Special Debates — Inquiry on the Natural and Built Environments Bill—Report of the Environment Committee

I move, That the House take note of the report of the Environment Committee on the Inquiry into the Natural and Built Environments Bill.

Very pleased, as chair of the Environment Committee, to start this debate on our inquiry into the exposure draft of the Natural and Built Environments Bill, or the NBEA. So the Resource Management Act (RMA) is the cornerstone of our environmental law in regulating the management of land, fresh water, air, the coast, and our territorial sea. Its overhaul and replacement with the NBEA and a strategic or spatial planning Act and the climate change adaptation Act is the biggest change in our environmental law in 30 years. And even though the draft bill, which the Environment Committee considered, was only a very small slice of one of the two bills to be introduced later this year, it’s no surprise that our report last November ran to some 70 pages and with a revised bill attached after that.

I’d really like to thank the more than 3,000 individuals and organisations who submitted to the inquiry and the 301 people and organisations who presented to us and expanded on their submissions. The analysis and the thought, often unpaid, that went into those submissions and presentations helped shape our conclusions and our 37 recommendations.

Also like to acknowledge the members of the Environment Committee for a shared commitment to improving the bill, the Ministry for the Environment officials’ patience with seemingly endless Zoom meetings, Parliamentary Counsel Office for their insightful drafting, and our very capable select committee staff.

One of the former objectives is to make the resource management system less complex to standardise processes and to make them less costly. So the committee’s recommendations here included recommending that Government and officials really carefully consider the extent to which the new legislation should retain and accommodate existing RMA terminology, definitions, and concepts, especially where these are defined in case law. The intent here was to reduce the uncertainty, which will come with new legislation.

We’ve recommended a shift away from adversarial processes towards a more inquisitorial approach at both council and Environment Court level, and consideration of how to best support non-statutory conflict resolution processes, including tikanga-based processes on marae.

We wanted the use of digital tools improved, and central government, for example, could coordinate and fund an online portal to help councils follow Marlborough District Council’s example in fully digitising their plans and properly formatting those so that they’re easily accessible.

So the 25 clauses of the draft bill that we considered were its preliminary provisions such as the interpretation section, its purpose, elements of the national planning framework, environmental limits, natural and built environment plans, and regional planning committees.

So, talking about the bill’s purpose, as human beings our wellbeing is intimately connected to the health of te taiao. And the RMA’s purpose of promoting sustainable management and its effects-based regime haven’t prevented a decline in water quality in our rivers and aquifers, the ongoing loss of wetlands, or car-dependent urban sprawl. So we heard from submitters, including the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, who considered that the bill’s purpose clauses were not strong enough to prevent further degradation of nature and they’d be little improvement on the RMA. They suggested that much more directive and active language is needed, which prioritises upholding Te Oranga o te Taiao and protecting and, where possible, restoring the ecological integrity of the natural environment.

So the majority of the committee didn’t recommend any substantive changes to clause 5, which sets out the purpose of the bill, which is to enable Te Oranga o te Taiao to be upheld, but we did make considerable changes around other causes in Part 2. We also recognised the need for further conversations between the Crown and Māori about how te reo terms such as Te Oranga o te Taiao and Māori concepts are used in the bill, whether they’re defined, and what further direction is needed to give effect to the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

So the changes that we recommended related to clause 5 were particularly around environmental limits. We spent quite a lot of time on that. We wanted to ensure that environmental limits are set for the purpose of protecting ecological integrity and/or human health, while noting that the National Planning Framework (NPF) and natural and built environment plans rather than individual consents are the major tool to achieve protection and restoration of nature.

We recommended that the bill express environmental limits in two ways: either as the minimal biophysical state of the environment, or the maximum harm or stress that could be permitted. To avoid a race to the bottom and to encourage improvement in the health of nature where it’s been degraded, the bill should enable the Minister for the Environment to set targets as a pathway for improvement.

It’s been widely agreed that a major failure of the RMA has been in implementation and the absence of national policy, national environmental standards, and national direction until relatively recently. Councils were just left to work out how the RMA should be best applied. So the National Planning Framework is intended to consolidate and build on existing national directions, such as the national policy statement on freshwater. Here, the committee recommended an expanded purpose for the National Planning Framework and that it would be mandatory rather than optional for the NPF to prescribe environmental limits on at least six environmental domains, from air quality to estuaries, as well as providing direction on matters of national significance.

We heard a strong desire from submitters to retain local democratic input and community engagement in plan making. So district plans, regional plans, and regional policy statements are all going to be scooped up into one regional natural built environment plan, which will be a massive exercise. Submitters sought stronger representation of councils on the proposed regional planning committees which will prepare and maintain these plans. So the committee recommended that the bill clearly set out a substantial role for local authorities, and I’m aware that the local government resource management reform steering group has made some further recommendations here.

Moving on to urban trees, more than two-thirds of the submissions to the inquiry—over 2,000 submissions—were about urban trees. Submitters reminded us that these trees are an essential part of a well-functioning urban environment, and they provide shade, reduce the heat island effect, and reduce soil erosion and stormwater run-off. The changes that the National Government made in 2013, submitters told us, had had a devastating effect on urban tree cover. So officials indicated that the issue of urban trees would be considered—because it wasn’t in front of us—but we’ve yet to see the results of that.

The replacement of the RMA and the introduction and passing of the Natural and Built Environments Act and the Strategic Planning Bill by the Parliament is a legacy project for the Government. I would encourage Government and the Ministry for the Environment to update the public on progress so that New Zealanders are better informed about the evolving shape of these two critical bills. This could include outlining their thinking on where the legislation is likely to differ from the recommendations in the Randerson review, how the regional planning committees will be structured and operate, what is proposed for urban trees, and how it is intended to ensure high-quality urban environments with the removal of the concept of amenity values, which has been part of the RMA.

This would give stakeholders and people time to absorb and consider the changes proposed and raised any potential red flags. The Government response to the select committee report, which the Ministry for the Environment released earlier this year, for example, provided no indication of whether any or all of the select committee recommendations would be progressed. Speaking now as a Green MP, the Green Party is also interested in whether it’s intended to respond to the evolving international discussion about the rights of nature and the growing campaign to establish an international crime of ecocide for harm to nature.

There’s been a large amount of public money, thinking, and parliamentary time which is going into the RMA reform exercise, with the expectation that changing our law will actually change the outcomes for the environment and human wellbeing. Transparency will help build trust, and building trust helps contribute to good policy and good law.

So it was a very substantial inquiry. Very grateful for everyone who contributed, and we look forward to seeing the two bills later this year. Thank you.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s been quite a while since we did the inquiry on the Natural and Built Environments Bill, and this debate has been postponed many times, so it’s excellent that we are here today.

I want to start from the start, before we got into our inquiry at the Environment Committee, and that starting point is really about the Resource Management Act (RMA) and the problems with it. It’s an Act that this House has looked at many different times and has amended many different times. There’s been a problem with both environmental degradation and also troubles with getting development through, and by “development”, I mean all sorts: hard infrastructure, soft infrastructure—the works.

The problem has been really around the status quo of the RMA, so it’s hard to change what we’ve already got and to do better. So for these reasons, the last Government set up an expert group to review the RMA, and it had a very wide ambit. We’ve just heard Eugenie Sage, the chair of the committee, refer to that as the Randerson review, which I will do so as well.

What that Randerson review recommended was three Acts—not just one, but only one really to replace the RMA and two others—so I think it’s important just to briefly touch on those. One is to enable spatial planning. The Randerson review called it a strategic planning Act. So the idea here is to link the infrastructure funders with the planning decision-makers and to look at long-term planning, so that will help with climate adaptation and help with population growth—where do we want people to go and where do we not want them to go, and what infrastructure needs to go with that—and by “infrastructure”, I’m not just talking about roads; I’m talking about schools and hospitals, and everything that goes with it.

Another piece of legislation is one for addressing issues with climate adaptation. There is a real difficulty in the current legal framework that we have for existing activities that we know will be affected by climate change in the future, but we don’t necessarily know when, and there are a lot of equity issues about how decisions are made, what work needs to happen, and where it needs to happen. So that’s a separate piece of legislation.

Then there was the replacement of the RMA with the Natural and Built Environments Act. So this was to move the planning system to an outcomes focus, to move the energy in the planning system so that all the GDP activity that happened from consents at the end stage of the process to plans—so more at the start of the process—to actually recognise the built environment properly in the legislation, to have more of a role for mana whenua for them to be at the table rather than sort of just being consulted, and to enable better climate mitigation and a whole range of other things.

This is an ambitious programme. With these three Acts, the Government decided as a first step to have this exposure draft of the replacement RMA, the Natural and Built Environments Bill. So it wasn’t fully formed, but it was very much done so in the context of that Randerson report, and it’s an unusual process to have an exposure draft before we see the full bill. In this case we’re going to see two bills, both the Natural and Built Environments Bill and the strategic planning one, with the spatial plan.

This exposure draft process gave the select committee and all the submitters a real chance to feed into that bigger policy development that we don’t normally get as non-members of the executive, and I think that is was really useful. It was, of course, not perfect, because we only had part of the bill, but it was very useful, and we’ve heard from the chair a range of different suggestions for the things that we thought could be improved.

I also acknowledge the timing of this inquiry that we did. We were going to travel around the country and talk to submitters, but then there were some COVID lockdowns, so that didn’t happen, and it was on Zoom. Like the member before me, I would really like to thank all of the staff that helped us with it, both the policy staff, the drafters, and, of course, the staff of the committee, some of whom have changed since then. I know that some of them will be watching today, and I really want to thank them for the hard work in having organised the travel, and then it all being cut away. So thank you, Madam Speaker.

Well, thank you, Madam Speaker. This is a significant debate on a very important potential change to our legislative and regulatory framework that, really, forms the foundation stone of New Zealand’s natural environment, our planning legislation, what can be developed, what can’t be developed, where it can be developed and how, and also how our natural environment is maintained, protected, and enhanced.

And, of course, the Resource Management Act (RMA) as we know it today is cumbersome, it’s expensive to administer, it’s complicated, laypeople literally have no understanding of it and are required to use expensive consultants and lawyers to work their way through the maze that the original legislation from the early-1990s I don’t think ever really intended to occur. But the RMA in its current form has been amended something like 18 or 19 times significantly, it now runs close to 900 pages of black-letter statute, and it’s completely no longer fit for purpose. There was an agreement at the last election, across the Parliament, that, in its current form, the RMA’s time had come and that it was time for a new, fresh look.

So this Government has embarked upon a process that has led to this debate today. As the previous speaker, the deputy chair of the Environment Committee, has made the point, the concept of presenting an exposure draft for submissions and hearings to a select committee is a little bit unusual, but I think it’s been a useful process, if only to identify the holes that exist in the plan that was presented to us.

I think it’s important that people who are listening to this debate and who may not have had the benefit of participating in the select committee process understand that the exposure draft document that was presented to the select committee and to submitters for consideration was a very short piece of work in terms of the substance of it. It had some big concepts contained in it but there were more pieces missing and more questions asked arising from the exposure draft than there were answers. If I can make an analogy: we were presented, as a committee, and so were the submitters, with a document that, I think, from memory, ran to about 17 or 18 pages, might have been 20 pages, but had a significant number of placeholders in it; places where clearly the policy work was either not complete or had not yet been agreed by either officials, the Government, its Cabinet, or the Labour Party caucus. At the end of the exposure draft process, we were none the wiser for that. It was kind of like asking the select committee and the submitters to do a big jigsaw puzzle with many of the key pieces missing and to be wearing a blindfold at the same time as you’re trying to do the jigsaw puzzle with the pieces missing.

It would have been enormously helpful if the second piece of legislation could have been considered at the same time. It was originally going to be called the “strategic planning legislation”; I understand it’s now going to have the name “spatial planning”. But it would have been very helpful to have had that piece. We expect, I think, to have the adaptation piece, the third leg of the trifecta—we could have had that too but that’s clearly a work in process as well.

So our support, on the National Party side, for this process was conditional, in a way, in that we wanted to see what the primary piece of work was, and we weren’t given that. We weren’t given the certainty, the surety, that we were looking for, and nor were submitters, of whom there were some 3,000—and we heard just over 300 in person or via Zoom sessions. Those submitters, as the chair of the committee said, put in an awful lot of work; much of it, I fear, was kind of wasted work, because they too didn’t have the full complete picture of what the Government’s agenda is for the replacement of the RMA.

Now, the Minister has said, on a number of occasions, that he’s going to stick very closely to the report of the committee chaired by retired appeal court judge Tony Randerson QC. That report from that committee was a very extensive report; very detailed. If that is the road map that the Minister’s using, then we have some concerns on this side of the House because we think there is an argument for a different way of thinking; a different focus completely. The House needs to understand, I think, that notwithstanding the academic ability of the chair of that committee, his background and experience, or the members of that committee, it represents what is, effectively, very much 1980s’ thinking.

What is being proposed in the Randerson report has received almost no critical analysis or detailed work in any meaningful respect. It’s largely been accepted by the commentariat and officials and the Minister as being the guide and the road map to a future pathway. We remain unconvinced of that pathway, and we really wanted to see something that was more suited to this century rather than last century. And this process of reforming our resource management framework provides the Parliament and the people of New Zealand with a magnificent opportunity to update our thinking, to not use the blinked thinking of the 1980s and do what amounts to pretty much grand tinkering of the current scheme on a massive scale. I think that is a wasted opportunity.

So the National Party’s support for this process is conditional, and the Government needs not to take it for granted, because we are not convinced that this process, upon which he has embarked, is the right process, and I don’t want this to be wasted effort on behalf of officials, submitters, councils, and even the Randerson committee, ready to be tossed out by an incoming National-led Government, who are not satisfied with this legislation, who are not satisfied with the direction it takes, and who are not satisfied with the outcomes that it is potentially going to produce, because our reading of this, so far, indicates that so much remains uncertain, so many of the flaws with the existing RMA are just magnified and made potentially worse by the proposed exposure draft that we’ve seen.

So we’ll be looking for some significant change, and I think the onus is upon the Minister to actually think outside the Randerson report, be more bold, forward-focused thinking, and to think about a legislative regulatory framework that is purpose built and defined not for the 1980s but for the 2020s, 2030s, 2040s, and beyond, because what we are confronted with, at the moment, is a piece of backward-looking change that I don’t think potentially serves the future of New Zealand’s natural environment well—and I don’t think it serves the future of New Zealand’s built environment particularly well either. There is, for instance, in the exposure draft no voice from the entrepreneurial business development sector in this legislation—plenty of voice for other stakeholders, plenty of voice for all sorts of community groups, for submitters, all that sort of stuff—nothing that says, “We want to make New Zealand a better place, and we can do it in a way that is constructive and positive, while, at the same time, maintaining, enhancing, and looking after and protecting our beautiful, natural environment.”

So, as we go through this process, the National Party will continue to look very carefully at the legislation that eventually comes into the House later this year, and I’m pleased that the Minister has indicated that the two pieces, the Natural and Built Environments piece of legislation and the spatial planning legislation, will come in simultaneously. That’ll be a juggling piece of work for the select committee to do. It’s not beyond our wit or ability to do that—I’m sure we can do that—but the underlying message I want to send to this Parliament and to the Minister is: do not take the National Party’s support for this reform for granted; we want to see something far more ambitious, far less costly, far less cumbersome, and far less confusing than what has been put on the table so far. We don’t want to have decisions made by judicial activism and interpretation, because so much of what is being put into this legislation at the moment is ill-defined, unknown—words, phrases, and terminology that have no common-law tie. We made some mention of that in our report, but still the potential for, actually, the courts to be deciding what the framework for our natural and built environments should be remains enormously high in this area. We are utterly unconvinced that the pathway that the Minister is taking is the right one, but we are prepared to continue engaging, and we want to work with the Government constructively if we can.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. ACT opposes the direction set out in this draft bill because it won’t solve the problem that it says it sets out to. That is, how do we enable thriving communities, a healthy economy, and to underpin that Kiwi way of life where we all share a love for the natural environment?

How can communities thrive when getting consents for even basic building materials like sand and rock are almost impossible? This week, McCallum Bros in Northland had their application for sand extraction declined. That means that the sand used in the Auckland Central railway tunnels and in the Central Interceptor waste-water project will come to an end; they won’t be able to get sand to make concrete for vital infrastructure. That’s going to add to cost, to delay in everything that gets built in Auckland.

What this Natural and Built Environments Bill will do is actually add to the cost of building, add to the cost of infrastructure, it’s going to add red tape, and it’s going to take longer to get consents to do stuff so that we can build New Zealand out of the infrastructure deficit that we’ve been left with.

It’s also what the Infrastructure Commission said. They said the current Resource Management Act has led to years of delays and cost billions in unnecessary consenting processes. There’s no evidence presented by the Minister that this bill will solve that problem.

ACT believes one way to reduce planning and consenting costs is simply to stop planning and consenting for things we already know how to do well to mitigate environmental effects. For example, a code of practice for common activities like earthworks and drainage would replace the need for thousands of consents that are required every year. It would save a huge amount of time and tens of millions of dollars in building costs.

This Government is squandering an opportunity—a once-in-a-generation opportunity—to change the way we manage natural environments and the built environment. For reform to be successful, ACT believes some meaningful changes are required that are not included in this exposure draft of the Natural and Built Environments Act. Protect property rights and expand the right of people to use their own property for the maximum utility. Address the artificial scarcity of land caused by the lack of infrastructure required to service it. Remove gateway tests, which require developers to prove why they should be allowed to build something, rather than simply focus on how they manage environmental effects. We should reduce the range of activities which require consent by requiring simple codes of practice to be followed. And we should limit those who are allowed to object to private plan changes and consent applications to only those directly affected; we need to exclude the activists and the nimbies from being able to object to vital infrastructure and development projects. And, of course, we must prioritise outcomes so that vital work, like making concrete, is prioritised. And finally, we need to base environmental protections only on science, not cultural or social constructs. This will actually increase certainty for developers and local councils so they do not end up living in fear of the Environment Court and activist judges.

The proposed reforms advocated by the Minister will actually introduce less certainty, more cost, more delay at a time where we need to be agile and ready to adapt to our future. We don’t need to be telling people how the shape of their cities should look. We don’t need to be telling people how they should be developing their property. We should be enabling councils to focus on funding and delivering infrastructure because that is how you get the next generation to build so that they can live in affordable homes like the last one did.

All parties agree that resource management reform is necessary. But this draft bill is not the reform that we need. We do not believe it improves the status quo; that is why ACT does not support the development of this bill.

Mōrena. Tēnā tātou e te Whare. It’s a pleasure to rise on behalf of Te Paati Māori to speak in the special debate on the Natural and Built Environments Bill exposure draft. There’s much to like about the bill in respect of its overall direction and recognition of tangata whenua and Te Tiriti. In saying that, there should be explicit acknowledgments of the articles of Te Tiriti, rather than the principles, and of our tino rangatiratanga.

The greatest challenge will be how the overall positive direction manifests itself in the remainder of the bill, yet to be drafted, and the operational delivery through new planning instruments. It is essential that hapū and iwi are positioned in meaningful partnerships with central and local government. Te Paati Māori notes that often the failure of the current system was not the Resource Management Act (RMA) itself, but rather the delivery of the RMA through councils’ plans. The RMA has been held up as all that is wrong with our environment consenting regime, when plans today still largely reflect the structures of the plans and mechanisms you can find in controls that existed prior to 1991.

Ensuring the purpose of the bill is carried through to all parts of the bill will be crucial. That means a consistent partnership approach to decision making and protection of the environment. It is critical that the “effect” clause means equal partnership in decision making. A partnership must have true meaning and not mirror practice that currently exists, where iwi and hapū may be invited to engage.

We support the precautionary approach; however, this should also apply across the whole framework and be aligned with Te Oranga o te Taiao as set out in proposed clause 5. Decision making at the national and regional level must include at least 50 percent tangata whenua to reflect the purpose of the bill in partnerships enshrined within Te Tiriti. Iwi must be able to make their own appointments that clearly reflect takiwā boundaries. The relegation of iwi to be no more than an “engaged party” appears too often in the words used in this exposure draft and various discussion documents. The aims of the reforms are not supported by the action of future decision-making as set out.

We don’t support the final decision for the national planning framework, resting with the Minister for the Environment, as this provides no check or balances on the executive. A greater level of scrutiny, we believe, is required. It is shameful that the 50 percent governance is not proposed for plan development. This is a huge failure and will undermine any support for the new reforms, leaving local government to, effectively, continue along the same line, or the same path, region by region, which defies the aims and principles we believe that are set out. The current mana whakahono system has provided no significant change for mana whenua in the resource management space. It is unlikely an enhancement of this redundant system will help. In fact, trying to enhance this mechanism looks like an additional window dressing to make it look like Māori are being given a clearer or greater role, but there is nothing in it to convince us of this. There also needs to be significantly more work done on clear signalling of when hapū and iwi may be consulted on, or notified for consents.

In closing, the Government still has a lot of work to do alongside tangata whenua to get this draft to a point where it can be progressed. Te Paati Māori are hopeful that we may be able to support this bill, as this is the most significant reform of environmental law in decades. But that is also precisely why we cannot get this wrong and urge that, as rangatira and kaitiaki of Aotearoa, tangata whenua must have our decision-making rights honoured. Anything less will fly in the face of our nation’s founding document—Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Nō reira, tēnā tātou katoa.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, and it is a pleasure to speak on the Natural and Built Environments Bill inquiry. I didn’t spend all of my time on that committee when the inquiry was going on, but I did spend enough time to get a good flavour for it. And my colleague Scott Simpson, the Hon Scott Simpson, did make a very good point. It is a significant proposed change, albeit that there’s so many placeholders in the draft that we have no idea what it’s actually going to look like. I would like to thank all of those submitters that came in. Actually, as my colleague also said, there was some significant effort gone into those submissions that came forward, albeit that they also didn’t know exactly what they were submitting on. I think a lot of them pointed out quite clearly their fears of what they are assuming is going to go into those gaps, those significant gaps in the draft bill.

I think one of the things for me that I didn’t see, and it didn’t give me any comfort, that should be in there—the Minister’s there and, hopefully, he’ll take some notes, but one thing that all of us who are electorate MPs will hear all the time from constituents is how much the Resource Management Act—the current RMA—is a disabling piece of legislation. It’s supposed to be an enabling piece of legislation. It is sand in the gears of everything. Now, no one is suggesting for a moment that we should just have open slather on these things. But Simon Court, my ACT colleague, made a very good point. We could have things such as, you know, standards that we don’t need to run through these processes.

A lot of the people involved all the way through the RMA—it’s an industry now. They’re totally dependent on these applications going through really complicated and long processes. They make money out of it and, of course, they may not set out to do it but, in effect, what they do is build in a very slow and tortuous path through which anyone who has an application has to go through. And if I can give you an example, at the moment we’ve got a whole lot of renewable energy projects on the books, people wanting to get out there and get their renewable energy projects up. Everybody wants it—the Government wants it, we want it, New Zealanders want it—but they’ve got to go through this tortuous process. And actually a lot of those people are sitting back there and weighing up the costs and the benefits and the uncertainty in some of those projects that they are thinking about and thinking, “Well, actually, on all grounds, it probably should get there. But really, are we going to put our money up and put it at risk to run through this process where we’ll have”—and particularly the Department of Conservation; one of the worst, actually. They get in there and put in a submission against that, and then they run through a torturous process where they just delay, either just through their own bureaucratic slowness, or they’re hoping that the applicant will tire of the process and withdraw their application. I think we see that all the time. Every electorate MP will be well aware of it.

But I just wanted, with the time I have left, to note some of the comments from some of the submitters. The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment said that the environment limits should be given more substance and that they need a lot more clarity. And I have to agree with the commissioner; he’s doing some fantastic work, by the way. I think he’s really on the money on a lot of things these days. The New Zealand Initiative said that the bill is so broad that it threatens uncertainty over what activities are legal. I agree; I can’t agree more strongly. And I think they pointed out also that they have concerns about clause 8. The key is how the trade-offs will be made between these outcomes, which will be determined by the Minister for the Environment through the national planning framework. This is sort of like a “Henry VIII” power going to the Minister, who is all wise of course. I think that’s, actually, just ripe almost for corruption. I think the Minister should be very worried about that. I’m not suggesting for a moment that anyone is corrupt, but it’s not just corruption not being done; it’s corruption seen not to be done. This bill is really stepping right on the line of this, and I’m really concerned about that and I think every New Zealander should be as well. It’s got to be a lot better than what we’ve seen. And I hope that this bill, when we finally see it—

Order! Order! The member’s time is up. And before we take the next call, may I remind members that we are not to accuse anyone else of corruption in this House. The next call is Tāmati Coffey, who is connecting with us remotely.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m very pleased to take a call, albeit a short call, on the bill in front of the House at the moment. It did take a lot of conversations, but I have to say there was big support for the objectives of the reform, noting the 30 years’ difference between now and its inception, with many learnings in the process. Speaking of the process, there was also some support for the process too, the consideration of a draft report which was going to be tossed around by different submitters to be able to understand exactly what they thought of the bill. Some were frustrated with it, and earlier speakers said that obviously that was a frustration for some because there were quite a few gaps in there. It was prefaced on the Randerson report, so there was a lot of information that was put into there.

I took a specifically Māori lens to the submissions and I tuned into specifically those Māori submitters who came in the form of those iwi and those entities who have settled. There were marae, there were hapū, there were whānau trusts, and pan-Māori organisations like the New Zealand Māori Council and the Federation of Māori Authorities. All contributed as collectives into this conversation, and we also heard from Māori resource management practitioners who shared their experience too, but, by and large, we had a huge range of Māori individuals who took the opportunity as well, and I want to thank them all for their contributions.

One of the things that we talked about was Te Oranga o te Taiao, and this was raised by many, both Māori and non-Māori—the concept being around the taiao, the environment that we live in, and the oranga of the taiao being the wellbeing of the environment being of the utmost importance. When you look after the oranga of the taiao, then obviously we all benefit. But the thing that came through in some of those submissions for me, which spoke really strongly, was the concept expressing the intergenerational importance of environmental wellbeing to Māori, and centralising that relationship around decision making over natural resources with the input of hapū and iwi. The draft legislation enables Te Oranga o te Taiao to support the wellbeing of present generations without compromising the wellbeing of future generations. As a committee we thought that more clarity was definitely needed, and, obviously, for legal certainty as well. We needed to know what was required to be able to implement it, which isn’t such a bad thing, but we recommended that the Government continue to work with national iwi and Māori groups to further develop the concept.

Recommendations 10 and 11 centre around Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The Natural and Built Environments Bill will have a new Treaty clause which will be to give effect to the principles of both the Treaty of Waitangi and Te Tiriti of Waitangi. You see, for the last 30 years, Treaty clauses have come a long way, and as it stands the current clause is about taking into account the principles of Te Tiriti of Waitangi, the Treaty of Waitangi. Many Māori told us that they were sick of being consulted and they wanted some stronger recognition in there as well. We believe that that’s a good thing so we have instructed the Government, through our report, to be able to do the same.

There were big conversations around infrastructure and making sure Māori had input at whatever level, and there are going to be planning committees. We heard strongly from Māori submitters that they wanted input into those planning committees, either as iwi or as hapū, but they definitely wanted representation and saw it as a right through our obligations as the Crown to honour our Treaty partnership.

We also talked—and this came through in recommendation 36—about the significance of mātauranga Māori, which is a new concept in our parliamentary House but is actually a very, very old concept. Some submitters said that mātauranga Māori shouldn’t be ignored and that we must have regard to it, and we as the committee also agreed that as well, to be able to help inform the technical advice that comes through, making sure that mātauranga Māori, where it exists, is adhered to and used for full information.

Any references to Māori terms do need to be clarified, because we wanted to be able to make sure that when we put it into legislation it absolutely had certainty for those people that use this type of legislation day in and day out. Iwi, hapū, mana whenua, mana whakahaere—all of those terms came before the committee and we believe that it’s on the Government to be able to really define those terms and work in conjunction with Māori right across the county to be able to do that. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It is a pleasure to be talking on this Natural and Built Environments Bill. Although I wasn’t on the select committee—it’s a long time since I’ve been on the select committee; I sat on it many years ago and was actually the chair, but anyway—it’s an opportunity to talk about this, particularly in relation to building construction, which I have a role in.

As my good colleague the Hon Scott Simpson noted, we will be supporting the bill but there are some serious concerns about the bill at this stage, and, hopefully, they will be addressed. The big issue, really, is that everyone in this House—and, I think, virtually, in New Zealand—agrees that we’ve got to have something that’s empowering, that can actually allow things to happen. We need rules that are simple to understand, simple to enforce, but provide adequate protection. When you have developers incurring an estimated cost of about $1.3 billion a year in terms of trying to get consents for new projects, trying to build new homes which are so desperately required, you know that there is something seriously wrong. Of course, this is the outcome of the Randerson Report that led to a suggestion of three bills—splitting into three—we were keen to do two. But this bill and this exposure draft that we’re discussing today obviously had some very serious limitations. As Scott Simpson noted in his speech, a 20-page report with glaring omissions and, just simply, areas where there is no detail at all. That’s obviously something that’s wrong, and many of the submissions agreed with that and said we should be looking at both this part and the second bit that the Minister’s going to bring before the House around the adaptation piece, which will be looked at and progressed separately but later. So without seeing the totality of the reforms, it’s pretty hard to see whether in fact they’re going to achieve the outcomes which we want. At the moment, there would be a great deal of concern that we don’t, actually, that we’re going to just end up making it more complicated, spending a lot of time and not achieving the outcomes.

So I found it fascinating when I was just looking through some of the notes. Even organisations around the Environmental Defence Society, the society has one paragraph of positive aspects—one paragraph—and 30 pages of outstanding comments and suggested improvements to the bill. What the dickens is that? That shows that Mr Parker has not been doing his work as well as he might—which is unusual—and not preparing this as he should, because if you’re going to put up a major reform, make sure you get it right so that people can understand it. Thirty pages of concerns! This is the Environmental Defence Society. This is not some right-wing organisation; this is something that is deeply concerned about the environment, as all of us are, including me.

Some areas of interest for them—purpose. They’ve got concerns with the purpose. Well, actually, I was looking at some of the other submissions, and I think everyone has concerns with the purpose—it was very unclear. The environmental limits, they’ve got concerns with environmental outcomes—well, gee, isn’t that what we’re trying to get to? National planning framework, content and plans, the relationship between the bill and other elements—these are just some of the key big headings that they’ve raised. That just shows you that we have got a lot of work to do on this issue.

As my good colleague Stuart Smith noted, clause 8—which is a major piece of this proposed legislation—again has some major, major issues that need to be dealt with. Broadly, I was just looking at some of the other issues—“The bill is so broad that it threatens uncertainty over what activities are legal”. Jeez! That’s a pretty worrying statement. “The definition of environment in clause 3 is so broad that it encompasses almost any social, cultural, economic, and environmental outcome.” Wow! Mr Parker, you’ve got some work to do on this. Thank you very much.

Can I begin by thanking the Environment Committee for the work they did on the exposure draft of what is, essentially, the equivalent of Part 2 of the Resource Management Act (RMA), which is the heart of the more general provisions, as opposed to the processing provisions, really.

I might make just some introductory remarks as to how much has been done in civil society before we embarked upon this project. It’s roughly 30 years since the RMA was passed, and there is a societal concern that it hasn’t worked properly. It has certainly cost too much for people to work through. It hasn’t protected the environment adequately, and that’s so obvious in respect of climate-changing emissions, water quality, and soil loss. In addition to that, it hasn’t adequately seen to the development outcomes that we need as a country, including the housing space where there is agreement, at least on this side of the House, that constrained land markets have been one of the reasons why house prices have gone so high in New Zealand, because we haven’t been making enough land available for building opportunities. So it costs too much, it hasn’t protected the environment, and it hasn’t enabled housing. It’s a three-way fail. So we’ve been willing to take this on and try to improve things. The Productivity Commission gave us some learnings, so did some civil society reports from Local Government New Zealand, the Property Council, Infrastructure New Zealand, the Environmental Defence Society, and lots of others.

We then had an inquiry by a panel led by the Hon Tony Randerson. The panel considered the idea as to whether we should have a separate development Act compared with a separate environmental protection Act, and concluded that that would not solve the complexities, that it wouldn’t make things easier, and that it would probably make for worse outcomes because these things do need to be integrated and are not irreconcilable. The Randerson panel presented a template which we’re largely implementing. We thought it’s such a big piece of work that we needed to chunk down the consideration of it by select committee and civil society by putting the equivalent of Part 2 to the committee first, which we’ve done and we’ve had the report, which we’re taking very seriously in Government. We thank the select committee and the submitters to it for that report, and we’re proceeding to implement those recommendations of those select committee reports, as well as the balance of the Randerson report.

Can I respond to some of the issues that have been raised today by others in this debate, and I thank them for their comments. Unnecessary consents: I agree that there are unnecessary resource consents in the current system. We have already as a Parliament addressed that in a very significant way last year, with the upzoning bill, which enables tens of thousands of building opportunities, probably hundreds of thousands, to flow through the planning system in a way that will not require a resource consent to build a new house, in a way that currently does require a resource consent. That sort of principle will be baked into the new system, because we don’t see those issues as being inconsistent. I agree with Simon Court that there are too many issues where unnecessary resource consents are required by the system at the moment.

I also agree with the comment that he and Scott Simpson both made about there being too much uncertainty as to who should be able to participate in the system. One of the recommendations from the Randerson report which we will be implementing is to require plans to be clearer as to who is to be notified in limited notification applications, because there’s too much uncertainty around that, and, as a consequence, planning departments at risk of suit for getting it wrong, default to too wide a group of notification.

In respect of issues that are boundary disputes in the residential sphere that go to recession planes or an intrusion into a recession plane, the proposal is that those be notified just to the adjoining people who are directly affected and that those issues be resolved through alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, rather than through the courts. So I agree that those concerns are legitimate, and we look forward to work with other parties on those issues to try and make them better.

In respect of the point about codification of things rather than bespoke details of them in consent application and consent conditions, I agree with that as well. I think that it is absurd that applicants trying to develop have to specify, in a bespoke manner, sediment controls for major road works; they shouldn’t have to do that. There should be a series of standards for sediment control. It couldn’t really be much worse than what happened even with those bespoke controls on Transmission Gully, where there were terrible breaches of good practice up there, and a lot of sediment ending up in the Porirua Harbour. We should actually have agreed standards, and there could be standard A, standard B, standard C, and standard D. A new applicant might say, “We think it should be standard B.”, and the council might say, after having a think about it, “No, we think it should be standard C. There are some serious risks here, you need to follow that standard.” But it shouldn’t have to be specified in a bespoke way.

Currently, costs are far too high. They’ve increased, according to the Infrastructure Commission, about 150 percent, so that they’re now 250 percent of where they were about a bit more than a decade ago, and that’s just absurd—just absurd. How do we control that thing? Well, I’ve actually been around here for a while and I’ve come to the conclusion that we can’t control all of these things in Parliament through the legislation. The last Government with ACT and National tried to do that with a number of amendments, and they were well intentioned but it actually didn’t control costs. We do need to enable and push responsibility on to the councils to control excessive costs. Councillors ought not to be able to interfere in an individual planning decision but they should have to take responsibility for the control of the efficiency of their planning departments, and I intend to make that clear and, perhaps, give some more tools to councils so that they can keep control of the complexity and cost of the planning processes that are being operated through their councils. I can give some personal accounts, on another occasion, of where these things are going wrong currently; I think most of us can.

In respect of how you get the flow-through of signals to the private sector as to where they should invest, the spatial planning Act, I think, will make a big difference. The spatial planning Act will set out likely new infrastructure corridors that need to be released when you hit triggers of population growth. Those infrastructure corridors will be better protected through new designation rules and the associated activities, like intensive subdivision around those transport corridors, will flow through into Master Builder Association plans. In those sorts of situations, once that land is released or that corridor has started to be utilised, the development of those things will become permitted activities on occasion.

So things will be a lot more logical going through the spatial planning Act than the Natural and Built Environment Act. The number of plans will reduce from over a hundred to about 10. The first plans to put together will be quite complex. There’s no simple way to do that. We will be well advanced compared with the implementation of the RMA, because we will have in place a national planning framework which transitions all of the existing national direction and adds a bit more. The crucial bit that is being added, which I think members will want a briefing on from the Infrastructure Commission once the bill comes to the House, will be the piece that the Infrastructure Commission is leading in order to get these development rules clearer and to incorporate the likes of the standards or codification of codes that Simon Court mentioned.

The five objectives that we’re trying to achieve are to protect and, where necessary, restore the natural environment; better enable development with environmental biophysical limits—and I emphasise biophysical limits—including development of housing.

I’ll just divert a little bit on why we’re specifying biophysical. We agree that you can go too far with matters of taste rather than matters of environmental outcome. So we’re trying to strip out the excessive reference to amenity, which doesn’t mean to say that we want everything looking like Stalingrad. There is a place for decent urban form.

The third principle is to give effect to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, and Tāmati Coffey has spoken to that. We need to better prepare and adapt to climate change and risks from natural hazards. We need to improve system efficiency, effectiveness, and reduce complexity, whilst also retaining appropriate local democratic input.

There is a concern amongst some in local government that this is Big Brother or Big Sister taking over plan making; that is not the case. There will be no Government representatives on these joint committees that are massaging together plans that will all be in the control of local government, with iwi participation. In respect of the spatial plans, there will be a central government representative that local government want because central government has to martial transport and health and police and the Department of Conservation in order to put together these plans.

So I look forward to the introduction of the full bill and, again, thank the committee and members for their contributions today.