Resource Management (Freshwater and Other Matters) Amendment Bill

I present a legislative statement on the Resource Management (Freshwater and Other Matters) Amendment Bill.

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

I move, That the Resource Management (Freshwater and Other Matters) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

It’s a privilege to make the second reading speech on our first amendment bill for the Resource Management Act (RMA) in this Parliament. Well, it’s not quite true to say it’s the first RMA amendment bill—we repealed the Natural and Built Environment Act before Christmas last year—but it’s the first bill that makes substantive amendments to the existing RMA. I’d like to thank the Primary Production Committee for their excellent work reviewing this bill.

As members will know, the Government’s taking a three-phased approach to reform of the RMA. Phase one started less than a year ago, with the repeal of the Natural and Built Environment Act and the introduction of the Fast-track Approvals Bill, which is currently before the Environment Committee. The purpose of this bill is to reduce unnecessary regulatory burden on key sectors to promote development and investment in infrastructure, housing, horticulture, aquaculture, forestry, and mining. As part of phase two of our reform programme, we’re making quick and targeted changes to give councils and consent applicants the certainty they need to operate. We’re also speeding up the process for developing and amending national direction under the RMA. This bill changes both the RMA and several pieces of national direction, which are the instruments for nationwide policy and environmental standards that determine how the resource management system functions on a day-to-day basis. It also continues the Government’s drive to ensure regulations are fit for purpose and don’t place undue compliance costs on several key sectors that make an important contribution to the economy.

The national direction changes that are included in this bill are very important, because the Government—as part of the rest of the work we’re doing in phase two around national direction, which we intend to carry through to phase three of our reform programme—is keen to make greater use of national direction, national policy statements, and national environmental standards as part of that work. They are powerful instruments, used well, and, if I reflect back, one of the failings, I would argue, of the RMA in 1991 to actually operate properly is the failure of successive Governments to use national direction properly. That has changed, to be fair, in the last few years, most notably the National Policy Statement on Urban Development (NPSUD) 2020, which, of course, actually started life in 2016 but was significantly strengthened in 2020 under the previous Government. We, of course, are making further changes to bolster the NPSUD, which will come forward as part of that national direction programme of work next year.

We’re also looking to make changes to significantly strengthen the National Policy Statement for Renewable Electricity Generation. The 2011 version was OK, as far as it went, but it’s now 13 years out of date and doesn’t reflect the environment which we are in now, where we have significant climate change obligations and a real need to make it easier and quicker to consent new renewable generation right around the country. The previous Government—and I see previous Ministers here in the House—did consult on a 2023 exposure draft of the renewable energy generation national policy statement. We have taken some of that work, and, in the new year, the public will be able to see a consultation draft on a strengthened national policy statement on renewable generation. It’s very important we make it easier to consent renewables; fast track is part of that, but we also have to fix the underlying RMA structure.

Anyway, in relation to this bill, this new bill will exclude Te Mana o Te Wai hierarchy of obligations set out in the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management (NPSFM) from resource consent applications. It addresses concerns about the way the hierarchy is being applied to individual resource consent applications, while we undertake a review and replacement of the NPSFM. The bill also amends stock exclusion regulations to remove the map of low-sloped land and associated requirements. The Government’s view is that the last Government’s policy was well-intentioned but took a one-size-fits-all approach. As a result of the changes in this bill, regional councils and farmers will decide where stock needs to be excluded based on risk and a catchment-focused approach, reducing costs for farmers.

Thirdly, the bill repeals the permitted and restricted discretionary activity regulations and associated conditions for intensive winter grazing from the National Environmental Standards for Freshwater. Feedback from councils and representative groups show there’s been significant sector-led improvements in winter grazing practices in recent years. It will still be managed through regional council plans and national management practices such as those outlined in the Ministry for Primary Industries’ intensive winter grazing module and agricultural sector initiatives. The bill now introduces two new regulations. The first requires minimum setbacks around waterways, and the second requires the protection of critical source areas.

The fourth change is to align the consent pathway for coalmining with other mineral extraction activities under the National Policy Statement for Indigenous Biodiversity, the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management, and National Environmental Standards for Freshwater. This simply means that coalmines will be treated the same as other types of mining with similar environmental effects.

Fifthly, the bill suspends councils’ requirements to identify new significant natural areas (SNAs), for three years. This is to allow time for a thorough review of how they are operating, and my ministerial colleague the Hon Andrew Hoggard is working away on that. The criteria for identifying new SNAs was an attempt to standardise the approach towards identifying our most important areas, but there are real concerns that less significant areas are being captured, placing undue restrictions on how that land is used. Many landowners are investing quite a lot of time and resources into protecting native biodiversity, actually, and our Government’s view is we should be working collaboratively with landowners to incentivise more of this work, rather than a prescriptive, blanket-approach that dictates in a burdensome way to landowners what they can and can’t do with their land.

The final changes in the bill are about streamlining national direction, as I’ve talked about. It is, I think, a bit silly that under the RMA it’s typically a two-year process to amend or make national directions. We are removing, in this bill, the process of using a board of inquiry process. From memory, there hasn’t been a board of inquiry process for national directions since 2005. Instead, successive Governments have opted for a Minister-led process, which I think is the right way to go. We’re getting rid of that, out of the bill—oh, I’m sorry, my notes tell me 2010 was the last board of inquiry process. We are removing that.

We’re also removing section 32 reports. Section 32 in the RMA requires an evaluation report to be prepared when the national direction is made or amended. We’ve thought quite hard about this. The Government’s view is that they are largely duplicative with regulatory impact statements that the Government already has to provide through officials and then to Cabinet. They’re not quite the same, but they are largely duplicative, and so the bill will remove that duplication. It also provides a more straightforward pathway for smaller updates to national directions. It shouldn’t take two years to make minor changes.

One thing that has been added to the bill since its introduction is changes to section 107 of the RMA. Section 107 restricts when a council may consider a discharge permit—

💬 Steve Abel: Lobbied by industry.

Well, actually, lobbied by regional councils as well as industry. There is widespread support for this change. It’s not just industry—you’re letting your prejudices get in the way of a good story there. Section 107 restricts when a council may consider a discharge permit, which is a resource consent for discharge activities, and before they can grant a discharge permit they have to be satisfied that certain listed effects are unlikely to arise in the receiving waters as a result of the discharge. It became clear, following recent court decisions that I don’t think were expected, that time-critical amendments to section 107 were needed to give councils and consent applicants from several sectors clarity about the law and the certainty they need to plan.

The change enables councils to continue to manage certain discharges under section 107, while ensuring that granting a discharge consent can be consistent with improvement and allow for that improvement to occur over an appropriate time frame. It applies to all discharge permit applications, including those that are under way. It’s not ideal to make changes to substantive legislation by way of, essentially, insertion of a select committee process, but that is the path that was, essentially, put before us by a result of, I think it’d be fair to say—most reasonable commentators would say—an unusual interpretation by the court. So the Government—well, the Parliament and the Government, I hope—is acting.

This is bill No. 1 of our quick and dirty—well, not quick and dirty; quick and targeted changes to the RMA. Bill No. 2 is under way, which will make more substantive changes to the RMA. Then, of course, we’ve got phase three coming in the new year, and I’m looking forward to seeing that under way. I commend the bill to the House.

I don’t have time to address all of the things that are in this bill. I’m not going to be able to deal with the biodiversity issues. I don’t have much time to deal with, even, the wetland change here, which is an exception to—I’ll go back a step.

Most of New Zealand’s wetlands, more than 90 percent of them, have been lost; 10 percent within that figure are the wetlands that are left in national parks. In non - national park areas, wetlands are even rarer, so nixing them should be hard to do. The sad reality was, until we moved against the nixing of wetlands, a further 5 percent of the remaining proportion had been lost in the last 10 years. We went hard on that. We thought we needed some infrastructure exceptions because it turned out we went too hard, and so we reinstated the ability to nix a wetland when you’re expanding a quarry. But you don’t need to do that for coalmines. Why are we doing that for coalmines? That’s what this legislation does. It’s terrible.

We’ll hear them say, on the other side of the House, as they did in the House today—the Prime Minister said, “We’ll need to import coal from Indonesia for Huntly instead.” It’s a different sort of coal. The coal that they run on the West Coast is hard coal for coking purposes; it’s not the sort of coal that you’d poke through Huntly in a dry year.

I’m going to spend most of my time on what’s wrong here on the water front. Now, to understand the water story, you have to go back in history. What went wrong in New Zealand that this country, when I grew up, that had these sparkling waterways, regenerated every second of every minute of every hour of every day fresh water coming from the mountains, flowing to the sea—sparkling rivers over beautiful gravel bases in the South Island—a bit different up north, I know, where they’ve got muddy-bottom rivers.

What happened? Well, what happened was the economics changed. The Uruguay round of the GATT capped the amount of exported dairy products that World Trade Organization countries could export to the rest of the world, that was subsidised. Therefore, there was no more extra subsidised production going into growing Asian markets, and that increase in demand fell to the lowest-cost producers in the world, which were New Zealand—which were New Zealand. A wonderful thing—a wonderful thing. As a consequence, the economics of dairying, relative to other land uses, changed. We also had technological advances with advanced pumps, centre pivots, k-line irrigation—the economics of irrigation changed. As a consequence, we had a rapid increase in dairying, which surprised everyone—including regional councils and including farming groups—the rapid pace of change.

The Growing for Good report came out in 2002 from the then Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Morgan Williams, reporting that we had a growing problem. In a couple of decades, we had something like a 600 percent increase in nitrogenous fertiliser use in New Zealand, and an increasing intensity of farm practice, particularly in dairying. We also had the economic benefits that came out. It became our greatest export earner, and there’s been a lot of wealth generated for New Zealand and a lot of jobs that are well paid for New Zealanders, which I celebrate, but we did have a problem with declining water quality. By the time we took Government, we had some standout examples of that, sadly. We had problems with intensive winter grazing.

Now, as the economics of farming changed, dairying spread into areas that can’t grow grass in winter, and they’re reliant upon winter crops to be grown. We had some poor practices. I see other members in the House deny this.

💬 Mark Cameron: No, I’m just a farmer. I understand how it works.

Well, we’ve had lots of farm leaders acknowledge that this was a serious problem. I’ve got some photographs of how bad it got in New Zealand. These are photos of intensive winter grazing before we regulated the practice. Cows up to their udders in mud—appalling; I know the farmers here would not approve of that. I’m not saying the majority of the farmers did, but some farmers did and did it repeatedly.

This got so bad that the estuaries have been filling up in New Zealand. The worst one is probably the Southland estuaries, where they’re very reliant on intensive winter grazing. The recent sediments—if I can find the photograph of that, maybe my colleague will find it; a picture paints a thousand words. As a consequence, those estuaries are full of recent sediments that are 18 inches deep. The cockle beds have been dying. These are all photos of around the same time. We’ve got areas in Southland where we’ve got records of mackerel invertebrate health—these are the little critters that live under streams. We’ve got records that go back many, many years, and we know that, in those areas, compared—oh, here goes the photo of the estuary; this is the estuary behind Invercargill. It’s putrid. There is nuisance algae that grows. You walk across it and your gumboots get sucked off and the cockles are dead.

This, as another member would be aware, led to Jacqui Dean interjecting on me asking why do I hate farmers, and put on her record “Jacqui Dean says I hate farmers”, and that video clip was, by some in the farming industry, clipped to David Parker saying, “I hate farmers”, and produced on the internet, which is why some farmers still suffer under the misapprehension that I, one of the founders of the A2 Milk Company, somehow hate farmers. I do not hate farmers, and I object to the way I was misrepresented by members of the then Opposition at that time. That led to a change in the Standing Orders, actually.

It’s not only that that’s bad; it’s got so bad that we’re losing our kelp beds. This picture here that members won’t be able to see shows kelp beds in recent memory in yellow, and in the red we’ve got where kelp beds are now. We have lost most of the kelp beds around the Otago and Southland coast because turbidity has increased and, therefore, there’s less photosynthesis and the kelp beds are gone. We haven’t lost them around Stewart Island, because they are not subject to the same pressures. We’ve always had, after storm events, sediment, but we have a lot more of that now.

Now, in response to this, the Labour Government said, “Look, we actually have to regulate some of these intensive winter grazing practices.” We came up with a first module and it was criticised by the rural industries as not working.

💬 Mark Cameron: It didn’t work.

There were some fair criticisms made of that. We worked with the Southland Regional Council in league with DairyNZ, Federated Farmers, and Beef + Lamb—Beef + Lamb because a lot of these problems are actually not on dairy land; they’re on land that’s used for winter grazing, which is sheep and beef land elsewhere—and we developed a new variant of that that did work. It said, “Look, if you do this properly on low slopes rather than steep slopes—if you do it on steeper slopes, then you increase by a multiple the amount of sediment that’s gone, plough along the land rather than vertically up and down it.” Simple rules like that—all sensible stuff.

We always agreed that this would transition into farm plans once they were stood up and had some force behind them, and that’s a good thing, and I still agree with that. Why get rid of the rule, in the meantime, which is working? I know the ACT Party, to get elected, went around the country and said, “Tens of thousands of New Zealand farmers were going to have to get a resource consent.” No, they didn’t; it was about 100 people who had to get a resource consent because the permitted activity pathway worked and was practical.

What else are they doing here? Te Mana o Te Wai is a concept which was originally a National Party term. They’ve turned against it now because it’s a Māori phrase, I think; not because of what’s in it. It, essentially, says, “Look after the health of the river first; then human uses, like drinking water; and, thirdly, commercial uses.” The select committee has pretended that that was an absolute standard and that everyone had to have the health of the water protected before you could do subsequent things. It never was—never was. In fact, the advice from the officials to the select committee confirmed that exact point to us.

💬 Miles Anderson: Tell regional councils that, David.

Regional councils know that too—and regional councils—

💬 Hon Member: Oh, rubbish.

They do—they do. They submitted to the select committee that they knew that. Were it to be otherwise, it would be an absolute nonsense argument because, otherwise, all of the other detail in the national policy statement becomes irrelevant. In any event, we left it for councils to sort out how they were going to clean things up over a generation.

When you hear this Government talking about balance, you know that it’s not right. They talk about balance, when, really, what they mean is more pollution. This should have been let to run—this should have been let to run. There are improvements being made; a lot of them are being made through catchment management groups. Who funded them? The last Government was the one that funded them. They’re great for peer pressure, they’re great for education within the farming community, but they do need to be underpinned by either farm plans or regulations. Until you have decent farm plans in place, there is a need for some regulation.

It’s a sad day when this Government is actually now legislating for more pollution of our rivers, when even now we haven’t got some of these problems under control. It’s going to take a generation to clean up, but at least under the last Government we were actually on a track to start that cleaning up. This Government has cleaned out the background regulation and they’re allowing our rivers to be further polluted.

The member’s time has expired. Members, 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 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.

The House is resumed. Members, we are on the second reading of the Resource Management (Freshwater and Other Matters) Amendment Bill.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Quick and dirty is what the Minister responsible for RMA Reform called it, and that was absolutely correct—quick and dirty. It gets rid of unnecessary regulatory burden. It’s an omnibus apocalypse bill, this one. The unnecessary regulatory burden is the protection of the environment. It turns out that safe drinking water is an unnecessary regulatory burden and it is a barrier to the exploitation of nature. This Government wants to get rid of any barrier to exploitation of nature, and it turns out environmental protections are those barriers.

Safe drinking water was something that we thought was an important priority after the disaster in Havelock North, where people got very sick—people died, in fact. It was a terrible event. It was a consequence of agricultural contamination of drinking water, so under Te Mana o te Wai a hierarchy of obligations was created that said that you must first protect the health of the water; you must, second, at least protect safe drinking water; and, third, you must seek to see what are appropriate exploitations of water for other purposes. This legislation gets rid of that Te Mana o te Wai hierarchy, because safe drinking water is a barrier to exploitation.

In fact, that’s true, in some sense. That is true because the biggest cause of freshwater contamination is agricultural intensity. We know that. There’s lots of science on that. We know that the biggest cause of nitrate contamination is dairy cow urine. What I would love tonight is if the farmers in the room can get their big-boy pants on, because what we need to be able to do is have a mature conversation in this country about the system causes of harm to our environment and the system causes of climate contamination without people feeling like we’re making a personal affront to farmers. We love farmers and we need farmers. We need to be able to have a big conversation about the worst effects of agricultural intensification on our fresh water, on our marine coastal environment, and on our climate.

Now, this bill, if you look at the catchment, it turns out that you put a whole lot of sheep and a whole lot of cows and a whole lot of fertiliser in a catchment and you get increased nitrate in the drinking water. That’s one of the effects that you get in Southland with intensive winter grazing. Southland has had a hellish winter, let’s be fair—a miserable winter, no fun for the animals; no fun for the farmers either. Let’s be clear: farmers are not sociopaths. They do not want to see their animals suffer; they do not want to see their animals die, but they have died in vast numbers in Southland this winter because of what a miserable winter it’s been.

One of the effects that this bill gets rid of is the intensive winter grazing rules that go some way to protecting animals and protecting water and fresh water. The regulatory impact statement from the Ministry for Primary Industries said, “if done poorly or too extensively, … winter grazing can have serious negative effects on both animal welfare and the environment, particularly freshwater and estuary health.” It can increase the “discharge of nutrients, sediments, and microbial pathogens into surface water and groundwater.” by stripping the land of its vegetative cover. Forest & Bird says, “winter grazing had disproportionately greater adverse effects on freshwater, and therefore on whatever marine environment it drained into.” Te Ohu Kaimoana, representative of 58 iwi, pointed out that “loosening [the] restrictions on land-based activities, erosion of soil and the subsequent pollution of coastal marine areas would in fact ‘achieve the opposite’ ” to supporting the fisheries and agriculture sector, “ ‘undermined the rangatiratanga of iwi/Māori and failed in its obligations as a Treaty partner under Te Tiriti o Waitangi.’ It violated these obligations”—the Crown, that is—“by failing to seek feedback, … also by neutering Te Mana o te Wai, a move the New Zealand Māori Council called ‘absolutely outrageous and unconscionable’ ”.

These things—Te Mana o te Wai, protection of the marine coastal environment, protection of fresh water—are a barrier to the exploitation that this Government wants to facilitate. The quick and dirty—the quick and dirty and the dead, you could say, in terms of the consequences of water contamination. That’s what they want: exploitation of nature. The barrier to it is protection of nature. That’s the intensive winter grazing. That’s Te Mana o te Wai.

Wait, there’s more—can you believe it? Yes. What about the negative effects of climate change on the environment? It turns out that one way that you make more extreme weather events such as we saw in the South Island this year—not that we expect to see any more of those; that was a one-in-100-year thing! Yeah, right. One of the ways you make that worse is by putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Hey, I know—we could mine more coal, and we could do it by destroying one of the most effective means of sequestering carbon there is on the Earth: wetlands. We could destroy wetlands to mine coal. That’d be good! That’s why I’m calling it an omnibus apocalypse bill, because that is exactly what this legislation does. It says that, though we’ve destroyed 90 percent of our wetlands in this country, we’re going to make it easy to destroy some of the last 10 percent to mine coal—true story. You can’t believe it, but it is what this Government is doing. Indeed, as the Minister put it, it is quick and dirty.

What about significant natural areas? Significant natural areas are areas where biodiversity is of high value, and they are designated as that for very good reason. I just want to acknowledge something here in terms of the farming community. There are many farmers who do incredible work on their land with protection of significant natural areas. They gazette those as Queen Elizabeth II National Trust covenants. There are farmers who protect gullies, who do riparian planting, who restore wetlands. I even know farmers who’ve created new wetlands on their farms, so all credit to them and big ups to them. That is absolutely awesome, and we want to see more of that and we want to support that.

One of the challenges we have in a global biodiversity crisis is identifying those precious areas of biodiversity that have not yet been destroyed and harmed, and, to be clear, New Zealand has cleared more of its lowland rainforest than the United States, than Canada, and than Australia. We have 7 percent of our lowland rainforest left. Extraordinary, isn’t it? But those are the facts. Most of that lowland forest is cleared for farming, so where farmers are protecting that lowland forest—absolutely important, but also we need to identify where those vital biodiversity areas are. Otherwise, we are going to get what? A return to the general clearance of land out of an ignorance of where the really valuable land is. As Forest & Bird pointed out, the pretext for the idea that we have to get rid of these significant natural areas is in fact incorrect. In fact, there is a lot of work done with farmers identifying their significant natural areas and highlighting to them the bits that are most valuable to protect and should most be looked after. This legislation, believe it or not, pauses the identification of significant natural areas—yet another example of diminishing our action on climate change and on biodiversity protection.

Another thing that was extraordinary that we experienced on the Primary Production Committee is section 107, amended by clause 23A. It was a court case that was held—actually, I might leave it to my colleague to speak to this. It was a court case that was held and it found that there was a necessity to ensure that there was mitigation of pollution put into significantly polluted rivers. At the last minute, after the hearings had been held, industry groups got hold of the Government and said, “This is a problem. You need to get in the way of this and stop this from happening. You need to make sure that this court case finding is not upheld, because it’s a barrier to our ability to continue to exploit fresh water.” Now, as Forest & Bird said about the significant natural area thing, it was deliberately inaccurately politicised. It misrepresented how significant natural areas are identified, how landowners can input into significant natural area identification processes, and what the implications are of having significant natural areas identified on a person’s land. It removes the critical tools of councils in their planning tool boxes for protecting nature as part of a sustainable management. “They are [efficient], as they make a move back to general vegetation clearance rules inevitable”. That’s what this legislation does.

What we see here is an omnibus apocalypse bill. It is indeed quick and dirty. It is an example of how this Government, on many counts, sees the protection of nature as a barrier to exploitation. It is a truly regressive, backwards way of looking at nature. We are going to see more degraded waterways, we’re going to see more contaminated drinking water, we’re going to see a more polluted marine coastal environment, we’re going to see more misery and suffering for animals, and we’re also going to see more destruction of biodiversity. In all counts, it is disastrous. We condemn this bill.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I always enjoy the opportunity to debate my colleagues on the left side of the House, and doing this tonight, to speak to the Resource Management (Freshwater and Other Matters) Amendment Bill, is certainly one of those opportunities.

I don’t enjoy conflation in this House, although I’ve just heard a fair amount of it. I’ve heard language like “barriers to exploitation”, as if somehow this Government is hell bent on destroying the environment. What we are trying to do is speak to pragmatism, and I just want to touch on previous remarks by the former Minister for the Environment, the Hon David Parker, who did speak to a perceived animus that rural New Zealand had for that gentleman. I don’t believe that is the case. I think the perceived animus was from farmers who were disgruntled by lawmaking that didn’t understand causality—cause and effect—and some of the hyperbolic statements from the member Steve Abel just now insert a sort of rationale, you might say, that we’re hell bent on destroying the environment. What an absolute nonsense. We live in the environment.

The member spoke about significant natural areas, and I want to delve into that. I want to delve into intensive winter grazing. I want to delve into the national policy statement (NPS) for 2020 and what that looks like, and stock exclusion rules. I’ll start in reverse order, if I may, about some of the remarks pertaining to not caring about animals, and animals being knee deep, or hock deep, as we would call it—udder deep—in mud in intensive winter grazing. That is a reality. In regards to the stock exclusion and intensive winter grazing legislation framework that we have proposed in this, that affords farmers a reality to feed their livestock to mitigate concerns about animal welfare. Feeding caloric value is what it’s actually called—so we can introduce enough calories to our animals on a daily basis, because that part of the world doesn’t grow at that time of the year.

💬 Steve Abel: Isn’t that—

No, let’s debate this. That member has made some pretty flippant remarks, saying that we don’t care about the animals, and I think that out of ignorance—I think was the terminology; that is a nonsense.

The NPS, when we are talking about fresh water, remarks about Te Mana o Te Wai—now, if I can frame that for this House. When you’re a farmer, when you’re a rural person, and when you live in rural New Zealand, you hear all the time of a hierarchy of obligations and what it means in rural New Zealand, and it’s predicated on, in descending order, a set of “thou shall not do”, if you might like, principled on spiritual, then cultural, and then economic. Well, I’m sorry, Mr Abel, and to others here, but we’re an economically hamstrung society. Rural New Zealand is the first to bear the brunt of this stuff. Legislators in this House come into my backyard and say, “You can’t do that.” That is a nonsense—that is a nonsense.

The mauri, or the life-force, of the water—former Minister Parker mentioned that somehow it wasn’t being exercised by councils. Councils can’t even interpret this themselves. They’re saying to us that they don’t understand it, and it quite literally could mean—in some of the submissions we heard—changing the watercourse to alleviate said flooding is changing the mauri, or the lifeforce, of the water, and yet that member over there and others say that Te Mana o Te Wai is not a problem, with the adherence to the hierarchy of obligations. Well, I’d wager anyone that it absolutely is.

Cultural next—I’m sorry, but if we are in the red, as farmers—we are certainly not in the black and investing in the kinds of things that Mr Abel asserts we should otherwise care about. Stock exclusion rules and intensive winter grazing was canvassed ad nauseam in the select committee. I just want to commend all my committee. They work collegially, they work hard, we debate the issues, and I think we represented New Zealand in our capacity pretty well, but I make a couple of observations. I am a farmer. That is a practical reality of feeding animals in a part of the world that has limited growth at that time of the year. It is a nonsense that the members opposite would assert—former Minister Parker referenced this before—sedimentation loss. We as cow cockies, wool growers, farmers, everyday people, talk about the top four inches. That is gold to us. I don’t need to have evangelical sermons from said member lecturing me on how to plough a field. I do it daily. Why on earth would farmers in rural New Zealand want to see their sediment wash down a waterway?

To Minister Parker and other members that criticise and critique, I would say that is a nonsense. We don’t do that. That’s the kind of asset we’ve spent an inordinate amount of money on a mortgage trying to preserve. It is a practice, and we do everything to try and alleviate that: riparian planting, buffer zones, minimum areas that we would not otherwise, you might say, harvest for winter grazing purposes, or certainly cultivate. So, sorry, sir, I maintain that some of your remarks are something of a factual nonsense. It’s not actually something that we do. We live in the world of reality.

💬 Hon David Parker: A picture paints a thousand words sometimes.

Well, I’m sorry, Minister Parker, you and I certainly disagree on this one.

I just want to tie off with a couple of other remarks, if I can. When it came to significant natural areas, Minister Hoggard and I traversed and talked about this ad nauseum, at length. It’s something that farmers took huge umbrage with. I have known and spoken to many people, both in the submissions process and post that, where they have said whole areas of their farms were encapsulated in a significant natural area—not parts of it; the whole blessed thing. Now, you try and reconcile that when you’re a rural New Zealander, when now the council has veiled the entire property, which you own a mortgage over, and said, “Factually, the way you farm is going to have to change because it is deemed a significant natural area.”

That’s why we changed the legislation. That’s why this gentleman beside me worked so damnably hard to put some common sense back into the conversation, giving council that extension period so they wouldn’t rush to judgment, they wouldn’t create a significant natural area just because they could; they would actually ascertain whether it needed to be done—was it, in fact, something that otherwise would not need to be caught by the National Policy Statement for Indigenous Biodiversity? That’s the kind of pragmatism that this country needs. We are economically depressed. I am tired, as a rural New Zealander, having been beaten up by people that do not understand my life, that farming people are not being listened to.

Causality, cause and effect—and I’ll tie off with one other final remark. There have been assertions made that we have to do more to care for the environment, whether it’s significant natural areas, whether it’s issues to do with intensive winter grazing, whether it’s to do with fresh water and the NPS for fresh water. All of the above are the kinds of things that we as farmers, wool growers, cow cockies, we live with every day. We don’t need to have it lectured to us by this place. We live with it. That is our backyard. We own a mortgage that protects it, and we do damnably well to try and create tomorrow being a little bit better than today. This legislation affords that. It creates the environment that somehow will get a little bit more economic security, you might say, with all the difficulties that are being thrown against rural New Zealanders. Some of it is climate, some of it is market driven, some of it is silly lawmaking, both current and former, all of which we have to reconcile and debate.

I will not apologise to this House and anyone in it for standing up for rural people and an outcome that creates a slightly better tomorrow than today. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak to the Resource Management (Freshwater and Other Matters) Amendment Bill, and may I start with congratulating the previous speaker, Mark Cameron, the chair of the Primary Production Committee, and the select committee for the work that they have done on this omnibus bill. Planning law of this type—Resource Management Act stuff—is highly complex. They have gone to work, they’ve put a practical lens over it, and I think that that, essentially, was what was missing from the earlier version of many of these measures that we’re discussing today. I will congratulate the committee on that.

I too would like to reflect on some of the comments that the Hon David Parker made in his address, which was interesting. He talked about the sparkling waterways of his youth. Actually, if you go back in history, Mr Assistant Speaker O’Connor, I know that you are from a dairy farming background on the West Coast, and I’m sure this wouldn’t have applied to your property, but all the piggeries and all the dairy sheds were on the creek banks so that they could just wash the effluents directly into the creeks. All of the factories were by the creek banks, so any waste was disposed of right into the waterways. I think some of the utopian views of how we’ve managed water in the past are somewhat overblown, although I do take the former Minister’s point. I think his overall history was correct in that we did have an intensification of farming—particularly around the dairy industry—in quite short order.

I don’t think we quite understood what those implications were and, in some cases, we have reached or exceeded the ecological limits, and we should not be in denial about that, but the bit that the former Minister missed was the response to that. Things have changed remarkably—the attitude. We’ve come to terms—as I say, we’re not in denial about some of these things, and where we’ve had issues, we have moved dramatically, as an industry. Whether it be sheep and beef, whether it be horticulture or dairy farming, the management practices have changed dramatically.

You only have to look at the catchment groups, and I can’t speak highly enough of the catchment groups. There are 290 catchment groups now around the country doing actual, practical things on the ground, not because they’re regulated—and I do take the earlier point that they were initiated and supported in some cases by the previous Government, and that is a good thing. Those are the measures that will actually move the dial. There is some absolutely incredible work going on out there, and the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment has identified that in his latest report. It’s actually finding out where the critical areas are and working collectively on a catchment by catchment basis. This is how we reverse and engineer our way out of any issues that we might have.

In terms of the bill itself, I’d just like to go through some of the key points. Te Mana o te Wai: we’re excluding that from the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management in terms of that hierarchy. This was an incredibly dangerous piece of planning law. It was so vague, it would have been great for Steve Abel and his mates over in the NGOs and the Green Party, because every time they got to the Environment Court, they would have just had to put up one phrase and they would have won because it was a catch-all. It’s not good planning law to have such a vague and nebulous term. We have come back to a more structured and balanced approach.

In the low-slope maps, those indicative of the one-size-fits-all regulation that was so heavily criticised by the farming community—those low-slope maps often mean that, actually, quite extensive farms with very low stocking rates would need to fence off enormous lengths of territory, especially if you had a number of tributaries going through your farm. In some cases, it was hundreds of thousands of dollars per farm, often at very low stocking rates and for very little environmental outcome. It takes away the fact that we do recognise the issue and that we have fenced off many of our waterways, and certainly in more intensive areas, almost all of them, but there is also the innovation—the collars. There are companies like Halter, Gallagher—whatever—that have got these collars now, which use high-frequency sound. This innovation is actually like farming by magic. You can actually draw a line on a map and the stock won’t go past that point. It has now been rolled out in the beef industry. With beef cows on hill country, you don’t have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on fencing; you can merely keep them out by putting a collar on them.

There is so much innovation and stuff we can do, and this is not just being driven by regulatory requirements; it’s being driven by our markets. We’re an exporting nation. We’re trying to get premium products into higher-niche markets, and we absolutely understand the imperativeness of looking after our environment and looking after our animals. As Mark Cameron pointed out, looking after our topsoil—no farmer wants to have their topsoil degraded by poor management practices.

The other thing too is the unintended consequences around this because of the winter grazing rules. Farmers trying to get round the need for resource consents and the like for their winter grazing—actually, in some numbers; in Southland, in particular—have gone to bale grazing, which is all-grass wintering, where they put bales of hay out and the stock gather round and chew on the hay or the baleage. That has caused enormous damage, far greater than any properly managed winter grazing system.

There are unintended consequences from some of this stuff. The practical people on the Primary Production Committee would recognise those things and could see those unintended consequences, and that’s why we’ve got a much better set of regulations coming in.

Minister Jones would want me to reference the coalmines and the standardising of those regulations with other mineral extraction. That is just a sensible provision and it was something that was skipped in the early drafting of the bill that the Primary Production Committee has picked up.

The review of the significant natural areas (SNAs), at its core, is a property rights issue—absolutely a property rights issue. I noticed that Mr Parker had plenty of photographs, but Minister Hoggard has held up a few of his own, showing areas of very sparse scrub or matagouri, essentially, that is being captured as SNAs, and it had just gone too far. We do need to have a look at that. We have pressed pause.

Steve Abel, in his address, actually mentioned the Queen Elizabeth II National Trust covenants (QEIIs)—what is it, Minister Hoggard; is it 280,000 hectares that’s in QEIIs—

💬 Hon Andrew Hoggard: It’s enough.

—and, of course, a third of New Zealand is actually in the conservation estate, anyway. Internationally, comparatively speaking, we’re an absolute ecological wonderland, but we do have to make a living in the world and we do that by farming. We’re the best farmers in the world and the most efficient farmers in the world. We’re the best at growing grass and we have to lean into that. We have to accept that that’s how we pay for our social services and the like. Essentially, 82 percent of it comes through our primary sector still. We cannot be kneecapping these industries unnecessarily. They do need sensible and measured regulation.

I did want to speak to the amendment to section 107 and the court—again, we’re having to react to this through court rulings. Essentially, there was a vast group of farmers in Canterbury that just would not have been able to farm under this, because, technically, their regional council would not have been able to roll over their resource consents. The Minister himself, in introducing the bill, suggested that it wasn’t an ideal scenario to be bringing it in in this way, but our hand was forced and we have acted. We have been responsive to those regional councils that have come to us.

Farmers are absolutely committed to better environmental outcomes. We, as a Government, believe and trust in them. We will work with them, and this is why New Zealand First will be supporting this bill. Thank you.

This is a five-minute, split call.

Tēnā koe, te Pika. I stand on behalf of Te Pāti Māori as, actually, the nation’s first rural people. All our marae, our papakāinga, are in the rural area so I feel that we are more than equipped, with thousands of years of experience, to talk on behalf of the rural community. Let’s go there—before we have this argument about how only farmers have an affinity with the rural community, most Māori are some of the largest shareholders of the largest milk providers in the Parininihi Ki Waitotara and the Fonterras. None of us stand here alone without other economic interests, and I think this analogy that I can only be representing one sector of a community is short sighted—as short sighted as those who are talking about the removal of Te Mana o te Wai.

Had it been called something else, I wonder if we would be even here debating the exclusion and even having it excluded. Te Mana o te Wai is a world-leading—absolute world-leading—policy, simply because it protects the health of our water, not just for me as the first rural community but for all people’s mokopuna, for all of the community. What we are seeing is that ditched for the interests of commercial exploitation or interests.

Te Mana o te Wai was about lifting the level, lifting the standard—dare I say, lifting the game. I don’t know how many in this electorate live in rural areas, but in my rural area we are constantly told to boil our water, not to swim in this awa, not to take kai from this awa, not to go near this stream, and it is because of pollution that comes from sectors that should and could be doing better.

Now, I want to talk about the bad rural farmers, and they are bad farmers who don’t give a hoot about the protection and the stopping of pollution of our wai. That is why and that is how significant this kaupapa was. What we have now is a bill that is excluding Te Mana o Te Wai, again, for no other reason than because it is a Māori policy, even though it’s a Māori policy intent to protect everyone.

We have freshwater management from resource consenting processes that are simply, in the national policy statement, being replaced. We have to seek to align a whole consenting pathway, so that—let me be really clear to our whānau who are watching this; bored, thinking, “What the heck are they doing now?” They are wiping things out to make it easier for the consenting pathway for coalmining and other mineral extraction. This is another commercial ploy. It is about profit before people and profit before planet, nothing else; there’s no other way to explain this. It’s amending the Resource Management (Stock Exclusion) Regulations 2020 in relation to sloped land. OK? It’s repealing the permitted and restricted discretionary activity, and it’s also making it easier to speed up the process to amend the national direction. Everything is about easy, fast, for one reason and that is about economic desire—profit, profit, profit.

Our primary concern with this is the cost of that profit and what it means to the devastation of our wai for future generations, because the profit that we see coming out will only benefit those who have the mortgages today. It’s not intended to be looking after anyone else in the future. As one of those very first original “OG” rural people, I get extremely concerned when we see that the removal of Te Mana o te Wai is about not only removing the ability to protect all citizens’ rights to have healthy wai for future generations; it’s also about diluting mana whenua. It’s about making it easy to mine and to destroy tangata whenua taonga, indigenous taonga, impacts on significant natural areas. In short, for us, that’s wāhi tapu.

This is a really bad, bad bill, but I guess we’re used to hearing that come out of Te Pāti Māori. When it comes to us being really clear on what we stand for, we will always challenge—and it doesn’t matter which party’s in Government—anyone that is relegating their profit and greed needs over the needs of future generations’ desire to be living well and to be living in a community and an environment that is well.

This is a bill that is about making it easier for bad farmers and, sadly, we still have that in Aotearoa.

There’s so many decisions made around the world today that show we humans are not the sharpest tools in the shed. We’ve created these bizarre systems and we permit behaviours that harm not only ourselves but our environment, and therefore the very foundation of our existence. But, despite these flaws, we do have the capacity to evolve, to actually improve the way that things are. And that’s what makes this bill so incredibly disappointing.

You see, with the previous Government’s freshwater reforms—and I want to acknowledge the Hon David Parker in this—we were evolving. We had our heads up out of the sand. We were actually looking around and we could see the vast swathes of Aotearoa where we had polluted and contaminated streams, rivers, lakes, estuaries, and beaches. We were realising that we actually didn’t have to cement this legacy of disconnection with our environment, where we’re leaving to our kids and grandkids a place where they can’t swim in their local river, where we can’t safely get kai for our whānau, and where people need to check the council website for the level of toxic cyanobacteria to check whether it’s safe to actually take their dog down to the local river track for a walk.

The country saw all of that and we took the lead from iwi Māori, with them saying, “Hey, there’s a solution here.” It’s one that’s known, it’s one that’s been practised, and it’s one that has always been in their exercise of rangatiratanga over fresh water. And that solution, as was outlined by my colleague, is Te Mana o te Wai. It was translated into a legal hierarchy that then shaped freshwater legislation in Aotearoa. It protected the mana, or the hauora and the health, of water, and it made sure that that came first above human needs, which was so important and what we so need today.

It would have then been translated into council plans and into consenting decisions. Among the many aspects of the legislation that are now being dismantled, weakened, or outright cancelled in this bill, be it the stock exclusion and winter grazing regulations as part of it, the pathways for allowing coalmines in and around wetlands and significant natural areas, and the delay in the identification of those areas—those aspects remaining intact would have gotten us closer to actually turning the tide on our bleak and rather shameful, actually, track record of ongoing freshwater and environmental declines.

Now, the worst part of this bill is the part that changes section 107 of the Resource Management Act. Section 107 is this fundamental baseline protection for freshwater ecosystems. It currently provides a backstop of very minimum water-quality standards that councils can allow, where they actually draw a line where we cannot keep polluting in perpetuity. Amending it, as proposed in this bill now, actually weakens protections for freshwater ecosystems and allows councils to permit higher levels of pollution in some of our most degraded waterways. It’s a completely undemocratic, kneejerk reaction from this Government and it will take freshwater protection backwards.

I say “undemocratic” because I was around the Primary Production Committee table when section 107 was brought up by a number of submitters, and the chair made it really clear that changes to this were out of scope for this bill. Not only was that misleading to those submitters but including this amendment shuts out public, iwi, hapū, environmental groups, and everyone who cares about the dire state of freshwater protection in Aotearoa and their right to actually engage in the legislative processes that will influence it. This bill is removing and eroding the protections for fresh water, wetlands, and areas of precious, significant biodiversity. Te Pāti Kākāriki do not support it.

Look, I’m quite happy to rise here and talk to the Resource Management (Freshwater and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. There’s been quite a lot of discussion around a lot of things tonight, and most of them are quite misleading, I believe.

The first thing I’d like to say is that farmers are sick to death of being lectured to by people who know nothing about farming and continually paint a narrative where the farmers are out to destroy the environment, so we’ve had quite a bit to go through here. I suppose one of the best things that we can be doing is taking a catchment-by-catchment approach, which is what a number of our side of the House talked about tonight. A one-size-fits-all, overarching piece of regulation that has been implemented has not worked, and, in fact, what we’ve got is perverse outcomes where things—

💬 Rawiri Waititi: That’s why the Māori Health Authority was established.

This has got nothing to do with the Māori Health Authority, mate.

I guess there’s a number of areas here that are frustrating. The significant natural areas (SNAs) that were implemented under the National Policy Statement for Indigenous Biodiversity were not implemented by councils as one would think they should be. They were done by a blanket mapping, without anyone actually going physically on to properties to see whether the mapped areas were in fact SNAs. What we’ve got in a number of councils in the South Island is huge areas of farmland being captured under the SNA provisions. These areas of farmland, if they’re covered within, for example, the Otago Regional Council, are now being proposed to have all sorts of restrictions placed on them. The council’s deciding how much fertiliser you can put on. The council’s deciding how many stock units you can run per hectare. The council’s deciding all these things which, if they go through, will make those particular farms uneconomic and therefore those people will be driven off the land.

For the Opposition parties to be talking about how the SNAs are a great thing, that is not the way the farmers see it. The way we see it is that, currently, if there are SNAs on your property, it’s because generations have looked after those SNAs and that’s why they’re there. Currently, if there are SNAs on your property, I guarantee you that most of the farmers are actively managing and looking after those SNAs. Currently, we have in New Zealand 2.8 million hectares of farmland on sheep and beef farms in woody vegetation, and that represents 25 percent of the country’s woody vegetation.

Mr Abel talked about animal welfare and how the changes that we’re proposing are going to have negative animal welfare outcomes, and that’s just a nonsense. If you look at past practices in farming—and I could take you back to the 1970s where a lot of the rolling country was ripped up during the summer for winter cropping, and over time it was recognised that there was a lot of sediment loss. So what happened? Roundup. Roundup happened, and huge areas of the country were sprayed with Roundup where in the past they’d been cultivated, and—

💬 Scott Willis: Don’t worry; we’ve got GE coming next.

That’ll be good. That’ll be great. Because of that, the minimum tillage practices that were undertaken have really decreased immensely the sediment run-off from those properties.

As time goes on and the science becomes available, farmers change. Mark Patterson alluded to this in his speech, and I believe that these changes are more than needed, because the costs associated with these current rules are excessive. They’re driving farmers out of business and they’re driving poor farming practice. I guess one quote from Debbie Ngarewa-Packer was “profit, profit, profit”, as if profit is something to be shunned. If you’re not making a profit, you’re not feeding your family. If you’re not making a profit, you’re not paying your bills. If you’re not paying your bills—

💬 Debbie Ngarewa-Packer: If you want to quote me, quote me correctly or don’t quote. Keep my words out of your mouth—profit before people and planet.

—you’re not on your land. The banks won’t tolerate it. You really believe that?

Another quote from Steve Abel was about wetlands and how they’ve been decreasing. Well, the New Zealand Greenhouse Gas Inventory reports a net increase of 3,000 hectares between 1990 and 2007. That’s a net increase. If you read the report, you’d know that. I am very happy to see these first lots of changes come through, and I look forward to the second and third lots of changes to make life easier and to make pragmatic and smart decisions around this and to actually involve the people who know about it rather than people who read about it in a book or hear about it at their NGO meeting. I commend this bill to the House.

Ka pai, Mr Speaker.

Ko Waiapu te awa, Ngāti Porou te iwi

Ko Waiapu te awa, Ngāti Porou te iwi

Taku manawa ko Te Tairāwhiti

Taku manawa ko Te Tairāwhiti

[Waiapu is the river, Ngāti Porou are the people

Waiapu is the river, Ngāti Porou are the people

My heart is the East Coast

My heart is the East Coast]

Kia ora tātou.

💬 Rawiri Waititi: Kia ora, kei te aha?

[Hello, how are you?]

Kei te pai rawa atu, whanaunga, hoki mai.

[I’m well, cousin, welcome back.]

That song has become something of an anthem in Ngāti Porou, and the Waitoa brothers and their mother, when they composed it, chose to start—rather than with our mountain—with our life flow, our life force: our Waiapū River. Partially motivated by the fact that it’s also the name of our rugby club, perhaps, but also because, like I said—

💬 Rawiri Waititi: They could improve.

—ha, ha!—they understand that the water is our life force.

We’ve heard a lot of arguments in the House tonight, and I thought that I didn’t actually need to go far; I’m just going to talk about my own backyard. I respect that everyone is talking about their reality, so I’ll talk about mine and, therefore, ours.

I’ve talked about the river. When Māori stand up and say pepeha, they start with an identifying maunga or hill, or the land; then they go to a body of water typically—ocean, river, lake, stream—and then they identify themselves, because that’s who we come from.

The Minister spoke earlier and announced that the purpose of this bill is to reduce the regulatory burden on key sectors, including farming, mining, and other primary industries. At what cost? How can you farm without healthy land, how can you mine without healthy minerals, and how can we have other primary industries without fresh waterways and a healthy environment?

This is not just about water, and, of course, to imply that we don’t want industry is ridiculous. To imply that we don’t want people to make money and have a good lifestyle is also ridiculous.

I’m not here to belittle people’s experiences on their land, but I actually live rurally as well—actually, more rurally than Rawiri Waititi, and that’s saying a lot. This notion of who is a farmer and who isn’t is getting a bit tiring. I think we need to concentrate on the key issue here, which is the land that we’re farming and the waterways we need for our whenua to thrive, because if we don’t have healthy whenua and healthy wai, we don’t have industry. Now, when I was talking about how I don’t need to go far to look, I’m not going to stand here and blame industry, but we know the situation we’re in now.

My river is called Waiapū. He wai apu whenua, he wai apu tangata, which means, literally, that it’s the river that eats land and people. Until recently, drownings used to be a regular topic, but that’s a whole other show—we’ll talk about that another time—and over even my lifetime, I’ve seen the riverbed just broaden. We can almost walk across to Tikapa now—across the river. That’s the reality. That’s what we know. Why do we want to keep promoting practices that are going to make that worse?

We already know that. In Tairāwhiti, we’re dealing with erosion. It’s quite unique on a global level—we’re getting famous for it. That’s why the Raukūmara Pae Maunga Restoration Project is so important. I mean, it’s nothing to be proud of, but we’re there, and we don’t want to go any further.

💬 Rawiri Waititi: They broke it and we’re fixing it.

Kia ora—and by returning to nurturing our whenua who’s nurtured us for so long.

Like I said, I do not begrudge you wanting to make money on land that you own, and that’s the difference in perspective: it’s about ownership and whose responsibility it is to nurture whom. Well, in our world view, it’s a mutual benefit, and that’s why, like the tuahine over here has said, there are a lot of huge Māori land corporations—Māori farms—and the responsibility goes back to not just their iwi and the economic development. We’re not scared of those words “economic development”. We need that because we’ve got so much recovery to do and development, but we have to remember how we do that. We’ve got to nurture the whenua so that the whenua is in a good position to nurture us back, and to give you those profits that you want from your land that you’ve mentioned earlier.

I just want to go back to the wetland areas that came up recently. For obvious reasons, they’re important, but we’ve just had so much flooding recently. We still haven’t recovered from Cyclone Gabrielle—and just a big mihi to our whānau in Te Wai Pounamu, who are also in a state of recovery now. I’m not the expert, but I just want to acknowledge Tui Warmenhoven, who’s been doing research in Te Tairāwhiti for many years, and acknowledges that wetlands are a natural flood mitigation response. We could be saving billions in infrastructure if we just restore Papatūānuku to look after herself.

These are things: farmers and the stock exclusion. We’ve just had a fabulous—well, it’s still going—kaupapa in Te Tairāwhiti called te mana o te Waiapū, where they’ve fenced off about 55 kilometres of waterways. That might seem like small fry to you, but that’s a big deal for small-scale farmers like those in Te Tairāwhiti, who don’t make massive profits. They are surviving off their land, they are feeding their families, and they are contributing to a small local economy that helps people stay on their whenua. They’ve undertaken that, and not only did they fence off 55 kilometres of waterways and plant 155,000 natives; they also employed 43 people. These are not pie-in-the-sky, ridiculous, romantic notions that we’re promoting here. These are practical solutions that can be done, and we can find the balance between economic benefit and restoring our taiao.

There’s more, but I do want to acknowledge the people who are actively doing this, not only in Te Tairāwhiti, but around Aotearoa whānui who are restoring Papatūānuku, Tangaroa, ngā wai katoa o tō mātou nei whenua [the earth, the ocean, and all waters of our country].

The last thing I wanted to raise was the submission process. Even very apt submitters found the deadline oppressive, especially when you’re dealing with groups like Ngā Hapū o Ngāti Porou, who, while sophisticated and very experienced submitters, are under-resourced. They don’t have the huge teams who can go and do the research for them, etc., and I think the quote that their project manager, Agnes Walker—I hope you don’t mind me mentioning you, Ag—made that was probably the most apt was “It wouldn’t be so bad if there wasn’t so much.” Every day, a new submission. Every day, another takatakahi on ngā rōpū Māori, and, on that note, I just can’t help but wonder if things would have been different if this was just called three waters and not Te Mana o Te Wai, which is a shame, because who doesn’t want to acknowledge the mauri and the mana of our life-giving force? What next? Well, we are worried about the air already.

In conclusion, I just wanted to acknowledge all the whānau out there who are looking after our taiao, and I want to acknowledge the sentiment in this House, too. Yes, everybody has the right to do well on your whenua, but at what cost? We’ve talked about cost. That’s the cost: we’re going to have nothing to farm soon, we’re going to have nothing to mine, and we’re not going to have any water to drink and any waterways.

Finally, it’s not just us; it’s the biodiversity in our ecosystems and our waterways. On that note, I just want to acknowledge the kōkā in Tāngoio, who is rebuilding their tuna [eel] stocks in their river after the floods. We do not commend this bill to the House. Kia ora tātou.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. First of all, I’d like to thank my colleagues on this side of the House for their heartfelt, reasoned, practical contributions this evening. This omnibus Resource Management (Freshwater and Other Matters) Amendment Bill amends the Resource Management Act 1991 (RMA) and various national direction instruments necessarily. It proposes efficient, targeted changes which give certainty to councils and resource consent applicants.

The Government is taking a three-phrased approach to much-needed reforms of the resource management system. We replaced the Natural and Built Environment Act and the Spatial Planning Act in December as part of phase one. Phase two began when the Government introduced the Fast-track Approvals Bill in March. This bill is part of the second phase to make targeted legislative changes to the RMA in 2024. We also plan to amend or develop new RMA national direction as part of phase two, which will make it easier to consent new infrastructure, get more houses built, and it will enhance the primary sector.

This bill, the Resource Management (Freshwater and Other Matters) Amendment Bill, proposes quick, targeted changes which will reduce the regulatory burden on key sectors, including farming, mining, and other primary industries. Farming is the backbone of this country. It underpins our economy, it’s a significant contributor to GDP, and directly employs over 360,000 people. This bill will make a difference to Rangitīkei’s farmers and fruit producers. Indeed, farmers across the country are reassured and delighted by this Government’s common-sense approach. It’s part of our plan to reduce the regulatory burden on our nation’s farmers and food producers, our plan to get Wellington out of farming and to allow our farmers—the most efficient and sustainable farmers in the world—to get back to what they do best: farm.

How? Let me count the ways. This bill includes provisions to exclude the hierarchy of obligations in the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management from resource consenting, which Minister Patterson spoke so logically and succinctly about. It repeals the contentious low-slope map and associated requirements from stock exclusion regulations, thereby reducing costs to farmers. It repeals the permitted and restricted discretionary activity regulations and associated conditions for intensive winter grazing, and suspends, for three years, requirements under the National Policy Statement for Indigenous Biodiversity for councils to identify new significant natural areas and include them in district plans.

The Resource Management (Freshwater and Other Matters) Amendment Bill was referred to the Primary Production Committee on 28 May. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my fellow members of the committee—the best select committee. We called for submissions on the bill, with a closing date of 30 June. We received and considered submissions from 1,997 interested groups and individuals. We heard oral evidence from 123 submitters at hearings in Wellington and via video conference.

Advice on the bill was provided by the Ministry for the Environment, with support from the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment and the Ministry for Primary Industries. The Office of the Clerk provided advice on the bill’s legislative quality. The Parliamentary Counsel Office assisted with legal drafting. And I thank them all for their significant and valuable contribution.

As a result of a robust select committee process, we have some proposed amendments to the bill, including amending clauses 41 and 43 of Schedule 1 to make clear that the bill’s provisions would apply to all resource consent applications rather than only applying to applications lodged with a consent authority after the bill commenced, saving time and money. In relation to the National Policy Statement for Indigenous Biodiversity 2023, we recommended amending Schedule 2 to extend the time frame for councils to confirm their original methodology to identify significant natural areas from four to six years—again, improving efficiency.

The Resource Management (Freshwater and Other Matters) Amendment Bill proposes targeted legislative changes that can take effect quickly—changes that give certainty to councils and consent applicants alike. These changes will have real impacts in the short and medium term, while the Government develops new legislation to replace the Resource Management Act. This bill enables economic growth in key sectors, including farming, mining, and other primary industries, by relieving regulatory burden. These sectors are crucial to growing New Zealand’s economy. The bill’s about efficiencies. It’s about saving time and money, cutting red and green tape, backing our primary industries, and backing our farmers and food producers. It’s about getting Wellington out of farming.

I’m a proud sheep, beef, forestry, and maize farmer, and wetland creator from Turakina in the mighty Rangitīkei. I commend this bill, which is about getting the regulatory framework, farming, and New Zealand back on track.

I wonder, Ms Redmayne, as a member of the whips’ team, you might like to set a good example by not reading your speeches in times to come.

Kia ora, Mr Speaker. I’m a bit confused this evening, to be honest, about a number of things, but one is, when the members of the Government talk about getting Wellington out of farming, I’m actually unsure what that even means. Because I think that when we talk about Wellington, I guess we’re talking about this place and talking about Parliament. This is the place we come to, to create a better New Zealand and to put regulations and things in place. When we talk about getting Wellington out of farming, it almost feels like going backwards—back off track—to a world where, yeah, there’s no rules, where they get to do what they want on their own terms.

I think the challenge we face—and it is a challenge of ideology on either side of the House tonight—is around the conversation of water, around the conversation of our environment. It’s not either/either; it’s not actually about the fact that because we’re standing up and wanting to protect our waterways, because we’re standing up wanting to protect our environment, that means that we’re anti-business. It isn’t that at all; it’s about how do we actually do this right.

Clean water standards and having Wellington involved in the protection of our waterways, of our wetlands, isn’t just around environmental stewardship; it’s actually about good economic decisions. It makes good economic sense for New Zealand to ensure that we have regulations, that we have policies, that we have laws in place that ensure a prosperous, a vibrant, a clean Aotearoa New Zealand.

Now, as we go around in this debate tonight, we’ve obviously all tried to sort of grasp some kind of localism, and I will do the same, just to play along. I live in Taranaki, which is beautiful, but it also has its issues. I think, if you look around New Zealand, it’s around 90 percent of New Zealand’s wetlands that no longer exist; in Taranaki, that’s 98 percent. We are over proportion in terms of our wetlands that have been drained, whether it be for agricultural purposes, whether it be just for urban development. This is something—because Wellington wasn’t involved for 100 or more years in these spaces, that was allowed to happen.

We need to ensure that this place has legislation that fights for those wetlands, that fights for our waterways, that fights for our environment, but also fights for our economy. We can’t stand here and sit here and debate tonight and say, just because we want to talk about how we do water better, how we make sure that we protect water, that that means for some reason we’re anti-business, we’re anti-progress, because we’re not. We are very much standing up around environmental degradation, and this piece of legislation—the Resource Management (Freshwater and Other Matters) Amendment Bill—is something that takes us backwards.

The previous speaker just praised things like the fact that they are bringing in the Fast-Track Approvals Bill and they’ve disestablished the Natural and Built Environment Act and that mining’s coming back and that means that, you know, progress and business is all here to happen, but I guess that’s partly why 40 percent of the country thinks we’re in worse shape a year on since this Government came into being. It actually is, I would see, an attack not only on our environment, on our waterways, but actually an attack on our economy and how we actually do it properly.

I looked at the report from the Primary Production Committee, and the officials in that report noted that the effects of these proposals remain uncertain; it’s not clear. They’re rushing through, they’re pushing this through for the sake of, I guess, their mates. We need to have better conversations about this and how we do water well, around how we look after our environment, around how we do business better. That’s why we, on this side, cannot support this legislation.

Look, I rise in support of this bill, and as a very proud member of the Primary Production Committee, where we heard the submissions on this bill and we heard a lot of the primary industries’ concerns around the previous legislation and that top-down, centralised approach from Wellington, where they were being told how to run their farms. Well, on this side of the House, we are aspirational for our farmers and our growers and our primary industries. This piece of legislation is about taking Wellington out of farming and is about ensuring that we get rid of the red tape and the regulation that has had the brakes on, and ensuring that we get our primary industries moving again, we take those brakes off, and we’re aspirational.

The Resource Management (Freshwater and Other Matters) Amendment Bill is part of our Government’s clean-up job. It’s about changing restrictive resource consent processes, local authority obligations, and stock exclusion regulations. It’s part of our Government’s plan to get Wellington out of farming and make practical decisions and stop that avalanche of red tape and regulation which is holding our country and our economy back. We need to make practical decisions and it’s time for our farmers to be able to do what they do best, and that is farm.

We’ve had some great, constructive debate tonight. Listening to the Māori Party talk about putting profits over people and talking about the bad farmers in New Zealand is really, really disappointing and so sad to hear because our farmers are doing a good job. They are the backbone of our economy and they are what gets the wheels moving in our country. They’re providing hundreds of thousands of jobs and the exports that the rest of the world relies on.

The bill will also speed up the process for preparing or amending national direction. The current process for making or amending national direction is unnecessarily onerous, costly, and it just takes too long, and we need more localism. The member who just spoke before spoke about localism, because that is what this bill is about. We need to power up provincial New Zealand once again and get back to localism because we are backing our farmers, who are the world’s best producers, and we are producing high-quality, safe products that are sought after globally. It’s about improving the profitability of our primary sector, and we are cutting that red tape.

Look, this bill does many things. One of the main areas that we discussed very thoroughly through the select committee process was about excluding the hierarchy of obligations in the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management from resource consenting. We heard many submissions about the hierarchy of obligations and how they were preventing many consents, they were vague, and they are not a good piece of legislation. So that is why this bill is going to be excluding those, and making things more clear—practical solutions where we can see some sense.

This bill will also repeal the contentious low-slope map and associated requirements from stock exclusion regulations, reducing costs for farmers. During the campaign—because I’m in a very rural electorate, the mighty electorate of Tukituki, Hawke’s Bay—this was a real concern for farmers, all of the costs and the compliance and these unnecessary rules that have been inflicted on our rural sector.

This is about getting rid of those stock exclusion rules, but also the winter grazing, because that was another area that was discussed very thoroughly. It’s really interesting because most of the councils across the country supported this. The reason they supported it was because they supported localism and making local decisions for the farmers and for the growers in their regions, and this is what is happening now. Why create rules and regulations from Wellington that do not work in provincial New Zealand, in regional New Zealand? This is why this is a great bill, and that is why I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Catherine Wedd, the member who just resumed her seat, talked about that side of the House, this Government, being aspirational. “Aspirational for whom?” I ask you, because this is not aspirational for the environment or, I would argue, for New Zealand, at all. I mean, what we have from the other side of the House is a conservation Minister who says that it’s too expensive to save every species or to protect our biodiversity, and that protecting 30 percent of our oceans—which New Zealand signed up to, is not a legal obligation—is just aspirational. Then we have, of course, their Cabinet, which is weakening protections for the Hauraki Gulf. So, aspirational for whom? The whole argument pitting the economy versus the environment, it’s tired—and it’s really a false dichotomy because without the environment, you have no economy, as well.

Over the recess, I visited three different wetlands in Whangārei. One was the Wairua River floodplain, which was, I guess, an example of how few wetlands are actually remaining across New Zealand. This was a little sliver that was in the middle of a dairy farm, and it was explained to me that when it was thought to be productive to give away land for dairy farming, we lost a lot of our wetlands across the country. I also visited the Jack Bisset Wetland and the Underwood, both man-made wetland restoration projects—the Underwoods in partnership with the Department of Conservation, as well. I heard a fair bit about how important wetlands are to protecting our biodiversity and how little—I think my colleague David Parker said we’ve lost about 90 percent of our wetlands. With this bill and with the amendments that this Government is making to the Resource Management Act (RMA), we’re going to have even less in future.

I want also to point to one of the main changes that I’m opposed to in this bill, and that is allowing coalmines on wetlands, basically, and significant natural areas (SNAs).

💬 Steve Abel: What year is it?

Honestly, we’re going backwards about 40 years with this Government, frankly. I mean, currently, new coalmines are unable to lodge consent applications if they would impact an SNA or a wetland, and that is for good reason. It’s because opening this up will actually open us up to devastating our biodiversity. We are in the midst of a biodiversity and climate crisis, and this Government does this? Existing coalmines, as it stands, can apply for an extension, but only for thermal coal used for heat, and that has a sunset clause of 2030. For coking coal, it’s a little bit different—there’s no sunset clause, for specific other reasons—but what this amendment bill does is do away with most of these restrictions.

Now, there’s been a specific coalmine that’s been quite controversial for a number of years. It’s called Te Kuha and it’s in Westport. There’s been a whole process of the Environment Court coming out and, basically, saying that consents should not be granted, mainly because of the legal protections of biodiversity values and wetlands. It’s, by and large, understood that an area like where Te Kuha would go protects a huge number of threatened species—bird life, flora, fauna—and allowing coalmining would cause irreversible and permanent damage to the natural environment. That’s why, sometimes, we have regulation, and so this whole narrative from the other side of the House that people just want to make money and that things are too difficult and too costly and take too much time—sometimes, we have regulations for a purpose. For this reason, it was actually to protect the environment, which this Government is completely doing away with.

I just want to touch on also some of the process elements of this particular amendment bill. Now, my Green Party colleague Lan Pham had mentioned quite eloquently the issues around section 107 of the RMA. Really, the issue there is it is an important environmental safeguard that has existed since the RMA has been enacted. Some submitters were told not to submit on section 107, because the bill as introduced didn’t include amendments to section 107. They were told to save it for another day, apparently. Now, we see amendments to section 107, which perhaps raises issues of a breach of natural justice and procedural fairness, frankly, because those particular submitters were not allowed. I would really be keen, at some point, for a member on that side of the House to explain, especially those who wax lyrical about being on the Primary Production Committee. Perhaps they could elucidate for us and explain why this particular thing happened: basically, where submitters were shut out of submitting on this particular section.

I’m just quickly looking through the supplementary analysis report from the ministry, on this particular bill. Now, it’s not just Te Kuha that might be allowed to mine, or that area to be mined, as a result of this amendment bill. The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment has clearly said here that it’s not possible to quantify how many new coalmines or extensions for existing coalmines would be impacted by the proposed changes, and that it’s likely that, following the change, some consent applications that were previously prevented will now be made as well—so, no proper analysis on just what the impact of this will be.

Then, as we’ve seen with so many bills introduced by this coalition Government, limited consultation was undertaken. No consultation with stakeholders was undertaken on the coalmining provisions included in the National Policy Statement for Indigenous Biodiversity. As policy decisions were taken by Cabinet at pace to allow for the changes to be included in the bill, there was no time for consultation before these decisions were taken.

Then the report goes on to talk about the Treaty of Waitangi considerations—the fact that there are broad obligations under the Treaty of Waitangi to engage with Māori on matters that affect them but also that the Crown has specific commitments through Treaty settlements to engage with post-settlement governance entities—but they haven’t done this either, and so there’s no analysis of the risks of that to the Crown, and no consultation because it was rushed through so quickly.

This is a bill that is devastating to the environment, and, along with everything else that that side of the House is doing to degrade our environment in the midst of a biodiversity crisis, and for the reasons that I’ve outlined around the process of this amendment bill, I do not commend this bill to the House.

E ngā mana, e ngā reo, e rau rangatira mā, tēnei te mihi mahana ki a koutou, e ngā hoa. Te whenua e tau nei, e noho ana ahau.

Ko Grant McCallum ahau. Tino hūmārie, ko ahau te mema Pāremata mo Te Tai Tokerau. Nō reira tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā tātou katoa.

[To the esteemed, the representatives, and many leaders, this is the warm acknowledgment to you, dear friends. The land below, here I sit.

I am Grant MacCallum. Very humbled, I am the member of Parliament for Northland. And so I thank and greet you all.]

This whole debate makes me really quite sad. It takes me back to the period of 2017 and the election leading up to it. It reminds me that during the election campaign, as a farmer—and I’m privileged to be on the side of the House tonight with most of the farmers that are representatives in this House. I go back to that campaign specifically because during that campaign we were the ones that were vilified and dragged through the—actually, through the rubbish because we were seen to be the enemies of the country by the people on the left. It was actually really sad. What it led to—you could feel it as a farmer. We took it personally. We were basically being accused of not caring about our land, not caring about our waterways, which is just rubbish, right? It was really hurtful.

As a member of the National Party at the time, with the support of others, we coordinated a protest in Morrinsville. That gathered support from all around the country to highlight those issues, right? I knew at that point, we’ve got to stop doing this. All I’m hearing tonight is we’re having the same polarising debates, and it’s going to be that same polarising debate. Unfortunately, what it shows me is that there’s a complete lack of understanding—complete lack of understanding—of how farmers see their place in New Zealand. I’m a fourth-generation farmer. Both sides of my family go right back, and many of the other farmers in this room are the same—they’ve been in the farming for generations. This country has grown its economic wealth on the back of the farming community.

How did that come about? Various Governments of all colours have encouraged us to get out there and develop our land, and we’ve responded to that. We’ve responded to the economic drivers. Then—and I think it was 2002—at the peak of all the whole, you know, dairying explosion, particularly in the South Island, the “dirty dairying” campaign was launched. To be fair, at the time, a lot of us felt quite insulted by that. Then, we actually stepped back and thought, “Actually, let’s have a look at how we’re doing this. Can we do it better?” And yes, we can. And guess what? We are. That’s what we’re doing now. We’ve taken the lessons on board from that and said, “Well, how can we do it better?”

Quite recently, I was privileged to host the first meeting of the Aotearoa New Zealand Community Catchments group in Parliament, right? This to me is the way of the future, and I’ll just quote a couple of things from the speech I gave that night, because I think they’re very, very relevant. The whole purpose of the community catchments group, their whole mission statement, is empowering communities through collaboration, applied science, and local landowners—namely, urban and rural working together. Because guess what? This is not just a rural challenge. Urban people also have their challenges. And guess what? They have to pay for it too. All you have to do is look at some of the challenges that have been highlighted in the various small communities around New Zealand where their sewerage schemes aren’t up to scratch. How are they going to pay for it? It’s a real, real challenge.

What frustrates me is that whole thing’s painted as just the farming community. It is not. The beauty of the community catchments group is the word “community”, right? It’s through the power of the communities that we can improve the quality of our environment, right? For too long, the farming community has been seen as a problem rather than part of the solution, right? Once upon a time, as farmers, yes, we drained swamps. Guess why? We were encouraged to. That’s what the country wanted us to do. But now? We build wetlands. That’s what we’re doing now. It’s all turned around. We understand the value—where the value sits in New Zealand for our exports. The environmental value of our products is seen as high and is the direction that the world is moving in, and we’re up for that and we’ll continue to do it. What is not helpful is being demonised by people on the other side of the House who refuse to understand the challenges that we face. It’s taken us generations to end up where we are now with our challenges with our water and water quality. It needed to take time to move forward.

There was a real discussion about Te Mana o Te Wai and the priorities—that’s the issue. When they all sat together and considered together, then we can work with that. We can all work around and say, “OK, yes, we’ve got to have good quality drinking water. Yes, we’ve got to look after the health of the rivers.” Yes, but we also need economic development for everybody to be able to get ahead and for our families to be able to thrive and do well and support our economy so we can support our schools and our health system. That’s what we need. But when it’s in a hierarchical system—

💬 Debbie Ngarewa-Packer: You compromised it.

Yes, it is about compromise. That is what life is about. Puritanical approaches to things lead to the arguments that we’re having today. From where I’m standing, if I—you know, it’s interesting: no compromise over there. Well, that makes life difficult for us, right?

In Northland, the regional council went part way through this process, and basically 40 percent of the land in Northland was going to be very hard to farm livestock on—you were going to need a consent to do it. That was going to create all sorts of issues. You would probably wind up with 30 or 40 percent of Northland going into a pine forest. Is that what we want?

💬 Steve Abel: No.

I don’t think so, right? What I implore people is they need to step back from this discussion and stop just throwing rocks at each other. I could quite easily throw rocks at people on the other side, because I’ve certainly had my arguments with them, but what we need to do is actually find solutions, and what we’re doing as a Government is taking a pragmatic approach and saying let’s actually support the economy of New Zealand, support our farming communities, and our urban communities. They have to actually pay for their things as well, right? So, with that, I commend this bill to the House.

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