Natural and Built Environment Bill

I present a legislative statement for the Natural and Built Environment Bill.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I move, That the Natural and Built Environment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Environment Committee to consider the bill.

Today, we are considering very important and substantial reform that affects all aspects of the environment we treasure and live in—legislation which affects everybody’s lives. The essences of life—clean air and water; housing; infrastructure such as roads, hospitals, and schools; renewable energy; farming; and commerce—are all impacted by these laws. Change is long overdue, but it has proved difficult to achieve. Successive Governments have not delivered; we are.

Since the Resource Management Act (RMA) was passed in 1991, there have been more than 20 major amendments and countless thousands of minor ones. They’ve made it ever more complex and difficult to navigate and overall have failed to fix the underlying problems. Everyone is frustrated: environmentalists, developers, councillors, farmers, and home builders. We need a faster, cheaper, and better resource management system. It is undisputed that the Resource Management Act is not working as was intended. It takes far too long, costs far too much, and it’s no exaggeration to say it’s broken.

Plans under the RMA have been too restrictive to enable sufficient house-building opportunities. The planning restrictions have strangled land markets, pushing up prices and restricting home-building opportunities. There is agreement across this House and across Government agencies that this has been a major contributor to land costs being amongst the least affordable in the OECD. In major cities, this has flowed through to inflated house costs for all housing, old and new; on the housing front, the RMA has had severe problems.

Sadly, environmental outcomes have also been poor. In practice, cumulative environmental effects have not been well managed. This is most obvious in the degrading of water quality and the loss of biodiversity and of valuable soils. Resource consenting has become ever more costly. Between 2014-15 and 2018-19, council consenting fees have increased by 66 percent for non-notified consents and 124 percent for notified consents. Infrastructure New Zealand Te Waihanga has estimated that infrastructure developers are collectively spending $1.29 billion annually on resource consent processes—5.5 percent of total project costs. This is outside the extreme end of approval costs internationally, with benchmarking showing that equivalent costs in the UK and the EU vary from 0.1 percent to 5 percent of project cost. Consenting is also taking longer, with a 50 percent increase in decision-making times between 2014-15 and 2018-19.

The RMA has not responded well to environmental challenges. Our environment is under significant pressure, with many of our native plants, animals, and ecosystems under threat. Many of our lakes, rivers, wetlands, and estuaries are degraded. The majority of monitored swimming sites do not meet World Health Organization safe swimming guidelines in summer. It’s all interconnected. The degradation of our natural environment reduces the ability of our ecosystems to recover from shocks like the increasing storm events that come from climate change. Sediment run-off is degrading our inshore fisheries. We’re losing that valuable topsoil. Sediment and nutrient loads extend beyond estuaries, adversely affecting kelp beds and scallops.

So it’s been a fail on the enabling of houses, a fail on the cost of consents for infrastructure, a fail on environmental protection, and civil society has concluded that RMA reform is overdue.

Over the past 18 months, Government has been advancing changes, as recommended by the expert panel chaired by the Hon Tony Randerson KC. They considered and we’ve considered reports from the Productivity Commission, the Waitangi Tribunal, Local Government New Zealand, the Employers and Manufacturers Association, the Environmental Defence Society, the Property Council, and Infrastructure New Zealand. The Government has engaged with local government, the private sector—including developers and infrastructure providers—environmental NGOs, and Māori groups, and now we’re legislating for changes that are grounded in the Randerson panel’s recommendation.

The Natural and Built Environment Act (NBA) sets out how the environment will be protected and used. It covers land use, along with environmental protection, order takes, and discharges and use of the coastal marine areas. NBA plans will describe the way in which a region’s resources will be managed, how environmental limits and targets will be set locally, how infrastructure development will be enabled, and how conflicts between outcomes will be resolved. More than 100 RMA plans reduce to 15 regional level plans across the country, prepared by regional planning committees who also approve them. Submissions are heard by an independent hearings panel. Time to take to prepare the equivalent of an RMA plan will reduce from 10 years to four. With fewer plans and faster processes, local communities will continue to have a strong voice, including through statements of community outcomes. There is flexibility for regions to determine the make-up of regional planning committees, which comprise representatives from local government and Māori groups. We’re not putting in place 50:50 co-governance.

Broader on Treaty issues, we’ve aligned the new law with the wording in the Conservation Act to give effect to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi. Treaty settlements will be fully upheld and carried over.

The most significant change to enhance environmental protection is the shift from an effects-based approach to one that’s based on outcomes. The RMA approach of avoid, remedy, and mitigate has in the end allowed the accumulation of small negative effects, to the degradation of the likes of water and the likes of topsoil, as well as loss of biodiversity. The NBA changes this approach, setting limits to maintain current environmental levels and targets where degradation needs to be addressed. This shared environmental generation ethic is described as te Oranga o te Taiao, which is defined in the NBA and will support a responsible and positive relationship with the natural environment.

The National Planning Framework (NPF) will be central government’s primary lever to influence the new system. The first NPF is in development. It carries over existing national direction. It has new content on infrastructure and also dealing with natural hazards, including those caused by climate change.

Infrastructure is a major focus of the first NPF. Te Waihanga is leading the preparation of this direction, which will include policy outcomes, targets, standards, and rules to support a nationally consistent approach to infrastructure. Under NBA, consenting will be simplified and made more efficient. Greater use of standards, a reduced number of activities, and the expanded scope of permitted activities will reduce the number of unnecessary consents. This will reduce costs. Fast track, which was put in place in response to COVID and has been successful at reducing average consenting periods by 15 months, will be made permanent. We will not adopt fast track for all projects, as the National Party has suggested. They’re on the wrong track on that, because that would gum up the system and would turn fast track into slow track.

Designations are carried on as the main tool for infrastructure provision—I’m not going to have time to go into that detail. I’ll consider that in the Spatial Planning Bill.

Section 32 reports have become hopelessly long-winded, post-fact justifications and are hardly used. We’re putting an end to this waste. They’re going to have to be expressed succinctly and plainly, be proportionate to the scale of the proposal, and be prepared in a way that’s useful to a decision maker. We’re also legislating for an evaluation report to be limited if it’s giving effect to a provision in the National Planning Framework.

The cost-benefit analysis in the supplementary analysis report says that every dollar spent will deliver benefits of between $2.50 and $4.90. This comes from a reduction in consent volumes and a reduction in costs when consents are necessary. It will result in efficiency benefits from between $210 million and $430 million per year. Central and Government costs for infrastructure and development projects are likely to decrease. Consenting and designation costs go down, corridor protection protects investment certainty, and the opportunity to purchase land earlier in the development cycle also helps. Housing affordability benefits are predicted to be between $146 million and $834 million per annum. Public good benefits include a well-functioning resource management system for future generations and, of course, include the environmental outcomes that cannot be measured in dollar terms, but they’ll be improved. And those benefits are always very expensive.

The combination of the NPF, the regional spatial strategies, and the NPA plans will embed expanded supply of land and enable renewable electricity generation so we can affordably decarbonise the economy and address cumulative effects. The new system will be faster, cheaper, and better, and I commend the bill to the House.

Well, thank you, Madam Speaker. I think “Hope springs eternal” is probably the best way to summarise the Minister’s introductory speech in the first reading of this quite momentous piece of legislation. But we’ve been a long time coming to this point.

So the Minister, in his address to the House this afternoon, has presented a long list of reasons why the existing resource management framework in New Zealand needs to change. And he correctly summarised that there was unanimity across the Parliament at the last election that the existing legislation that was first passed in 1991 had long since ceased to be effective for our beautiful natural environment in terms of protecting, maintaining, and enhancing that natural environment. And it was woefully inadequate in terms of providing for our built environment and the development of infrastructure, lifestyle, and the sorts of developments that we want as a First World nation.

But is what the Minister is proposing the correct answer? I think that on this side of the House, there’s probably one simple test that we will want to apply to this legislation as we give it vigorous attention and scrutiny through the select committee process. The test that we will want to apply to this suite of legislative changes that the Minister has brought to the House—remember, this is just the first part; the second part, the spatial planning part, will be receiving a first reading later this afternoon. But there is a third leg to the treble and that’s the adaptation piece, which won’t be seen until next year and may not be concluded in the life of this Parliament. But the question and the test that we will apply to this reform package is: will it make it easier to get things done? Will it make it easier to get things done? I am sceptical, upon first glance at this fairly significant piece of legislation, that the answer to that question will be in the affirmative. I’m not sure that it will be. And for anyone that is doubtful about the complexity of the issues that are confronting this Parliament when we attempt to reform the existing status quo, just have a look at this first piece of legislation and look at the size of it. The existing Resource Management Act (RMA) runs to some 900 pages. It started out in 1991 at about 300. And then, as the Minister has said, it’s gone through a lot of amendment and change since then and has ended up at about 900 pages. This first leg of the trifecta that the Minister is introducing to the House runs to nearly the same length, some 807 pages, and then we’ll add in the Spatial Planning Bill and then we’ll add in the adaptation piece—and I would put money on it that the total will be longer and more complicated than the existing status quo.

So what does this piece of legislation seek to do? Well, it seeks—I think, and I’m going to give the Minister some credit, in a well-intentioned way, to try and improve things. And so from that point of view, that’s a good thing: to try and improve things. But if the remedy is worse than the ailment, then that isn’t moving our nation forward. We are a country of 5 million people spread across a not insignificant landmass—about the size of the United Kingdom or Japan—and we have some of the most complicated, most expensive, most complex planning and resource legislation on the planet. Some of it stems back to the actual formation and creation of the existing RMA. A quite radical piece of policy at the time which set about trying to resolve the eternal conflicts of how to protect, maintain, and enhance the natural environment while at the same time allowing development. It set those two conflicting positions, if you like, into one piece of legislation. At the time, people thought, “Well, this is world leading. This is going to be the way the world will go.” And we all sort of patted ourselves on the back in New Zealand, we thought this was world-leading stuff. It turned out that, in fact, the world didn’t follow us and they didn’t go down the path we went down—and they did not do it for some very good reasons.

So there are some issues that we want to present to the select committee and to this House as this piece of legislation works its way through the system. In essence, we’ve got a number of main concerns. The first one I’ve outlined is the answer to the question: will it make it easier to get things done? We’re not sure that it will. But we are concerned that this piece of legislation and the other two pieces that go with it will actually just add more bureaucracy to an already heavily burdened bureaucratic system. The plan is to establish 15 regional planning committees with some very dubious democratic accountability levels applied to them. We don’t know quite how they are going to be appointed, what the decision process will involve. But we do know that those regional planning committees will be effectively another layer of local government, and that’s a cause for immediate concern. But it’ll be another level of local government that has enormous power, enormous power to influence the outcomes of people’s lives and how they live their lives. And so we are concerned about the whole concept of the regional planning committees, how they’re going to work, how they’re going to operate, how they’re going to be appointed, who makes the decisions, where is the democratic accountability, and where they will actually assert and exert their power and influence.

Another area of concern for us in the National Party is the high degree of legal uncertainty that the new reform package will bring to anyone who wants to get anything done. And so there is a lot of new language, a lot of new vocabulary, a lot of new terms in the proposed legislation. There’s a new concept in terms of replacing what the RMA used to refer to as “sustainable management” with the new concept of “Te Oranga o te Taiao”. Now, that’s an untested term and phrase, and pity the poor developer or person who wants to get something done that is going to have to end up taking a case all the way, probably, to the Supreme Court to get some kind of judicial interpretation in understanding of exactly what the term means. That’s going to be expensive and time consuming. And it will need to be tested because iwi will want to test it in exactly the same way as any other sector of our society want to test it, to find out exactly what it means and how it will be applied.

Then I think the next area of concern that we have on this side is as to whether the balance of these reforms are pro - development and progress or whether they will hinder development and progress. On our reading of it, it looks very much so that things will be harder to get done, that the development of much needed infrastructure is going to be very, very difficult. And so there’s nothing in this bill that gives us confidence that it’s going to be easier to get things done.

Now, there have been a number of responses to the legislation—[Interruption.]

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order! Hon Scott Simpson.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. There have been a number of responses to the proposed legislation and I just want to just go through a few of them because I’m sure that many of these folk will want to be presenting submissions to the select committee. But there’s one that stuck out for me that I thought was very appropriate. It comes from a former Labour Cabinet Minister, one David Benson-Pope, and he is now and has been for some time a long-serving councillor on the Dunedin City Council, and he says that the suggested savings were “a bit overblown”, to be his analysis of that. And then he said further he’s wary of a one-size-fits-all mentality. And then he goes on and says “A lot of wheels are being reinvented now, many of them unnecessarily.” And so good old David Benson-Pope, a man who spent quite a bit of time in this Parliament and has had a very long career in local government, so he’s dubious and concerned about it. And then you’ve got Alan McDonald from the Employers and Manufacturers Association, he says “Success or failure will depend on how these reforms are made a reality.” And isn’t that going to be the test: how are these reforms going to be made a reality? Leonie Freeman from the Property Council, she’s got concerns. Federated Farmers have concerns. There are a whole range of legal practitioners and citizens and developers who have concerns, and even the environmental organisations have concerns—as do we. We will not support this bill at first reading.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I want to acknowledge the work of the Hon David Parker in shepherding through what is not only a massive piece of legislative reform but it’s an issue that is hugely important to New Zealand. As well as being cheaper, faster, and better resource management law, I’m confident that the new planning system that this bill begins to usher in will not only protect the environment better than the old system but it will allow our towns and cities to grow, it will allow the homes to be built that we desperately need, and it will encourage more liveable and successful cities.

I want to devote my call to some comments about how the whole issue of urban tree protection will be dealt with under the new planning system. I think everybody understands that trees are extremely important to the life of our cities. There are many reasons, as the Lorax said, that we must speak for the trees. They bring beauty to our lives, they attract birds, they give shade, they are good for our mental health. The urban forest futureproofs our cities for climate change. They cool cities that are becoming hotter and hotter because of the increase in hard surfaces associated with intensification. Climate change is making our cities wetter and more flood-prone, and trees absorb and filter stormwater. They improve air quality, they provide a very important acoustic buffer in our neighbourhoods, and, most importantly, kids can climb on them.

Now, the problem that we need to address is that the big change that’s under way in our cities—the intensification that must happen in order to allow more homes to be built and allow space to be used more efficiently in our cities—is putting great pressure on the urban forest. We must build more homes and we must allow our cities to grow up, but all of these things are putting pressure on the garden suburbs of our 1950s-style cities. There is clear evidence, particularly in Auckland, that the development pressures unleashed by the reforms of the Auckland Unitary Plan have led to a massive surge in new homes being build—particularly medium-density housing—and that is speeding up the loss of trees on private property.

We need to strike a better balance. Through the changes that we are beginning to debate today, we are going to make it easier for councils in their new plans to protect the special trees that people love in their neighbourhoods. Under the National Planning Framework to be released next year, we will allow councils to create a rule in their plans that would protect trees of a certain size or age. They’re often referred to as specimen trees. Now, that would mean that if a property owner wants to remove such a tree, they would need to get a consent, and this gives communities, through their council, the opportunity to weigh up the value of a specimen tree against the value, for instance, of developing that patch of ground, or for the council and the landowner together to find a win-win solution.

Now, this is not possible under the current rules in the Resource Management Act (RMA), put in place by the National Party in 2009, which require councils to schedule individual trees or groups of trees on specific named and sited properties if they want to protect them. These restrictions from 2009 certainly give certainty to landowners and developers, but they make it virtually impossible for councils to protect the very special trees that people value. Under our proposals, councils will still be able to continue protecting trees by scheduling them as they can under the RMA, but we won’t be going back to the pre-2009 system where, in some places, property owners routinely needed to get a consent to remove trees.

But preserving our urban forests requires much more than just regulating what happens on private property. The National Planning Framework will also direct urban councils to develop an urban forest strategy as part of their plans. It will be evidence-based and it will contain percentage targets for canopy cover. Auckland is currently at an average of only 18 percent canopy cover. The international benchmark is 30 to 40 percent. Brisbane has canopy cover of 44 percent, Melbourne has a target of 40 percent by 2040, and it’s worth noting that in our major urban centres today, some suburbs are leafier than others. Auckland’s working-class suburbs have substantially lower canopy cover. Māngere-Ōtāhuhu has 8 percent cover. My own electorate of Te Atatū, in the Henderson-Massey Local Board area, which has some of the fastest urban intensification going on in Auckland today, has just 15 percent canopy cover, and it is reducing on a weekly basis because of all of the intensification. The strategies will need to cover not just trees on private property but trees in the road corridor and in parks and in public places, and, ideally, these urban forest strategies will use a range of methods and incentives to increase public acceptance of urban trees and build a sense of collective responsibility for the urban forest.

The Government recognises that the future planning system will make it easier for councils to protect the urban forest, but it is going to take considerable time for those changes to bed in, and, in fact, it could take up to a decade before the Natural and Built Environment Act (NBA) plans that will be created under this legislation that we’re debating today are operational at a local council level. So we will amend the current RMA, and possibly the existing national direction, as a transition measure to ensure that the outcomes that we are talking about today can be put in place much earlier than they would be if we were going to wait until the new system ushers in a new generation of NBA plans.

So what this means is that over the short term, councils will still be able to protect trees using schedules in the RMA plans, but they will be able to introduce a narrow tree protection rule where a resource consent is required to remove a specimen tree of significant size or maturity. In addition to that, councils will still be able to use things like financial contributions, where they will have the ability to rebate financial contributions levied on a landowner or a developer in order to incentivise the retention or the planting of trees.

The same principle applies to development bonuses when a landowner or developer wishes to do anything that is not strictly enabled under the detailed provisions of that local plan. They can then negotiate with the council and, in doing so, the council will have the opportunity to incentivise the retention of trees. Finally, the Medium Density Residential Standards, which are subject to current intensification plan changes, are designed specifically to allow outdoor space to be grouped as communal space in developments, thereby allowing more space for trees amongst the medium-density developments.

So there it is. That is the approach that we are taking in the course of stewarding this new planning system for New Zealand on one important aspect of the urban environment, and that is how we protect and enhance the urban forest.

Well, I was quite looking forward to that speech from Phil Twyford. I thought we were going get a discourse on competitive urban land markets and flooding the market with development opportunities and taking advantage of cheaper land which would drive cheaper housing.

💬 Hon David Parker: We’ve already won that argument.

Ha, ha! Well, you might have already won that argument, there’s consensus across the Parliament around that. It’s just a shame that this bill doesn’t actually deliver that.

💬 Hon David Parker: It does.

It does not. But I thought we were going to get a diatribe around that, but we didn’t. Instead, we had seven minutes on the somewhat niche topic of trees—niche but important, lest I be accused of environmental vandal. But, no doubt, the Minister will make further contributions as the bill goes through the House, because I know that he is all in favour of competitive urban land markets driving better housing outcomes.

This is a bill that has been a long time coming to the Parliament. I want to be very serious around this, because there is consensus across the Parliament that the Resource Management Act (RMA) is broken; there’s no doubt about that. It has delivered neither better environmental outcomes or better quality infrastructure or faster infrastructure, and it has also—and this is the worst bit of it, in my view—helped deliver the most unaffordable housing market in the Western World.

Now, I’ve been at the Infrastructure New Zealand conference this morning, as the Minister has, and I heard someone stand up and say, “Oh, the RMA is only part of the problem.” Well, the RMA is a big part of the problem. I don’t think many people who have studied the issue comprehensively would deny that.

For 30 years, we have tied ourselves up in these labyrinthine planning processes that have managed to produce a social and economic disaster of extremely expensive house prices, extremely expensive rents relative to income, and now, of course, around 4,000 families living in motels around the country—at enormous fiscal cost to Government; billions upon billions every year. There is consensus that we need to fix the RMA.

The question is whether or not this package of bills from the Government does that. I do just have to make a slightly political point: the last National Government spent nine years arguing for comprehensive RMA reform—and David Parker is smiling; I know he’s going to say, “So why didn’t you do it?” The reason we couldn’t do it was because we could never get the numbers in the Parliament. The Hon Peter Dunne, who sat down on the crossbenches there, sat there for three years and would not accept the arguments around housing affordability and around infrastructure provision and around all of the arguments that David Parker is making now. He would not accept those points, and he just sat there and point-blank refused to accept the need for RMA reform.

💬 Hon Dr David Clark: Nine long years.

It was nine great years, actually, David Clark, and it’s going to be another great nine or 12 years in a year-or-so’s time.

So we could never get the numbers, and Labour opposed all of the sensible changes we put forward to the RMA during that time in Government—and they cried crocodile tears—and now they turn around say, “Oh, don’t worry, we’ve got it all sorted.” So we’ve waited five years, and here we go.

Look, I don’t want to be churlish about this, but as I say, I do just want to make the point politically which is that it is somewhat galling to hear David Parker turn up in this Parliament, and Phil Twyford, and, no doubt, Rachel Brooking—she can’t blamed for it, actually, she wasn’t part of it, so I can’t blame her. Anna Lorck is not responsible either—it’s David Parker and the Ministers who have been around for a while; it’s their fault. They turn around and say, “We need RMA reform.” Now that they’ve got an absolute majority, they’re going to ram it through.

Genuinely, genuinely serious point: we’re going to partake in the select committee process properly, there’s no doubt about that. Scott Simpson and myself and the other National members and Eugenie Sage, who is a very good chair of the Environment Committee, I know will do a good job examining the bill, but we are sceptical.

I want to lay out why we’re sceptical. The first is that we worry about the bureaucracy. Now, the planning system is already riddled with bureaucracy. Under this new system, there’s going to be these regional planning committees. There will be 15 of them mapping the existing regional council boundaries, clumping Nelson and Tasman together—time will tell how Nelson and Tasman will feel about that.

“Committee members shall be appointed by the local councils.” Now, our worry is that argument over who is going to be on each of the committees will take years. Now, I’ve been around long enough to see a few local government bum fights in my time, and they can get unpleasant quickly. I do worry that just the actual debate about sorting who is on the committees and mana whenua and which particular iwi is on the committee etc. is going to add to more bureaucracy.

We worry about the democratic deficit. Territorial regional councils are made up of elected members, they decided the shape of their cities. These are going to be appointed members; voters can’t throw them out—at least not easily. Of course, there is even more plans that these new committees will have to give effect to. So we worry about the bureaucracy.

The second thing is, and this is a very important point, is legal uncertainty. The purpose of the new Natural and Built Environment Bill will be to “recognise and uphold upholds te Oranga o te Taiao”. Basically, sustainable management as a purpose in the old RMA has been explicitly replaced by te Oranga o te Taiao. Now, I’ve checked the statute books. This is a legal term that is completely new to New Zealand law.

💬 Hon David Parker: It’s defined.

Sure—sure! But it’s never been used before, there’s no case law on the issue, it is completely new to New Zealand law, and apparently it’s been written for this bill, and it’s in the purpose statement of the bill. So that is going to suffuse its way through the new RMA system—or the new Natural and Built Environment system.

💬 Angie Warren-Clark: Yup.

“Yup”—OK, so she’s proud of it. OK, that’s all good. Good to have that clarity. The regional committees, the councils, the planners, the builders, everyone is going to have to figure out what this means and apply it. Good luck.

One option is that everyone just decides that “te Oranga o te Taiao” just means “sustainable management”, which is the term it’s replacing. But if Parliament meant that, we’d just say that. Parliament is not saying that, or at least the Government proposal does not say that. So when Parliament changes the words, the courts assume we’re doing it deliberately. Now, I’ve already had RMA practitioners approach me and tell me that there is going to be years of legal wrangling over this language. That means more delays, more costs, more roadblocks for new housing and infrastructure.

Add on top of that the requirement to take account of the principle of the Treaty of Waitangi to “give effect” to the Treaty of Waitangi. Now, it sounds like a small change, but it’s not. As any RMA lawyer will tell you, there’s a big difference between taking account of something and giving effect to it. Now, the Supreme Court has recently ruled that “give effect to” means implement, and it is a strong directive; that’s their language. It significantly strengthens the provision. Our view and our concern is that it will make it more difficult to do things—not easier—and it will let to more legal uncertainty. We want to get to grips with that issue in the select committee; I think it’s going to be very important.

Now, the Government’s argument is that the Conservation Act 1987 contains that language; that’s true, it does. But the Conservation Act is specifically about conserving and protecting resources. It doesn’t have to solve the problem of choosing between nature and development. The planning framework for our cities and our environment does have to solve that problem. So the strategy of just transplanting language from a totally different context, in our view, is misguided.

Thirdly, we’re concerned about the balance in the bill. We’re concerned it’s too tilted against development and in favour of the environment. Now, the Government says this will make it easier to do things. Everyone is in favour of that. But look at clause 3 of the new bill: “(a) enable the use, development, and protection of the environment in a way that—… (iii) promotes outcomes for the benefit of the environment”. Now the emphasis from the current law is very different. This new law is about promoting the environment, and only if you can promote the environment and comply with environmental limits and te Oranga o te Taiao will you be able to do things. This is not a recipe for faster and smoother; it is a recipe for argument.

Look at all the things that plans have to do: protect or restore ecological integrity, mana, and mauri of air, water, soil, the coast, wetlands, estuaries, lakes, river, biodiversity, reduce greenhouse gases, recognise the relationship of iwi and hapū, conservation of cultural heritage, protection of customary rights, public access to the coast, protecting highly productive land, plus—plus—the use and development of land for housing, business, and the ongoing and timely provision of infrastructure services. How can plans achieve all of those things? This is a recipe for gridlock, like we have at the moment.

The second point I take from that is it’s very clear where the balance lies. Look at those things that plans have to provide for. The natural built environment and infrastructure barely get a look in—they barely get a look in. These bills—and this bill in particular—look like environmental protection Acts. They are not pro-development bills. Our concern is that they will not lead to making it easier for New Zealanders to get things done. We oppose them, but we’ll consider them at the committee.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I have to say that I am very excited to be speaking on this first reading—this will be of no surprise to anyone here—of the Natural and Built Environment Bill, noting that there is no “s” on that “Environment”; excuse me if I accidentally add one in. We’ve heard already that this bill has been a long time in its development. We’ve had people, practitioners talking about how the Resource Management Act (RMA) is a problem for a long time, people in this House talking about how it’s a problem, and then Minister Parker established the Randerson review, chaired by Tony Randerson.

💬 Chris Bishop: Who was on that?

Who was on that? I had the great privilege of being on that before I was an MP, and it was a very interesting process to be involved with. Of course, that group considered many of the issues that have made it into this bill, and the one we’ll be discussing later. And then, of course, it’s been some time in the development of these bills since those reports, so my point there is that this has all been very well thought through. It’s important. It’s complicated. Planning is always complicated, because people want to do different things with their land and there will always be conflicts.

So some of the things that I wanted to talk about quickly: one thing is that some commentators have said that this this piece of legislation is no different from the RMA; that it just all looks the same but it’s a slightly different shape. But I think when you look more closely, you see that it’s actually very different, because the focus here is on outcomes, not just effects. We’ve had the previous speaker, Chris Bishop, talk about some of those outcomes in clause 5. There are those differences with giving effect to the Treaty, and I agree with the last speaker that it is a big change. There are also smaller changes that are harder to see, and that is in things like the definition of “environment”. There’s no longer any reference to amenity, and that’s a very fundamental and important difference.

However, the drafters of the bill have been careful not just to get rid of concepts that are well understood and change the names for changing the names’ sakes. So we still have consents—admittedly, we don’t have non-complying or restricted discretionary. We still have designations, we still have plans, and we now have a national planning framework.

So I think it’s important if we just spend a little second on those outcomes. Some of the outcomes are to address climate change, and this is the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, the removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, and the reduction of risks arising from, and better resilience of the environment to natural hazards and the effects of climate change. That is very important.

As to the previous speaker, Chris Bishop, saying that there’s not much about development, one of the outcomes in clause 5(i) is the ongoing and timely provision of infrastructure services to support the wellbeing of people and communities, and, of course, at clause 5(c) where we’re talking about land being available for housing, and, in fact, there is the ample supply of land for development to avoid inflated urban land prices. So all those things are quite different.

There are also, of course, limits—specific limits that are going to be set by the national planning framework. There are also targets. And, in clause 6, just staying in the purpose part of the bill, we’ve also got to recognise the positive effects of using and developing the environment to achieve the outcomes. That’s a big change as well.

We’ve heard about the one plan per region. It’s important to note that it’s not the regional council in charge of those plans; it’s all the different councils within one region making a plan together. We also hear that it’s going to take 10 years to implement, and that’s because there are 15 regions, the way that we’re going to use it in this bill, because we’re putting Tasman and Nelson together; they’re both unitary authorities. It’s going to take 10 years because we’re not going to do everyone all at once; there’s a region-by-region approach. In the Randerson review, being part of that group and talking to practitioners, it was very difficult for the practitioners in New Zealand to do both the Auckland unitary plan and the Christchurch plan at the same time. So there has to be some thought about that transition that this bill reflects.

We need to do this. It’s easy to say, “Well, National wanted to do it last time, but they didn’t do it.” Here it is. It’s had a lot of work that’s gone into it. The select committee is going to spend the proper amount of time examining this. Everybody wants it, every speech that I’ve heard so far tonight. Everybody wants it to work and wants it to be efficient, to do both looking after our environment and providing for the needs of our communities. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. I’m pleased to take a call on the Natural and Built Environment Bill. The bill has certainly been a very long time coming, and I congratulate Minister Parker and the legion of officials in the Ministry for the Environment and other agencies on all of the mahi that they have put into it, drawing on a plethora of reports, the very substantive review by the Randerson team, the Hon Tony Randerson, and that report published in 2020—because it does deal with that problem that we’ve got: urban areas which have been struggling to keep pace with population growth. There’s been a lack of coordination between infrastructure investment and development. We’ve got increasing car congestion, reduced housing affordability and a lack of protection for the environment.

But sometimes I think it is too easy to blame the law and to blame the Resource Management Act (RMA), because it’s partly a mind-set. It’s a very frontier, colonial mind-set of taking, taking, taking from nature and not recognising the dependence that we have on infrastructure—green infrastructure that nature provides in terms of soil, sunlight, air, fresh water, and our oceans. So I’m really pleased that te Oranga o te Taiao is a key concept embedded for the first time in the bill, because with Te Ao Māori perspectives it recognises that humans depend on nature and that we are connected. We need a resource management system that delivers better, and there’s a very big ambition in this bill in moving away from the focus on managing adverse effects to focusing on outcomes, environmental outcomes, and human activities occurring in a way that promotes those environmental outcomes: development happens within limits and it meets targets.

There are quite major changes to the whole planning process with regional planning committees, the two members representing iwi, and other representatives from councils being involved in those. It sounds easy to take more than a hundred plans and make them 15. That is a huge exercise and the devil will certainly be in the detail, in this bill, both in the detail and in the way in which the bill is implemented over the next decade. It will be Labour and Minister Parker’s legacy.

Some of the concerns that the Greens have: a bill of over 800 pages would get the normal six-month select committee process, but for such a large bill, that is actually a limited amount of time. I apologise in advance to submitters who will be having to come to grips with this complicated legislation over the Christmas break and make submissions, and I do wish to point out to the Minister that there could be a significant improvement in the information that the Ministry for the Environment (MFE) has on its website.

We’ve had the release of the supplementary analysis report. That refers to a lot of ministerial oversight group Cabinet papers. They are not available on the MFE website. There’s a lot of aesthetic, white space on that website, but real gaps in information, unlike three waters, for which at least the Department of Internal Affairs had a comprehensive list of all of its reports and they were very easy to access. It’s important for the public to be able to understand the consideration of options that went in to developing the bill and why certain provisions were arrived at.

In terms of the Green Party’s position, it’s certainly to support it at first reading so that it goes to select committee for that public scrutiny, but our support beyond that does depend on achieving some significant changes. I was pleased to hear Minister Twyford talk about urban trees, because it was really disappointing to see in the bill that it just perpetuates the status quo. It requires councils to schedule individual trees and small groups of trees to identify them before they can achieve any protection. It makes no improvement on the status quo, but what I heard was there’s the potential for changes through that select committee process. So that’s one of the things we are concerned about.

It’s interesting that National is saying that the bill potentially constrains development. From the Greens’ perspective, we see it as potentially expediting development. There are a number of exceptions to meeting the outcomes and some of the targets. There is the ability for the Minister to create exceptions through the National Planning Framework, the wider ability for designations, and more agencies being able to be requiring authorities, and I think back to the huge community concern when Central Plains Water was given requiring authority status and was able to have a big designation over farmland with farmers unable to undertake some of their activities because that would have conflicted with the proposed reservoir.

But there are things in it too like the notification notice that consent authorities won’t be required to hold a hearing, even if a consent is notified. I’m still grappling with the detail of that. Does that mean that there’s less opportunity for the public to get engaged? I would note the experience of people in Christchurch with the Christchurch district plan post-earthquake, where with the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority, in particular, there weren’t hearings. People felt alienated when decisions were made behind closed doors without an opportunity to talk directly to those decision makers.

Around aquaculture, coastal sea space is a public asset. It is the commons. There is, in the rhetoric around the bill, a lot of talk about promoting aquaculture, promoting investor confidence, providing new opportunities, accelerating aquaculture, but at the same time we have a handbrake on marine protection. So there may be some tensions to work through there.

One of the things I do like is the compliance and enforcement provisions. There’s a huge gap in the current compliance system under the Resource Management Act; the Environmental Defence Society and Marie Brown highlighted that in their report Last Line of Defence. You’ve got a lack of staff resources, a lack of funding, and a lack of serious intent to actually enforce plan rules, so there’s no advantage then for industries and for landholders to do the right thing if those that are doing the wrong thing always get away with it. So there are provisions in the bill where councils have to have an up-to-date compliance, monitoring, and enforcement strategy. They can cost-recover from monitoring permitted activities. Consent authorities can consider an applicant’s compliance history when assessing a consent application. There is the increase in financial penalties, and the fact that companies can’t use insurance to pay fines. Those are all significant improvements to the compliance and enforcement system, and that is likely to provide better for nature.

I think we’ll have interesting discussions in the select committee and from submitters about the allocation tools that are in the legislation. We’ve got a number of issues, particularly in regions like Canterbury and Otago, where catchments are over-allocated and where councils have agreed for too much water to be taken for irrigation, agricultural use, with too long a terms on those consents and not adequately providing for the river and the aquifer needs or for the future needs of communities. So there is the recognition in the bill that the current system of “first in, first served” doesn’t always work.

Providing—taken from the Randerson review—principles of equity, sustainability, and—there’s another one—

💬 Hon David Parker: Efficiency.

—efficiency to drive new allocation mechanisms is something I think we’ll really look forward to getting submissions on. An ability to have more short-term consents, as the Natural and Built Environment Bill transitions over from the RMA, and to have some market mechanisms like auctions and tenders, but not for fresh water takes—some of those conversations through submissions I really look forward to, to see whether we can improve the bill there.

Also one of the other areas, other than te Oranga o te Taiao, is the mechanisms to better ensure that the principles of the Treaty are given effect to and upheld. The decision to establish a new national Māori entity to monitor Te Tiriti performance of the whole system, to provide input into the development of the National Planning Framework, to provide advice, and to nominate members for the boards of inquiry will certainly give Māori more influence in the way in which we do resource management as well as those positions around the table on the regional planning committees.

It is a big bill. There is an awful lot of detail in it. I hope that the select committee process is constructive and we really do need all of the parties in the House to work to improve the bill so that it endures.

Just having an oppositional stance—I was pleased that Chris Bishop said he was going to be constructive. This bill is too important to fail. It needs to endure, so we all need to work on ensuring that it is as good as possible when it is reported back. Kia ora.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. New Zealand’s resource management laws have become unmanageable, with rules piled upon rules, all of which hold back progress and many of which have actually led to unforeseen environmental consequences. The root cause of this is the current Resource Management Act’s lack of philosophical coherence. It can’t decide whether privately owned land and the right to decide what to do with it belongs to the property owner or to the council, local government, iwi, central government, or the Environment Court. The same confusion also exists for shared resources like lakes and rivers. As a result, it’s difficult to make decisions about how to use or develop resources, and that leaves us all poorer.

Minister Parker claimed in his introduction to this 807-page bill that the reform will deliver resource consents and permits faster, better, cheaper, yet the bill appears to be simply RMA 2.0, Minister. It’s a reform designed by a committee, a committee led by one of the same planning lawyers who came up with the first Resource Management Act (RMA).

Now, sitting under section 5 of this bill, there are no less than nine environmental outcomes—including some that are extremely vague, such as the “ecological integrity, mana, and mauri of air, water, and soils”—and each one of these nine outcomes has many sub-outcomes as well, 18 in all. How 18 outcomes and sub-outcomes are meant to be balanced by decision makers is unknown, untested. There’s no hierarchy amongst these outcomes, and the criteria for decision making in section 6 affords discretion for decision makers in how they are pursued and, once limits are met, is also incredibly vague.

Now, the intentions of Minister Parker are well signalled: faster consenting times, more certainty for industry and for infrastructure agencies, yet the Minister has been forced to concede already that the reforms won’t actually deliver this. He has proudly announced that the fast-track consenting provisions under the existing Resource Management Act will be carried over and embedded into this new, 807-page bill. That’s right—the fast-track provisions, which limit who can object to developments and require a quick response from the Environmental Protection Agency, have to be retained. That’s an admission the reform process has failed right there, Minister.

Now, the Labour Government’s preference for centralisation is well understood, and it’s continued here in this bill, with a national planning framework no less, Minister. The National Planning Framework will have to be created by an Order in Council, so it won’t be here in this bill, and it relies on an executive decision by the Minister for the Environment—who currently is Minister Parker—establishing a central planning system directly from the Minister’s office. It’ll say what you can and can’t do around the country, and what consents you’re even allowed to apply for.

Now, this raises constitutional issues, as these powers are so wide and far-reaching that it’s not normally delegated to Ministers and officials for such wide-ranging and extensive powers. Allocation of resources will be by a bureaucratic juggling of three principles: of sustainability, of equity, and efficiency. However, clause 88 of the bill does, in fact, allow for a market-based mechanism for the use of geothermal water, and “the capacity of freshwater to assimilate a discharge of a contaminant”, but then clauses 88 and 128 blow the market opportunity by explicitly prohibiting a market-based solution for the allocation of fresh water, Minister, which is a surprising contradiction and a real failure.

💬 Hon David Parker: Except if Parliament agrees.

Now, consenting remains at the heart of this system. Now, the Minister said, “Except if Parliament agrees,” so maybe he is open to more market-based opportunities to resolve conflicts in the environment. So let’s see. Let’s see. Hopefully submitters who come to select committee will take up that opportunity, Minister.

Now, consenting does still remain at the heart of the system. At its core is the idea that people who want to do stuff require consent. The role of the bill is to set out those areas which are permitted, and even permitted activities can have requirements such as certification by a qualified person—you know they need an assessment by an iwi, particularly areas that are identified as having value to Māori. But what we heard from submitters on the exposure draft of this bill in 2021 is what they want reform to do is to make it clear who has rights to do what, property rights—whether they’re landowners, whether they own existing assets like ports; transmission lines; and power stations, the things that deliver energy, for example, to our cities and industries.

Farmers, growers, and irrigators also want to know that they can build water storage and transmission so that their farming and production activities are more resilient to climate change, droughts, and actually to be able to put more water back into the rivers. Because farmers love the environment; they depend on it to grow stuff. People want to know they should be able to use their own land for the most efficient purpose. To maintain, renew vital infrastructure without having to spend years and millions—or tens of millions—getting consents for things that are actually vital to support healthy communities and a thriving and healthy economy.

Now, instead of replacing the RMA with a property rights - based system that allows Kiwis to develop more and get things done, Labour’s used their replacement as a Trojan horse for another round of co-governance, Minister. That’s right, the driving principle of this bill is te Oranga o te Taiao, which means plans must incorporate “the health of the natural environment”, “the intrinsic relationship between iwi and hapu and te Taiao.”

Minister, I feel I also have an “intrinsic relationship” with the environment, but it’s not mentioned here. The “interconnectedness”, it says, “of all parts of the natural environment”, “the essential relationships between the health of the environment and its capacity to sustain life;” but how land and fresh water will be managed by relationships and interconnectedness in practice is anyone’s guess, Minister. But we’ve heard from Rachel Brooking, who was also involved in the design of this bill, that it’s going to take 10 years to implement. So I guess that’s why we need the fast-track component.

But look, this is simply a recipe for endless judicial hearings as people try to figure out what it means. This is placing undefined relationships and concepts like “interconnectedness” at the heart of land and water management; means that just about anyone will be able to object to anything, and that’s the fundamental problem we currently have—

💬 Anna Lorck: You object to everything.

—with the Resource Management Act, Anna Lorck. That’s what we have. In Tukituki, people objecting to the use of water. It’s going to put your farmers, your growers, and your primary producers out of business, Anna Lorck. Labour hasn’t learnt from the public’s rejection of three waters and co-governance. Who your grandparents are should not make any difference to the decision making you have over how other people’s land is used to what water rights you have.

Now, all persons exercising powers under this bill must also give effect to undefined principles of the Treaty of Waitangi. A National Māori Entity will provide proactive monitoring of Te Tiriti performance. Now look, while regional planning committees are intended to have, at a minimum, two iwi representatives, the Waitangi Tribunal has indicated it would insist on 50:50. So it remains to be seen how this works in practice, but we’ve seen how Labour gives effect to their constituency, and I reckon 50:50 co-governance is how it’s going to end up, Minister.

Now, there’s no explanation as to how this will make it easier to build houses, build transmission lines, transition to a renewable economy, become more climate-resilient against drought, or simply fix roads. There’s no idea how this is going to work in practice.

Labour’s addressed none of the problems the original RMA has caused. Co-governance, co-Government—whatever you call it—has no place in our planning laws. The Government should instead take a property rights approach. The only rights people should have to object to something you want to do is if it actually affects them in their property—imagine that.

Instead of giving a whole lot of people the rights to object to stuff, ACT says that you should have the right to do what you want with your own property. ACT will be announcing our own alternative to the Resource Management Act next Tuesday. We will have an alternative that the people of New Zealand, and submitters, will be able to evaluate against this Minister’s poorly designed bill.

If we want to make it cheaper to get goods to market, to build homes, and actually deliver a better New Zealand for the next generation, we need to reduce Government interference in our lives and go back to a principle that Kiwis should be able to maintain and enhance their property rights. That’s the only way we’ll realise our economic potential—

Order! The member’s time has expired.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Gosh! What a contribution from that previous member, Simon Court. The irony sits in the fact that we’ve just—

💬 Simon Court: Point of order, Mr Speaker! Given that the member enjoyed my contribution so much, I seek leave from the House to have another five minutes.

💬 SPEAKER: I don’t reckon.

TĀMATI COFFEY: How bizarre.

💬 SPEAKER: No, I’ll further rule. I’ve given the call to Tāmati Coffey. You can’t interrupt another member to take a call. I think we’ll start that time again.

TĀMATI COFFEY: OK, sure. Thank you, Mr Speaker. The irony of that previous member’s contribution is that we’ve just finished about, in this very House, the Ngāti Kahungunu ki Wairarapa Tāmaki nui-a-Rua Claims Settlement Bill, and that’s poignant for this moment, because the member stood and he talked about how all of these spooky little concepts like te Oranga o te Taiao giving effect to the Treaty were at odds and had no place in future environmental management. I completely disagree with that, and I think that he’s at odds with the previous contribution from his own party, which supported the Ngāti Kahungunu settlement and which actually talked about the environment in their settlement and the relationship that they’re intending to have with their environment. And they’re not the only ones. We’re at the end of a very long journey in this House of addressing our historical wrongs when it comes to Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The Crown has accepted the wrongs over the many years, and we have had settlement after settlement. That has changed the game. That has changed the game, and it has meant that Māori do have expectations that if we are going to reform our environmental management system, they do want a more meaningful say.

So it was through the work of the Environment Committee—I want to take a moment to thank the Minister for actually giving us a really good run-in to this bill here. Through putting up the exposure draft into the Environment Committee, that created all this engagement with practitioners, with iwi, and with lots of different stakeholders all across the country so that they knew what was coming. This has been well signalled. We understand what this is; this isn’t a shock. I do hope that we get more contributions in through the select committee, but I should think that, actually, the first lot of submissions that we got with the exposure draft actually highlighted some of those main points, and hopefully those different stakeholders will see that a lot of that has tried to be addressed in here.

So the opportunity to be able to give effect to Te Tiriti o Waitangi—yes, it is a change. But, obviously, we talked about it as a committee, and we thought we actually need to develop that a little bit more. We need to give some more guidance about exactly what that looks like so that people that are practitioners that use this legislation can do it with ease. The concept of te Oranga o te Taiao: again, we broadly talked about it with the exposure draft. There was the requirement—we heard a lot of people saying that they need more guidance in that space as well and more clarity and legal certainty to be able to implement it. And hopefully we can move in that direction. But I think it’s a credit to the Minister and a credit to the direction of this legislation that we’re willing to engage in good faith, because that’s what our iwi Māori have done for a very long time in this House with their own Treaty settlements; they have engaged with this House in good faith. And we’re engaging with good faith back again.

The role of Māori in the system is going to ensure that we uphold our Treaty settlements, ensure that we uphold those commitments and those arrangements, and ensure that Māori maintain the established decision making and participation at a regional but also, across the board, at a national level. We know that the Resource Management Act (RMA) has not supported the aspirations when it’s come to housing for Māori especially—for Māori especially because there is a lot of under-utilised Māori land sitting all across the country that could absolutely be part of the housing crisis solution. But, actually, the RMA hasn’t done a great job in being able to take those barriers away and enable that development to carry on. So I look forward to the kinds of changes that we’re going to see in this area.

I want to note as well that there was a statement put out by the housing Minister, Megan Woods, when she talked about these reforms and being able to set a national direction on things like papakāinga—we’ve never had something like that before. I look forward to that and how that might roll out in our various communities. Practitioners like University of Auckland’s Māori architecture professor Anthony Hoete talked about current planning restrictions not keeping up with the needs of Māori. Even the concept of moving away from individual dwellings into multiple buildings on one site—all of this is enabled by the new direction that we’re taking in the system.

And I wanted to talk to the point that the previous member made about where the voices of the community are going to be upheld. And I want to tell him that, actually, it will be, and we’ve been really cognisant of making sure that our communities all across Aotearoa have a say. And so, similar to the RMA, communities are going to be able to make submissions into the regional spatial strategies, into the natural and built environments plans, and we’ve got that regional planning committee that’s going to ensure that any person or any entity can make a submission into that process.

Whatever happens here, it’s an exciting time for iwi Māori to be looking at these reforms and seeing themselves reflected in these changes at a regional level and at a national level as well. And I’m very glad to understand that there will be an independent national Māori entity that will be monitoring the Te Tiriti performance in the system and that will be able to provide input into the national planning framework to be able to provide recommendations to both central and to local Governments as well. And it’s intended to do it in a way that does not usurp the mana of Māori in any area. I look forward to these changes, and I commend it to the House.

This is a split call. I call Sam Uffindell—five minutes.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I stand here to speak as the representative from Tauranga, the city that has the most expensive housing in the country—the fastest-growing city in New Zealand, and one that is beset by planning issues. We have the largest port in the country, and we need to expand that with a third berth. And, as the Minister will well know, we have been completely unable to get anywhere near doing that, and very soon we will reach capacity. We have significant housing constraints, and we don’t have the incomes that support the enormous amounts that people in our city have to pay for housing.

We know that the Resource Management Act is responsible for a great deal of this, and so I came here hoping that this bill, the Natural and Built Environment Bill, would help to address it.

💬 Hon David Parker: It does.

Unfortunately, Minister, I’m not convinced that it does. I see this bill as adding more bureaucracy, greater complexity, and more uncertainty into our planning and resource consent process. It puts a significant amount more on the plate for people to consider without any hierarchy in relation to the competing values that they will need to look at. Part 1 of the bill came in—and it’s there; the Hon Scott Simpson has it in front of him.

💬 Hon Member: Have you read it?

I have not yet waded through the enormous, two-tonne monolith that’s just been handed to me. This is part one of three. I’m not sure that it is going to get the job done. We are a small country, and we have significant infrastructure deficits. If we’re going to take those seriously, we need to be a lot more dynamic in the way we do things. Unfortunately, on this side of the House, we do not believe that this bill achieves that.

We note there is significant legal uncertainty, and that’s already been discussed here today, with the effect of te Oranga o te Taiao—my apologies if I didn’t pronounce that correctly—coming in. We have never used this in the New Zealand legal system before, and we know that that is going to create significant work for lawyers. Good if you’re a lawyer; I’m not.

💬 Hon Scott Simpson: The Minister used to be one.

The Minister did. And there is going to be a significant amount of work to determine exactly how that is to be implemented. You look at all of the outcomes that this bill must achieve—looking at protecting ecological integrity, the mana of air, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, conservation of cultural heritage, protection of customary rights—and then actually try to get things done like build houses. There’s absolutely no hierarchy given to it. So we can all see where this is going to land up. It’s going to end up in a legal quagmire [kwag-mahyuhr], with an extra level of bureaucracy in there—

💬 Hon Member: Quagmire. [kwog-mahyuhr]

—quagmire [kwog-mahyuhr]—I’ve been watching too much Family Guy, quite clearly!—trying to determine what to prioritise and what not to prioritise. But what it’s not going to prioritise is the development of New Zealand, and it’s certainly not going to prioritise the development of our city of Tauranga. We have four representatives here in the House today from our great area, and I would be incredibly surprised if any of them can honestly put their hand on their heart and say that this bill is going to improve the lot of Tauranga. [Interruption] There you go! Well, I know that that side of the House love it. It doesn’t mean you have to follow along like a bunch of lemmings, because you are clever enough to know that this is going to take New Zealand backwards.

It will take 10 years to implement; that is what we’ve heard so far. The regional planning committees are going to take control of it. We don’t know how that is going to look. We know that that will have to give effect to Te Tiriti. And that’s a significant, significant change from taking into account the principles of the Treaty. As the Supreme Court has noted, effectively this means to give effect, means to implement. I see this bill as something that will add another layer of bureaucracy, increased complexity, significantly increased uncertainty, and it certainly won’t help us address the huge housing and infrastructure deficits that we have in this country. I oppose this bill.

Tēnā tātou e te Whare. I rise to give a call on the Natural and Built Environment Bill. We will also not be supporting this bill, but not for the same reasons as the parties beside me.

Te Paati Māori cannot support the Resource Management Act (RMA) reforms until changes are made to protect and restore our environment and guarantee the rights and interests of tangata whenua. Resource management is one of the most important areas of law, especially to us as tangata whenua. What we have seen is that legislation of this significance should not be rushed. The Government must have the active consent of key tangata whenua.

Instead, what we have seen: key groups who have been asked to be engaged like the national Iwi Chairs Forum are urging caution and highlighting that the scale and pace of the reforms cannot be implemented on the ground. They also strongly reject the notion of a national Māori entity on the basis that it would undermine the rangatiratanga of hapū and iwi. While the Crown invited iwi technicians to the drafting process—and we compliment for that—we do ask: why did they refuse to release all sections of the bill to its Treaty partners prior to introduction to the House. Only when they signed confidentiality agreements could they get parts, and then they were sharing it with their own people.

This is not a partnership, and this is an example of our concerns. Yes, there are some improvements from the existing RMA, but in other ways, we’re concerned that the bill is taking us backwards. Co-governance is only a step on the road to realising our rights as tangata whenua. These bills don’t go far enough as far as we’re concerned. Māori will be a minority on the crucial, important regional planning committees, rather than being able to exercise their rangatiratanga and kaitiaki leadership that is inherently our right. When it comes to the core purpose of resource management law, the protection and restoration of the environment, this bill is even worse than the existing RMA.

These reforms only require a setting in environmental limits that we believe are preventing ecosystems degrading from their current state. This is despite the situation across many areas where maintaining ecosystems at their current state is not sustainable. So the current resource management regime at least requires sustainable management and environmental standards to reflect that safeguard. That’s not what we’re seeing projected here.

It’s clear to us that the new regime will favour developers at the expense of the natural environment, which undermines the Government’s own core objectives with these reforms: protecting and enhancing ecosystems. We are currently facing unprecedented biodiversity crises and the imminent collapse of many ecosystems integral to our way of life. To weaken baseline environmental protections at a time like this is a real worry.

We note that the transition provisions provide for a slow roll-out across the country. This means the RMA and new legislation will operate side by side. This level of complexity will not be easy for mana whenua to manage. It also undermines unified systems across the country and proposed objectives for the reforms.

So, once again, we believe mainstream interests are being catered for first and those protected by Article 2 of Te Tiriti come second. The Tiriti clause now uses the language “give effect to” rather than “take into account” mirrors the Conservation Act 1987 is an improvement on status quo. But this still falls short from our perspective of requiring the Crown to honour Te Tiriti, despite their precedent for that language in the Education and Training Act.

Is this really the best the Crown can do in 2022? From our perspective, no. We can do better and we hope you will. On an issue as important as this, we think you should be striving for more cross-party support.

From our perspective, we will seek a range of amendments, including setting environmental limits that require the restoration of ecosystems from their current state; holistic application of te Oranga o te Taiao, including cultural and social determinants; increasing Māori appointments on regional planning committees, so that they make up at least half of the committees; change and give effect to Te Tiriti to honour and implement Te Tiriti; express explicit acknowledgments of the articles of Te Tiriti—rather than the principles—and of tino rangatiratanga; and removing reference to the national Māori entity in favour of reference to accountability and oversight of structures that are determined by the national Iwi Chairs Forum and National Urban Māori Authority.

Our hope is that the Government is willing to work with us to set stronger environmental limits and ensure the framework gets consents from tangata whenua so that we will be able to support this bill into law. We look forward to ongoing discussions at the select committee and beyond. Kia ora koutou.

Kia ora e te Mana Whakawā. It’s an honour and a privilege to stand here to make a contribution to the Natural and Built Environment Bill. I have sat here and I’ve listened to everyone’s contribution to this bill, and it’s really fascinating. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Minister David Parker for his leadership, first of all, and for giving the select committee time to consider the details of this. Now, we call this the bill, but before, it was the natural and built environment exposure document. They gave us an opportunity as a select committee to consider what could be and what may well be a better bill for us to consider, which we are considering today.

It’s fascinating. When I hear contributions from the other side, they agree with the Minister that the system is broken, they agree with the Minister that it’s too costly, and they agree with a lot of things we’re saying, but at the same time, they’re saying that they oppose the bill. When I think of all their contributions, it reminds me of a well-thought-out, landscaped garden, where you think that the Ministers have looked at it and said, “All right, we really need a lot of experts to look at this well-thought-out, landscaped garden.”, and what the Opposition is saying is, “Oh, that garden is terrible. We need to do something about it, but we really don’t know what it is. Let’s just complain.”

I have heard mention of “This will take 10 years—this will take 10 years.” I think they weren’t listening to what the Minister had said, which is that this is a progressive change. We will go from a hundred regional plans to 15. What that means is that 15 plans will progressively be implemented to 15 regions, so some regions will get it within the first two years and in other regions, when it’s completed, it’ll be in 10 years’ time. So I urge all the regions, please, you can put in a submission and say, “We’d like to be considered first in the implementation of this natural and built environment.”

There are over 800 pages in this bill. I asked Rachel Brooking, because she’s an expert on this matter, and I said to Rachel Brooking, “OK, for me, how do I read this at a high level?” There are three parts to the Natural and Built Environment Bill, which are the National Planning Framework, natural and built environment plans, and consents. I’m asking those who think that this great big, massive, 800-page document is too difficult to please have a look at the clauses where it talks about the principles—oh, here it is. Please have a look at the clauses where it talks about the principles.

Can I remind the House, clause 3 in Part 1 talks about the purpose of the bill. It talks about the purpose of the bill. Clause 4—like the member Tāmati Coffey has gone into trouble by giving us an explanation—is about giving effect to the Treaty principles, clause 5 sets out the outcomes, and, of course, clause 6 sets out the principles for the Minister and the regional committees for decision making.

So I will leave the details there, but what I want to urge communities to do, communities like those where I’m from in South Auckland, young people, Pacific, ethnic communities—this is the time for us to make a contribution. Please make a submission. We, as the select committee, are going to give opportunities for those who want to make a submission to either have it written or see us in person.

Budget 2022 for the Government has three goals, and we know what the goals are. One is to continue keeping the country safe from COVID-19; two, accelerate recovery from COVID-19; and number three, it’s about laying the foundation for the future, which is what this bill is all about. It’s about laying the foundation, how we are going to build wellbeing. Number one is to keep New Zealand safe from COVID-19—continuing that—and number two is to recover. But what I want to say is that this was going to be high level. This is part of the Government’s work in terms of laying foundations for the future—I’ll keep going—laying foundations for the future. This plan is well-thought-out. I commend the Minister on his work on this, and I commend the bill to the House. Mālō ‘aupito.

💬 Stuart Smith: Mr Speaker.

Oh, I’ve got about 10 seconds to go, so I don’t know if I—there we go. It’s come time for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break. The House will resume at 7 p.m.

Sitting suspended from 5.55 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a call on the Natural and Built Environment Bill. There certainly is agreement across the House that the Resource Management Act (RMA) is broken, and it does need to be repealed. I think every MP in the House will have had constituents who’ve approached them with the frustrations that they’ve had through trying to get resource consents for a range of things. Unfortunately, the legislation is absolutely the cause of those problems, and I think what’s exacerbated it, often, is the enthusiasm and the vigour with which council officials have taken their roles on to interpret what the legislation means on the ground, the processes that are gone through—whether a report is good enough or not—before you get through the stage of getting a consent actually approved or declined. And let’s face it, any of this legislation should not be just about allowing people to do what they want, it has to meet limits—and those limits are best decided at the community level, and I’ll come back to that a little later.

Examples of things that really have perverse effects: mobile phone towers often end up being put in the wrong place because the consenting authority says “No, it can’t go on that, it’s better to go on that one” and, actually, everybody’s worse off because the original place that they wanted to put it in would have had a far better mobile phone coverage. So it has a real impact on everybody’s lives—in fact, in some cases, it’s a safety issue. The Port of Tauranga, which was mentioned before by my colleague Sam Uffindell, and the issues they’ve had—also, I know Timaru Oil Services, which is a relatively new petrol retailing and importing company, wanted to have an import terminal, or build some tanks at least, in Tauranga; and they couldn’t get a resource consent. So we will be debating another bill at some point this week around competition in the fuel retailing space. And, actually, the issue, in this part, is being held up by the RMA. So competition is there, but it’s constrained because of the RMA. We had the same issue with the supermarkets and all of the covenants put on land and around those areas so other competitors couldn’t come in.

I think some of the real doozies, though, are the Christchurch flats that were declined permission to put a turning bay within their flats because it would have a visual impact for pedestrians. I mean, these are the sorts of decisions that can come across it. But I think another one that’s of real interest to this debate is the suburban hospital in Auckland that for four years has been trying to obtain a resource consent to build more capacity, much-needed capacity, but it’s been held up by one objector. I think you may well have heard this person’s name—the objector is Tony Randerson QC.

💬 Hon Scott Simpson: KC.

Oh, sorry—KC it is now. That’s quite right.

💬 Hon Scott Simpson: Not the same one that chaired the committee?

Well, it’s the same name isn’t it? I think it might well be, it might well be. So what hope do we have of a legislation that is going to avoid those sorts of nimbyism—or the power of the nimby not being curtailed? I think it’s probably highly likely that that’s not going to change at all.

I’d like to also talk about—it says under section 5 “[Protecting] or [restoring] the ecological integrity, mana, and mauri of the air, water, and soils; the [coasts], wetlands, estuaries, lakes, and rivers … and biodiversity.” Fantastic—you know, I think we’d all agree that those things should be protected. But then it goes on to saying “[reducing] greenhouse gas emissions.” I don’t know what this bill would have to do with greenhouse emissions. That is covered under the Emissions reduction plan, it is covered under other legislation—why do we need another piece of legislation just to muddy the waters, just to add more complexity? In fact, climate change is the new religion, actually, in a way—it has to be put up in every bit of legislation, it has to be referenced in every speech, practically, by the true believers, or they’re not doing their bit. And I think this will do nothing to help climate change whatsoever.

It also is recognising the relationship of iwi and hapū and the exercise of their “kawa, tikanga—including kaitiakitanga—and mātauranga in their… [ancestral] lands, sites, wāhi tapu, wāhi tupuna”, and other taonga. I don’t have an issue with that; no issue at all. But I’m the fifth generation on my family’s farm. I’m no longer living on it, but my family are there. If my children were there, they’d be the sixth—my nephews are the sixth generation on that farm. My ancestors broke that land in; they developed it. They tamed the rivers, they planted willow trees to contain the rivers within their banks, something that hadn’t been done—that’s the Canterbury Plains; I come from mid-Canterbury. Those rivers wandered all over the plains, that’s how they were formed—when people wanted to develop the land, they needed to contain them. All of that was done without a resource consent. I would argue that my family and my wellbeing is tied to that land—why am I not mentioned in this legislation? We are in a country where one law is there for all. We are all equal under the law, but this seems as though some are more equal than others, and I don’t like that—and I don’t think New Zealanders like that either, and I don’t think it should be in the legislation.

💬 Harete Hipango: Ahi kā, Stuart.

Yeah, well it can be called whatever it likes, but it’s still the same. But I think that everyone has a deep relationship with their past, and I think that to single some out from others is unfair.

It’s interesting that we now talk about, in the legislation, outcomes rather than effects—and I think that’s fantastic; that’s what we should be doing. Outcomes are what is important, and congratulations for doing that, Minister, I think that’s a good thing. However, it still refers to effects quite a bit throughout the legislation, so I’ll look forward to going through the select committee process for the practitioners that have to deal with this to see what impact that will have—if any—on the bill and how it is introduced, and whether it will have some impact on it. I don’t know whether it will or not.

As has been mentioned, it certainly looks like the ground is being laid for co-governance. I, certainly, from the National Party standards, am absolutely against that in this sense of the word; co-governance, as far as the Treaty settlements that have gone before it are concerned, are a different thing. I thought that we should come up with another name for it, rather than co-governance, because I don’t think that’s exactly what that means. The bill says “to give effect to the [Treaty] and the [Treaty] principles”—the Treaty principles are actually up for debate! We asked, actually, when the officials were in, “what are the principles?”—and they said they don’t know, because the principles are still evolving.

So that is putting this RMAs reform on a foundation of sand if we don’t know what the principles of the Treaty are. I don’t even know why this should be referred to, quite frankly, in that we have other methods for dealing with those sorts of issues. Tāmati Coffey spoke before, and I think I absolutely agree with him about having access to their lands; and I think what a pity, what a pity that the Labour Party did not support the Te Ture Whenua legislation that was put up, which would have dealt with that and enabled Māori to have access to their land, access to their assets for their own betterment and wellbeing—but no, they didn’t, and I think that was a great pity.

I see the Minister has set limits for the national planning framework for air, indigenous biodiversity, etc.–including coastal water, estuaries, freshwater, and soil—and may also set limits in other aspects of the natural environment. Well, what a job! So we have to accept that the Minister is going to have the wisdom of Job; the wisdom of biblical proportions to make those decisions. Quite frankly, that is a disaster waiting to happen, and guess what—we all pay the price. In fact, the biggest issue New Zealand faces, outside of the tyranny of distance, is actually the economies of scale that we face in New Zealand, and the one thing we could be is nimble; this legislation is far from that. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you for the opportunity to be the final speaker and to make a contribution to the first reading of the Natural and Built Environment Bill. I have joined the Environment Committee this year, and it’s a real pleasure. I was a not a member at the time of the review of the resource management framework and the drafting of this bill, but I understand the Resource Management Act (RMA) has undergone a transformational journey, so I welcome the privilege to speak on this.

I want to acknowledge and congratulate the Minister, David Parker, for his leadership. This bill is very, very important in terms of the overhaul of the RMA. Despite earlier contributions, we are now at the point where this bill has been more engaging, and communities have had their say, and industry partners right across Aotearoa. The Environment Committee, in the next step of the process, will also have consultation to allow for more public scrutiny.

As we heard earlier, the repeal and the replacement of the RMA will reduce costs in consenting times and the resource consenting process in Aotearoa, which has become very costly under the RMA. In fact, it was highlighted earlier that between 2014-2015 and 2018-2019, council fees have increased by 66 percent for non-notified consents and 124 percent for notified consents, respectively. The consent system was taking longer with decision-making time frames.

Minister Parker appointed the 2020 Resource Management Review Panel to undertake a comprehensive review of the resource management system framework, with the main focus on the RMA. The aim of the review was to improve environmental outcomes and better enable urban and other development within environmental limits.

The RMA is broken, and consent fees have almost doubled. I want to acknowledge the multiple issues since the introduction in 1991, confirmed by a number in the industry—builders, and also in the legal profession—who raised a number of issues around highlighting time frames, planning mechanisms, including the RMA with so many processes and information to go through.

This bill, the Natural and Built Environment Bill, introduces new standardised conditions that will see fewer bespoke consents and, specifically, speed up the process. What is needed is a faster, cheaper, and better framework for resource management.

The plans under the RMA haven’t been working because it’s just taken far too long and cost New Zealanders far too much. The RMA is a major contributor to land costs being the least affordable in the OECD. The environmental outcomes have been poor, with degrading water quality, loss of biodiversity, and just the resource consenting. So there have been many actions to date—including the Randerson panel recommendations—with regards to looking at New Zealand’s natural environment under significant pressure; urban areas throughout Aotearoa have struggled to keep pace with population growth; the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions and to adapt to climate change; and, specifically, that iwi and Māori have an effective role in the system to be consistent with the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

Just as I finish up, to achieve the above objectives will address multiple problems in the current Resource Management Act, as highlighted by the Minister David Parker before the dinner break. Once the bill is enacted, it will be implemented progressively region by region.

In closing, I am optimistic that we will get there. I would like to acknowledge the chair of the Environment Committee, and members of the Environment Committee, who will continue to do the mahi and work really hard because they are committed to arrive at a better system for our country. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is, That the Natural and Built Environment Bill be considered by the Environment Committee.

Motion agreed to.

Bill referred to the Environment Committee.