Motions — Exposure Draft and Terms of Reference for Inquiry on Natural and Built Environments Bill: Parliamentary Paper—Referral to Environment Committee

Madam Speaker, I seek leave to move a motion without notice referring the exposure draft and terms of reference for an inquiry on the Natural and Built Environments Bill: Parliamentary Paper to the Environment Committee for consideration.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Leave is sought for that course of action. Is there any objection? There appears to be none.

I move, That the Natural and Built Environments Bill: Parliamentary Paper on the exposure draft be referred to the Environment Committee for consideration in accordance with the following terms of reference:

1. The purpose of the inquiry is to provide feedback on the extent to which the provisions in the exposure draft of the Natural and Built Environments Bill will support the resource management reform objectives, to:

a) protect, and where necessary, restore the natural environment, including its capacity to provide for the well-being of present and future generations

b) better enable development within environmental biophysical limits including a significant improvement in housing supply, affordability and choice, and timely provision of appropriate infrastructure, including social infrastructure

c) give effect to the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and provide greater recognition of te ao Māori, including mātauranga Māori

d) better prepare for adapting to climate change and risks from natural hazards, and better mitigate emissions contributing to climate change

e) improve system efficiency and effectiveness, and reduce complexity, while retaining appropriate local democratic input.

2. The select committee is asked to pay particular attention to objective (e) when providing their feedback on point 1.

3. The select committee is also asked to collate a list of ideas (including considering the examples in the parliamentary paper) for making the new system more efficient, more proportionate to the scale and/or risks associated with given activities, more affordable for the end user, and less complex, compared to the current system.

4. For the avoidance of doubt, the scope of the inquiry is limited to the following:

a) feedback on the exposure draft

b) feedback on the material in the parliamentary paper that provides rationale for the clauses in the exposure draft

c) collating a list of ideas for point 3 above.

And that the committee report back to the House with any policy recommendations to the Government by 18 October 2021 and that it have the authority to meet on Fridays during the sitting of the House and during an evening after 6 p.m. on a day on which there has been a sitting of the House, despite Standing Orders 193 and 196.

Can I begin by thanking the House for granting leave, given that the report-back is in the middle of October and it’s quite a complex piece of work that the committee is being asked to undertake. The additional time that that accords by allowing the committee to call for submissions immediately and start getting its briefing from departmental officials I’m sure will be appreciated by the committee.

I’m not going to go into a lot of detail, but I think there’s general agreement across the House that the Resource Management Act (RMA) has passed its use-by date and hasn’t really achieved the purpose, which was to protect the environment and enable development. In truth, processes take too long, they cost too much, and it hasn’t been successful at protecting the environment against cumulative effects. The RMA’s theory was that we would avoid, remedy, or mitigate adverse effects—in the end it’s generally been “mitigate” rather than “avoid”. As a consequence, environmental services have been sliced off like a salami having a slice taken off time and again. That’s the reason why we’ve had degrading water quality, and it’s also failed in its role, really, in respect of greenhouse gas emissions. In addition to that, it obviously hasn’t enabled enough housing supply to keep up with the demand for housing, and that’s not the only reason why we have a housing crisis in New Zealand, but it has contributed to it.

The new legislation moves or proposes to move to an outcomes focus rather than an effects basis, and those outcomes are to be specified in the national planning framework, which is explained in the explanatory note that’s going to the select committee. That will include bottom lines on things like water quality. But, for the first time, it will also have positive prescriptions in there to require positive outcomes for infrastructure development and housing. Although there is some provision in respect of housing in the current National Policy Statement on Urban Development, there will be a more holistic view to this. It works in combination with the proposed Strategic Planning Act, which will provide high-level strategic planning by region. The number of plans will chunk down from around 100 to about 14. We say “about” because we’re not quite finalised as to what we’re going to do in the north of the South Island, where there are a couple of unitary authorities. But, essentially, it will reduce the number of plans from 100 to 14, which is an enormous reduction.

One of the requests of the select committee is that they try to harvest everyone’s ideas as to how we can drive proportionate processes, how we can have a system that requires less consents. Where consents are required, the processes that are run to resolve sometimes the inherent tension between development and environment—how can we run processes that are more cost effective and proportionate to the issues that are being considered?

I would ask for the support of the House for the motion and I’m interested to hear colleagues from around the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Thank you, Minister Parker, for your patience this evening. It’s been appreciated.

The exposure draft that we’ve seen for the first time today is an interesting document, partly because it’s relatively light on detail, and I know that that’s part of the reason that it’s going to the select committee for consideration before an eventual piece of legislation will be prepared, and it will then go back to select committee for further consideration. So this is quite an unusual step, but, as Minister Parker has indicated, I think that there is unanimity across the House that the existing Resource Management Act legislation has ceased to be effective. It has ceased to be fulfilling what was once a grand objective back in the early 1990s that would see it providing for our built environment and also for our natural environment, and the sad reality is that after those years have transpired, a document that originally was made up of about 300 pages of black-letter law now runs to something like 900 pages and has, I think, been amended substantially 18 or 19 times. It’s practically incoherent and unintelligible to laypeople. It’s time for this House, I think, to look carefully at future planning laws and also at how, as a country, we best protect our beautiful and natural resources.

On this side of the House, we’ll be working diligently as the exposure draft is looked at by the select committee. We’ll be interested in testing out the detail, filling in some of the gaps, and asking the questions about how this new piece of legislation will effectively overcome some of the challenges of the current existing legislative and regulatory regime that we find ourselves in, because we aren’t yet convinced that this process of what will, effectively, be three pieces of legislation is going to achieve that. We’re willing to be convinced, but we want to test it out, and that’s what we’ll be doing at select committee.

So thank you, Minister, for going through this process. It is a unique experience, and it will be a process that, hopefully, will bring out the best of our parliamentary legislature and the system that we have, but that doesn’t mean that it gets a free ride. It means that it will be tested, probed, and analysed not only by the parliamentary Opposition but by outsiders: NGOs, stakeholders, developers, and environmentalists around the country. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. The Green Party welcomes the release of the first draft of the first of three bills to replace the Resource Management Act (RMA), the Natural and Built Environments Bill, and, like Mr Simpson, also welcomes the exposure draft process. It is only a 12-week process—we have to report back by 18 October—so really appreciate the fact that the House has given leave tonight because otherwise the hard-working Environment Committee would have one week less to consider it and report back.

The Resource Management Act gets blamed for a lot of things which are not its fault. Any legislation which is at the interface of human interaction with nature—how we use land, water, air, sea space; what human activities we undertake and how we do them—is always going to be a source of tension: conflicts between our responsibilities to Papatūānuku and what many assert as their rights over their land. And I don’t think this bill will be any different. It is the fact that we are getting, really, the purpose and the heart of the bill at select committee to invite public submissions on. We will be wrestling with that same conflict.

I went back and just skimmed through Our Common Future, which was a report of the Brundtland Commission, the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987. That report was really the genesis of the concept of sustainable management in the RMA. The Brundtland report talked about sustainable development, but a lot of the thinking back in 1987 was that the environment didn’t exist as a sphere separate from humans, and it was naive to even think that. But the environment is where we all live, it’s where development happens as we attempt to improve our lot within this abode of the environment, and the report said the two are inseparable. So we will still be dealing with that tension and that’s why I think it is really helpful to have in the Government notice of motion the requirement that the select committee collate a list of ideas about how we make the new system more efficient, more effective, more affordable, and less complex. As many have noted, a piece of legislation that has grown to 800 pages in length to plans which are whole tomes which are impenetrable to people seeking to undertake activities, which are obtuse—we need to really simplify that down.

So in terms of new ideas about how we make the system work better, I’m reminded of the first district plan, which became operative under the RMA, which was the Ashburton district plan. The first time the parties had really engaged with each other over significant natural areas, it might be said—this was way back in the early 1990s—was in the Environment Court in mediation on appeals that had been lodged on that plan. We need to have processes at the front end of the planning process where the different parties can get together, can recognise what they have in common, and make it so much easier for the council then to—or in this case, it will be the committees that have mana whenua, council, and other representatives on them—frame that plan. Are they processes like citizens’ assemblies, where a representative range of people deal with the issues that are causing tension in a region and work out what some of those common solutions are?

Commissioners are going to have much more of a role in having panels of commissioners hear the plans. Now, some of those commissioners at the moment will be acting as expert witnesses. Presenting evidence on resource consents for irrigation takes one month, and then they might be a commissioner on a panel hearing submissions on a resource consent subsequently. We need commissioners to be genuinely independent. That goes to issues, I think, around their tenure, and having a permanent body of commissioners might be one of the ideas that comes up through this process. So I would really welcome submissions from across Aotearoa, but from people who have got skills in alternative dispute resolution, because we need to find ways of getting to agreement without that adversarial process always of being in front of the courts.

The national planning framework, which is dealt with in this bill, is one of the significant changes, I think, in terms of the way I understood it might roll out from the Randerson review. The Randerson report was a very comprehensive and commendably clearly written, accessible report. It highlighted the need to make sure there was more integration across the instruments of national direction, national policy statements (NPSs), national environmental standards, and the like. What I see in the exposure draft of the bill, the national planning framework is a suite of national direction which will happen through regulations and it’s not clear, although the Minister did comment in answer to a question in the House today, as to whether the independence of a board of inquiry will assist with that process. At the moment, under the RMA, the board of inquiry process is very helpful in hearing public submissions and providing very cogent advice, as the board of inquiry chaired by Judge Sheppard did in relation to the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management. The fact that then National Government changed that NPS was unfortunate but there was transparency between what came out of the board of inquiry and then what Government proceeded to do. And then, of course, Minister Parker as environment Minister has subsequently changed it and significantly strengthened it.

We need a robust process for ensuring that that national planning framework does provide good direction and that there is good public consultation in it and so we’ll be very interested on the submissions that come forward as to how we can best do that. It’s only a very slim exposure draft—18 pages—but it does deal with the heart of that first tranche of legislation. I do really look forward to the submissions and to hearing those and reporting back to the House by 18 October to take this step on the road to the major overhaul of our key environmental planning legislation, the RMA. Kia ora.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. ACT will support this motion to refer this exposure draft to the Environment Committee. That’s because ACT is not only here to oppose the Government when it is proposing poor legislation; the ACT Party also intends to propose much better regulation and Resource Management Act (RMA) reform than the Minister has set down here today.

ACT believes that sunlight is the best medicine; however, given the direction set out in the terms of reference and the exposure draft, and the direction set by this Government in some very poorly thought-out national policy statements and environmental regulations around fresh water and indigenous biodiversity, they set the tone for a Government’s resource management reforms which are designed not to enable development and not to focus on sustainable communities and what they need to have a good environment but also high-paying jobs and healthy communities into the future. In fact, what it does is set up a preservation regime which would have been a fantasy for environmental activists in the 1970s and 1980s, and which it appears to have taken another 40 years to bring about.

Well, the ACT Party opposes the preservation agenda. We support sustainable management of natural and physical resources in a way that benefits communities and that leads to better environmental outcomes. And when the ACT Party considers environmental outcomes, we accept, as do many Government agencies, as do businesses and communities, that in order to have a better economic and social outcome, there is always a need to tread on the earth in some way but that our obligation is in fact to tread as lightly as possible; not to fear to tread, not to abandon our development hopes, not to abandon aspirations for our communities and our people to live in warm but affordable homes, in the places that they want to live, that they choose to live, not necessarily where they are prescribed or told to live by central government planners.

That is why ACT will support these terms of reference and this motion to take the exposure draft to select committee, because we want to invite submitters who share ACT’s belief that private property rights should underpin all laws that govern how you use your land. When we look at the exposure draft and we look at the terms of reference, we actually see some really significant conflicts that cannot possibly be resolved through this legislative agenda that’s been set out here. We see 1a)—to protect—to protect. Now, I believe in enhancing the environment; not to protect just what we’ve got but to make it better, and there are many, many examples we could use, whether it’s in roading projects—when you drive down a new State highway, a road of national significance, or a new four-lane highway that connects cities or connects suburbs within cities, you will see the most fantastic wetlands and plantings which enhance the natural environment. So it is possible to develop resources, to develop infrastructure, and to develop land for housing and farming, including irrigation and other absolutely vital aspects of infrastructure—it is possible to develop those and enhance the environment.

But that’s not what we see here; we see, essentially, protection as being the intent, and when we hear talk of environmental bottom lines, what that means to people who own land and develop land and build infrastructure and build houses, it means there will be more rules to say you can’t, rather than a very clear set of guidelines to say what you should do and what you’re allowed to do and who is not allowed to interfere with or object to your consent applications and your development applications. But what it looks like, the terms of reference as set out here, it looks like we’ll be asked to consider how many more people, how many more—what we heard from the Green Party—community groups, how many community parliaments, even, might need to be set up to review your development applications, to review infrastructure projects and all kinds of other consent applications. The last thing that people who support ACT and who build homes and who build infrastructure want is to think that there will be more committees set up and more people who have the power to decide about your project or what you do with your land.

So the Minister confirmed ACT’s reading of the terms of reference. It’s a preservation bill; it’s not true resource management reform. All of the outcomes we’ve heard. We already know about the national environment standards for fresh water—the draft national policy statement for indigenous biodiversity which has been put somewhere in a bottom drawer until it can be whipped out and probably snuck through in the dead of night, like so much poor regulation and lawmaking we’ve seen in this Parliament. It is a preservation law that we’ve been asked to review.

Now, it also refers to mitigating climate emissions. Now, I don’t know if anybody else has heard of the zero carbon Act. Hands up. Crikey, nobody’s heard of that! What about the emissions trading scheme? Hands up. No? Oh, look, fortunately there are members on this side of the House who do know what the emissions trading scheme is. It turns out that there’s already a system that New Zealand businesses and Government and consumers have. In fact, every time you fill up with a tank of petrol—that’s right; petrol or even diesel—you pay for your emissions through the emissions trading scheme at $3 or $4 per fill up. There are already laws and regulations in place which focus on how to mitigate our climate emissions in the most cost-effective way possible. It seems remarkable, if it wasn’t being proposed by this Labour Government, that now they want to propose another law to mitigate climate emissions, as if that’s an admission that the zero carbon Act is already failing, or will fail, and that the emissions trading scheme—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! The member will come back to the motion at hand.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It looks like an admission that the emissions trading scheme is bound to fail by including how to better mitigate emissions in a resource management reform. It appears to be quite unnecessary.

Then we come to the Treaty of Waitangi—the change set out by the Minister from, essentially, “take account of the principles of” the Treaty of Waitangi under the current Resource Management Act, which means that every developer and every organisation seeking a consent is required to consult with iwi Māori groups in their rohe and to get their feedback; now it actually is “to give effect to” the Treaty of Waitangi—as if there are not many, many other pieces of legislation and many other avenues to give effect to the Treaty of Waitangi. Now it’s here in this proposed resource management reform as well.

Now, that is why ACT would actually repeal the RMA outright. We would replace it with an environmental protection Act and an urban development Act, an urban development Act based on the Productivity Commission’s—the Government’s own Productivity Commission—Better Urban Planning report that expands the rights of property owners to build on their own land. That’s how we will get more infrastructure and more land opened up for housing. ACT would also establish an environmental protection agency that would provide a rules-based framework for organisations and developers to seek consents. It would limit the number of organisations and who could object, and it would give developers and central government agencies like the New Zealand Transport Agency and KiwiRail and different local government agencies confidence to apply for expensive consents that are absolutely vital to build infrastructure for more housing. ACT would allow that law to only focus on environmental issues that are not otherwise dealt with, like climate change. It’s completely unnecessary to have climate change mitigation or emissions included in this bill, because there are already other pieces of legislation that deal with that.

Now, ACT will be constructive. We will strive to bring out the best in this resource management reform. We are in favour of cutting poor regulations, and that is why ACT will support this notice of motion to refer this to the select committee, but we will certainly be holding a blowtorch to it.

The member’s time has expired.

I seek leave to speak to the motion.

Leave is sought for that. [Interruption] OK. All right, so the member does not need leave.

Kia ora. Thank you, e te Pīka. We agree that the reform is needed. To be honest it’s never really worked for tangata whenua. We appreciate the work of the Iwi Chairs Forum, of the Federation of Māori Authorities, and many of the iwi Māori technicians who have worked with the Crown and got this mahi to the level that we’ve reached.

We do want to mention notification of elevating Te Tiriti, noting it’s not principles; it’s the article and text of Te Tiriti that the Crown is obligated to. We would like to see continued functions of the Resource Management Act to make sure that there is environmental protection, and although we need to build houses, this is something that is about an “and/and” and not at the consequence of our environment, tō tātou pūtaiao [our science]. We are concerned about the rights and interests of tangata whenua. This legislation, more than probably most legislation, impacts us as Māori hapū, whānau, in more ways than any. So we do want to make sure that there is a guaranteed explicit role for tangata whenua to be part of the decision-making position.

One of the other things that we’d like to emphasise is that we do agree that the select committee, and, indeed, the entire country and Parliament, are given time to critique this in detail. So I’m pleased to say that Te Paati Māori supports that it goes to select committee. Kia ora rā.

Motion agreed to.