Spatial Planning Bill

I present a legislative statement on the Spatial Planning Bill.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: 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 second time.

This bill is an important part of the new resource management system, the new laws that will do a better job of enabling development and protecting the environment. This bill was also introduced in November 2022 and referred to the Environment Committee. I, again, thank the committee for their careful work in considering the around 3,000 submissions on the bill and I, as other members, do acknowledge the capability and hard work and chairpersonship skills of Eugenie Sage. The Government has accepted the amendments proposed by the committee, which will improve the bill’s workability.

The Spatial Planning Bill has a single function. It’s the creation and the implementation of regional spatial strategies. This will do a number of things, including national consistency across key aspects of these strategies. Time and again throughout the long reform process leading to this bill, we’ve been told by developers and environmentalists alike that the absence of regional planning is a major problem in our resource management system. Above all else, those with interests in the system are crying out for predictability—land use rules, land use plans, and uncertainty around where infrastructure should go, delaying infrastructure, and there’s a lot of money and time being wasted. Spatial planning at the regional level will be a big step in overcoming these challenges.

Finally, developers and environmentalists can expect to work with plans across the country that are based on some pretty common-sense underlying principles. For years, we’ve had successive leaders of parties rallying against the Resource Management Act (RMA), promising that they’d throw it out, they’d repeal it. Now that we’ve got around to finally putting something comprehensive in its place, they’re going to chuck it out and start again. They know this reform’s right and they know it needs to happen.

I’m going to recount a bit of a story. Just after we started the RMA reform process, I was somewhat surprised to have Federated Farmers come into my office and say they wanted the RMA. And I said, “Too late. You’ve kicked it to death.” I actually used those words. You’ve got to ask yourself: why is it that Federated Farmers want the RMA now? Because they’ve hated it. It was before they saw the detail of the bill, but they had learnt that we were going to knock over first in first served, in respect of water issues. It’s an issue that’s perhaps more apposite to the Natural and Built Environment Bill rather than this, so I won’t go into that now, but I’m happy to in the committee stage of the House. Now we’re seeing some parties in this House wanting to demonise this in order to court a few votes, and I suspect also to deny the Labour Party and the Greens credit for a job well done.

The regional spatial strategies will drive the direction in growing regions. They’re actually not so important in regions that don’t have growth pressures, but in growing regions they’ll make it easier for regions to respond to the challenges that they face over the next 30 years or more. The strategies will be given effect through natural and built environment plans, and there’s very broad support from submitters for introducing this new spatial planning system that comes through the Spatial Planning Act. We need these spatial strategies to ensure that the regions identify the areas where growth is likely to proceed in the future, perhaps with some population triggers, and the areas where it’s less likely that growth is likely to take place. You know, some of the areas that might be prone to climate change hazards or might be areas of high natural biodiversity compared with other areas that are lower productive land and more suitable for development. So spatial planning will deliver an integrated approach, including protection of the likes of transport corridors or rail corridors.

This will both enable the private sector to mobilise their resources towards the areas which are most efficiently developed, but it will also enable central government to better plan and integrate these things into the long-term investment plans that central government has for the likes of transport infrastructure. So this will both deliver improvements to infrastructure provision and to the appropriate release of land when it’s needed.

Now, we’re not creating monopolies for anyone or saying that all development should be in a certain area. In any event, these decisions will be regional; they won’t be made by central government. But I think it’s pretty easy to see that the efficiencies that will come of this will be significant. And indeed, once a spatial strategy suggests that those areas over there should be developed and those transport corridors protected and those areas of natural importance protected over there, a lot of the development activities will flow through into Natural and Built Environment Act plans as permitted activities. It’s one of the reasons why the new system can have so many more permitted activities rather than things that require a bespoke consent. It’s because they will have been identified as future areas for growth in the spatial strategies. And that’s why developers up and down the country, the big development firms as well as councils, think that this is a good idea.

The new system will also provide benefits by improving housing affordability. I do agree with Simon Court that population areas that are growing need to make ample provision for land and the new system actually embeds that as a principle. It requires very expansive land markets rather than just-in-time supply in a way that drives up land costs. But it also, through this legislation, can be done in a way that achieves sensible outcomes for infrastructure planning. In respect of climate change, Simon Court, in his last contribution, said it was irrelevant to these instruments. I agree that mitigation or emissions reduction is mainly a matter for emissions pricing, but urban form, avoiding natural hazards, including from climate change, storm events and the like has a proper place in the planning system, including at times in the Spatial Planning Act.

Regional spatial strategies will help achieve the purpose of the Natural and Built Environment Bill. While the spatial planning bill is a separate and new part of the resource management system, it is linked to the Natural and Built Environment Bill in several ways. It will be done by the same regional planning committees that are established under the Natural and Built Environment Bill. That was a recommendation of the select committee that we’ve adopted.

The national planning framework that Simon Court again criticised, saying that it was some sort of instrument of the Minister—it’s not. It’s not prepared any differently to the way in which national direction under the RMA is. And indeed, there are more checks and balances, and, in fact, in some ways less ministerial power in respect of the national planning framework than is the case in respect of national direction under the RMA, because some of the shortcut processes that could be abused under the RMA are not as able to be used under the new national planning framework. And the first example of that will be the first draft of the national planning framework will go to a full board of inquiry, quite independent of any Minister.

Essentially, the first national planning framework consolidates all of the existing national direction into a single document, tries to sort out inconsistencies, where that’s possible at that level in the planning framework, and then adds some more national direction in respect of a pro-development chapter for infrastructure and also a chapter on avoiding natural hazards, so that we avoid some of the problems that were so apparent in recent events from bad storm events up north. So the bill sets out what the Regional Planning Committee should consider when they’re doing a strategy. And I welcome the drafting improvements the committee’s made on that.

Because there is a need to align Government programmes with what regions want, there is one Government appointment on the Spatial Planning Committee in addition to the Regional Planning Committee members that are appointed regionally, and that’s because councils wanted that, because they sometimes find it difficult to marshal central Government to actually pony up and make commitments that are needed, and this will assist in that.

Public participation is made clearer by amendments from the select committee, which we’ve also adopted. I’m sure there’ll be lots of additional questions in the committee stage on this bill. The final point I would make is there’s no point having these grand plans if you don’t have implementation plans. So the Act requires implementation plans so that we can see how councils and central government agencies are going to give effect to the high-level principles or the high level provisions of strategic plans.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. Look, the Spatial Planning Bill is not as bad as the Natural and Built Environment Bill (NBEA) that precedes it, or is the accompanying piece of legislation. The National Party agrees with effective spatial planning legislation and a regime. The problem is that, allied to the NBEA bill, this will be a battering ram around development in New Zealand—it will make it harder to do things

I want to canvass a couple of points in my contribution on this bill. The Minister for the Environment seems to be of the view that just because a lot of time and energy has been spent on this bill—that it’s therefore good. And actually, the truth is the opposite: sunk cost fallacy. Just because we’ve spent a lot of time and money and energy, and officials have worked really hard and the Environment Committee’s done a good job, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a substantive step forward for the country or for the environment.

I want to pick up on a couple of remarks that the Minister said in his speech. The first is that the development community is looking out for predictability and certainty. That’s exactly right—they are. And the problem is, at the moment, they don’t have that. But this throws everything out and starts again with the NBEA bill and the Spatial Planning Bill, with these new amorphous legal terms—no one knows how they will be interpreted and no one knows what they mean. And we heard submission after submission to the select committee in relation to this, from both the sort of pro-environment wing of the world and the pro-development wing, and local councils—you know, name a group, there was a submission to the effect of legal uncertainty and complexity, and how worrisome that was. And none of the changes advanced by the select committee fix that basic problem. So the Minister’s right that people are looking for predictability. This throws everything up in the air and creates judicial chaos. That is what is going to end up happening as a result if these bills pass.

And it’s pretty clear, the Government wants to ram them through. Its David Parker’s legacy project for this tired Government. Judicial chaos will result. We are going to end up with year after year of litigation, trying to define exactly what the words mean in the two bills. That is not a recipe for predictability and certainty.

Then, he sort of made that sort of mean-spirited remark and said, “Oh, well, National and ACT are just opposing the bills because, you know, it’s like a job well done—you know, pat on the back, haven’t I done well? Isn’t the Government amazing?” Well, that’s not the reason we’re opposing it.

We’re up for Resource Management Act (RMA) reform. I’ve been a member of Parliament for nine years; I’ve been talking about RMA reform for nine years. And there are members who are a bit more long in the tooth than me. I see Scott Simpson here, who’s been our environment spokesperson for a long time. I see Louise Upton, former Minister in the last Government. No one doubts the National Party’s commitment to RMA reform. You look back and—

💬 Hon Scott Simpson: Couldn’t get any support from Labour.

Well, that’s exactly right, as Scott Simpson says. I remember, back in 2014, as a new, young buck MP—

💬 Hon Scott Simpson: Still young. Still young.

Well, I’m not that young. I turn 40 in two months—

💬 Anna Lorck: Oh, you do not! Oh, you’re so young!

Yeah, I know—I know—I know. I’ve got the greys already—got the greys already—this is what being an MP does.

Anyway, so I remember, as a young buck, backbench MP, coming down and solidly arguing for RMA reform and putting forward these ideas. And David Parker and Grant Robertson and Chris Hipkins and all the rest of the Labour Party frontbench sat where we’re sitting now and said, “Oh no, we can’t have this. You’re putting the development—it will overcome the environment. It’s such a disaster.” And David Parker opposed substantive RMA reform for years. And Peter Dunne sat over there, just in front of where my good friend Simon Court is sitting now, and he was a stick in the mud on RMA reform and said, “No, no, we can’t do this.”, and he invented every reason under the sun not to do it properly. And you could never get a parliamentary majority through the House to do substantive RMA reform.

Then, much like they did on the TPP—or, sorry, I should say, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP)—half the Labour Party caucus stood here and marched down Queen Street about this appalling, outrageous breach of New Zealand sovereignty. And then what do I see, what do I listen to on the radio the other morning? I see Chris Hipkins on the radio. “Oh, you need to realise, CPTPP is a gold standard free-trade agreement. It’s just wonderful. Open markets is the New Zealand way, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.” They changed the name—they changed the name. They think adding the word “progressive” to the agreement. Anyway—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Righto, Mr Bishop, you’ve had a pretty good five minutes. The bill.

The Speaker’s about to cut me off on it. But I’m just making the point that we’re up RMA reform, but it has to be substantive.

Here are the issues with this piece of legislation. The select committee has deliberately changed the Spatial Planning Bill. It essentially has the same purpose as the Natural and Built Environment Bill. I won’t repeat what I said in my earlier contribution on that bill, but the idea that clause 3—the purpose is to uphold te Oranga o te Taiao, a legally undefined term in New Zealand up until now—is going to make it easier to do things, frankly, is fanciful. It’s completely fanciful. That whole Purpose section massively prioritises protection of the environment. I use the word “protect” specifically, because the courts, as I said before, have found the word “protect” has a particularly strict meaning, and it will be interpreted by the courts in a way that massively prioritises the environment over development, despite what the Minister says.

I mean, he sort of waxes lyrical, “Oh, we’re doing this for the development and infrastructure chapter.”, and all the rest of it. Well, that’s all fine. You can wax lyrical all you like in Parliament. The actual issue is how these things get interpreted. The Purpose clause of the NBEA and the Spatial Planning Bill—those Purpose clauses suffuse themselves into the various plans that flow from that. It’s a hierarchy. Everything has to flow from that. It is going to cause judicial chaos and lead to a diminution in predictability and certainty. So that is the most fundamental objection that we have to these two bills.

One of the really interesting themes that came through the submission process was the loss of local democracy. Now, I am not someone who thinks that local democracy is a good in and of itself—that it’s sort of like a supra good that should superimpose itself on everything. I think there’s a balance to be struck. I do think there’s a role for national direction through central government. At the end of the day, particularly when it comes to housing, central government bears much of the fiscal costs of poor local government decision making. So to put that into real terms, we spend, at central government, $4 billion a year on housing subsidies—$4 billion. Over a four-year Budget cycle, that is 10 Transmission Gully motorways on housing subsidies, on accommodation supplement, on emergency housing, on income-related rent—you know, $4 billion.

💬 Angie Warren-Clark: Are you going to cut them?

We want to reduce that amount down, for sure, but we want to do it by fixing the housing market. You know, it’s not sustainable that the Crown spends $4 billion per year on housing subsidies—it’s not. And the Government knows that. So the actual answer is competitive urban land markets. And to be fair to the Minister, that is one good thing, of the Spatial Planning Bill, which goes in the right direction.

So, as I say, I am not someone who thinks that local democracy is a good in and of itself—there’s a balance to be struck. But the submissions about the loss of local voice that came through the select committee were striking. Hamilton City Council’s submission, I thought, was very good. They said, “The framework destroys our ability to make timely, cost effective, democratically accountable decisions. The regional planning committee plan process is unwieldy, costly, time consuming, undemocratic, reliant on territorial and regional boundaries which are irrelevant and unreflective of communities of interest, unrepresentative, and lacks political accountability.” Strong words, but they’re not actually unreflective of many of the submissions that came through from many local councils.

The other point that comes through—which the Minister didn’t really address—is all of the Government’s reform processes in this area are completely disconnected from each other. It’s very discombobulating. So you’ve got three waters, which when it was initially introduced was the four entities, and, in the middle of these bills going through the select committee process, that all got up-ended. Now, we’re into the 10 regional entities. We’ve got different structures when it comes to the regional planning committees for this one. But you’ve also got the Review into the Future for Local Government, which is proposing another whole up-ending.

So local government quite rightly feels completely discombobulated by the Government’s reform processes. These bills are not a step forward. We’re up for RMA reform, but it has to be things that actually move the dial and will make a difference. These bills take us backwards, therefore we can’t support them.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for this opportunity to speak on the Spatial Planning Bill. I want to touch on a couple of points made by previous speakers, but first, start with saying why we wanted this piece of legislation in the first place. That is because New Zealand—all Government colours—has not been great at linking up our infrastructure with our town planning.

Part of that is because of who funds the infrastructure, and, as the Minister said before, the idea here is that the regional planning groups will have somebody from Government on those bodies, and that is because Government, obviously, is a funder of much infrastructure, along with councils and other groups.

Now, we heard earlier—the Hon Scott Simpson was saying in the previous bill’s debate—that this reform package was supposed to be three Acts and two of them don’t work without the third piece. That third piece is the climate change adaptation bill that we haven’t seen yet, and that piece of legislation is to deal with existing activities or houses or businesses, whatever you want to think of it, that are going to be impacted by climate change. So that is because they are low lying, and there’s going to be sea level rise at some point in the future.

What do we do about the existing people who live there? Part of the Natural and Built Environment Bill does some work in terms of being able to extinguish existing use rights. It’s limited. Of course, these pieces of legislation, both the Spatial Planning Bill and the Natural and Built Environment Bill, allow for stopping new activities because of climate change hazards. How you deal with those existing activities, how you fund them, all of those aspects—that it is difficult, and that is something that we need to continue to work on, I think, in a cross-party way. But it doesn’t undermine the purposes of these two other pieces of legislation: the specific one that we are talking about, which is our planning to link in infrastructure with our town planning, and to do it on a longer time scale. So not the Resource Management Act plans of a 10-year time frame, not the Natural and Built Environment Bill plans of the 9-year time frames, but to really be looking out 30 years or longer.

I just want to touch on that previous speech as well—by Chris Bishop—that was saying that National is keen for resource management reform, and they tried to do substantive resource management reform in the past. I really want to challenge that. The bills that I saw as a practitioner, they did not try and address the status quo, and they did not try and address these difficult issues of long-term planning in infrastructure funding. These reforms do, and that is why they’re so important.

Now, speaking again in reference to the Hon Scott Simpson’s previous speech, I also do want to agree with him that the Hon Eugenie Sage has done a marvellous job of chairing the Environment Committee for both of these bills. Also, I want to say that I think every member of that select committee was incredibly hard-working, and, again, I want to thank all the submitters for making their submissions.

Now, of course, the select committee has recommended some changes to the bill, and one of them is around the Water Services Entities Act, and we just heard the previous speaker mention that. Now, clause 3 is the purpose section, and that is to promote the integration and the performance of functions under the Natural and Built Environment Act, the Land Transport Management Act, the Local Government Act, and now the Water Services Entities Act 2022. So what the select committee has done in their report back is put that new infrastructure Act into the relevant provisions of the bill.

Another thing that I want to highlight is that at clause 16(3), there is now the word “map”. I’m excited about the addition of this word. It was, I think, slightly odd that a bill talking about spatial planning didn’t mention maps; it now does. I think that is what most members of the community imagine a spatial plan will look like; there will be some maps. So well done to the select committee on that.

Of course, the select committee has also made changes that reflect changes also made in the Natural and Built Environment Bill and some of the technical changes. I think another important change that the select committee made was at clause 15(1)(f), that the spatial plans are now to link to limits and targets, where they apply, that are set under the Natural and Built Environment Bill.

So this is a really good bill to do better in the things that New Zealanders aren’t great at doing, which is linking that infrastructure and the town planning. So I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Listening to the Minister who’s just resumed her seat, I’m mindful of the fact that we are a small nation at the bottom of the South Pacific. We are a nation of 5 million people, about the same size as metropolitan Melbourne in terms of population, but we have a landmass that is about the same size as Japan or the United Kingdom. Yet, we insist on making things so difficult for ourselves, and we have done for years. This legislation does nothing to make it easier for ourselves—for our built environment, for our natural environment, or indeed for those people who are vested with the responsibility of trying to plan for the future needs and demands and opportunities for citizens and for our built and natural environment. So I have to disagree with the Hon Rachel Brooking and her view.

She comes to this debate not only as a member of the Government but as a former practitioner in this area, and let me tell the House that the only people who are going to benefit from this legislation, from the natural built environment legislation and the spatial planning legislation—and, I suspect, the adaptation piece that we have yet to see—are lawyers. This is going to be a lawyer’s gravy train. To my colleague Tama Potaka: if the politics doesn’t work out, Tama, you’re going to be going back and being a resource spatial planning lawyer, because there’s going to be tonnes of opportunity and huge opportunity for vast fortunes to be made in the legal profession. There will be years—years—of judicial interpretation around these statutes, and this one, just because it is smaller and less numeric in volume than its traveling mate, the Natural and Built Environment Bill, doesn’t mean that it’s any less complicated.

The Environment Committee ran these two bills alongside each other, and it would be remiss of me not to join with other colleagues in congratulating and thanking the chair of the select committee, who I think did a particularly good job and was across the detail. The Hon Eugenie Sage, I think, did a job that is not only a credit to her personally but a credit to the select committee process, because we were working under very tight time frames. The legislation was introduced to the Parliament just before the Christmas break last year, and then submissions were called for until early February, over the summer break. Notwithstanding that truncated and shortened period, over a time when most New Zealanders are on holiday, the select committee received something in the order of more than 600—I think 610—submissions, and ultimately we heard from about 365 submitters.

This piece of legislation, the Spatial Planning Bill, is the one that actually creates, effectively, another layer of local government, and it’s a layer of local government that will be non-democratic, will have no democratic accountability, but will have enormous power and enormous influence over the lives, the property rights, and the wellbeing of people for decades and decades to come. These regional planning committees that will be established won’t have democratic accountability. That was probably the issue that was raised most regularly by people who were concerned about this piece of legislation. These people will be, largely, faceless, they will not be accountable at the ballot box, and they will have enormous power to create plans that will have an impact on the lives and the wellbeing of people, businesses, and communities up and down the country.

My colleague Chris Bishop made it very clear: we are up for discussion and debate and for a rational approach to the reforming of our resource management legislation and regime. But this is not the way to do it. We didn’t hear, for instance, a very effective answer as to why this bill is actually needed at all. What we could have had was—as we have now, essentially—the planning portion of the regime included in one bill. A number of submitters made that point, and we didn’t ever really get a satisfactory answer, either from the Minister or from the officials who were advising. Now, just on that note, I do want to thank the officials, because they were absolutely burning the midnight oil on this legislation, and the other piece of legislation as well, the natural built environment legislation. But it was clear, as we worked our way through the select committee hearings and advice from officials, that much of it was literally being made up as we went through it. There were words that were being changed, phrases that were being changed. Questions that were being asked by laypeople who are members of the select committee, who were just asking simple, basic questions like “What does this mean in practical terms?”, were unable to be answered by officials. They literally had no idea what the practical implications would be.

We hear from advocates for these two pieces of legislation that a lot of work has gone into it, a lot of effort has gone into it, a lot of thought has gone into it—therefore, we must proceed. Well, I don’t buy that at all. If the work and the effort and the energy that has gone into it has produced something that will ultimately be worse than the status quo and worse than what we have now, that surely is a good reason to halt it and not proceed any further. The argument that says, “Oh well, we’ve invested so much time and energy into it; therefore, we must proceed.” simply doesn’t wash with me or my National Party colleagues. We don’t think, on this side of the House, that just because we’ve come this far we should just keep going. We don’t think that is a sufficiently robust or clear rationale for keeping going.

I want to take just a minute or two to have a talk about what I think a previous member mentioned was the “intellectual grunt”. I think it was the Hon Stuart Nash who mentioned that an enormous amount of intellectual grunt had gone into this; that there was an enormous amount of intellectual grunt in the Minister’s office. Now, that may well or may not be the case, but that of itself is not sufficient basis to proceed with something that is clearly going to be more complicated, more costly, and more complex than we currently have. The bill hands over planning and decision making to groups of elites that are, in my view, going to be enormously powerful. They’re going to be unaccountable by way of the ballot box, and those regional planning committees—yes, they are less numeric than the situation we currently have, but they replicate the same essential challenges.

I want to just give an example of my own electorate. The Coromandel is nominally included in the Waikato, and we already think that much of what happens in the Coromandel is already too Hamilton-centric, because what happens in Hamilton doesn’t necessarily reflect the thinking and the views of what happens in the beautiful Coromandel. We’re not convinced remotely that decisions made by a geographically physically distant group of people is necessarily going to represent the best interests, long or short term, of people in my part of the country. That’s one of the basic flaws in the Minister’s assumption that just having a smaller number of planning organisations or planning committees is going to make for more effective planning in spatial planning. Again, I remain unconvinced of that argument, and I’d be happy to hear from speakers on the Government benches as to why they think that it will be better for regions like mine that will end up having planning foisted upon them from an area that is geographically remote and culturally, physically, politically different from the area that is being planned for. So I’m very worried about those sorts of things.

I want to follow up, just lastly, on the potential for, I think, judicial uncertainty around not only the creation of these regional planning committees but what job they will do. Again, we heard from submitters about a lack of clarity about appointees—how they would be appointed; who would make the decisions; what accountability there would be; what qualifications, what backgrounds, what experience would be needed. So we think that there are a lot of unanswered questions from this legislation. We don’t support it. We don’t think it is the right way to go. Just because there is some intellectual grunt or otherwise in the Minister’s office is not sufficient reason, in our view, to proceed with this legislation. We don’t support it. We won’t support it. And, what’s more, if we are given the opportunity to form a new Government before the end of the year, we will repeal this and its partner legislation before Christmas.

The time has come for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break. The House will resume at 7.30 p.m.

Sitting suspended from 5.58 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.

Members, before we broke for the dinner break, we were debating the second reading of the Spatial Planning Bill. The next call is a Labour Party call.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m going to take a shortish call on this important bill, which—as the Hon Rachel Brooking observed before the dinner break—finally integrates town planning or urban land-use planning with infrastructure, and that is indeed one of the breakthroughs. This Spatial Planning Bill is bringing New Zealand into the 21st century in terms of planning practice by making spatial planning a central feature of the new system. It’s not just about integrating various kinds of land-use planning with infrastructure and growth planning and so on. It also integrates on another level, and that is spatially and through governance entities, principally our city councils and district councils.

Let me give you an example of an area where this is particularly important. So in the Waikato, Hamilton is a growing, thriving metropolis, “the Tron”, but it’s surrounded by other district councils like Waipā, like the Waikato District Council. It makes no sense for these individual councils to be doing their own standalone planning in silos. Housing markets, transport corridors, the movement of people, economic activity, the protection of the things that matter that we want to set aside and protect from development—none of these things respect the governance boundaries of local government, of councils.

So this bill, this Spatial Planning Bill, integrates on that level. It requires multiple councils to get alongside each other to create these regional spatial planning committees and produce regional plans. That is really important. As the Minister also pointed out at the beginning of this debate, there will be a representative from central government in the regional spatial planning committee. That’s important too—that’s important too—because central government is the funder and provider of much of the most important infrastructure, like our transport infrastructure, the State highways, the rail corridors; you name it. And it has an interest, has a stake, in this planning. So that is important.

It’s also critically important in the new planning system, because one of the big shifts that takes place now is that there is a shift away from consenting towards planning. The regional spatial plans will feed through into the natural and built environment plans. The work that goes into those plans will enable a very significant reduction in consenting. There will be far more permitted activities. And in the interests of progress, I’m going to leave it there until the next instalment.

I just want to observe that while there’s been unanimous support for reform to the Resource Management Act (RMA) pretty much as long as the RMA’s existed, when I studied resource management law in the 1990s, I proposed to the lecturer that a land developer that we were asked to model consent conditions for should be able to progress because everything that land developers, civil engineers, drainage designers, ecologists responsible for establishing wetlands—everything that we knew back in the mid-1990s about how to design a subdivision that fitted into the local landscape and with the infrastructure was known. It was already known. When I proposed to the lecturer that my model land developer should be able to get a series of very, very simple consents that, basically, said, “Get on and build it.”, he said, “No, that will never be allowed—that will never be allowed. You’ll end up in the Environment Court or maybe the High Court. They’ll never let you do that.” I thought, “That’s ridiculous.” All of the engineers and town planners and environmental scientists in that class knew how to build a subdivision, knew how to build drainage, and knew how to establish wetlands—what you might call now “green stormwater systems”. But, no, that development and all of those other developments since the mid-1990s have had to go through the resource management consenting process.

So what is the problem with the Resource Management Act that we’re here to solve? Well, we’ve just heard from the Hon Phil Twyford, former Minister of Transport, housing even, who proposed a national policy statement on urban development that set out what it is that we want from urban development. We want high-density housing. We want higher densities around transportation hubs, around public transport, transport corridors. No kidding! Of course we do.

Well, when you look at the Auckland Unitary Plan—and I can speak on behalf of Aucklanders, because I live there—it says, “We need to fit in another half to a million people between now and 2050.” It’s coloured in to show where they’re going to live, and even at what densities—whether it’s future urban and what is currently rural land, where people are intended to live on larger sections, large homes, enough room for a trampoline, to park a boat in the driveway, or whether they’re going to live—according to Auckland Council’s Unitary Plan—in more intensive urban environments, places like Ponsonby and Grey Lynn, for example. The spatial planning in Auckland has already been done.

When Hamilton City Council—which the former Minister of Transport and housing the Hon Phil Twyford referred to before—came to the Environment Committee to speak on this bill and the complementary Natural and Built Environment Bill, they said, “For goodness’ sake! Do not lump us in terms of planning with all of those other councils that stretch from Raglan on the West Coast to the Coromandel on the East Coast, because we’re a metro of hundreds of thousands growing by hundreds of thousands or more between now and 2050. We have nothing in common with those rural communities and small towns of hundreds to a few thousand. We need to be treated separately. And, by the way, we’ve done our own planning and we know where the people are going to live.”

So let’s assume the spatial planning’s been done and the Spatial Planning Bill may well help clarify some of the processes around that. But the speaker before, that Labour former Minister of Transport and housing the Hon Phil Twyford, said that this bill now integrates planning and infrastructure development. Nothing could be further from the truth—nothing. There is nothing in this bill that does anything to translate the beautiful coloured-in plans and drawings showing where Hamilton, for example, and Auckland, for example, have identified where hundreds of thousands, even millions, more people will live between now and 2050 and integrates that planning with the provision of the infrastructure in servicing land that will allow those sections to be developed, those town centres to be developed. Nothing in this bill does that.

The only thing that would do that is a reform of infrastructure funding and financing that gave private property owners the ability to raise their own special purpose vehicles—in other words, raise finance and a fond—to build their own infrastructure independently from local government, or alternatively cash flow local government to build the infrastructure. [Holds up document] That’s what ACT proposes in our solutions for building New Zealand and conserving nature. What ACT says is: by all means do the spatial planning, identify how many people are coming, where are the places people shouldn’t live, where are the natural hazards—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Order! The member will come back to this bill. We are not debating ACT’s policies.

Well, Madam Speaker, if I may, this document here sets out new directions for resource management in New Zealand. These bills—the preceding bill, the Natural and Built Environment Bill, and this Spatial Planning Bill—apparently provide answers to the problems that the Randerson panel, which included current Associate Minister for the Environment the Hon Rachel Brooking, apparently set out to solve. But they haven’t solved it, and that is why, Madam Speaker, I offer an alternative. In fact, the alternative that I offer is set out very clearly in ACT’s alternative view on the Spatial Planning Bill. So if you may grant me some leave to speak to our alternative view, which is copied here from the committee’s report.

What is the problem to solve? Well, Randerson says—and that’s the Hon Rachel Brooking as well—there’s not sufficient national direction in the Resource Management Act. Let’s look at the Hon Phil Twyford’s National Policy Statement on Urban Development. It’s delivered in our community in Te Atatū, where Phil and I both live, a whole lot of density, one or two houses removed, 11, 13, 15 placed there, no car-parking, no additional waste-water connections, waste water and raw sewage overflowing into Wai o Pareira, Henderson Creek on a regular basis, 80 times in the past year. That’s what the current national direction delivered by this Labour Government has given us.

National direction on the National Policy Statement for Indigenous Biodiversity, released just a few weeks ago, trumpeted proudly by Labour’s partner: the Greens and James Shaw—what does that give us? Well, it sterilises access to resources, energy, quarries, for example.

What does national direction on fresh water—another policy implemented by Labour—tell us? Well, it gives us te mana o te wai, this concept that there is a hierarchy in the way we use water. First, we must consider the spiritual values of the water; only then drinking water and only then water for economic and social benefits—like people who want to make stuff and grow stuff. That is the national direction that this Government proposes to transfer into the Spatial Planning Bill.

But what’s missing? What’s missing when I look at a document that was provided to the public, setting out the purpose of these reforms? The climate adaptation bill—or Act. One of the three natural and built environments strategic planning is missing: the climate adaptation bill—from a Government that said, and a former Prime Minister that said, that the climate emergency is our nuclear-free movement. Who knew? It’s been raining a lot this year. Maybe they could have done something about the climate adaptation bill that told us how New Zealand should adapt to climate change, where we should be building infrastructure, how we should be defending assets, where may not be a good place to live—but, no, that’s missing.

So not only does this bill enshrine co-governance in regional planning committees that will be completely remote from democratic control, so the plans councils develop now will have no oversight under regional planning committees, but they will be influenced and potentially controlled by iwi Māori appointees, thanks to this Government. Another example of outsourcing decision making to unelected bodies and people appointed because of who their grandparents were. ACT opposes this, fundamentally.

What would ACT do? Well, what we would do is preserve the democratic process of planning that is taking place in places like Hamilton City Council and Auckland and all around New Zealand, under the Resource Management Act. But what we would also do is enshrine private property rights—the right to use your own property free from all kinds of objections by people who have no interest in your land except to tell you what to do. We would also, through our alternative policy here, complete the integration of infrastructure delivery, financing, and funding through ACT’s solutions for building New Zealand and conserving nature. It’s all here at act.org.nz. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Tēnā koe e te Māngai o te Whare. Thank you. In beginning a call on the Spatial Planning Bill, can I again acknowledge submitters, and there were over 610 submissions on this bill, compared to the nearly 3,000 on the Natural and Built Environment Bill.

I acknowledge the huge mahi of the Ministry for the Environment officials, who, as the Hon Scott Simpson noted, were burning a lot of midnight oil and working a lot of weekends on the bill, the departmental report, and advice to the select committee. I also acknowledge parliamentary counsel and the members of the very hard-working Environment Committee. We had a very collaborative process in working on this bill, despite the differences of view.

I would also like to acknowledge the Minister for the Environment, David Parker, but I especially want to acknowledge the secretariat for the select committee and the staff: Dylan, James, Jacob, Zoe, Colvin, Paquita, and others. They did a huge amount of work liaising with submitters, setting up meetings, liaising with officials, organising hearings, and drafting the report on this bill and the other bill. A lot of that work goes unseen, and I’d really like to have that read into the record.

This bill is a bit more manageable than the Natural and Built Environment Bill, but I don’t think the criticism of the Natural and Built Environment Bill on the basis of its complexity is well-founded. As the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment has said, “Complexity in legislation of this nature is inevitable. The environment we live in is not simple. It intersects with everyone’s property rights.”, and heaven forbid if ACT gets in and we have property rights dominating environmental legislation.

This bill does aim to establish a long-term—30-plus years—strategic approach to how we, as humans, interact with the natural and built environment through the development of these regional spatial strategies, which are developed with strong public community, iwi, and hapū input by regional planning committees. Those regional spatial strategies are intended to set out a vision and objectives for a region, identify the actions that are needed to achieve those objectives, and help achieve the purpose of the Natural and Built Environment Bill—te Oranga o te Taiao—and its 18-system outcome. They’ll look at what change is needed over that 30-year period in terms of land and water use, and where major development growth and infrastructure such as transport corridors, new renewable energy generation, and urban development should be provided for and how it should occur. As others have said, the aim is to integrate infrastructure with land-use planning, and to the Greens, the most essential infrastructure is the natural environment, which provides us with the essentials for life: water, clean air, and food.

Now, officials made it very clear that the regional spatial strategies would not map and determine land use on a property-by-property basis, but they would look at it over that whole region, and, as the Hon Rachel Brooking—who contributed an awful lot of her professional expertise to the development of the bill through the select committee process—noted, information presented visually in map form is much easier for the public to understand than, in my view, the planning jargon that we get in a lot of evaluation and other reports.

So these regional spatial strategies are intended to be broad and indicative at that regional scale, rather than the individual property scale, and it’s the natural and built environment (NBE) plans which will be much more specific. They will direct investment for things like land transport and for local services by central government and local government, and others have queried this. But the inclusion of a central government representative on the regional planning committees is a key tool to ensure that much better integration between the funding that’s available at the central government level for things like land transport through Waka Kotahi and the planning that is done at that regional level, and it will help resolve the issues that we’ve had under the Resource Management Act (RMA), where you’ve had regional councils having regional policy statements which set an urban-rural boundary and which want to ensure compact cities and towns, but we don’t have the transport investment decisions at central government necessarily accommodating that with better public transport funding and more funding for cycleways and active transport.

The regional spatial strategies will also provide for areas that require or may require protection, restoration, or enhancement. That’s one of the key matters in the bill, but one of the major shortcomings which submitters identified was that because infrastructure locations are identified in the strategy and a lot of that finer-grained work around where significant biodiversity areas are doesn’t occur until the NBE plans, there is likely to be a preference towards infrastructure or transport corridors over the protection of nature.

But those key matters are quite important, and I really take issue with comments by the ACT speaker about the climate adaptation bill. That bill, as I understand it and as the Hon Rachel Brooking noted, is to be largely about managed retreat. This bill has got a much greater focus than the RMA on planning for natural hazards, and clause 17 sets out the key matters to be included in the regional spatial strategies. One of those is the matters relating to risks arising from natural hazards and the effects of climate change, including areas that are or will be vulnerable to those risks, and indicative locations for infrastructure that is required or may be required to reduce those risks or provide resilience to them—things like stopbanks. So this is a much stronger direction than under the RMA. It’s a very good basis, I think, for ensuring that we avoid urban development in flood-prone areas and we ensure that through the spatial strategies, if there needs to be an adaptation plan with specific measures around coastal hazard or flood hazard, that is then provided for as one of the implementation actions that arises from the strategy, and those key matters were something that the select committee did spend some time on and did improve.

Similarly, around the public engagement provisions in the bill, the regional planning committees—which do these regional spatial strategies—have at least six members, including two iwi and hapū representatives. Now, there was a concern from the Hon Scott Simpson that the planning committees would be elite, and geographically and physically distant from local communities, but the select committee did make a number of changes to improve the process by which the planning committees engage with the public, communities, and councils. That public participation and engagement process is critical, and there’s a lot of flexibility now in the bill for the committees to use not just the normal submission process but other processes: public engagement through meetings, through social media, and the like. The bill requires the regional planning committee to actually set out in detail what process it’s going to use, particularly at the front end of the process, and make that publicly available to make sure that it identifies what are some of the barriers to participation by certain sectors of the community and how will those be overcome.

The principles for this public engagement are about encouraging collaboration and avoiding an adversarial process. So that is, I think, an improvement on the RMA, and one of the things the committee did was ensure that there is also provision for a hearing. That was to ensure that decision makers on the regional planning committee are actually face to face with the public and with submitters, so it’s not just unaccountable, faceless people making those decisions.

One of the other issues where we strengthened it was the integration between this bill and the water services legislation, because, of course, three-waters infrastructure is just the sort of infrastructure that needs to be identified in the regional spatial strategy. There is a requirement that the water services entities take account of these strategies and of implementation plans and that they ensure that their own asset-management plans and infrastructure strategies are consistent with the relevant regional spatial strategies.

So it is quite ambitious in its objectives. There have been a number of changes which, again, I think have significantly improved the bill, and one of them in particular is that issue around natural hazard planning and climate resilience. So I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker—a real pleasure to be speaking on the Spatial Planning Bill. It is a real pleasure because—currently living in Tauranga Moana and thinking about the infrastructure difficulties that we have in that community and the fact that we did not have a spatial planning bill or operation which gave us that outward look, 30 years, and so we are in a real mess in our community. This bill sort of looks at those kinds of problems that we have in these communities and seeks to solve them. So I am delighted to be here speaking on this bill.

It also does a couple of things which I—I am a business owner and I have a construction firm, and one of the things that I really particularly like about this bill is the amount of attention we pay to developers and their issues around consenting and the fact that if you’re building in one community versus another community, you might have two completely different consenting sets of rules, you may have a different cost here or a different cost there or a different set of standards. So what this bill does in practicality is it fixes those things. It fixes those things by giving a long-view plan out there around how we want to develop. You know, we heard from a lot of the community—610 submissions—and we had independent advice and we had amazing advice from our officials. I’m really delighted that this strategic direction, this work that we’re doing, is going to set us up to protect the environment but to support and enable development. Thank you. I support the bill.

The next call is a split call, and I call on Barbara Kuriger—five minutes.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Look, I just wanted to make comment at speaking about the committee stage on the Spatial Planning Bill. At the start of this process—back in January, February—it was at the stage where we started having cyclones which tended to repeat one after the other after the other as we went through this process.

But when I think back to discussions around planning in the first part of the committee, when we were doing this, it was like we were planning in real time as those events were going on around us. We were often shown maps of where the historic wetlands might have been in the Hawke’s Bay and aerial photos of where the water lay as we were working through the process of looking at what had happened in the Hawke’s Bay. It really got us thinking about just how important, going forward, planning is. I know we’ve had planning in the past, but it gave everybody the opportunity to think about where we build, how high and low we build, because not only did we have places flooded; we had places which were hill slides and those sorts of things.

We also—during that time, as a committee—went and had a look at a report from the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment talking about green spaces and the use of green spaces as we build our cities. Because often we see big subdivisions and there’s not very many trees and there’s not many gaps between them, and then we were starting to think, “Well, where does the water go?” So it really got us thinking about planning not just as a committee and I guess in a theoretical way, but we had lots of examples that we talked about during that time around planning.

We’ve heard about the Spatial Planning Bill being a move away from consenting and having far more permitted activities. One of the things that I really hope we can get to as a country—so I watch, now, our regional councils and our local councils do their 10-year plans and their long-term plans, and we have a democratic process in our central government which has a slightly different time frame, often, to what people have in local government. I know it’s a different year, but often it’s based on different cycles. What happens is Governments of both colours do this. The councils put their plans together and Governments of both colours come along and throw things in and then, all of a sudden, councils have to change at least parts of their plan.

So what I’m hoping that we can get to, as a Parliament and as a country, is lots more long-term planning. Because I know when I sat back on the Governance and Administration Committee at one point, we were talking about how short-term - thinking we are in this country and it would be great if we could get our heads together and really make sure that when we let our regions make a plan, that we aren’t disrupting it by throwing things in from the outside all of the time.

I also remember the conversation that Simon Court referred to with the Hamilton City Council, talking about how different they were from places like Coromandel and Raglan. Now, I represent places like Raglan and all the way down to Piopio and Mokau, which are also part of the Waikato Regional Council. So I know that, yes, the city was concerned that rural things might impact on them and they were looking at an urban environment as opposed to a rural environment. Me, being a local rural MP, I get the opposite end of that story and I expressed that at the time. So I guess when we’re planning, the big thing is to make sure that urban needs, as well as rural needs, are taken into account because one size doesn’t fit all and often we’ll be doing something slightly different.

The other thing that I would like to mention is we had quite a few conversations around vegetables—and fruit actually came into that as well. But in terms of the land that we actually use—and we look at the prices of broccoli and cabbages and those sorts of things in the supermarket now and we think about how we’ve resource consented our way around vegetables and what our responsibility is to the health and wellbeing of our community around delivering healthy food. So often we put all these barriers and all these regulations and all this proscription down on our vegetable growers, and then we wonder why the land is too difficult to get to and why it’s so expensive. So I just wanted to mention the vegetable growers tonight as I close off on my piece. Thank you.

I call on Arena Williams for five minutes.

Tēnā koe, ngā mihi o te wā Matariki. It is a Whiro moon tonight, which means that it is low energy in the Chamber tonight, but it is a good bill that we are passing and the brevity of this speech is no reflection on how important and necessary this bill is. In fact, it just reflects that we need to do it quickly.

May I take this opportunity to thank the members of the Environment Committee that worked on this bill, the secretariat, their advisors, and the many officials who have put a huge amount of time into this reform project. The reform of the Resource Management Act has been something that around the House we have spoken about with positivity because it is something that people care about; it is something that the people we represent need.

This Government is delivering on that. We have the privilege of tonight seeing in some legislation which will make our planning system cheaper, faster, and more effective. It will also be better for Māori. This bill has provisions which come straight from the recommendations of the Randerson report that will streamline and make more effective the provisions for Māori participation in our planning processes. When we bring in those voices to planning, practice, and infrastructure integration, that is important. That makes our cities better; that makes our planning processes for the entire country better, and that’s why I support this bill.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I too would like to make a short contribution, but nevertheless a meaningful one, on this Spatial Planning Bill tonight. We’ve heard from several people in this session that there were 610 submissions, which is a mighty effort. I’d like to commend those people and also echo my colleague the Hon Eugenie Sage when she gave thanks to the officials—and the secretariat in particular, who often don’t necessarily always get that shout out; they must have done a stellar job for that high praise to have come their way. And, in that same vein, I would also like to extend my thanks and my gratitude towards the Minister, the Hon David Parker, and also acknowledge the chair of the Environment Committee—which I hear is a very hard-working select committee—the Hon Eugenie Sage, who by all accounts was an incredibly thorough and very learned chair whilst tackling this particular piece of legislation.

We need an integrated effort, as we have heard tonight, if we’re going to help minimise the costs of adapting to natural hazards, and I think that’s really important when we think about recent weather events and all of the scenarios that that raises. A regional spatial strategy—that are not regulatory plans; they’re forward-looking strategies—that will be able to flow through plans into action, into a delivery and integrated approach, I think, for each area, acknowledging those bespoke requirements and those needs, is a really good thing. This is an excellent piece of legislation, and I commend it to the House.

Tēnā tātou i tēnei whiro marama.

[Greetings to us during this time of whiro marama.]

A whiro moon is upon us and for some of us, that actually gives us great energy—it’s those on the dark side of the moon.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to the Spatial Planning Bill at the second reading. And again, a big shout-out to those committee members left—left the House already—in fostering this bill through the process and the leadership of the Hon David Parker and others. It’s been pleasurable listening this evening, whānau—the wild and aspirational musings of my Labour and Green colleagues who have spoken to the bills that underpin the proposed Resource Management Act (RMA) reform. But given the complexity of the reform and my fanatic appetite for finding solutions of unresolved issues that confront our country, I contemplated whether or not a career in resource management law was a better risk-adjusted return for my time. Alas, I’m committed to spending more quality time with you all in this House.

As mentioned, National supports reform of the RMA, but respectfully opposes this bill. The bill’s purpose around regional spatial strategies to promote integration of the performance of functions under other legislation is noted. But one of the themes of this Government is the feverish compulsion to grow kāwanatanga, or Government, bigger than it needs to be or should be—an absolute imbalance in favour of article 1 of te Tiriti o Waitangi / the Treaty of Waitangi, rather than a careful positioning of articles 1, 2, and 3 across the legislative rubric. This imbalance has pervaded legislative drafting in the short time I’ve spent here, particularly in relation to prescribing Māori initiatives or participation to the detriment of more deliberate exercises of rangatiratanga.

Te Oranga o te Taiao is, yet again, another interesting, noble but ultimately misguided effort to envelope and restrict the innovation and creativity that goes with rangatiratanga. Adding an additional layer of bureaucracy, through the formation and the naming of the regional planning committees over and above city, district, and regional councils, convolutes our planning processes even further and compromises the very rangatiratanga that the Labour Government seeks to actively protect. Appointing members to these committees, rather than having elected officials, reinforces a democratic shortfall or deficiency which is becoming, unfortunately and intentionally, the modus operandi of this Labour Government.

The National Party, this great fine party of ours, the blue party, te pāti kahurangi, welcomes election of officials who make major decisions for big regions. However, where we have a loss of local democracy, an increase of Molesworth Street bureaucracy, I grimace and shudder. This is what is keeping me awake sometimes on a Whiro moon, sometimes on a Rākaunui moon, and cold at night: the thought of poor drafting across legislative platforms and drafting on the hoof.

My wise colleagues Bishop and Simpson have opined on the undemocratic nature of the regional planning committees proposed, particularly Hamiltonians trying to control people in Coromandel. These will be costly. They will be time consuming. They will be unwieldy and faceless and unreflective of communities of interest. These committees will lack political accountability and, basically, add more costs to an already expensive process. My own Hamilton City Council, home of the Chiefs—mana—has submitted that the decision-making processes which are ultimately accountable to the residents of Kirikiriroa, and sometimes answerable to Waikato-Tainui, will be severely compromised.

In clause 100(5), for example, the proposal is to entrench such committees into legislation. Wow! Another undemocratic body requiring legislation to dismantle. We should call it an agency rather than a committee. Clause 5—it’s a beautiful section—mirrors clause 4 of the Natural and Built Environment Bill. We have yet another powerful reference to “te Tiriti o Waitangi”. That’s right. Not “the Treaty of Waitangi”, nor the double banger “te Tiriti o Waitangi / Treaty of Waitangi”, but “te Tiriti o Waitangi”. I’m nervous about having this provision without context.

The elevation of te Tiriti o Waitangi without reference to the Treaty of Waitangi creates some further ambiguity, given the interpretation differences that we’ve had for years, nearly two centuries, for the English version of that fine covenant. My experiences in law over the past 30 years have seen a marked evolution in Treaty jurisprudence, often ignited by poorly drafted legislation. This is one area for the entire reform package, if it continues, that I would recommend further consideration be given to the nuanced wording. Perhaps the double banger is more suitable, or even the parentheses version where “Treaty of Waitangi” is followed by “te Tiriti o Waitangi” in parentheses, or vice versa. But “te Tiriti o Waitangi” by itself represents a risk space that is better located within the He Puapua thought document than the key RMA legislation.

Clause 7: that’s another provision which provokes a range of political PhD and Masters’ thesis projects across our academic fraternity. It reads: “Iwi and hapū responsibilities … [To assist in achieving the purpose of the Act] All persons exercising powers and performing duties and functions under this Act must recognise and provide for the responsibility and mana of each iwi and hapū to protect and sustain the health and well-being of te taiao in accordance with the kawa, tikanga (including kaitiakitanga), and mātauranga, in their [area of interest] rohe, or takiwā.” What mana are we talking about? Are we talking about mana wāhine? Are we talking about mana whenua? Are we talking about mana tūpuna? Are we talking about mana atua? It’s this lack of legislative clarity and certainty that gives rise to an absolute anxiety beating into the heart of a Capricorn.

The proposed legislation does nothing to define what mana, mātauranga, and kawa actually mean. In fact, these terms randomly turn up into an already complex framework. How in the world will decision makers make timely acquaintance and timely location of themselves in this space? Many of them cannot even pronounce tikanga and mātauranga, let alone make decisions based on them. Noble objectives, maybe; ahead of their time, definitely.

As one of possibly only two people in this Whare tonight who, whilst serving an iwi, has had to run a resource management team—people who actually go out and make—

💬 Arena Williams: Me.

There you go—maybe Soraya over there, my sister over there. People who’ve actually run a resource management team inside an iwi know how hard it is to not only find the capacity but also to fund the capacity to deliver meaningful engagement. The ability of iwi and Māori organisations to actually deliver meaningful capacity to engage, to consult, or, if possible, make decisions is something that confronts iwi on an absolute daily basis. The unintended consequences of this poor legislative drafting actually make it harder for iwi to participate in the resource management decision-making process. But no, we’ve had a whole bunch of drafters, Ministers, and committee members say it’s the right thing to do, without actually interrogating whether or not we’ve got the capacity or the funding within these organisations to deliver that capacity.

It assumes that there is enough RMA expertise out there, and I question that with a big 42-size font in bold and underlined. It is here where I can calmly refer to the wisdom of Laws 213 Public Law lecturer and former Labour leader and Prime Minister, Sir Geoffrey Palmer, who noted that we do have the fastest law in the West in his seminal text Unbridled Power. A respectful architect of much fine legislation, it was Sir Geoffrey that formulated section 9 of the State-Owned Enterprises Act—the godfather, godmother of what you’re talking about here in section 5 of the spatial bill—that ignited much deliberation, political, judicial, academic, executive, iwi Māori, and bureaucratic, of what the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi / te Tiriti o Waitangi constituted. That deliberation continues. But now we have a bunch of new terms—te Oranga o te Taiao, kawa, and mātauranga. Nōu tō piki amokura, nōku tōku piki amokura. [Mutual respect for different teachings or schools of thought.] How are you going to get consistency across all iwi, I do not know. The only way iwi have been together over the last 40 years is when they were forced in the Māori commercial fisheries legislation, because people have different views around what mātauranga, tikanga, and kawa mean.

Sir Geoffrey has more recently referred to New Zealand lacking the checks to prevent constitutional slippage, Toni. His comments could not be more prescient here. Constitutional slippage and ambiguity is where we are heading with the uncertainty proffered, curated, and created by people who have never been involved in RMA at iwi level, apart from one or two people in this House. If we can’t get these terms clear, how do we expect the judiciary will be able to interpret them, let alone decision makers in far-flung utopic rural electorates like the Bay of Plenty, Rangitīkei, Selwyn, and Tauranga?

This legislation—

💬 Hon Kiritapu Allan: Cuzzie, you can’t believe this rubbish you’re saying.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order!

We’ve got to build the road—build the road to Gisborne—build that road. This legislation should give clear guidance to decision makers around planning for the future for our communities, not the clear runway for fiscal futures of law and planning firms. At this stage I am unconvinced, unpersuaded that the wording is either durable or dependable for the tamariki, mokopuna generations who will inherit this messy wording, but also the environment we heartily proclaim to protect by way of this and other bills. Madam Speaker, kia tātou, Whiro moon.

Thank you. Being the final speaker for the Government, I put forward in terms of the Government bill second reading. Firstly, I want to acknowledge the chair, Eugenie Sage, for her commitment, for her leadership in guiding the many Environment Committee members—the permanent ones, because we had to have a lot of subs as well. I do want to acknowledge Minister David Parker and the Hon Rachel Brooking in terms of their kōrero and their advice and strength throughout the process.

I also want to acknowledge the colleagues, even though we disagree, but the collegiality was really helpful in terms of the seven months. Though we disagreed on various points, it was helpful to have a very strong secretariat who provided really good advice, and that includes parliamentary counsel.

I do want to acknowledge the just over 600 submitters who assisted the committee members in terms of understanding and providing examples of the legislation. That was helpful in terms of the report back of the chair to the House.

The Spatial Planning Bill is part of the reforms for the Resource Management Act. It is what the Government has been prepared to do and worked through the many various iterations, because we need it. We’ve seen the weather events of this year, and we need to move to a system that will guide New Zealanders, not just iwi Māori and hapū that we heard from—some very strong submissions. We also heard from many, many industry partners across the motu, and that was very helpful, being provided with analysis and refined drafting of the initial legislation, specifically around project development of where New Zealanders can build and cannot build, as we’ve seen this year.

This bill addresses a number of features, and specific to that is the 100 district plans that will now turn into 16 regional plans that will be administered by the regional planning committees. It will provide more meaningful, efficient development. And there are many views across the House; however, this bill will achieve what we set out to do in terms of stronger intent, the national consistency across key aspects of strategies. So as I wrap up, the bill will provide certainty and predictability. It is a good bill with permitted activity for future areas of growth. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is, That the amendments recommended by the Environment Committee by majority be agreed to.