector an opportunity to thrive and grow and develop urban environments of the sort that this country desperately needs, they’ve reverted to type and have developed a good old-fashioned, 1960s-style, centralised Government agency—a huge Government agency and a bureaucracy—to actually squeeze out the role of the private sector in urban development, to squeeze them out, because, ultimately, in their heart, this Labour-led Government doesn’t have any faith in the private sector. They want to be like most socialist Governments all around the world, who seem to relish the opportunity to tell people how to live their lives, how to spend their money, and how to make decisions, and they want that to be done from here centrally, from Parliament, issuing proclamations and decrees from Parliament, from the Beehive, and a State-run agency to do the job that, actually, the private sector, given half the chance and the right kind of regulatory and legislative framework, can do very, very well indeed.

If we look around the world to examples of where urban developments have been done in a way that is refreshing, vibrant, new, and going to create improved lifestyles for people, we look to places like—I don’t know—the Darling Harbour in Sydney or to Docklands in London or to the developments that have occurred in Melbourne. What is the common feature there? Well, the common feature there is not that you have a centralised, bureaucratic, State-run monopoly on good ideas but, actually, you let the private sector have a go, have a crack, and you smooth the pathway to allow that to occur in a way that is not bureaucratic, that is not State-run by a huge army of civil servants who actually, in the end, probably slow the process down. For the Minister the Hon Phil Twyford to stand up in his second reading speech and, essentially, give an apology as a rationale for this piece of legislation is an incredibly sad indictment on this Government.

You know, on this side of the House, we do have confidence in the private sector, in private entrepreneurs, and in business to do what they can do best, to do it profitably, to do it well, and to do it efficiently. But we have to make sure that the regulatory and environmental legislative framework is sufficient to enable them to do it. What really is at the nub of this issue is what’s required is some wholesale reform of our planning and environmental legislation. My colleague and friend the Hon Jacqui Dean made passing reference to it in her very good contribution in this debate, in that, really, at the root of the problem here is the Resource Management Act. We on this side understand and know that this piece of legislation actually wouldn’t be required if our primary planning legislative statute was doing the job that it was designed to do.

What we’ve decided to do on this side of the House is to take a very appropriate approach to it. Our leader, Judith Collins, has announced only a few days ago, on the back of the largest infrastructure plan and spend in this country’s history—she tacked on the end a very good piece of policy, which is to get rid of the Resource Management Act, actually to get rid of it, because its time has been and gone. Our opportunity now is to do one of the suggestions that the Environmental Defence Society has put up, and this is ahead of the report of Tony Randerson QC, whose report is sitting on the Minister for the Environment’s desk awaiting eventual publication. We want to see what that does, but, in the meantime, we take the view that, actually, our primary planning statute is not serving properly the role and objective that we need it to as New Zealanders, and it’s certainly not serving us in our environmental protection as well. So we think that the best thing to do is to start again. It’s run its course. It’s the subject now, sadly, of scorn, derision, and ridicule by almost every single New Zealander, and it’s time to start again. What actually we need is a proper planning statute, a proper planning Act—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): Mr Simpson, you’ve got four minutes left. You don’t have to take the whole four minutes, but in that time—

Oh, why not, Madam Speaker? I think members—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): —would you mind talking to the bill and not talking over me. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): It’s the Urban Development Bill, third reading.

Yeah, I know—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): Excellent.

—and the Urban Development Bill is only necessary because our primary planning statute isn’t working. If it was working, we wouldn’t need this piece of legislation. If it was working in the way that it was designed to, we wouldn’t need this. Actually, what we do need is some urban development, and we need it soon and we need it quickly and we need it rapidly. But using this methodology of a big, cumbersome State agency to do it is not, in our view, the way to do it. We think that there’s a more nimble, nuanced, flexible approach to it, and that’s why we’re going to be voting against this piece of legislation: because it won’t do what the Hon Phil Twyford thinks it will do unless there is proper and sensible radical reform of our resource and planning legislation. We oppose this legislation.

This bill has been carefully crafted. It builds upon the debris of nine wasted years under the former regime, where, despite a host of attempts, each intervention worsened the statutory framework for resource management in New Zealand, hobbled the ability of private enterprise to deliver housing outcomes, worsened the prospects of landowners, and, quite frankly, drove investors out of the field of expanding the industrial estate within New Zealand. It has taken our colleague the Hon Phil Twyford to bring forward the Urban Development Bill.

The essence of this bill is a statutory mechanism enabling Kāinga Ora, after it’s followed a process called the specified development project process, to assemble disparate blocks of land and to bring them into a coherent whole, thus enabling developments to take place. Whilst there will be opportunity outside of the heart and the more densely populated areas of metropolitan New Zealand, as my colleague Mr Eagle said, there are a host of areas in our capital city that will definitely benefit from the implementation once it comes out of the House and has been ratified by the Governor-General. So our party has not a sliver of doubt in supporting the Urban Development Bill, an overdue increase in statutory measures to affect societal outcomes in the form of better housing and a higher quality of life. We support the bill.

What an exciting day. Here we are, under urgency, passing all these laws. We get the opportunity to talk about the Urban Development Bill and even to listen to the member who has just spoken so knowledgeably about the housing industry. My first thing I’d say to the member who has just resumed his seat, the Hon Shane Jones, is if this was so important—and I’d just remind him that National actually proposed this during the term of office when we were last in power, so that’s three years ago. If it was so important, why has this bill taken this long to get to the House, three years later? So that’s the first thing. The first thing is that it has been an absolutely tardy response to something that should have been a long time ago and picked up because National had done the hard work on it.

The second thing I’d say to the Minister, or the member who has just resumed his seat, is that building 400 houses hardly makes a big difference to the 30,000-odd houses that are being constructed each year in New Zealand. And the Government’s efforts of building 400 houses over the last three years is really not part of the scene.

The third thing I would say to him is that if he actually understood the housing sector in New Zealand, it is particularly unusual—for a start, the top 20 builders normally account for about 25 percent of all new house builds in New Zealand. The New Zealand Government over the long term has only accounted for between 1 and 3 percent, and 400 houses over the last three years would put that at the bottom end of that spectrum. And the rest—three-quarters of the houses built in New Zealand—are built by one-, two-, or three-person building firms. So this should be seen in that context.

As I said, in many cases around the world, urban authorities have worked well, and there are a number of examples that people have quoted: Melbourne, Sydney, Toronto—all those sorts of stuff. Normally, they work in the context of big catalytic change, big areas that have been subject to absolute change and regeneration in an urban sense. We support the principle. We introduced the concept. But the issue with this bill, as it’s meandered its way through select committees, and then there’s some form of ministerial intervention over the last three years to slow it down, is that it is a cumbersome bill and it has some issues with it, as the New Zealand Law Society and as the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment—a whole raft of people—have identified.

It’s just interesting, even with setting up the specified development project, the role that Kāinga Ora has in it. Virtually every aspect is controlled and initiated by Kāinga Ora. The ability for third parties to be having an input in it is quite limited, and I think that is part of the issue with this. The thing is that we’ve already seen the impact of this. We have seen Kāinga Ora going out and poaching consenting staff—in fact, their best consenting staff—out of Auckland Council. This is where Kāinga Ora is going to first start this: they’re out there in the market paying up to $15,000 more per annum to these people to entice them from Auckland Council, across this entity here, poaching them, and putting the rest of the private sector, who is trying to build houses, in a worse position because now they’re finding it hard to get consenting officers.

So these bills need to be seen in the modicum of what’s going on. But I’d say this: why has it taken three years for this bill to progress to this point? It’s a shame on the Government, led by Labour but cohabitated with a number of other parties.

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. Tēnā koutou e Te Whare. I am inspired by this bill because it will enable us to create towns and cities and neighbourhoods that are vastly more livable than what we currently have. I can imagine—in fact, I’ve been to cities overseas, population 200,000, around the same size as Wellington City, situated in a comparable region, a city called Freiburg, which has five light rail lines—actually, I think seven now. They were building two more when I was there. They had two neighbourhoods that had been developed around the year 2000 that were almost car-free. This gave an incredible choice to residents of that city. Whereas, in most parts of New Zealand, there are very few choices. People have to live in a house that’s often not near shops, not near where they work, not in the centre of town; that’s usually too unaffordable for people. The public transport options aren’t as good as we would like—of course, we’re working on that. But where the house is located—whether it’s close to amenities, shops, schools, parks—is important, and, whether it has good public transport links from the beginning, that gives people choice.

So in this neighbourhood called Vauban in Freiburg, you can hear birdsong, you can hear children laughing. In this small neighbourhood, the highest development is four storeys. Most of the places have been developed as multi-family buildings that were designed by the families themselves. They hired an architect together and they built two, three, or four storeys. They have five parks in this neighbourhood, and the light rail line was built before the housing was. In fact, the tradies showed up on the light rail line for work. It’s also connected to the central city by very wide walkable and cyclable paths. Families who want to own a car, of course, can; they just have to park it on the outside of the neighbourhood. And there are car-share cars, which every person who owns the public transport pass has access to.

Now, imagine living in this kind of community. It means that you can walk right down to the shops, that houses were built to the highest energy efficiency standard—incredibly warm, many with solar panels, and all of them surrounded by lush green gardens. This type of living isn’t a dream. It exists—[Interruption]

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): I’m sorry to interrupt the member. Mr Bennett and Tim van de Molen, I’m actually having difficulty hearing the speaker. So if you wouldn’t mind going into the lobby for your conversation, that would be more respectful. Thank you. Sorry, Julie Anne Genter.

Living in this type of neighbourhood is entirely possible, and yet it is impossible in New Zealand right now. It’s been nearly impossible for the co-housing developments to create these sorts of jointly shared housing developments that weren’t required to have a car park in front of every single dwelling or have a garage on the side. So what we want is more choice. I mean, people who want to live in a stand-alone house and have two or three or four or five cars, they’ve got that option. It’s not particularly affordable, but many people are forced into that because there’s a lack of affordable housing. There’s a lack of quality, sufficient developments within the urban area that are connected by fast, frequent public transport and those safe walking and cycling routes. So what this bill does, in and of itself, is just enable that more coordinated development.

I could give another example. I was in Copenhagen, where a joint initiative between the city and the State was developing new housing around—they were pushing the port out into the harbour, and they were able to develop heaps of new housing, 25 percent of which was social or public housing, some of which was market housing; all of it around a frequent rapid transit route, which was being built. The metro was being built out—and with schools. There you get complete neighbourhoods with a variety of different types of people of different ages. But the amenity that exists when you have that option—you have those quiet, safe streets for the kids. That’s something that I want for my child. I know many other people in New Zealand would want that. What this bill will do is finally enable more of that type of coordinated development that starts with the rapid transit links and the safe walking and cycling routes, that provides a range of different housing types. So there isn’t just the stand-alone house, but there’s a whole range for families of different sizes, people of different ages, and it’s far more affordable.

Any time I’ve gone out and talked to New Zealanders and given a presentation of what can be done with very high-quality urban design and smart thinking, people say they love it. They want that here. So what this Government is finally doing is getting rid of some of the barriers to this type of development, to more affordable housing, so that younger people have the opportunity to live within a city. Of course, we have to invest in those fast, frequent public transport links, and we have to make cycling safe, but there’s such a huge opportunity in that. You know, in that town of Freiburg I talked about earlier, it’s not a huge city. Nearly 50 percent of the trips are walking or cycling trips. People of all ages use their bike to get around in all weather because it’s safe and practical. And, of course, the consequences of that are that transport is more affordable. So it’s better for their economy. They have higher productivity—something you would think the National Party would care about, but, of course, they don’t. So when you enable safe walking and cycling within the city centre, you make it easier for people to get around at lower cost and you reduce pollution through carbon emission and you reduce noise.

This bill will enable us to have the coordination to have high-quality development, like we did see in Hobsonville Point, which was, of course, started by the last Labour Government and working in conjunction with Waitakere District Council. But, ultimately, this is all about giving people more choice, and it’s about creating the types of towns and cities that we would love to live in, that we can afford to live in, that are going to protect us from climate change, and that are going to reduce pollution. All of this is entirely possible, and thank goodness we have a Government that is actually committed to taking action on climate change, that is committed to solving the housing crisis, and that is committed to enabling the type of high-quality towns and cities and neighbourhoods that many New Zealanders have been longing for, and this bill is just one step on our plan to deliver that. So the Green Party is supportive of this bill. I commend this bill to the House.

Well, that was a very interesting address from the Hon Julie Anne Genter. What I heard her say was they support this bill because it’s going to streamline a whole lot of things and get urban development happening. But I’ve heard speeches from the Greens recently opposing the COVID-19 Recovery (Fast-track Consenting) Bill, which is all about building things, roads, and providing jobs and economic growth in this country. So how is it that the Green Party can have two stances? I’m confused by that contribution.

I’m not going to speak too long. We have some concerns about this bill. We’ve raised them in the select committee, and we’ve raised them today with Minister Twyford. We got some satisfactory answers. We also found that the Minister wasn’t on top of the specifics of this bill. I’m concerned about this Crown agency having the power to acquire land willy-nilly. I’m concerned about the compensation. There are other aspects that concern the National Party as well.

But, if I can, just for the last half a minute of my contribution, can I acknowledge a colleague who’s going to be standing up here very shortly, the Hon Anne Tolley, in giving her valedictory speech. I have been in Cabinet with Anne Tolley for quite a period of time. She served this Parliament and her constituency of East Coast and Napier incredibly well over 21 years. We’re sorry that she’s leaving the National Party, but I wish her well—more time with Allan and the grandchildren. Congratulations, and well done.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. It’s a privilege to be able to speak on the Urban Development Bill. It’s a real shame that not all parties within this House are voting for such a good piece of legislation, particularly when there’s complaints of houses being torn down and land having lain vacant for so long, that there’s opposition to actually making progress and streamlining the ability for building houses even faster than what we are doing already.

We know that we need to intensify our urban environment, and we also need to know that such projects require a lot of work in terms of infrastructure, in terms of how we get that land and how we create high urban development standards, and often that creates a lot of risk for our developers. What we will do is enable specified developments and projects in two main ways, and we’ve seen that happen exactly in the Hutt Valley with Ēpuni, where we have 153 houses being built on land that has lain vacant there for over eight years. So right now, when we’re building on that land, having streamlined processes with the local council, with the way to build greater intensification right next to schools and rapid transport, that is the way that we have high-quality developments within our cities, that provide much needed housing for people who are waiting. So I commend this most excellent bill to the House.

I’ll take a very brief call on the Urban Development Bill, following the excellent speech by my friend and colleague Andrew Bayly. He asked the House why it had taken three years for this Government to get this legislation before the House. The answer is absolutely easy: it’s in the name of the Hon Phil Twyford. I’m surprised it’s even here.

I want to conclude my comments by also acknowledging the valedictory about to take place by my friend and colleague since I’ve been in this Parliament and the wonderful contribution that Anne Tolley has made to the democracy of New Zealand.

It’s a pleasure to take a very brief call on this really important bill. This is an incredibly important bill in the context of our acute housing shortage. What it’s going to do is allow us to do these complex urban developments that we really need to be doing, taking into account where you’ve got areas with multiple landowners, where you’ve got infrastructure that’s ageing and may need to be moved. So, basically, this bill gives us the powers and the processes to be able to do this. I commend this bill to the House.