Natural and Built Environment Bill

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’ll try and talk over the din here, but I am very pleased to be speaking on this third reading of the Natural and Built Environment Bill. It’s a single environment—at one point, it was going to be the environments bill.

Why I’m so pleased to be speaking on this is because it’s such a good piece of work—as opposed to what the last speaker, Chris Bishop, was saying—and it really deals with a lot of tricky issues that we haven’t been able to fix with the Resource Management Act (RMA).

So some of those things that it does, I’m going to talk about. It sets out the outcomes that it wants—and these are similar to sections 6 and 7 in the RMA, but a little bit different. But there are many of these outcomes, and, of course, there will always be conflict between those outcomes. So it’s very clear, in this piece of legislation—particularly at clause 3A—that there is to be a national planning framework. When the RMA was implemented, it was always supposed to have good national documents, but they didn’t really come along for a long time, apart from the coastal policy statement. So the national planning framework is going to be there and it’s going to really try and knock out some of the planning conflicts that you’re always going to get in anything to do with planning law. Of course, though, the bill also has some environmental bottom lines, and the purpose clause we heard about from the previous speaker of te Oranga o te Taiao.

Then there’s the regional spatial plan. So, at the moment, New Zealand is pretty terrible at planning for infrastructure. We’ll have these spatial plans—that’s in the next bill that I’ll talk about separately, but that that’s an important change as well. Then we’re going to have the regional natural and built environment plans—or the regulatory plans—which are similar to the current RMA plans. That’s where you look to see if you are going to need a resource consent or if you can or cannot do something.

At the moment, we’ve got over 100 of those plans, both made by regional councils and by district councils or territorial authorities. Instead, we’re just going to have one per region. You may be aware that we have some unitary authorities such as Auckland and Nelson, now Marlborough and Tasman, and Gisborne and Nelson and Tasman—they’re going to go together but Marlborough will go it alone. So we’ll have many fewer plans for users to have to deal with, which is a good thing.

Other changes from the RMA—much stronger on climate change. It also links with the Climate Change Response Act and you see that and the outcomes that I just referred to. Also stronger on hazards—and there is a national direction coming on those hazard provisions. I understand that there will be a national hazard planning framework and a national policy statement on natural hazard decision-making. So these will provide guidance to local government on how to consider natural hazard risk when making decisions on plan changes and resource consents. This is when they relate to new developments such as housing and infrastructure. The national policy statement is expected to limit new building in areas that are at very high risk from natural hazards, as well as require mitigations for areas at moderate risk. So the ministry is working on those at the moment.

Related to natural hazards and climate change, of course, are trees and green space, and the Environment Committee heard a lot about urban trees—and I note that I’m sitting next to one of my West Auckland colleagues, the Hon Dr Deborah Russell, and certainly a good number of her constituents made submissions about trees in the beautiful part of the world that she’s from. Also, though, what we’ve been thinking more about this year is the importance of green infrastructure and green spaces and the ability to soak up stormwater. We’ve also, of course, been thinking about stormwater as well.

We’ve seen changes from the select committee and in the Supplementary Order Paper during the committee of the whole House stage, so that the national planning framework (NPF) that I’ve been talking about—clause 58—gives some other specific issues that the NPF can include, and that now includes trees and green space. Green space is not defined and, of course, the Ministry for the Environment will need to do some further work and thinking in that, but I encourage them to do that as well and as quickly as they can—it’s a very important issue.

Also on green infrastructure, for designations now, accepted infrastructure as natural and green infrastructure is defined at clause 497 as “infrastructure that uses natural systems such as plants or soil, or mimics natural processes, to avoid, minimise, or remedy the environmental impacts of activities”. It’s a very good step in the right direction.

We heard from the previous speaker, citing many submissions that were opposed to the bill. Of course, there were many submissions that wanted changes to the bill—I totally accept that point. But when talking particularly about renewable energy, there were many submissions saying that proposed short-term consent for hydroelectricity was going to cause problems for that sector of our economy and our energy production. This was amended by both the select committee and the Supplementary Order Paper.

That’s a really important point to make—that there’s been a lot of listening, a lot of responding, and a lot of dialogue in the creation of this piece of legislation. It, of course, had a process with the Randerson review; it had an exposure draft; and then it had an extended select committee process as well. It’s important legislation—it deserves all of that. The previous speaker also said that it was naive to think that this piece of legislation would solve all the problems of the RMA and the planning world. But I think given that process, you cannot say that this is a naive piece of legislation, nor is it a naive idea to think that we can do better with our planning by doing better at both the national level and the regional level.

I do accept, though, that implementation of it is incredibly important. That didn’t happen with the RMA, as I just mentioned. We didn’t have the national planning direction that was also always considered necessary for the good implementation of the RMA. There is money that’s been budgeted for that in this implementation.

It will be done with some regions going first so that central government can work with them and work out what works well and what doesn’t work so well, so when other regions roll out, we will learn from that implementation and do it as efficiently as possible. It’s also crucial for that implementation that both the national planning framework and those regional plans—both at the spatial level and the regulatory level—do make those difficult trade-off decisions and take the community with them when they’re doing that, which of course the bill provides for.

So it’s one of those days in life where, on a personal note, I wasn’t sure that it would necessarily come, but it has come and I’m very pleased to be standing here in front of you and commending it to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. So here we are, on the third reading. It has been a very long process for this Natural and Built Environment Bill, and it actually goes way back before I started on the Environment Committee. There was an exposure draft earlier on. I joined this process in about the end of January or the start of February this year. It was a really interesting process when we looked at how we do things in our country as we went through the process of the cyclones. We were sitting there, in live timing, actually thinking about where the flooding in the Hawke’s Bay had sat, where things had happened in West Auckland where there wasn’t enough room for the water to go.

We wondered how, as humans in this world, we had got some things quite wrong over a period of time, to the point where there were a lot of people in this country who were going through personal suffering at the loss of their houses and their businesses. It wasn’t particularly due to anyone’s fault. It was just the way planning systems have worked. It has been in our rush to get housing built. I think that we all would agree that the old Resource Management Act process that we currently have is not actually working to full effect to protect either the environment or the people who live in it.

I think the big thing about this is that all of this work is hard. We’re looking at an integrated statute for resource use. We’ve got two bills at the moment: we’ve got the Natural and Built Environment Bill, and then, coming up after this, the Spatial Planning Bill. They have to fit together. Then when we get the climate adaptation bill—that has to fit in and lock in along with it. Alongside that, we’re doing the Local Government Act Review, and the Water Services Entities Amendment Bill and the three waters, which is now 10 waters; there’s a lot of stuff going on in this space. People want to be absolutely assured that whatever is put in place by whatever Government—whatever colour it might be—is going to work and that it is not going to, legally, be able to take years and years of, I guess, discussion going through the court system, as has been the case in the past.

So it is hard, and there is a diagram in the legislative statement that was put up by the Minister this morning. So what we’re taking into account, as we do this process, is the natural environment. Of course, we need development. We want the system to be efficient. We need climate adaptation and mitigation, and that certainly—as I said before—took up a lot of our conversations. Then of course, there’s Te Tiriti and the mātauranga Māori aspects of it all. So we’ve got quite a neat little diagram here that looks at how we put the national planning framework into place, how the regional spatial strategies are going to fit with it along with the Natural and Built Environment Act plans, the consenting system.

The Minister actually said in the House this morning, when he spoke, that there should be a 20 to 40 percent reduction in consent processing. Now, if all worked well, under this new piece of legislation, I think a lot of people would be hand clapping and going, “This is a really good idea”. I think the questions that still stick in people’s minds are: how is this going to work, and how is it all going to lock together? There’s still quite a lot of question marks out there.

The good thing, from most people’s perspective, is that this is actually now going to be a system which takes a shift from managing adverse effects to promoting positive outcomes. Personally, I’ve long been a fan of catchments being able to do their own—you know, we’ve got to have a bottom baseline of where we want our water quality to be achieved, our land quality to be achieved, all of the things that go on in our catchment, our carbon sequestration, all the rest of it. We need to have a system where we know what the outcomes are that we want to achieve.

What we’ve had up till now is a system where we’ve had so many regulations thrown at us, so that often, when people are looking at regulations, they don’t know if the one that’s coming down yesterday is going to complement or be contradictory to the one that is likely to come down tomorrow. I think that’s what we’ve done to people, not just in the farming community, but over a range of various business sectors. Everything is tied up in red tape. We’ve never looked up—very actively—to see what the outcomes are going to be. So I think the change in mood and the intent of this bill is heading in the right direction in terms of people just wanting to get up in the morning, not wanting to tick millions of boxes—so I hope certainly that that is going to be a really positive outcome of this piece of legislation—but actually putting their work clothes on and going out to work, whether it be farm gumboots or whether it be some business that’s undertaking a mining industry aspect. You know, if you can’t dig it, graze it, extract it, or grow it, and it’s not a fish, we really don’t have it. I say that time and time again and I’ve challenged lots of people in many rooms to give me something that doesn’t fit in one of those categories. So the people that are undertaking those, as well as people who want to develop housing developments, as well as people just wanting to build their own house want to know, “What is the outcome that is expected of me?” rather than ticking a whole lot of boxes, which is something that has traditionally happened in the past.

Look, I know even in getting roads built—I’ve got Mount Messenger in my electorate, and it’s good to see it’s coming along. There are cranes everywhere. From the time it was put in the Budget process in 2016, it actually took six years to get that started. It’s no wonder that we can’t actually make some progress. There’s still appeals going on, and there’s still things happening in that place. So I think we have to get much more swept up in this space. So the intent of the bill is a good one.

One of the things I wanted to comment on—and the last speaker, Rachel Brooking, actually alluded to it—was hydro facilities of any size, which the Minister spoke about in the legislative statement and in his speech this morning. It has been amended by the select committee because it certainly was a real concern, for a country who wants to build much more renewable electricity, that for small hydro schemes it was looking like 10-year consenting was going to rule them out of the ballpark. It would mean that they would never start, because the banks wouldn’t lend them the money. So it is good to see that this change has been made. Good projects like that will be looked on favourably in terms of where we take our renewable electricity work in the future.

What I would like to say in this third reading is that I think I spent something like 30 days in that select committee, and I know others spent a lot more time in that select committee than I did; I want to say that the process of that select committee was absolutely outstanding in terms of people being able to sit around the room, express their views. I have to give credit not just to the members of the select committee but also to the officials that came in from the Ministry for the Environment. Not every question or every change was able to be accommodated, but they certainly accommodated many things when they could and where they could.

I have to say that the chairmanship of the Hon Eugenie Sage and the members of that committee—it was very open. It was very transparent. We worked well together. We started off by splitting people across into subcommittees, because we did have lots and lots and lots of submissions coming through. I think one of the key things was the hydroelectricity, renewable electricity. People were concerned about the purpose of the bill: te Oranga o te Taiao. We spent a lot of time working on defining that. Basically, if the environment is healthy, the people are healthy. The wellbeing of the environment actually leads to the wellbeing of the people. It’s not a complicated thing to understand, but it does create lots of discussion. We want to make sure that that is absolutely in a good legal standing when it is introduced.

I think the one big thing that locals still need to be convinced of—we heard a lot about local voice and local input, and there’s still a bit of concern that maybe, as we lock this system together, that won’t be happening to the extent that they would like it. But I can certainly say that the process of the committee was a very intense and good one. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m very happy to be able to take a short call on this momentous occasion as the Parliament ushers in this bill, which sits at the heart of the new planning system, one that I believe will serve this country well in the decades to come.

This Natural and Built Environment Bill, once it becomes an Act, will, I think, reflect and take into account many of the really important lessons around how we live with and in our natural environment. It reflects a stronger, more urgent desire that New Zealanders have today to protect our natural environment for future generations.

It’s learnt many of the hard lessons from the last 30-odd years on how the planning system messed up our housing markets and made it really difficult for us to deliver enough quality, affordable housing for the people of this country. It seeks a lighter, more agile process. One of the very tough lessons of the Resource Management Act (RMA) era was that a heavy, slow, bureaucratic, and costly system dragged down people, both those who were wanting to protect the environment and those who were wanting to do things like build our towns and cities. It also reflects the contemporary desire for better and more Māori participation in the public life of this country.

I believe this law will better protect the environment. The notion of environmental limits are at the heart of it, and I think about Te Wai o Pareira, the river that runs through the middle of my electorate in West Auckland, and how polluted it is not only by the failure to invest in decent infrastructure but by the failure of the planning system to protect the taonga that our community loves so much, but it has become so polluted.

By investing more time and energy in plan making, the democratic process of our communities and our institutions—people coming together to plan what kind of development they want and what places in our country should be set aside and protected from development—it will mean that we will have far more non-notifiable activities. There will be fewer consents needed, and that will result in significant cost savings for people, for businesses, and for the country as a whole. It will be a lighter, more agile system.

National direction: through the national planning framework, which is central to this new law, we will have comprehensive and regularly updated national direction. One of the great failings of the RMA was that successive Governments failed to actually provide the national direction that that system was built around, and, as a result, we saw some terrible consequences, both environmentally and in terms of our built environment in the growth of our towns and cities.

The planning that will be done by councils and their communities and mana whenua under the Natural and Built Environment Act will be collaborative. Development, transport corridors, water catchments, and regional economies pay no heed to the boundaries of local government, and that’s why we are regionalising through this bill the planning process. It will force people to collaborate and to come together and to plan the kinds of environments and the towns and cities that they want. That is a huge step forward.

Finally, moving away from the approach of the RMA, which was of managing the effects of development, and towards a more deliberative and deliberate planning approach that will allow our communities to come together to say what kind of development they want and what kinds of places they want to protect is a move away from the neo-liberal thinking of the 1980s, which said, “We’re going to manage the worst effects of development, and otherwise we’re just going to let the market do everything.” That hasn’t worked, it was never going to work, and it was really at the root of many of the problems of the RMA. This bill, really, is in sync with the modern thinking that actually doesn’t consider “planning” to be a dirty word. We know we can think together, we can plan and prioritise, and we can build the country that we want, and this bill gives us many of the tools to do that.

I want to acknowledge the outstanding leadership and work of David Parker as the Minister for the Environment. This is a huge piece of work, and he has been right across it the whole time. He has shepherded it through and taken people along with him, and it’s also important at this stage to recognise the professionalism and the talent of the Hon Eugenie Sage in chairing the Environment Committee, who also, I think, did a tremendous job on that. I commend this bill to the House.

New Zealanders agree on the problem to solve: the Resource Management Act (RMA) has failed New Zealand in the past 30-plus years. The Resource Management Act has been the single biggest handbrake on developing land for housing. It’s made it harder to build warm, dry, and affordable homes. It’s led to a range of social problems: people living in cars, but not just living in cars, people considering whether they want to move towns, move cities, or regions for a better job, and finding they can’t find an affordable home that matches what their ability to pay is.

The Resource Management Act has made it much more difficult to build transport infrastructure. In Auckland, I can think of a number of projects, including the East West Link, which still languish in the Supreme Court awaiting determinations; projects that are absolutely vital to get trucks off local roads, improve productivity, and allow people actually to get on with building businesses rather than wasting money on expensive consultants and RMA lawyers.

The RMA has resulted in less competition, even between supermarkets until recently—higher prices for everything, lower productivity. If you can’t build efficient roads what that means is trucks spend longer delivering materials to site or to supermarket—we need to put more trucks on the road to achieve the same volume of work, it leads to traffic congestion and lower productivities. Ultimately, the Resource Management Act, and, I hate to say it, Minister Parker, for all the work you’ve done, the replacement bill will only lead to an ongoing decline in standards of living. This is not going to work, because what Labour has done is take the advice of people with vested interests; the same lawyers and the same advisers who advised on the Resource Management Act back in the 1990s were the same people engaged to tell this Labour Government how to fix the Resource Management Act. And you know what happens when you let a fox into the hen house? It has a good old feast on the hens, and that’s what’s happened for the last five years of consultation on the RMA—very, very disappointing for practitioners, for people like myself who have come from the building and construction sector, to see what Labour and what Minister Parker has delivered.

This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reform the resource management process—the way we use land, the way we protect the places that are special to us—but instead Labour has doubled down on some of the things that have frustrated development. It’s extended the red tape. It’s included metaphysical concepts in the Natural and Built Environment Bill, spiritual and animist concepts like Te Mana o te Wai. The purpose of the bill being to uphold te Oranga o te Taiao. It’s a novel term. Lawyers told us at the Environment Committee that it could take a decade or more to unravel what that means. This bill includes undefined terms like “mātauranga Māori” and “tikanga Māori”. Well, you can go to court and ask a judge what it means, or the Minister might have agreed with me when I tabled an amendment to this bill at the committee stage that we could include a very simple definition of what traditional Māori knowledge is if that’s what mātauranga Māori means. But the Minister refused.

This bill will carry over national policy instruments that have been one of the greatest handbrakes on moving on and developing productive land in New Zealand—getting on with building. The freshwater plans, that national policy statement which defined three bulrushes in a paddock as a wetland—three bulrushes in a paddock as a wetland—is one of the national instruments that’s going to be carried over with David Parker’s enormous 1,000-page bill. Now, when I pointed out to the Minister that three bulrushes in a paddock are a wetland and getting consents to disturb a wetland was prohibited, the Minister belatedly, after 18 months, finally changed the definition of a wetland in that national policy statement. Eighteen months of quarry developments—we depend on the aggregates, we depend on the sands and other materials to make concrete to build roads. Eighteen months of developments not able to get consent because the Minister accepted the advice from officials that three bulrushes in a paddock makes a wetland. All of that nonsense is being carried over in the Natural and Built Environment Bill.

Counter-productive policy that slows New Zealand down costs money. The Infrastructure Commission made a good point in a recently released report: consenting alone, stacking up the documents to apply for consents, spending their time in court—Environment Court, High Court, Supreme Court—cost New Zealand infrastructure- and asset-owners $1.3 billion in the year that they assessed; $1.3 billion just to get consents, not to do the bat survey, not to put up the silt fence, not actually to sort out the traffic management—$1.3 billion on consenting. Completely unacceptable. That is what is holding New Zealand back. This bill will make it worse, much worse, because it will take 10 years to work out what half of it means.

So what do we need to do? What could we have done differently? Well, a different policy approach that was rejected early on in the consultation by the Minister was to separate environmental protection of our special places from building and construction, from urban development, because it doesn’t make any sense to apply the same environmental protection principles and approach and framework and tests to, say, somebody who wants to build a gondola up the side of Mount Cook as it does to somebody who wants to build an urban motorway through a paddock, or a subdivision. But that’s what the RMA did with its integrated approach to land-use planning and environment with sustainable management, that 30-plus-year failed experiment. The Natural and Built Environment Bill, which will soon become law, doubles down on that approach.

What would ACT do differently? Well, we would say it’s time for a radical reset. When I came to Parliament, I gave a maiden speech. I said I’m not here to just cruise along with the status quo. I said I was a radical environmentalist, and that’s because we need to take a radical approach if we want to solve the problems of environmental damage and pollution and loss of biodiversity. We need a separate environmental protection Act that just focuses on environmental improvement and we need a separate urban development Act so we can get on with building infrastructure that actually allows our cities to grow, allows our regions to be connected to ports, to workers, and to markets. ACT would do that through our proposal for building New Zealand and conserving nature. You can find it on act.org.nz. We spent 18 months researching this.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Mr Court—déjà vu. You know where to go—back to the bill.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. The opportunities that this bill neglected were actually to change the focus; instead of having more people decide how you use your land, to go back to the principles of common law and private property rights. So the presumption should be not that we have to beg for permission from a planning tribunal or from a judge, but instead we have the right to use our land as long as we don’t affect our neighbours or discharge to the commons. Now, there are different ways to regulate discharges to the commons, like to fresh water or to air, than having to apply for permits over and over. The Natural and Built Environment Bill will soon become law and will still require people to get consents and permits for things that they can simply cut and paste from a code of practice. What ACT would say and what the Infrastructure Commission said in advice they gave to the Minister when preparing this bill, is that 80 percent of consents are unnecessary because we already know how to carry out those functions. That’s why ACT would say, “Let’s avoid all the consenting nonsense, and for common activities—in fact, all of those except for the most high risk in the most sensitive environments—you shouldn’t have to get consents at all”. ACT can reduce the cost of consenting permitting under any type of resource management law from the $1.3 billion a year to a fraction of that.

Now, what are the opportunities to come? Well, this bill will be passed. Councils will have to face this problem of how they implement something not knowing whether it will proceed. In fact, most likely it won’t because there will be a change of Government, and a Government that involves ACT has an alternative solution. So all of this transition cost, all of this wasted effort, all of this five years may be lost—or it won’t, because all the good advice we have will go into ACT’s policy prescription for resource management reform. Look forward to sharing it with you.

Tēnā koe e te Māngai o te Whare. Very pleased to take a call on the Natural and Built Environment Bill. Some people have said that the Labour Government has not been transformative, yet this area of resource management law has required tremendous leadership by the Minister, the Hon David Parker—and supported by the Associate Minister for the Environment, Rachel Brooking—to actually initiate this reform and to pursue it because of the huge complexity. As the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment said, and I quote, “Complexity in legislation of this nature is inevitable. The environment we live in is not simple. It intersects with everyone’s property rights. There are many interdependencies between property owners as well as many spillovers from their use of environmental resources. The natural environment also goes to the core of Māori identity. Any attempt to manage these frictions or conflicts, whether through regulations or markets, will involve complexity and demand high levels of specialist expertise.”—and that’s what we’ve had in terms of the Minister’s leadership of this reform.

Others—National and ACT—say that they’re just going to jettison it, but they do not provide any detail of what they’re going to put in its place, and I would contrast the tub-thumping bluster of Mr Bishop’s speech with the much more measured contribution of Barbara Kuriger, who sat on many, many days of submissions and hearings on the select committee and who was recognising that there is a need for change and some of the ways that change would improve things. So we have, on the one hand, what could have been cross-party agreement around this bill—there was the kernel of that in Barbara Kuriger’s speech—and yet we have the political positioning we have seen from National and ACT in opposing the bill from its first reading and not being prepared to engage in the changes that were needed in response to submissions.

Can I record again thanks to all of those individuals, organisations, councils, iwi, hapū, environmental organisations, and others who made submissions. The bill was substantially changed through the parliamentary select committee process because of those submissions. I acknowledge other members of the Environment Committee, the secretariat, Parliamentary Counsel Office, and everyone else in the Ministry for the Environment and all of the mahi that was put into that process. I think it’s easy to say “We’ll repeal the bill”, but why turn one’s back on all of that effort? The bill, in the time that it’s been available in Parliament, is the best that it could be. Land users, councils, and others all need certainty. Passing this bill and making it clear what the new legislation is the best course from here.

The bill certainly still has shortcomings from the Greens’ perspective. We think the infrastructure override provisions, in relation to places of national importance and areas of highly vulnerable biodiversity value, are too broad. We think that the Minister has too many powers and they are still not adequately constrained. The fast-track provisions endure despite the legislation purporting to be a more efficient process, and there’s inadequate recognition and protection of regionally and locally important landscapes. But it is the best that could be done in the time available.

I think it’s the debate over the purpose clause—clause 3—to uphold te Oranga o Te Taiao, which “enables the use and development of the environment in a way that promotes the wellbeing of present and future generations.” subject to this being achieved “in a way that—(a) protects the health of the natural environment;”. It’s that debate which has really been the nub of the issue, because we’ve seen from ACT that it just wants to get rid of any planning process and any consenting process, and we’ve seen from National that they do not recognise that the economy is a subset of the environment. To National, the environment is just something to exploit to promote more revenue generation.

So this bill, with its focus on that purpose, and with the 18 outcomes beneath that purpose, is about driving towards more positive outcomes. It is with the recognition, as the Randerson review did, that the Resource Management Act (RMA) has really failed the natural environment. We’ve seen that with increasing loss of indigenous vegetation cover, the indigenous biodiversity crisis, and the declining quality of our waterways. So, yes, there will be litigation around clarifying the purpose.

It does incorporate a Te Ao Māori perspective. That, I think, is really important in this place of Aotearoa, because Māori have recognised for generations that humans are part of nature, not separate from it; we have an intrinsic relationship with it and that all parts of the environment—te taiao—are interconnected. For the first time, we are trying to put that into the purpose of legislation. It is fundamental to who we are in Aotearoa and to our environmental management law, and it also is the basis for much improved participation by Māori in the way our environmental law works, particularly through the representation of mana whenua on the regional planning committees.

The 18 outcomes: there were a lot of submissions about the lack of priority here. There is potentially still a concern that the lack of priority in the legislation and the competition between the outcomes could go back to that overall broad judgment approach which has been problematic under the RMA, but the national planning framework has a critical role here in doing that prioritisation and giving recognition to key outcomes. Some of those new outcomes are absolutely fundamentally important, particularly in relation to climate change. We’re seeing severe weather events happening at an unprecedented rate and having to contend with those, so the outcomes in clause 5 around reducing greenhouse gas emissions so that we meet our targets in the Climate Change Response Act, and to reduce the risks arising from natural hazards and the effects of climate change are really important, particularly as the bill does enable some encroachment on existing use rights where there are provisions in regional plans to ensure that we meet those outcomes.

There will be a lot of work done on environmental limits and targets. We hope to see quite a few of those in the national planning framework, including those in the current national policy statement for freshwater management. It’s been the lack of targets and limits that has been problematic under the RMA until last term, Minister Parker strengthened the national policy statement on freshwater and it was no longer the tissue-paper document that it had been under National.

There are new provisions that will be in the national planning framework—and the Green Party pushed hard for these—around urban trees. I heard Chris Bishop talking about the bill being far too pro-environment, yet it has been incredibly hard to get recognition of urban trees in the legislation despite that being a major public concern. We finally did, and through a very late Supplementary Order Paper, we ensured that the first national planning framework will provide guidance on urban trees, because urban trees and green spaces, and the whole concept of “spongy cities” and using nature and green infrastructure as part of the solution to climate change is increasingly important. It is very cost-effective, it adds to urban amenity, and now that there’s this reference to urban trees and green spaces, there will be direction in the national planning framework around that.

I totally agree with the comments by the Hon Phil Twyford about planning, the need for a very effective planning process, and the value of planning, but there does need to be a major change in planning culture to get rid of the turgid, waffly, very lengthy plans that we have where people have to get consultants in to actually understand them. There is a requirement around succinctness and plain English in the bill, and I really hope that this occurs in the cost-benefit analysis and the evaluation report, and that this also is driven through into the plans.

This has been a massive exercise, and it is now going through its final stages in the Parliament. I hope that it delivers improved outcomes for te taiao as the basis for a healthy society and a healthy economy, and congratulate all of those—particularly the Minister, officials in the ministry, submitters, Parliamentary Counsel Office, and the select committee staff and members for the mahi that has gone into this. Kia ora.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It is an utter pleasure to stand here today and to speak on this bill. It has taken such a lot of time in this term to go through, so before I thank members etc., I want to just talk about the fact that we consulted on the exposure draft as an inquiry in 2021, so those members on the Environment Committee have been sitting with this process for a long time. We had the Randerson review land in July 2019 and we began our work there, and then, of course, we had the Natural and Built Environment Bill come to us. We have spent many, many, many months working on this piece of legislation, but rightly so because it has been 32 years since there was a proper and actual review that needed to occur across the whole system. We have carved up, cut out, and added to the Resource Management Act in too many ways for that piece of legislation to effectively protect our environment, so I’m really delighted to be here speaking.

I want to acknowledge, as others have, the stellar chairing by the Hon Eugenie Sage, who had the foresight to work with us all in such an amazing way to ensure that we all kept talking. She was completely over the detail of every submission and was such a valuable chairperson. We are very lucky to have had her in our select committee and I—we’ve all said it, but actually this is 1,000 pages of legislation that she knows every word of. So I do want to acknowledge that, and I would also like to acknowledge the Minister David Parker for the collaborative work that he did across the community as well.

This bill does something that very simply—very simply, we have moved from a Resource Management Act to a Natural and Built Environment Bill.

💬 Hon Member: What does that mean? Explain it.

This means that we have put the environment back into our legislation. We have put the environment at the front of—

💬 Simon Court: Environmental protection?

I won’t say it again, but that’s what it has done. So we are incredibly—on this side of the House, this is a piece of work that we have been working extremely hard for.

💬 Simon Court: [Walks toward exit] I’m wasting my time with you lot.

I’m extremely proud of the fact that we have got this across the line, and as a consequence—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Mr Court!

💬 Simon Court: Yes, sir.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Excuse me, you do not make gratuitous comments while you’re walking. You will go back to your seat, and you will stand, withdraw, and apologise.

💬 Simon Court: [Returns to seat] I withdraw and apologise.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Thank you. Now make a nice, quiet, dignified exit please. Can I just add that time? Add another minute to the speaker.

Another minute? Thank you, sir. I’m actually just about to take my seat.

But what I do want to say is that I’m incredibly proud of our Government for doing this piece of work. We have done it on behalf of the people of this country. Each and every person who has ever worked under the Resource Management Act has found some difficulties, and we’re fixing them. I commend this bill to the House.

I’m honoured to present on this third reading of the Natural and Built Environment Bill. National supports Resource Management Act reform but it should improve the status quo. In my view, this bill does not do that. I respect Minister Parker and the select committee for their mahi. There are some parts that are progressive and interesting but, in my view, ultimately flawed—flawed culturally, commercially, and constitutionally.

The bill’s purpose, to uphold te Oranga o te Taiao, demonstrates the vacuous drafting at play. That a Māori-sounding concept such as te Oranga o te Taiao can guide decision making is commendable. In this Chamber, defining these concepts implores caution and integrity, particularly when the concept is actually new to Māori communities. The definition proffered around te Oranga o te Taiao is near Picasso-esque: a thing of mysterious beauty that not many if any really understand. It reminds me of my fourth form art work down at central Hawke’s Bay. In my opinion, the use of a Māori phrase here, defined by ambiguous English language, is a boondoggle drafting experiment. There is an absence of hierarchy across the constituent parts of the definition.

There’s an absence of direction for those who invest across territorial and marine environments, including Māori who have a relationship with te taiao based on whakapapa and an aspiration to do something, like aquaculture in Whakatōhea, goldmining in Tara Tokanui, and corporate dairy farming like Wairarapa Moana and Parininihi ki Waitotara Incorporations. These absences, which are nearly as provocative as absences across our schooling system, have caused many diverse commentators to raise their concerns: the Chief Justice, Helen Winkelmann; Federated Farmers; and the Environmental Defence Society, who commented that the purpose of this legislation is wrapped up in word soup that allows fertile ground for litigation.

Clause 5 demonstrates legislative cubism, where the bill sets out system outcomes that must be achieved to ensure that the purpose of the Act is achieved. Clause 5(10) provides that one of the system outcomes is as follows, “The relationship of iwi and hapū, and the exercise of their kawa, tikanga Māori (including kaitiakitanga), and mātauranga Māori in respect of their ancestral lands, water, sites, wāhi tapu, wāhi tūpuna, and other taonga, are recognised and provided for.” But on questioning during the committee of the whole House the Minister was ill-prepared and unable to define what “kawa, tikanga” constitute. Time and again that question was asked, and what did I get? Crickets. I’ll tell you what, I’ll probably get the same crickets from the former Minister of Conservation—their epistemological foundations, their practical implementation, and their interface with one another are not known by the decision makers let alone applicants and the entire bench.

We should have kept our three wānanga here today to help us and guide us as to what they actually mean. We will definitely need our pyjamas for that conversation, though, because wānanga, as the member for Manurewa knows, best happen beyond the hours of urgency that the House holds. It is absolutely outrageous that the Minister and the select committee chair cannot define what kawa, tikanga, and mana mean but are eager beavers to throw it into the bill.

Absence again features in this clause—an absence of hierarchy between kawa and mana, tikanga and mātauranga. There is an absence of direction around what kawa is important and whose kawa? Ngāti Toa? Ngāpuhi? Tūhoe? Or te whānau of Waipareira? There is an absence of clarity. Our constitutional Westminster system has a number of foundational principles and the rule of law is the central poutokomanawa of all of them. In this moment, in this third reading, that rule of a law and legal certainty is immeasurably compromised. We’ve thrown more coals on the fire of legal activism, and for what? Another tick on the Government’s insatiable long list on omniscient kāwanatanga aspirations.

Minister Parker has described that National and others might have fiddled around the edges to reform the resource management system. This conclusion, I would recommend, is myopic. It makes cubism seem like basic art. Even the Green Party, fortunately, knows the only way to get genuine green outcomes is through blue. To suggest that the Treaty provision, now effectively similar to section 4 of the Conservation Act, will give clarity and stimulation is completely at odds with the actions of the current Government and the former Minister of Conservation, which failed at nearly every single step to implement genuine partnership with Ngāi Tai ki Tamaki in the Hauraki Gulf—the very iwi who sought and achieved favourable Supreme Court guidance regarding that clause. Instead, the young minds, the young talent, the young brilliance of Māori working out there in the tribal domain end up in judicial review and litigation processes instead of developing the socio-economic wealth and wellbeing we desperately need. Kia ora tātou.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I always love a bill where we get to quote economists—yay. It’s a good day—a good day in the House. As we know, economics is fundamentally about the systems that we use to allocate our resources, right? You know, who gets to decide what we do with our stuff? Do we use it, do we transform it, do we protect it, and who gets to benefit from that?

In recent years, we’ve seen a shift away, more and more, from those decisions being driven by the market and being driven by an insatiable desire for growth. The Resource Management Act was an attempt to try and help manage the damage that was done by allowing our resource decisions to be made by the market, fundamentally. We’ve seen shifts in the ways economists think and sociologists think, and Treasury—we can see, as they’ve incorporated our living standards framework.

This bill is another piece that helps us to shift fundamentally from a growth-led to a sustainability-led economy. It’s quite exciting. It enables us to fundamentally shift the way we operate our economy.

Students of modern-day economics—not those of us who studied when Mr Gekko was around in the last millennium—would have heard of Kate Raworth and her concepts that she introduces in Doughnut Economics. She talks about us living between where we’ve got fundamental social foundations that are strong and healthy and an ecological ceiling, and we have to try and live within that.

This bill helps. The intention—the collaboration that was required to tackle such a complex problem is evident. We’ve heard about the years of reviews and consultation and engagement and the changes that were made at select committee, and that collaboration is valued by those of us who, luckily, just got to sit outside and watch this massive piece of work being done.

I’m going to finish by quoting Kate Raworth. She says, “Today we have economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive. What we need are economies that make us thrive, whether or not they grow.” And so I commend this bill to the House.

Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. I am very glad to have a call on the Natural and Built Environment Bill, which is a great bill because this has been a long time coming and this reform is something that Minister Parker and the Ministers involved in this can be extremely proud of.

From the beginning, Cabinet, since 2020, has been committed to an objective for these reforms being to give effect to the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and to better recognise Te Ao Māori, including mātauranga Māori. I am going to use my time today to clarify three of the objectives which were subject to much discussion in the committee of the whole House and in speeches that have been given today. They are, first, te Oranga o te Taiao; second, Te Titiri o Waitangi clause; and, third, the National Māori Entity and its role.

First let me take you to te Oranga o te Taiao. It was very simply summarised—and well summarised, I thought—in the speech of Barbara Kuriger when she said, basically, if the environment is healthy, the people are healthy. It’s not complicated. And I appreciated that, because I think that’s something that all New Zealanders can understand and appreciate. Te Oranga o te Taiao is a concept drawn from Te Ao Māori and indigenous understandings of the environment, but those are not at odds with the modern demands of how we must care for our environment.

Upholding te Oranga o te Taiao is the purpose of this law. The concept has been deliberately developed to be an environmental ethic for all people in Aotearoa. Better recognising Te Ao Māori results in better outcomes in our planning system and for all New Zealanders. Te Oranga o te Taiao is defined in clause 3 of the bill and the definition reflects what the Resource Management Review Panel called the fundamental truth accepted in all communities—that the health and wellbeing of people is dependent on the health and wellbeing of the taiao.

Some members raised questions about te Oranga o te Taiao being a new term in the legislation and that that would therefore create uncertainty. We’ve heard hyperbole from the other side today about the number of lawyers, the many years tied up in litigation. But as the Minister, David Parker, dealt with in the committee of the whole House, he said even if we had kept the old Resource Management Act (RMA) purpose clause, this still would have been interpreted differently because this legislation creates a new planning framework. It would be unrealistic to create a new planning framework and then expect the courts to interpret the words in the same way. The idea that there can be significant resource management reform without the courts interpreting the words used, whatever the words are, is simply incorrect.

The bill, as discussed in the committee of the whole House, provides clauses to assist with the clarity and certainty of te Oranga o te Taiao as well. I’ve heard questions from the other side of the House today about the way that the hierarchy works. The good news is that the bill is set out in a way which assists ordinary people to understand how to implement it. The purpose, like the purpose of all pieces of legislation, does not stand alone. Unlike the RMA, the key means of achieving this purpose are coherently set out. This is in clause 3A of the bill.

Upholding te Oranga o te Taiao will be achieved through these means, in line with the approach outlined in King Salmon. There is a cascade of instruments that will progressively provide more detail on upholding te Oranga o te Taiao, from the legislation to the national planning framework to regional spatial plans to plans.

I also note that clause 3(2) of the bill sets out very clearly that upholding te Oranga o te Taiao must be achieved in a way which protects the health of the natural environment, and that subject to this—subject to this—it must be achieved in a way that enables use and development of the environment. That is clear: there is a clear hierarchy of priorities. I want to underscore that the Ao Māori worldview does not see rigid distinctions between environmental protection and use of the environment, and both are provided for in this legislation. As Minister Parker outlined in his speech, protecting our environment and fostering responsible development are not mutually exclusive.

Let me then bring us to Te Tiriti o Waitangi clause. I want to speak about how this clause is the same in both the Natural and Built Environment Bill and the Spatial Planning Bill. It requires all persons exercising powers and performing functions and duties to give effect to the principles of Waitangi. You might be familiar with those words, “give effect to the Treaty of Waitangi”, because they are what’s used in the Conservation Act and they have been in effect in that Act since 1987. They are not new words to our court system and to the lawyers who use them or to the developers and people who use our natural environment. The give-effect weighting to the Treaty clause is important because it’s been tested in the courts, but it is a strong weighting and it sends a strong signal.

The courts have said that “give effect to” simply means implement. On the face of it, it is a strong directive, creating a firm obligation on the part of those subject to it, and the question is: why is that important? In over 15 reports of the Waitangi Tribunal, they have found that the RMA falls short of the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and that Māori interests guaranteed under Te Tiriti are balanced out under the RMA. Importantly, most submitters at every step of this nearly four-year reform have asked for a “give effect to the Treaty” clause. This is well-supported change and it will help ensure Māori interests are no longer balanced out in the resource management system. It’s an important step forward for our system as a whole, and I believe that it will deliver better outcomes for all New Zealanders.

Let me then turn to my third point, which is the National Māori Entity. It’s the last mechanism that I wanted to speak about, and it’s an independent statutory entity. What’s important to note here is that the entity doesn’t take over the role of iwi, hapū, and Māori in the system, nor is it a substitute for those relationships which already exist between the Crown and Māori. The role of the entity is to add an additional support for the roles of iwi and Māori provided under these bills. The mana of iwi, hapū, and Māori is not usurped by the entity. Its primary function is set out in clause 30ZH of the bill, and its function is to monitor whether or not the resource management system is giving effect to the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

The entity will develop and publish a framework for this monitoring function and regularly monitor those who will be required to give effect to the principles of Te Tiriti under the Natural and Built Environment Act and Spatial Planning Act. It’s an important step within this process and when viewed with those first two things that I’ve spoken about. It’s also an opportunity to support decision makers to continuously improve how they give effect to the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, because, as we’ve experienced with the RMA, the expectations of people change and our decision makers need to evolve their decisions too.

In summary, the bill provides important mechanisms for meeting the Government’s objectives: that the reforms give effect to the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and better recognise Te Ao Māori. The new and improved roles for Māori provided by the bills support the roles in resource management that successive Governments have agreed with iwi, and these are things that all Governments of all colours need to continue to support. These reforms will deliver real benefits for New Zealanders, and that’s why I’m glad to have had a call on this bill and to support it today.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It is a pleasure to speak on the Natural and Built Environment Bill. What we’ve heard is quite a bit of passion from both sides of the House. I think one thing that anyone listening to this debate can be certain of is that everyone in the House cares for the environment. What we’re hearing is a contest of ideas—a contest of principles in which we should approach the management of the natural and built environment. We should not be afraid of that. We’re about to go through a contest of ideas when the House rises on 31 August through to 14 October. Not agreeing on something is healthy, actually. If we all agreed on it, probably the bar is not high enough, I would suggest, or it’s too woolly to worry about. The member who just took her seat, Arena Williams; I don’t agree with everything that she said but I cannot for a moment question her passion on this idea, and I think that’s great—it’s fantastic. But also, equally, my ACT colleague earlier also spoke with great passion with a diametrically opposed point of view, and I don’t think that’s an unhealthy thing.

I have not had the pleasure of being on the Environment Committee through the hearing of all the evidence for these bills, but I do want to take a moment to acknowledge the chair of the select committee Eugenie Sage’s herculean efforts to steer the select committee through that process, and all the other permanent members on that select committee, because it was a heck of a job. What a pity, after all that work, to have almost 1,000 pages of a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) dumped on the Table, which really I think was a kick in the teeth really.

💬 Hon David Parker: That’s not true—that’s just not correct. It was done at select committee.

Well, I think the Minister has had his turn. And I think that that SOP is just too much to bear. The exposure draft—I did go through that exercise—was also futile because there were so many empty clauses that meant nothing really; they were all placeholders.

So we heard evidence—a lot of it actually quite prescient when we went on to find what the bill was and warned against the very things that we have in the bill. For example, the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi—what does that mean? And we actually asked—and I was present when that was asked, I’m pretty sure, I do remember that—the officials: “What are the principles, then?” And they said, “Well, they’re evolving.” That is the issue that, time after time, we did hear, and we asked many questions of the Minister in the chair: “What does that mean? How is that going to be interpreted by the courts? How is that going to be interpreted when there is no actual definition?” What we heard, actually, in the Environment Committee on another matter referring to the same issue from a constitutional lawyer was that, actually, the law has a principle in that the law should be known by all—should be known by all. You don’t have to know it, but you should be able to know it. And what we have riddled throughout this bill are principles and references that are unknowable at the moment—for example, the principles of the Treaty, because they are evolving. The previous speaker said that referring and giving effect to the Treaty was great—that was fantastic. Well, the Treaty ceded sovereignty in article 1, and then it conferred property rights, and then in the third article of the Treaty it gave equal citizenship. Well, no one can disagree with that. We should just do that anyway. So what is the argument here and why that’s in the Natural and Built Environment Bill I’m not sure. We don’t know because we didn’t get any explanation. We asked the Minister time and again—didn’t get a thing out of it.

We heard before that the bill was going to put the environment at the centre and at the front. Well, I don’t think it’s ever not been, quite frankly. To think that this is novel, I think, is not actually all that relevant. Values and actual thoughts and what is thought to be the right thing evolve over time. I’ll give you an example of that. In south Marlborough, it was thought by the Forest Service at the time and the catchment board that the best thing to do was to spread Pinus contorta around to stop the erosion of the hill country in south Marlborough, which has now turned into an absolute environmental disaster. So having the environment as their cause was why those Pinus contorta seeds were actually planted—some of them right up above the bush line, as you know, I’m sure, Madam Speaker, because you’ve been there. And that has caused a huge environmental disaster today. Further, conifers were advised by the catchment board to be planted to stop rabbits—unbelievably today. It actually gave a better environment for rabbits to thrive.

So having the environment at the centre might sound great, but that’s not actually the end point. You’ve actually got to weigh things up; over time things change. This bill does nothing to improve on that. I think my colleague Chris Bishop put it pretty well when he talked about the fact that there’s so much work going into this, we’ve got to stick to it and carry on. He said it’s the sunk cost fallacy, and I think that’s absolutely right. There’s a lot of effort gone into this and, undoubtedly, the officials are beavering away at the moment on the assumption that this bill’s going to pass, and, unfortunately, it will. It will, but it won’t last long. Should we win the election on 14 October, it will be gone by Christmas. We’ve given that undertaking, and rightly so.

And we do see a way forward. All the members on the other side have to do is look towards our Electrify NZ policy, which shows how to deal with resource management in terms of renewable energy, which we’re all in favour of. By the way, Contact Energy said this bill, should it pass, will make it much harder to build renewable energy. The New Zealand Wind Energy Association also said it would be much harder to build—

💬 Hon David Parker: Rubbish.

—renewable energy under this legislation. Well, the Minister says “Rubbish”. He’s such an expert—he’s such an expert.

💬 Hon David Parker: The fast track applies to wind.

And the fast track—how fast is that? Pretty slow as it turns out—in one year under our policy. All of these experts have looked at it and they actually have all dismissed the Minister’s claims. I think the Chief Justice had something to say about that. What did the Chief Justice say? Was that a ringing endorsement? No it wasn’t. He said it was going to be a very difficult bill to navigate, and quite rightly so.

💬 Hon Member: Are you calling the Chief Justice a “him”?

They’re now complaining about the Chief Justice. Well, you can’t have it both ways. It’s a contest of ideas and, unfortunately, some people are afraid of a contest of ideas, perhaps because of the weakness of their own argument, I can’t possibly say.

Angela Roberts said that the growth led to sustainability and ecological certainty. I’m paraphrasing; I’m not quite sure exactly what she said but along those lines. Sure, we’re in favour of environment. Our resources are limited, but they are not that limited that we can’t have a small impact on the environment. And under this principle of the bill, it says that we must protect the natural environment. We’ve heard from legal experts that that is such a high test we’re going to be tied up in court for decades and it’s going to take 10 years to come into effect anyway.

I think this bill is a wasted opportunity. I commend the Minister for having a crack, but he went down the wrong track right at the beginning with the wrong principles. He’s wasted a lot of time and energy, and, unfortunately, when this bill passes, it will trigger a series of court cases that will go for many decades. The legal profession—actually, I thought they’d be delighted, but they’re not, because they end up having to defend people and try and get their clients’ projects across the line. And with all the uncertainty, no one will know where it’s going to go and how much it’s going to cost, and it is just a needless waste of this House’s time. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s great to be the final speaker, and it’s quite a privilege to speak on the Natural and Built Environment Bill in the third reading. I firstly want to acknowledge the Environment Committee members who worked tirelessly and also the officials from the different ministries. We worked for months, we had many, many meetings. I also want to acknowledge the chair, Eugenie Sage, who shifted us through collectively. We worked well to read the 2,945 written submissions.

We went the breadth of Aotearoa to hear the over 340 oral submissions and it was very helpful because I was a new member on the select committee. It was very helpful that over a period of months, listening to the current Resource Management Act legislation and reading about the new reforms, working with a planning approach, hearing communities from various local councils, but also industry experts who spoke on their written submissions.

One of the biggest features that I heard was the 100 current plans that will be moving to the new system under the Natural and Built Environment Bill to 16 regional spatial plans. It was helpful to understand that they will be phased over time. There were a number of recommended changes that were technical to improve the workability of the specific bill, especially to help the committee to be able to read it better. There was a lot of time spent with officials improving that, and I do want to acknowledge our Minister, David Parker, as well because he helped the select committee to understand the fundamentals of this bill.

We also heard about the failures of the current Resource Management Act throughout Aotearoa and why it is very important that this bill improves the environment, because currently what we heard was that under the Resource Management Act things are too costly and they take too long to improve. It was helpful to listen to submitters who raised a number of issues around rivers, around landscapes. It was helpful to hear from iwi, Māori, and hapū, on those features around the motu, fresh water, the concerns about infrastructure, and also around consenting and system users who provided analysis and development. It was also helpful to hear from the very busy building and construction industry and also from experts in the electrical industry. And there are a number of tricky issues that we heard about that the new legislation, when passed, will help with in the national planning framework.

The new limits of the nationwide policy: it is intended that those will have moderate risks, it was helpful to understand that, and specifically what was in front of us was the climate change challenges that we have in Aotearoa, thinking about green infrastructure, stormwater, and productive land. And we saw that in January when the severe weather events hit Aotearoa. So, lots of meetings, lots of kōrero; there’s a big journey around what this means to Aotearoa. We heard from many councils throughout around why local voices are very, very important to be part of the regional spatial strategies.

Therefore, the Natural and Built Environment Bill has fundamental framework limits and will help in a fail-safe way to reset the environment that takes into account biodiversity, and, specifically, improvements nationwide. I commend this bill to the House.