Spatial Planning Bill

I present a legislative statement for the Spatial Planning 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.

I move, That the Spatial Planning Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Environment Committee to consider this bill, too.

The Spatial Planning Act (SPA) is a vital part of the new system and provides for the development and implementation of long-term strategic spatial planning across New Zealand regions. This bill, the Spatial Planning Bill, will work with the Natural and Built Environment Bill, read a first time just earlier.

In December 2020, when Cabinet agreed to repeal and replace the Resource Management Act (RMA), it set five objectives for the reform: first, to protect and restore the natural environment; second, to better enable development within biophysical limits, stripping out the excessive reference to amenity in the existing statute; third, to improve system efficiency and effectiveness and to save time and money; fourth, to give effect to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi; and fifth, to better address risks from climate change and other natural hazards. The Spatial Planning Bill will work in tandem with the Natural and Built Environment Bill to achieve those objectives.

Can I thank the members who spoke on the first bill for their contributions. One thing that I thought was common to a number of the submissions from the Opposition was some scrutiny at select committee as to whether there is a need for some priority of clause 5 matters. There is some, accorded by clause 58 as well, but that’s an issue that I look forward to seeing advice from the select committee on.

The Spatial Planning Bill will create a more efficient planning system that takes less time and cost. It will cost less; it will better identify where housing and infrastructure will go, earlier in the planning cycle. This provides certainty to local and central government as well as to developers and infrastructure providers—enables them better to plan and fund their investments. The Natural and Built Environment Bill will put the detailed policies and rules in place to implement the regional spatial strategies, as well as making improvements that mean consents and designations can be delivered more efficiently.

Long-term spatial planning aids these objectives. It assists with infrastructure investment, land-use planning, climate adaptation, environmental protection and restoration. This bill requires the creation of regional spatial strategies for each region. They’ll set out a vision and objectives for a region’s development and change over a 30-year-plus time span, and focus on big issues and opportunities facing a region. A regional spatial strategy won’t address everything that needs to happen in a region; rather, regional planning committees will determine the key issues that need to be addressed, in consultation with their community. Where a strategy is not required for the entirety of the region, strategic plans can be made at a more localised level.

To address concerns from local government that central government agencies are too often uncoordinated and difficult to corral, the central government member will be responsible for communicating central government priorities. Over time, regional spatial strategies will become a vehicle for the delivery of infrastructure in the right places, in the right time. These are needed to provide clear signals to the private sector, as well as local government and central government agencies, like those responsible for transport and housing. The SPA will also unlock long-stymied development and industries such as aquaculture, and ensure that the infrastructure that new industries like aquaculture need—like wharves—is coordinated.

Regional spatial strategies will identify, in general terms, where urban expansion is expected in the future. This will guide decision making by identifying existing and future infrastructure needed to align with long-term regional growth. Infrastructure identified in a regional spatial strategy will be considered against narrower tests at a time a designation is sought, leading to efficiency gains. The regional spatial strategy will also identify areas that should be protected from development, such as areas with significant biodiversity or highly productive land, or areas at risk from sea-level rise. Regional spatial strategies will be accompanied by implementation plans that can set out triggers and key actions for delivery partners to implement, along with an approach to monitor and report on delivery. Where appropriate, they can be supported by more detailed implementation agreements.

The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment has suggested to me that the focus of regional spatial strategies should be prescribed to cover only areas that have been identified as key growth areas, or areas experiencing environmental pressure, and I look forward to feedback from the select committee on that issue, too.

In summary, the Spatial Planning Act will fill a critical gap in the current resource management system by delivering long-term spatial planning across New Zealand regions. Together with the Natural and Built Environment Act, this legislation will deliver a resource management system that, in contrast to the RMA it replaces, will deliver a faster, cheaper, and better system. In respect of the point that has been made by some submitters as to the length of the statute, the new bills—combined—are actually shorter than the existing system—

💬 David Seymour: By how much?

If you include the codification into the primary statute of the fast-track legislation, which is currently separated, the bills are about 20 percent shorter. If you want to contrast that with Australia, Australia has a similar length primary statute at the federal level, plus 600-page state legislature Acts; so their planning provisions are much longer than ours. That’s no reason to say that there’s nothing to aim for, but the legislation here is shorter.

I would also make one other point about the idea that comes from the ACT Party that you can rely, just about solely, on private property rights, to sort out these issues. I would point out—

💬 David Seymour: It’s not the ACT Party’s idea at all.

Well, that was—private property rights and public law rights were the two things that they said they would rely upon, and I would contrast that to the position taken by the ACT Party in respect of the three-storeyed medium-density residential zone. I do think that the new system will have outcomes that are better for the provision of housing, as well as the provision of infrastructure. I’m interested in hearing submissions as to how these things knit together—the SPA and the NBA—and I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. They say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and there’s more than an element of that analogy in this piece of legislation, because what this second leg of the Resource Management Act (RMA) reform trifecta that the Government is introducing, effectively, does is create another level of local government, another level of bureaucracy. But a scary one at that, in that there is almost no potential for electoral accountability, for democratic accountability of the people who will be making very significant decisions on a regional basis about what gets built, where it gets built, how it gets built, and what impacts that will have on the lives and wellbeing of the people that live within that region and, indeed, the cumulative effect of those plans across the whole country.

So this piece of legislation has some lofty ambitions. In the Minister’s legislative statement, it says that “The [Spatial Planning] Bill mandates long-term spatial planning at the regional level through the development of Regional Spatial Strategies. It will enable and drive changes in land use and the coastal marine area, while protecting and enhancing the natural environment. It will integrate planning across different legislative frameworks that are associated with the management of the natural and built environment.” Now, that’s very motherhood and apple pie—hard to disagree with it, except when one delves a little into the detail of what it might mean and how the implications of such planning might have actually perverse outcomes that go directly opposite to the lofty ambitions and intentions that the Minister’s new planning model has.

So there are going to be these committees all around the countryside—15 of them. The legislation defines the minimum membership requirement, but it doesn’t define how the district councils will appoint the base members to these new planning committees. And as one of my colleagues—Chris Bishop—said earlier in the day when he was talking on the previous piece of legislation, he’s seen more than a few local government stoushes in his time—haven’t we all. And the potential for enormous conflict and one-upmanship and regional and district scrapping over the representation on these committees is practically never ending.

And then, of course, we come to the mana whenua representatives—there will be a minimum of two. There’s nothing in the legislation that defines how those two people will be selected. I’ve always been of the view that if people are going to be put in places of decision making that have impacts on other people’s lives, their businesses, and their wellbeing, then there should be some accountability about it. There should be some clear pathway and definition about how people are elected and appointed, and then accountability through the recourse of a ballot box actually is the safest methodology, and that should occur. Now, there appears to be, in the make-up of these committees, almost none of that basic democratic principle about the way that the committees will be formed, how they will be shaped, who will sit on them, what the definitional requirements and capabilities of those people will be, and what kind of accountabilities they will be subject to.

Now, I want to just for a moment talk to the House a little bit about some of the practical issues that this piece of legislation may have in terms of consequential impact. So, clearly the establishment of these committees is a step for a further reduction in democratic accountability. So, for many parts of the country, for instance, in my own area of the beautiful Coromandel, decision making will move from Thames to Hamilton; and decision making, for instance, for Carterton will move to Wellington; and for Kaikōura to Christchurch; and from Ōpōtiki to Tauranga. Now, those smaller communities do have unique and individual requirements, ambitions, and ideas for the future of their regions and districts, and they don’t necessarily want those to be reflected by an unelected, unaccountable group of people who don’t live, work, or recreate in the areas where those smaller communities are represented. So we on this side of the House are very concerned about the issues relating to the predictability of outcome from these regional committees, their efficiency, and the timeliness of what they are seeking to do. We remain very sceptical about those things.

So a lot of this is based on theory. And yes, there will be not so many plans—there’ll only be 15 plans. They will be 30-year plans. Yes, that’s a smaller number than the 100 plans now, but they are plans still. So just because there are not as many plans, it doesn’t mean that the impacts of those plans is not going to be as powerful or even more so than the ones that exist now. So these regional spatial strategies will define where everything will go. And then it’s going to be, in theory, really easy for people to get stuff done if those things are clearly defined. Well, I would just say that that’s exactly the situation we have now. Nothing much has changed, except, under this new model, I think it’s going to be worse, because your consenting authority has to now avoid compromising the wellbeing of future generations before you can get a resource consent. That’s going to be very tricky. What does that actually mean and how will it be interpreted? What are the practical applications of that? Now, members of the Government will say, “Well, that’s all very fine and dandy.”, but it’s the practical application that is the problem.

So let’s just think for a minute about, potentially, the unintended consequences of a heavily planned city. So clause 17 of the Spatial Planning Bill states that a 30-year spatial plan will include “(1)(l) the indicative location of planned or potential business and [recreational] activities and the likely general scale and intensity of those activities”. So they’re going to plan where businesses can go and where houses can go. So what happens, for instance, if a spatial plan for a new suburb includes the indicative location of a supermarket? Now, is it easier to get a consent in that one place? Well, apparently it will be easier to get a consent in that one place where supermarkets have been designated. So the person who currently owns the land where that new supermarket designated place will be has suddenly had a windfall advantage in terms of being able to sell land to supermarket developers because the area has been defined. And that will be an issue for sure. So the person who owns that land now has a monopoly on the supermarket land, and so they can land bank and then extract a premium price. Rather than paying for a consent, the investor is paying more for the land, and so the price ratchets up again. And once they build their supermarket, clearly then there’s a very low threat of a competitor building a supermarket there because the designated land has already been designated. And so the grand plan starts to look very, very intrusive.

What about if they get it wrong? What happens if the town planner who has decided that this will be the supermarket area of the city—the supermarket precinct, if you like—what if they’ve got it wrong and they choose the wrong area? What if the demographics change? What if the movement of people and traffic changes and the supermarkets are suddenly in the wrong place; what happens then? What happens if, for instance, those planners actually get the whole thing wrong and there’s a move against supermarkets in years to come and we start getting minimarkets are all the rage? Well, what happens if they shift the theory to the practicality and get it completely wrong?

So there are some very big potentials for unintended consequences in this piece of legislation. I don’t think the Minister or his advisers have really thought through that stuff. So, again, on this side of the House, as we were in the first piece, the Natural and Built Environment Bill, we are sceptical of the outcome, we’re sceptical of the theory, we don’t think it’s nimble enough, and we will be opposing this legislation as well.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, for this opportunity to speak twice in one evening, this time on the Spatial Planning Bill. As we’ve heard from the other speakers, particularly that last speech, it’s very closely linked to the Natural and Built Environment Bill, and you’ll see throughout the bill that there are lots of references to terms and the purpose of that Natural and Built Environment Bill. Unlike the purpose clause of the Natural and Built Environment Bill, we did not, at the select committee, have an exposure draft for this, so this is a new piece of legislation for the committee. It was, however, part of the Randerson review’s recommendations to have a bill like this.

Just quickly, though, those links that it’s got with the Natural and Built Environment Bill include this regional approach that Scott Simpson just spoke to, and the idea of requiring these plans to be made at the regional level—so Otago, Southland, Canterbury, etc.; showing my southern bias there—is to make it more user-friendly for those people who want to use these plans rather than having to go through the plethora of plans that you have to use at the moment. Also, like the last speaker said, there’s a regional planning committee, and that’s all spelt out in the Natural and Built Environment Bill. But the difference for when the spatial plan is being made is that there’s a Crown appointment to that plan.

Also noting the definition of “infrastructure”: infrastructure’s defined in the Natural and Built Environment Bill, and it is very wide and it goes quite a lot broader than the Resource Management Act (RMA) definition, that includes mainly pipes; it also now includes Kāinga Ora, hospitals, waste disposal facilities, schools, and fire and emergency services. That’s useful, because the problem that this bill is trying to address is that lack of coordination between the infrastructure that we need when we have new development happening. The idea of having a spatial plan at that regional level is that it goes for a 30-year time frame—so it’s looking out much longer than the regulatory plan that you have currently under the RMA or that’s suggested under the Natural and Built Environment Bill. It’s really trying to knit together the planning of new infrastructure with those new growth areas but also protecting areas where we don’t want new growth.

What happens often is that when there is growth in an area, that means that infrastructure has to come with it. So people often think of roads, and, certainly, the Land Transport Management Act and land transport plans are very much part of the spatial plan, but also there are those other things, like, if you’re intensifying an area, do you need a new school? Do you need a new hospital? Do you need a new fire station? All these things—it’s very useful to be able to think about them for the long term and in an integrated way.

So that is what this bill is trying to address and trying to work through, and my understanding of why it separated out is those relationships with the Acts such as the Land Transport Act and the Local Government Act, and that’s because the plans made under those Acts need to be consistent with or implement these spatial plans to an extent, but not entirely, because the spatial plan is a high-level document, and it’s important to note that at clause 66, I think it is—excuse me—“interest in land must be treated as not being taken or injuriously affected by any provision in regional spatial strategy unless [the] Act provides otherwise.” So it’s trying to sit above the regulatory plan. That regulatory plan in the Natural and Built Environment Bill must be consistent with the Spatial Planning Bill, and that’s found in a few sections in the Natural and Built Environment Bill. Thomas Coughlan noted that it was both clause 104 and 109, and I’m sure that’s something that will be remedied in the select committee process.

Also important to note, with that one extra person who’s on the committee being from Government, that there’s a duty to assist. That’s at clause 64, and so departments, Crown entities, local authorities, iwi authorities, groups that represent hapū, and network utility operators—they all must provide information or technical support to a regional planning committee. That is all part of the important coordination role that the bill’s trying to address.

So this is an important part of our reform of the resource management system, and it should lead to much better environmental outcomes in terms of protecting those areas that need to be protected but also enabling the development in the housing that we desperately need. Thank you.

I know it’s a great treat to have another go on my feet on these linked bills. I think it’s a—

💬 David Seymour: Not for the audience.

Well, yes—the audience are really enjoying it, I’m sure!

The regional spatial strategies, which the Spatial Planning Bill sets up will have a 30-year lifespan. And as was discussed in the last speech by Rachel Brooking—I think she really highlighted how complicated this is and how these things are supposed to knit together and work seamlessly, while I’m struggling to see how that’s going to work. We’ve gone from 100 plans down to 15—and that sounds fantastic. What a great way—we’ll cut the number down. But the problem is that we’ve got lots of councils around New Zealand and they represent communities of interest, and their licence to operate, if you like, in a public sense, is that they represent their communities, and, when they get too big, they become a real problem, and Environment Canterbury (ECan) is one good example of that.

There may well be others, but I can only speak from my own electorate’s perspective. The Marlborough District Council is a unitary authority, it’s a regional council, and it’s a territorial authority—they do a fantastic job, easy to do with one council; no issues there. All the planning situations all seamlessly work together. Yeah, of course there’s issues, but they’re not as bad as anywhere else—it’s a one-stop shop. But in the southern part of my electorate, we have district councils and we have ECan. Now, ECan stretches all the way up to the Clarence River—for those that don’t know, that’s in south Marlborough—and then goes all the way, including Christchurch along the main divide down into the Mackenzie Country. So it starts up in the great electorate of Kaikōura, it goes down next to Matt Doocey’s electorate and includes Christchurch, which—

💬 Dr Duncan Webb: Duncan Webb’s electorate.

Dr Duncan Webb over there, and then Nicola Grigg, and then it goes to the highly respected MP for Waitaki, the Hon Jacqui Dean. And so what I would put to the House is that there is nothing in common with Kaikōura and Christchurch, there is nothing in common with Hurunui and mid-Canterbury, and there’s nothing really in common at all with any of them in the Mackenzie Country. And yet they are all under ECan. And that is why ECan is the car crash it is, because it does not actually—

💬 Hon Eugenie Sage: Well, you put commissioners on for nine years, why didn’t they fix it?

—I think the Green Party have at last woken up—represent its community well at all, because its community is so diverse and not at all knitting together. And that’s exactly the way we see ECan operate, it’s an absolute mess. And that is what we will see when we go down to 15 plans, I have no doubt about that. I think the work now of the Commissioner for the Environment on his catchment work that he’s doing, that is the way to go to manage these sorts of things. Sometimes less is not more. And, I think, in this case, and when we’re talking about plans, it will definitely not be more and it will cause a huge amount of problems.

I’ll give you an example of central planning—this is what we’re talking about, essentially, central planning. I’ll give you an example of how badly that can go wrong, because I know Rachel Brooking and Angela Roberts have been wanting me to bring wine into our debate, and so I’m going to do that for you tonight. And so I’ll go back to the early 1970s, in Hawke’s Bay, and Montana Wines were looking to expand their vineyards and they wanted to expand and plant vineyards there, however, the planning rules wouldn’t allow them to do so. But this had a happy ending, because Frank Yukich, he got so frustrated with these planning rules that wouldn’t allow him to plant grapes and expand their winery operation, so he went off down on the advice of a Department of Scientific and Industrial Research scientist named Wayne Thomas, and had a look in Marlborough. He went around, he was so struck with the region, everybody thought “too cold”—the central planners said, “Too cold, couldn’t grow grapes there.” However, the Marlborough District Council were much more accommodating than Hawke’s Bay. And so he ended up with his own money, putting deposits on 1,600 hectares of land to buy for vineyards, not telling anyone. I know the land agent who’s now since passed away who went out and purchased these properties. He was not allowed to say what it was for, who was buying it—there were rumours going around Marlborough: “Somebody’s buying land up.” No one knew what it was for. Anyway, in the end they planted grapes there and then on 14 August in 1973, he said—I quote—“Wines from here will become world famous one day.” And how right he was, against all the advice.

Now, I can tell you there were a couple of other moving parts in that since the 1984 vine pull went on, there was an issue with Australia and New Zealand Closer Economic Relations and along came Ernie Hunter, and Ernie Hunter had sauvignon blanc. He went to the Sunday Times Wine Show in the UK—I’m coming to the bill, Madam, it’s all about central planning—and he won there and that is how sauvignon blanc got its start in the world. If we’d listened to the central planning rules, there would be no grapes in Marlborough, there would be no wine industry, and New Zealand would not have got there. So the point is that if we expect that central planning rules will get it right, they will not.

Now, the Minister mentioned aquaculture and the importance of being able to get the locations of wharves and things right. Well, I’m sorry, I don’t think that central planners are going to get that right at all. Businesses will either put it in the right place or they’ll put it in the wrong place and lose some money and someone else will do it in the right way. That’s how we get innovation. So I guess the underlying point I’m making is that we need the freedom in New Zealand to be able to innovate. That is one thing that we can do and we do it well. We have a reputation for being the number eight wire innovators. Well, I think it’s a lot more complicated than that and we don’t give ourselves enough credit for the innovation that we do do. But that requires a regulatory framework to allow those things to flourish. And central planning for those sorts of things will not work. Yes, we need some planning, there’s no doubt. I do think that we need to protect our best soils in New Zealand. I totally agree with that. Where you draw the line becomes a real issue though, and it’s a property right issue and people that are on what they feel is the wrong side of the line are going to be very upset about that, because it will actually make a significant difference to their economic wellbeing. However, those tough decisions do have to be made.

But, again, this bill has a number of issues which I canvassed before about, you know, “In preparing an RSS”—that’s a regional spatial strategy—“the [regional] planning committee must have [particular] regard to relevant iwi and hapū management plans and … must have regard to mātauranga Māori” as well. I don’t have a problem with that, as I said earlier in the previous bill. But what about everybody else? Do they not have any special interest in things that are happening in New Zealand? Why would it only be one group? People that have spent generations on that land and—I’ve forgotten, what was the term?

💬 Harete Hipango: Ahikā.

Ahikā. Whose ahikā is better than anyone else’s ahikā? Whose is more valuable than anyone else’s?

Tāmati Coffey: Don’t steal our words—don’t steal our words.

I’m not stealing; I’m borrowing it.

💬 Sam Uffindell: We’re all New Zealanders.

I think that is exactly the point—Sam Uffindell has just made an excellent point, “We are all New Zealanders”, and we are all New Zealanders. We forget that at our peril. I think enshrining things in legislation that call that into question is wrong—it’s just plain wrong.

Actually, while I’m on it and I’m on a roll, the decision of the Supreme Court shows the foolishness of getting rid of the Privy Council. We must have things—we want to have a say in our own way, not have activist judges expanding our legal system. And that’s exactly what we’ll get with this piece of legislation. It will be years of court cases, years of heartache. It will break some people, trying to get things done. It will end businesses. It will stifle innovation. And we’ll all be the poorer for it—all of us will be the poorer for it, except for the few people that get selected to be on the committees. And they’ll be well paid and they’ll be probably all related and we won’t have a chance of getting rid of them. And we should, if they’re going to have anything to say about our planning laws. This bill is as flawed as the previous one, so I condemn it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Can I borrow a tissue? I noticed your box was closest.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Take the whole box. I live to serve!

TĀMATI COFFEY: Thank you, Madam Speaker. I can now start my contribution.

I really appreciated that contribution from the previous speaker, Stuart Smith, because he helped to highlight that actually, yes, we are all New Zealanders, but we come to this House acknowledging that we have a special relationship with iwi Māori and that, actually, as Crown, we must respect that in everything that we do. So, yes, he was absolutely right—we are all New Zealanders—but Māori have a very special place in that relationship, and, for that reason, have a special place in the reform of our environmental management system.

💬 David Seymour: Special people.

TĀMATI COFFEY: What was that?

💬 David Seymour: Special people, huh?

TĀMATI COFFEY: Yes.

💬 Simon Court: What makes them special?

TĀMATI COFFEY: I’m going to carry on; I’ll let them keep talking to themselves. Maybe one day they can stand up and actually take a call on this, but, in the meantime, I’ll focus on my call, which is that this here is about long-term thinking, which is the thing that has to be encouraged here. For a very long time, Māori have taken a long-term view of our environment, but, unfortunately, our laws haven’t really enabled that.

Recently, more and more iwi and hapū are coming up with their 100-year iwi plans. This is something that is new, actually, but we’ve taken a really long-term view. It’s been really intentional. Back home in Rotorua, we have our own Te Arawa 100-year plan, and, of course, you can imagine what that consists of: the environment and the protection of the environment, the looking after of our lakes, the looking after of our rivers—all of those kinds of things that we deem to be important. We’ve got a saying in Te Ao Māori, which is “Toitū te whenua, whatungarongaro he tangata”—as we the humans come and go, the land remains. The land remains, and that’s what I want to talk about here. The Spatial Planning Bill is actually an attempt to insert some long-term thinking into the way that we develop our communities.

I want to use an example. In Tauranga, we have the Smart Growth plan and it’s been incredibly successful in being able to develop the transport arterial routes, the housing—how that’s going to go, the appreciation that it needs to be built back from the water’s edge because climate change is a thing. So there’s a big area of land that’s been specially pegged out as being land that you shouldn’t be building on, especially as we’re more and more aware of our climate change responsibilities. So that has been a real success.

Just the other day, I was driving along the Tauranga Northern Link and I saw that the next section of the motorway out at Te Tumu—they’re starting to develop that into an access on to the whenua there, which is going to be a big site for more housing, more communities, and more developments. What the Smart Growth plan has been able to do is coordinate all of that effort, using the local council, involving iwi into that conversation. It’s the way that things should be, but, unfortunately, they haven’t been done that way and we need to do better.

I want to talk about the spatial strategies so that as we develop these plans, we’re making sure that we are identifying those areas which are significant to Māori, and I can point to an example back in Rotorua where, a few years ago, the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) had decided it was going to run a motorway through small Māori settlements on the eastern side of the lake. It was met with fierce opposition. It was eventually thrown out because there was such opposition to it. It ran through suburbs like Ngāpuna—translated, it’s about the springs, the many springs that sit in that area. NZTA at the time were really keen to knock through there and build a four-lane motorway through a place which had been renowned to our local Māori community—my iwi, my hapū—for being a place which was significant for the healing waters which sat underneath the surface. We need to do better. We need to do better when it comes to trying to coordinate what our communities look like into the future, and the Spatial Planning Bill is a big key part of that.

I look forward to traversing this through the Environment Committee as it tracks through. I look forward to the submissions that come before it and making sure that we’re creating a system which is fit for 2022 and which absolutely has got Te Ao Māori and mātauranga Māori and whakaaro Māori sitting at the heart of it, because Māori, for a long time, have been wanting this and I believe that it’s going to be welcomed with open arms. I commend it to the House.

Tēnā koe e te Māngai o te Whare. I’m pleased to take a call on the Spatial Planning Bill. As others have noted, it does provide for a strategic framework for environmental management and regional development with a term for the regional spatial strategies of 30 years, but also looking out and being informed by climate change predictions over the next century. It will guide major decisions about how land and also coastal space is used and allocated.

As the Randerson review said, one of the frequent criticisms of the Resource Management Act (RMA) is that it has been too slow in responding to demand for increased housing, leading to higher costs and a great deal of inequity. That’s partly due to development occurring in an ad hoc way rather than being strategically focused, and partly because plan development has been quite slow and litigious.

At the moment, the Auckland Council is the only council that’s required to have a spatial plan and there hasn’t been a consistent framework in the RMA to encourage it. And as Tāmati Coffey noted, councils such as Tauranga and those in the Bay of Plenty, through Smart Growth, have worked really hard on doing spatial planning, but they’ve had quite a weak mandate and there’s been limited incentives elsewhere for councils to cooperate. It depends very much on the personalities of councillors and chief executives and just whether they actually get to do that. So they’ve had to develop, as they did with Smart Growth, their own governance and decision-making arrangements. So this bill is a step forward in providing that framework for spatial planning to happen across the country.

And as Rachel Brooking noted, it’s a really important step forward because one of the problems in areas like Tauranga—or everywhere, really—has been that central government agencies might be at the table sometimes, but there is no commitment to the funding to follow through on the decisions that are agreed about where infrastructure goes. Generally it has been the transport agency, Waka Kotahi. It hasn’t necessarily been the education ministry, health, in ensuring if you’re building new communities where the health facilities, where the schools and preschools go. So the Randerson review highlighted about five key problems: no outcomes focus on the RMA; poor alignment of land use and infrastructure plans; not enough focus on the long term; and that inadequate engagement and coordination between local and central government. The review team recommended that spatial planning was a key tool to achieve that integration and that has led to this bill.

As with the Natural and Built Environment Bill, it will be these regional planning committees with two iwi members and council representatives which will be the real workhorses to drive the development of the regional spatial strategies. They will cover, potentially, a large geographic area: the whole of the region, land and territorial sea. I envisage that they’ll map the pattern of existing infrastructure; the areas that will be subject to constraints because of natural hazards, flooding risk, sea-level rise risk; what areas are suitable for new development; and where new infrastructure should be located.

One of the issues, though, that means the Green Party is only supporting this bill to select committee is that the bill does appear, once again, to embed the bias in the RMA towards use and development rather than protection. Clause 17 includes the list of key matters that the regional spatial strategy should address, and the key matters in relation to protection, restoration, or enhancement are areas that may require protection, restoration, or enhancement. If we contrast that with all of the other matters, they are areas that are appropriate for urban development and change. In the Greens, we want to make sure that there’s the same investment in providing information, identifying areas that need protection because they’ve got threatened species present, where there shouldn’t be more vegetation clearance, there shouldn’t be more urban development—the same level of investment and research on that as there is on identifying areas that are suitable for subdivision. At the moment, words like “may” make it very, very vague and provide absolutely no certainty that nature will be better off through these regional spatial strategies.

Also concerned in the list of key matters was matter (d), which is “areas that are appropriate for developing, using, or extracting natural resources, including generating power:”, because, under a former National Government, there was a list of rivers prepared that were suitable for hydro generation. They included wild rivers, rivers like the Clarence and Marlborough, famed for rafting and kayaking. So we want to see a greater attention in the Natural and Built Environment Bill to tools like water conservation orders so that they actually do protect wild rivers, and we don’t see things like these regional spatial strategies identifying a list of rivers that generators would like to get their hands on.

One of the significant changes in this from the exposure draft is that we now have 15 regions. There was strong advocacy by Marlborough, Nelson Tasman, and Te Tau Ihu iwi that they shouldn’t be combined in a whole Te Tau Ihu top of the south region. So we do have Nelson and Tasman preparing their own regional strategy and Marlborough preparing its own, because there are quite different issues in terms of geography and particularly the big investment in aquaculture in the Sounds.

The provisions in the bill around public engagement and consultation are crucial because you cannot—if we’re preparing these regional spatial strategies with a 30-year life, being reviewed every nine years, they need to really engage with the public so that they have a real input in deciding what happens where and how they’d like their communities to evolve. We need much more innovative tools, things like citizens’ assemblies, polling public opinion, ensuring that children have a really strong voice, not just relying on the traditional submission and hearing process. But, again, there’s a bit of a concern here. Clause 32 certainly provides that the process must encourage participation, but there’s a qualifier that it’s “by the public and all interested parties, particularly those who may be involved in implementing the regional spatial strategy.” That potentially gives a stronger weight to the infrastructure providers, to the telcos and the corporate interests, and, again, weakens protection for the environment. So there needs to be really good and innovative participation, but not biasing certain interests.

One final issue is in all these regional spatial strategies, some of the key infrastructure will, of course, be around three waters. The House is going to go on to consider the Water Services Entities Bill, but it’s not clear—because you’ve got very different regions, 15 regions in this bill and the Natural and Built Environment Bill, but only four entities whose boundaries don’t match on to the regions—how this really good coordinated spatial planning will actually happen. And it’s not clear, too, about the relationship between the regional planning committees operating under the RMA reform and the regional representative groups. You really need that coordination, and there’s nothing that I can see in the Water Services Entities Bill and nothing in this bill which actually teases that out when three waters infrastructure is exactly the sort of infrastructure that we need to be planning ahead for.

One of the other major concerns is that the bill doesn’t appear to promote the precautionary approach in terms of—there’s quite a high bar to identifying areas where adverse effects might occur, rather than if there is a likelihood of those or we don’t have sufficient scientific understanding ensuring that those areas aren’t identified for development. So the Green Party is happy to support those to select committee, but we will be seeking some significant changes there and our position beyond that will depend on that. I really look forward to public submissions and am concerned that there may not be enough time to tease through all of the issues with this bill and the Natural and Built Environment Bill just in a six-month process.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. So, as a civil and environmental engineer, I ask, “What is the problem this bill is trying to solve?” Now, according to the text that accompanies the legislation, “Regional spatial strategies will identify big issues and opportunities facing regions and develop strategies and implementation plans to respond to them. A regional planning committee, comprising representatives from local government, central government, iwi, hapū, and Māori”—I thought iwi and hapu were Māori, but they “will develop a regional spatial strategy for a region. [And] All [people] exercising powers and performing functions and duties under this bill must [somehow] give effect to the [unknown and ephemeral] principles of [the Treaty of] Waitangi.”

My take on the problem that the Government’s trying to solve is that Kiwis are not building homes and businesses in places that the Minister and his planning advisers want them to. The Labour Government, of course, is suspicious of private developers and they hate cars, and this bill gives them all the power they need to sterilise private plan changes which deliver the best master-planned communities, for example.

As we heard last year, when the exposure draft of the Natural and Built Environment Bill was presented to the Environment Committee, this bill will give the central planners—appointed and approved by the Minister for the Environment, David Parker—the ability to limit where roads and highways can be built, even if they’re desperately needed to unlock access to ports and to new residential and commercial areas.

The intent of this Government is clear. We only need to look at those superb master-planned communities proposed for Drury South in Auckland; and Ōhinewai, the Sleepyhead precinct in the North Waikato. Local councils and central government agencies—Waka Kotahi—objected to these developments on two grounds. Councils claimed they couldn’t afford the infrastructure to connect these communities to the rest of the region. They proposed that for Drury, 60,000 additional people, and the Sleepyhead precinct in the North Waikato were not where the regional council planners had proposed that new towns and new people should live. Therefore, they objected. The New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) opposed any development on the Sleepyhead precinct and in Drury South on the basis that this might generate traffic on the State highway. Who knew? State highways—intended to carry traffic—but NZTA said, “No. We don’t want these new developments—they’ll produce traffic.”

So either they can’t afford to upgrade the network or they’re following the directions that their woke, car-hating Minister, Michael Wood, has set for NZTA. He insists that vehicle kilometres travelled—in other words, the journeys that we take—will be reduced by 20 percent in the next 15 years. Now, I’ve looked at planning maps; I’ve looked at projections. New Zealand’s population’s intended to grow by 1 million over that period; by 2 million by 2050. Apparently we’re going to be using private motor vehicles and delivering freight by trucks and vans at 20 percent of this. What absolute nonsense. But that’s the kind of central planning nonsense that will drive planning under this Spatial Planning Bill if it becomes law.

Now, these developments—at Drury South and Ōhinewai—were actually approved because the planning commissioners agreed with the developers. It’s important to deliver homes where people want to live, and to develop mixed-use commercial operations where people can work in the same place—what we call mixed-use developments. And that’s what good development looks like.

Now, if you think about the policy objective—the proposal—regional planning committees comprising representatives from local government, bless them; central government, whoops; iwi; hapu; and Māori to develop a regional spatial strategy for a region.

Imagine when planning how cities might be developed and might grow, that no one from business, from commerce, from infrastructure delivery agencies—even the Government’s own KiwiRail or NZTA or whatever they are—all communities are included on a regional spatial strategy development committee. How on earth will these planners know where businesses in future might want to build the distribution warehouse so they can keep things ready to deliver to their customers?

I mean, apparently the central planners appointed by Minister David Parker will know—and these businesses are just expected to build where he tells them. How will businesses know where to build the food court or a shopping mall or anything, for that matter? Unless Minister David Parker and his planning tsars tell them. Well, the Minister and his officials actually don’t care about that. They will have a vision of how and where cities should grow, and the rest of us people—who want to build new homes; who want to build new town centres and commercial operations—will just have to suck it up.

I can see the attraction to central planning, though. When I was an engineering student, instead of doing my assignments, I used to play SimCity. Fantastic PC game.

💬 Hon Members: Great game!

Great game, SimCity, that’s right. Now, it’s a wonderful game: you lay out the streets and the infrastructure. You lay out the streets and the infrastructure first, and the tiny people on the screen would then organically build their homes and businesses where you built the infrastructure. And this bill misses the valuable lesson of SimCity: the role of Government is not to colour in planning maps, telling people where they are and are not allowed to build homes and businesses. The role of Government is to deliver the infrastructure, which enables communities to thrive and a healthy economy to grow.

This bill perpetuates the Resource Management Act (RMA) planning obsessions, which is colouring in maps but on a national scale. And with the cold, damp hand of the Minister for the Environment holding the colouring-in pencil, this bill fails to give us any sense of how the infrastructure needed to grow communities will be funded—will be delivered—to meet the needs of our people now and in the future.

Now, the commentary says, “This bill works in tandem with the Natural and Built Environment Bill as a single integrated system. [That] bill aims to recognise and uphold te Oranga o te Taiao and to enable the use, development, and protection of the environment, within limits and targets.” Well, wonderful! We don’t know what te Oranga o te Taiao is. We’ve heard it could take a decade to litigate through the courts what that definition means. It’s completely unhelpful. What Kiwis want to know is: will Government be there with the money to deliver the roading, the public transportation, the three waters infrastructure that’s needed to enable towns and communities to grow?

Now, one thing this bill points out is it’s helpful to have a 30-year time frame—actually, an approach which identifies what should happen in a region over 30 years. Now, this is ACT policy. What we say is, actually, local government should be telling central government where they want to grow—not the other way around—and that central government should come to the party with the funding and make sure that the infrastructure that’s delivered is delivered on time and on budget.

We believe in a bottom-up approach; that communities should tell central government what they want; not have planning maps imposed on them by a Minister for the Environment from his fifth-floor Beehive office. This Government’s got it all backwards. Central government, it says, will communicate priorities. The Minister said, “Central government will communicate priorities.” in his introduction just a moment ago. Well, ACT has a completely different perspective. How about communities work out how and where they want to develop through a democratic process, then central government comes to the party, clearing barriers to growth, wiping away regulations that stop people building, and planning to fund and finance the infrastructure?

Now, Labour’s addressed none of the problems that the RMA has delivered us. All they’ve done is insert a healthy—or unhealthy—dose of co-government into an already flawed system. Co-government has no place in our planning laws. This Government should take a property rights - based approach with people who want to build new homes or new towns, even—or they need to develop quarries, resources, mines for those valuable minerals we need for the low-carbon transition—so they can do so where those resources exist, where it makes sense to do so.

ACT will be announcing our alternative to this flawed RMA approach next Tuesday. We ask the people of New Zealand to pay attention; it’s a much better offering than this Government.

Kia ora e te Mana Whakawā. It’s always an honour and a privilege to stand and make a contribution in this House. I need to respond to the last speaker, Simon Court. He said something that actually pressed my button. He said that we hate cars, and he kept saying something about the Minister of Transport, the Hon Michael Wood. I just want to remind the member who just spoke of the Wellbeing Budget that this Government is very strategic and we have goals.

So the goals for this year, in terms of our Government, are continuing to keep New Zealanders safe from COVID-19; secondly, continuing to accelerate the recovery from COVID-19; and the goal that I like—particularly about this bill—is number three, laying the foundations for the future, including addressing key issues such as our climate change response, housing affordability, and child poverty. This bill, along with the last bill I spoke on, the Natural and Built Environment Bill, is about that. It’s about laying the foundation for the future, housing affordability, and, in the end, getting our children out of poverty. The Spatial Planning Bill will provide, as many speakers have said before me on this side, a strategic framework for the environment management and regional development.

I’m really going to speak about Part 2 of this bill, the Spatial Planning Bill—Part 2, clause 12 and clause 17. So Part 2 sets out requirements for the regional spatial strategies. So each region must have a regional spatial strategy, except for the Chatham Islands territory and offshore areas administered by the Department of Conservation acting as a local authority. So those are the exceptions in terms of having each region needing to have a regional spatial strategy. I need to just say RSS, but I think if I keep saying regional spatial strategies, we might all get it by the end of this.

So the spatial planning, therefore, will help coordinate and integrate decisions made under the relevant legislations by requiring the development of long-term regional spatial strategies. In terms of clause 17, it talks about the contents of spatial strategies, so it tells us what must be in these regional spatial strategies. We’ve heard members before in the House mention something like protection and mention things about Māori, but it does set it out in clause 17. Clause 17(1)(a) talks about the “areas that may require protection, restoration, or enhancement:”, and it also goes on about “areas of cultural heritage and areas with resources that are of significance to Māori:”. The last speaker, he spoke before and he questioned, but my response to that is that he actually needs to go and read the information, unlike how he gave us an example where he didn’t do his assignment but he played games. I would recommend the member to go and read clause 17 that actually outlines the contents of the regional spatial strategies.

I particularly like 17(1)(f) where it talks about “areas of the coastal marine area that are appropriate for development or significant change in use:”. We have seen, in most of this year, the devastation of climate change on the shores of some of our areas in the country, and I think 17(1)(f) refers that each region must have this in terms of coastal marine [Coughs]. Sorry, I think Mr Coffey wanted a tissue before; I might need a glass of water. Thank you. It’s the passion, Madam Speaker.

I just need to remind everybody what in the contents they actually need to know in terms of clause 17. I would like to remind everyone that’s watching, including everyone in Papakura and in South Auckland: please put in a submission. We want to hear your voices because it is those voices that are missing in some parts of our talk. I commend the Minister and I commend this Spatial Planning Bill to the House. Mālō.

Sam Uffindell—five minutes.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’ll make it a good five minutes. I just want to comment, firstly, I heard the previous speaker, Anahila Kanongata‘a-Suisuiki, mentioning about encouraging people to make submissions. I would also encourage people to make submissions, and I’m sure there will be quite a lot of them. I hear there were quite a lot of them on the three waters legislation—88,000 or so. I’m not sure whether they were properly waded through, but I would encourage a lot of submissions on this bill.

I would also encourage the Minister to make sure that the select committee process can be extended to make sure that all of those submissions can be properly heard, whether that is being read or whether that is in person, because we should all know this. I mean, this is a significant change and it will have a significant impact. I think we’ve gone over it a fair bit tonight and earlier this afternoon on the earlier bill about how the Resource Management Act (RMA) was not a fit for purpose piece of legislation and how we all had significant hopes that these bills, or this trio of bills, would, you know, go about amending that. That side of the House is quite certain that it will, and I think everyone over here is pretty aware that it won’t.

We acknowledge that we have a very expensive housing market in the developed world. We have a lot of red tape, we have a lot of bureaucracy, and we see this bill as adding more bureaucracy, more complexity, and more uncertainty to an already bureaucratic, complex, and uncertain situation.

We have argued for fundamental RMA reform for a long time—

💬 Angie Warren-Clark: But done nothing about it besides that.

We do note—we tried; we didn’t have the numbers. We will note that, during that period, Labour did oppose a lot of minor and sensible amendments, like removing the requirement to get a resource consent to chop down a tree on one’s property. I have a tree that will have to come down on my property soon. If my wife is watching this—

💬 Hon David Bennett: Chop it down.

—she’ll know what I’m talking about. Benno’s saying, “Just chop it down.” I will do the right thing.

But after five years of attempting to make reforms, we get to where we are now with this Spatial Planning Bill. We look at what is required here, and we do note there is a positive in the formation of the National Planning Framework. We do note that the RMA did result in quite a few policy silos. But when we look at what will be created in the regional planning committees—and it’s been touched on quite a lot today, how that is going to create issues. It’s not necessarily a democratic process. There have been concerns raised about it being a co-governance-by-stealth arrangement. I’m not necessarily saying that it is, but it could definitely give rise to those concerns. These people that will be on this are not democratically elected, and they will have the ability to say that this area of land has to be used for this. That is a 30-year call, and the reality is that things don’t always work out like that. This isn’t like SimCity where you can just plan what it is a long time in advance—

💬 Angie Warren-Clark: Ha, ha!

—there are a lot of—thanks for the laugh, Angie—different actors involved: businesses, individuals. They may be a new industry popping up in a certain area. There may be housing development that wants to occur there. The Government may have a different plan around where they want to build some major transport infrastructure. As my colleague Stuart Smith noted, there was an area around his patch where it was deemed that it wouldn’t be suitable for vineyards, and they were certainly proved wrong on that front. I think there is a lot of flexibility and choice that is removed, and we end up in a situation where each committee’s secretariat—gee, that sounds communist—will be dictating, effectively, what people can build.

I think we’ve got a real opportunity here to do something good in this space. We all acknowledge that we aren’t where we need to be. There does need to be more consideration. There probably needs to be a little bit less ideology on the side of the Government and more consultation with all of the stakeholders involved. This needs to be an enduring process. It’s no good that this goes through under this Government and whenever a National Government comes in, it gets removed or replaced, and we’re back to square one. So like the rest of my colleagues, I oppose this bill. Thank you.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Dr Duncan Webb—five minutes.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a real pleasure to stand up and talk just a little bit about this bill, the Spatial Planning Bill. It always comes as a surprise to me when the National Party stand up and have done nothing in this area in their entire time of Government, whilst Minister Parker has worked tirelessly to overhaul this entire system and now has a comprehensive package of reforms to bring to this House. And what do they say? “No. It’s no good. It’s not right.” Well, it is right, and one of the things that this bill does, which is really important, is take a long-term approach—30 years and beyond—because we know that the short-sightedness of what goes on in planning now has caused us real problems.

Certainly, in terms of regional planning—and I heard Stuart Smith get up and talk about Hurunui and the wider Canterbury area, and say that we had nothing in common with each of the relative districts. Well, Canterbury is actually a really good example of where there are some massive gains that could be made in things like residential and urban planning, transport networks, transport corridors for industrial developments, and so on, but because we have a number of local councils, they’re competing against each other. There’s a race to the bottom for rates. They’re not investing in infrastructure. What we need is good, thoughtful, long-term regional planning, and that’s what we’ve got going on here. This is absolutely the cure for a system which is clearly broken. We need to overhaul our system, which is expensive and time-consuming.

It came as a huge surprise to me to hear the ACT Party dissing this bill when what we’ve got now is a brake on the kind of enterprise that they pretend to be champions of, but we actually want wise, well-planned, and profitable development that is good for the whole community. This is the way towards it, not by some strange process that they’ll cook up—the cauldron is going to be opened on Tuesday morning by all reports! The work is being done. We know that the business case around this material has shown that this will have real and substantial economic benefits. So I think that, in terms of a framework to restore and protect the environment from further degradation, this is absolutely what we need, to recognise that development in the right place is right and to be encouraged, but within our biophysical limits—that we can’t continually chip away at our environment.

And, as for those on the other side of the House who say Te Oranga o te Taiao is some kind of strange thing that no one can understand, it’s pretty simple. An underlying principle that the health of our environment is a bottom line isn’t hard to understand, and if you struggle with the concept that we should put the health of the environment front and centre when we make environmental decisions, you have got a real problem—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Don’t bring the Speaker into the debate.

Sorry, Madam Speaker. This is a very good piece of legislation, which puts the environment front and centre, which thereby will enhance and encourage development and will do it in a more cost-effective way that’s better for all New Zealanders. This is a great bill. I commend it to the House.

Thank you for the opportunity to take a call on the Spatial Planning Bill, first reading. Alongside the Natural and Built Environment Bill, this legislation is much needed. The Spatial Planning Bill is the template for the next 30 years. It highlights the environmental outcomes that need to be achieved because we are under the climate change changes, not just in land use but also around our environment.

The information requirements are really important—that the plan provides better infrastructure. I’ve come from Auckland Council for over a decade, where spatial planning was really important for communities such as Māngere in South Auckland. The benefit of having a spatial plan is to see what we currently have by way of environment, by way of housing, by way of business centres, medical, churches, communities, that all are in the mix. What the Spatial Planning Bill provides is coordination of the template—the better infrastructure which is missing in communities such as in South Auckland.

I just want to highlight that the bill is a huge step forward for Aotearoa. Despite what colleagues on the other side say who probably have not had the experience, I can tell you that the coordination and the review of the spatial planning—the integration—is very helpful, particularly for rangatahi and young people who want to be involved in terms of climate change outcomes for their community. They want to have better education.

In terms of infrastructure, many of the communities in South Auckland face a number of challenges when it comes to spatial planning because of housing typology that may not necessarily be available for them. However, what they do—and, certainly, my lived experience is that they get involved when there is public engagement through the tools such as Auckland Council elected members by way of local boards. So public engagement has been critical to the success of the smaller spatial plans under Auckland Council. Part of that is our kōrero with iwi and with mana whenua. Part of the public engagement that I have been a part of is to actually recognise and to understand the values of tikanga, particularly around wairua and whenua, and the reason why we as a community—and it’s not just iwi rangatahi; it’s also Pasifika and ethnic communities. I can only speak of my experience with Auckland Council.

The regional spatial strategy is really important because it provides innovative tools. This Government has provided funding for businesses, post-COVID, and one of the things that has been highlighted recently is how young people carry out their business within five days. So two of those days they’ll be studying, two of those days of the week they are entrepreneurs, and the last day they’ll be working on Uber. The environment for businesses and entrepreneurs, particularly in big centres, is changing. The Spatial Planning Bill will help with the integration, particularly when Kāinga Ora are building houses. In Māngere, over 10,000 dwellings are being provided for the communities as such, and land use and whenua is really, really important, but we are seeing the building going upwards.

So infrastructure is very important, and I’ve given you the example. In a post-COVID environment there are those challenges. However, what is very important to communities is things such as transport infrastructure, housing typology, playgrounds, good parks, and even the life of the local streams. So public housing that has been provided in various areas around the motu, the environment to understand the environment—lots of our rangatahi and our tamariki in the respective communities want to be involved, but in order for them to be involved and in order for them to be engaged in things such as spatial planning that is currently being carried out by the likes of Auckland Council, they want to know where they can plant trees, they want to know how they can watch that tree grow, and what affect and impact tree planting has in a community.

So, just in closing, I want to highlight that the priority of this Spatial Planning Bill is very important for big communities around the motu that they can become involved. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Any council worth its salt will be very much against this bill. What is the point of having a district council in New Zealand now? This bill puts everything to regional councils around spatial planning. They’ve taken away three waters from the local councils—taken away water—now they’re taking away planning. Planning will now be done at a regional level. What’s the point of having a council? Are they going to be doing parks, pools, and playgrounds? That’s all they’re going to have. That’s all the council will have left to do. It won’t be doing planning of housing, it won’t be doing planning of infrastructure, and it won’t be doing its water resources. They’ve taken away one-third in the three waters; they’re taking away basically another two-thirds now. They’re leaving them with bugger all. Every council should be standing up against this bill, because it takes away the ability to have independence in commercial decision-making.

Now, my colleague Stuart Smith made a very good point before when he talked about Marlborough and how nobody thought it was actually going to be the great capital it was, until somebody actually put that investment in there. Well, I want to give you another example, and that is Tauranga port. There was a decision made around the ports for New Zealand 30 years ago, and guess where Tauranga port was in that decision! At the bottom. Nobody foresaw that Tauranga port would be the primary port for New Zealand. Thirty years ago—that’s what they’re talking about. A 30-years-ago decision by some Minister, that could be a Green or Labour Minister that’s against any commercial sensibility in their bones, could decide that Tauranga port should get no investment for 30 years and that we all go and put it into Timaru port or we all go put it into Northport or we all go put it into Auckland port, because that’s what New Zealand decided 30 years ago in its port strategy. Nobody foresaw Tauranga, and look what happens now: Tauranga’s the only commercial port in New Zealand. It owns one or two other ports throughout New Zealand, and it is the gateway for New Zealand produce. Tauranga City has boomed as a result. If we had central government planning, that would not happen.

I want to give you the tale of two towns, and this is very dear to me because this is in the Waikato. So we’ve got Cambridge and Te Awamutu. Te Awamutu actually had a four-lane road from Hamilton to Te Awamutu, and that came out of the 1980s and that was there, and National built that, actually. And then what happened was Waikato District Council decided it was going to allow subdivision of land, and it allowed 5- and 10-hectare plots of land to be subdivided. Take that 10 years forward, you had Tamahere/Mātangi. Then they opened that up to 1 or 2 hectares. Tamahere/Mātangi became some of the most valuable land in the country; the most valuable houses in the Waikato are there, and it meant that Cambridge and Hamilton were linked. Cambridge is now double the population in the future of Te Awamutu. Cambridge will be a city soon, and because that subdivision happened on one side of the Waipā boundary where Waikato was, Cambridge boomed. On the other side of the Waipā boundary, where there was no subdivision, Te Awamutu did not boom, and Te Awamutu had the infrastructure in the first place. That shows central government planning—in this case, regional planning—can fail. The success is actually through the market.

If we look at this plan, Sleepyhead would not be going to Ōhinewai. Now, I can name you Ministers here that have gone to that actual proposal and said, “What a great thing it is for the Waikato, seeing the Northern Corridor growing.” Sleepyhead would not happen under the regional plan, because the regional council actually opposed Sleepyhead. It opposed the development there. It said it shouldn’t happen, and under the plan that these Ministers are putting forward, that would not happen, but they’re very happy to go out there in election year and say, “Look at this 2,000-house development, major industrial development north of Hamilton. Isn’t it great to see?” Well, it would not happen under this plan, because the regions would have power, and the regions would make the wrong decisions.

If you look at Hamilton, for example, the great city it is, it actually needs Waikato and Waipā and Cambridge to actually be competing against it opening up land. If it didn’t open up land in those other two places, Hamilton would not be forced to open up land and we would not have the growth we’ve had. Competition has actually delivered more in the Waikato than any spatial planning will ever do. We’ve got this thing called Future Proof that was set up to do exactly this. It’s a dog. Everybody knows it’s a dog. Councillors sit around, talk about it for days, have lovely cups of tea, sausage rolls, spend a lot of money, and do nothing. Nothing actually comes out of it. It’s when you’ve got businesses that invest like Sleepyhead that actually make things happen, and then they go buy the cups of tea and the sausage rolls so that those councillors can improve it. That’s basically what happens. That’s what will happen under this plan.

Now, I haven’t gone on to some of the other issues around the participation of different groups and that, but we will do that in the committee stage. But I would say this: the ACT Party was quite right in saying that infrastructure actually is a big part of growth, but they’re wrong in the sense of wanting communities to determine that. Business is a better determiner. Where we want to grow will come through infrastructure and business development. There is nothing wrong with New Zealand farmland being made into houses. There is nothing wrong with using our best land to build our best cities.

There is going to be a huge development between Hamilton, Tauranga, and Auckland in the next 30 years—that whole area will boom. There is nothing wrong with using that land for housing. And where are we going to house the people? They’re not going to Taumarunui and they’re not going to Invercargill—unfortunately, Penny. They are going to be between Hamilton, Auckland, and Tauranga. That is New Zealand’s best land, and there’s nothing wrong with having another million people in that area. That is the future of this country. The market will make that happen. The Government’s job is to provide the infrastructure for the market to allow that to happen.

Spatial planning will not allow that to happen. I can tell you what’s going to happen in spatial planning, because the Waikato Regional Council, which would be the ones making this plan, are dominated by some Hamilton councillors that traditionally have a left-wing view of the world. They don’t believe in growth; they don’t believe in that. They actually think that what we’ve got is enough, the world can’t get better. We can get better. We can grow. We need to grow. It is the success of this country, in growth. That’s what we need—not some councils determining the spatial planning, not some Minister determining the spatial planning, but the market determining our spatial planning based on the infrastructure that we have. Government’s job is to provide the infrastructure; it’s not to provide the decision making. And—

💬 Anna Lorck: That’s what we’re doing, Mr Bennett.

—no, it’s not—if we look at what they’re doing, they’re saying the Minister will determine through the regional spatial plans.

Any council out there should be damn scared of this bill. It basically takes away what they had left to do and takes it away now.

💬 Hon Member: It doesn’t.

The second thing—no, it does, because it’s only the regions that do it; it’s not the councils, and we need competition between councils. We need the Waipās and the Waikatos to fight it out. That’s how we get growth. That’s how we get what we need. We do not need central planning; we need a market delivery system that’s based on strong infrastructure that comes from our Governments of the day. That’s what we need to do.

Now, the Labour Party are getting very upset, because this is one of their babies that they thought there was going to be no problem around, and the backbenchers were told by the Ministers, “This’ll solve some of your issues.” The reality is, as people understand it more, they’ll come back to those backbenchers and say, “This is another dog you’re putting forward.” Do you really want to do that in an election year when you’re going to be under big pressure? No. We’ll get these Ministers to come back to the House and say, “This is getting a bit hard. We’ll have to just do a bit more work on it.”, but be aware, anybody in local government: this is what they intend to do to get rid of local government. Might as well amalgamate them all now. It’s all right in Auckland to say the spatial planning works on a regional scale. You might as well not have Waipā and Waikato District Councils. What’s the point of them? They’re gone.

The member’s time has expired.

💬 Angie Warren-Clark: And thank goodness for that. Madam Speaker—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order! If the member wishes to take a call, she will make a call to the Speaker. I don’t need any extra comments, thank you.

Thank you. I’m delighted to take a call on a bill that I’ve actually read. That member who has just taken his seat, the Hon David Bennett, obviously hadn’t, and did I hear him say that he’s happy for productive lands to be used to build houses on? I thought that that was one of the things that the National Party were attacking Labour about, and so I’m really surprised that a million-plus people can go into that community of Hamilton. I’m quite surprised, actually, about that whole speech. But, like I say, I don’t think the member has read the bill.

Now, let’s go on to the bill. The bill, I really do have to say—having come from Tauranga Moana, where we do have a really interesting model in our community—will, essentially, provide some great planning and a system in place to ensure some strategic planning. Basically, what has happened in my city is that we have had growth which has not been planned well. Tauranga Moana—we are suffering from a lack of infrastructure that fails to support us to grow appropriately. We have two-lane bridges in the middle of cities. If there’s an accident, our city is closed off. We have a situation where we have much more expensive land outside of the city—which is for kiwifruit, etc.—which is meaning that we don’t have land to be able to use.

We have SmartGrowth, and they have done some extraordinary work, but it’s all retrospective: it’s all about what we needed to have 20-plus years ago. Now, this bill, the Spatial Planning Bill, will actually enable us to get ahead of these issues that are coming. It will actually support us to be able to think about where we need a school, where we need a hospital. I’m sorry, but the market is not going to deliver that for us. I’m sorry about that fact, but, actually, it won’t. We need to manage, to insure, and to plan, and we need to do this. A 30-year window is the kind of window that we need. I’m thinking about my children and my grandchildren, and I’m thinking about the kind of liveable city that I’m in currently, in Tauranga Moana; the issues that are happening for us currently, and what will happen going forward if we fail to plan, going forward.

My city is a coastal city. We know climate change is coming; we know something is going to really alter in our city. We know, with climate change, there are going to be some changes in the crops that we can grow, and we’re a kiwifruit country. Kiwifruit country could be at risk. This Spatial Planning Bill enables us to get ahead of these big issues. I think the really important thing that the members from across the aisle haven’t taken into account is, absolutely, this is complex stuff, but it needs to happen, and we don’t resile from that. We don’t stand back and say, “Oh, too hard; we’ll not do anything.” That sounds very much like the National Party’s response to the Resource Management Act. We’re actually getting in, we’re putting this in place, and we’re going to give it a damned good go.

Now, the thing that is important to recall, as well, is that there is a review period that is built into this bill. It’s about looking and seeing if these plans have been successful and reviewing them. I think that that’s very important and very sensible. It means that, sure, if something remarkably different happens, there can be a review period, and that seems very sensible to me.

Finally, I would like to just address the fact that, with the select committee, we are absolutely going to be working across two pieces of legislation that are interrelated. So this is a plea to the public out there: we want to hear on both pieces of legislation. We’re very interested to know both pieces of legislation, and your views and values. But also, when we are managing this process—and the two will be running together—we’d like to ask and ensure that the public put together a submission so we can easily tell which piece of legislation you’re referring to. I think that that’s absolutely critical for us so that, when we hear from the community and the public, we actually are really clear when we do our pre-reading what we’re actually going to be talking about.

And, finally, I would just like to acknowledge the select committee who, even though and despite the fact that the Opposition and the ACT Party are not agreeing to support this bill, will work diligently, who will work together, because, despite the things that everyone has said here in this House, they know it’s important that we have to get this legislation right. We have to do the right thing for the environment. We have to do the right thing for people. With that, I commend this bill to the House.

The question is, That the Spatial Planning Bill be considered by the Environment Committee.

Motion agreed to.

Bill referred to the Environment Committee.