Natural Environment Bill

Committee of the whole House

The member the Hon Rachel Brooking is not quite right. Clause 2 is the commencement, which actually brings quite a lot of stuff into force on the day after Royal assent. The default is that everything comes into effect the day after Royal assent, but then there are the exceptions at clause 2(2). Then new clause 2(2A) is the backstop, which is four years—which, the member is right, is new. I mean, at a high level, it’s basically: the law is the law once it gets signed by the Governor-General or the administrator of Government—she’s out of the country—and then there’s a bunch of exceptions in the next four years, and the backstop is the four years.

That’s relatively complicated, at some level, because it’s a complicated piece of legislation, alongside the Planning Bill/Act. The intention is that the national policy direction (NPD) standards and plan-making provisions get commenced immediately, and then the Order in Council process will commence the regulatory functions, including duties and restrictions and consenting once the proposed plans have been notified. So, you start the NPD, move down to the plans, and then we turn on the system over the next few years. That’s the intention. Exactly when that happens will be “to be determined”, obviously.

To clause 2(2)(ca), (cc), and (cb), which the member asked about, I’m advised they’re all intended to commence on the specified transition date, as will everything under clause 2(2). In the meantime, with relation to the regulatory functions, they’ll remain in force under the Resource Management Act (RMA), with amendments made to the RMA by the Planning Bill. It is complicated, but there’s a pathway to get it all into place in the next three years, and whoever ends up in possession of the RMA reform Minister portfolio—which, probably, I venture to suggest, will not exist once these bills come into effect; well, that’s not a decision for me, but—

💬 Lan Pham: It’s even more necessary.

💬 Hon CHRIS BISHOP: Well, I think—I’m just going to throw this out there—that we’re going to end up with a Minister of Planning. I’m just going to say that: a planning Minister.

CHAIRPERSON (Teanau Tuiono): We heard it live today, right now.

💬 Hon CHRIS BISHOP: I’m going to get myself in trouble now! It’s not my decision, but, I mean, personally, I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to have a—I mean, the RMA reform Minister job has been—you know, we’ve done the national direction. Well, fast track is now in the infrastructure portfolio, but we’ve done the national direction; we’ve now done this package of legislation, the two bills, and the ancillary stuff, and my own personal view is that we should just have a planning Minister, and, probably, the Minister for the Environment should be the—

💬 Lan Pham: Damage control.

💬 Hon CHRIS BISHOP: What’s that?

💬 Lan Pham: Damage control.

CHAIRPERSON (Teanau Tuiono): Let’s just leave it to calls and not have a conversation across the Chamber.

💬 Hon CHRIS BISHOP: That’s, I think, unfair. Oh, well, anyway, all of that’s to be determined. Those things are actually outside the remit of the debate and, actually, frankly outside my powers, so I probably shouldn’t have commented on it, but anyway, we are where we are.

Keep going—keep going.

💬 Hon CHRIS BISHOP: No, no—no, no. I’ve said too much—I’ve said too much. It’s about a three- to four-year transition window, and it’s actually relatively straightforward when you think about it.

Committee of the whole House

Committee of the whole House

I inadvertently widened the scope of the debate.

I’m just curious—I am curious.

💬 Hon CHRIS BISHOP: Yeah, yeah, well, so am I—so am I. I’m just taking—

💬 Arena Williams: “Planning Master-General”!

💬 Hon CHRIS BISHOP: Eh?

💬 Arena Williams: Call it the “Planning Master-General”!

💬 Hon CHRIS BISHOP: I’m just taking some further advice.

💬 Hon Rachel Brooking: On that?

💬 Hon CHRIS BISHOP: Definitely not on that. As I understand it, previously, Acts used to specify who the responsible Minister was, so they would say, you know, “The person responsible for this Act is X”. We don’t do that any more; responsibility for legislation is a Cabinet Office process, as I understand it, and so exactly who will be responsible for both Acts will be a decision for the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. That will all be worked through.

I suppose I was just indicating that it makes sense to have a planning Minister responsible for planning and a logical place for the Environment Act would be the environment Minister, but that may also not be true. Anyway, that will all be worked out. It’s actually not that material, to be honest, for the purposes of this discussion. It’s not actually that relevant to the legislation. The point is there’s going to be an Act, and there will be a Minister responsible for the Act.

Committee of the whole House

Committee of the whole House

Well, thanks for that, comrade. We’ll sing “The Internationale” together. Goodness gracious me.

A few sort of inaccuracies there. I mean, the starting point of all of this stuff is that it is difficult, OK, because we’re in a once-in-a-generation, once-in-a-30-year transition from the old to the new. That’s the sort of starting point, and there’s a number of ways you can approach that. You can do a decade, which is what the previous Natural and Built Environment Act (NBA) and Spatial Planning Act (SPA) process was going to take, which I think most people thought was too long. I would agree on that. Then you can do the kind of different regions turn on at different times approach—again, that was the NBA approach. That’s not perfect either. There was some logic to that, notwithstanding Arena Williams’ comments around how that would be silly. That is theoretically possible under this transition, but it’s not our intended approach. The member is right: it would not be good to have Auckland and Waikato with different rules at different times. That would be very complicated and confusing. That’s not the intention. It’s theoretically possible, but that’s not the Government’s approach.

We’ve gone for, again, as I think I’ve said a number of times throughout this debate, a balanced approach, which is: you’ve got the backstop of the four years; some things come into force immediately—kind of quick win - type stuff; a backstop of four years; and then a staged transition approach throughout it, and we’ll just work our way through that.

Should there be an approach of laying out in dates exactly when each provision comes in? I mean, well, there’s an argument for that, but then the trade-off with that is the flexibility around the system not keeping up, around some people not being ready. You do need that flexibility, and I think we’ve taken the right approach with that.

I can tell the committee there will be extensive material prepared. The Ministry for Cities, Environment, Regions and Transport is already working around that communicating. They’ve already got various different stakeholder groups set up. They’re working with Local Government Professionals—Taituarā, I think they’re called; the old SOLGM, Society of Local Government Managers. They’re working with the Resource Management Law Association. There’s an erstwhile alumnus of that organisation in the Chamber. They’re working with the New Zealand Planning Institute—great people who will be in this donkey deep in the next four years or so, Liz Moncrieff and the team. There’s a lot of people invested in all of this stuff, and there’ll be an extensive amount of workshops and stakeholder engagement and material publicised, and all of that will work its way through regardless of who the Minister is, obviously.

Just, finally, in relation to—I understand Ms Pham had a question for the chair when I was away: how much of this bill is rolled over from the Resource Management Act (RMA)? It’s a good question. These bills draw on the RMA in places which are efficient and reduce litigation risk of using new terms. Ultimately, they are new bills. They are new bills; different scheme; different framework; funnel approach, obviously, which we’ve talked about; a variety of different instruments and tools throughout it. But we have kept some of the RMA nomenclature, and I think that was important. That was actually one of my criticisms of the NBA and the SPA: big new terms that have not been used before—clearly there has to be some of that in the new system, but as much as you can, you want to try and use terms that people are familiar with, because that helps the transition.

Committee of the whole House

Thank you, Mr Chair. I want to start by talking about commencement in clause 2, because it’s really important. This framework, in terms of a functional resource management system, is so critical to the entire country and particularly all those people who live in this country and all of those people, particularly, whose jobs it is to interact with it and plan for it and just be part of it. What really pains me about this commencement section is how necessary a functional framework is, but then I can’t help but be so struck how dysfunctional this system is.

Now, when it comes to commencement, the simple fact is these bills should not commence, and they shouldn’t commence because the Government has got it so staggeringly wrong. Why it’s staggering is because we had all the people who actually know, who are actually involved in these systems, putting in front of us the solutions that could have made it functional. Why didn’t the Government listen? Why didn’t the Government take this opportunity to get something right?

My title that I think would be much more appropriate for this bill in particular is the “Natural Environment Dysfunction Bill”, because even at the highest level, the Government have failed to even understand the concept of integration, where we cannot separate the built environment from the natural environment. It doesn’t work. It’s been spelt out time and time again that this is completely illogical, and there hasn’t been a clear justification as to why it’s split.

That’s where the dysfunction starts, but it continues through so many aspects, including the fact that the Government is claiming this is a fit for purpose 2026 framework, when the environmental limits themselves are not even environmental limits. That does not make sense, and it’s actually shameful for a country like New Zealand, where so much of—this Government purport to be all about economic growth and our exports and everything—

💬 Grant McCallum: Jobs.

💬 LAN PHAM: —and jobs, and all of that depends on the backbone of our economy, which is our environment, and we’re selling it off in these bills.

Another aspect that could be considered by this Government is that this is the “Natural Environment (Delay till we Die) Bill”. The delay, the delay, the delay is consistent throughout climate, throughout environment, and by the fact that, for example, the Government just introduced last-minute amendments that mean that regions of this country will not even have environmental limits—noting that they’re not even real environmental limits. These environmental limits don’t even come into play until the 2040s.

We are getting nowhere fast. We are in a race to the bottom with this bill, because the environmental protections that New Zealanders know have, ultimately, not even managed to protect the environment so far. They’ve been so drastically eroded and weakened, and any tools that could have progressed these things are gone. We are seeing agricultural industry lobby groups coming straight in and dictating the terms of this reform. It’s not even serving our best farmers; it’s serving our bottom-of-the-barrel farmers. It’s letting the most polluting farms off the hook in a totally unfair way where the good farmers have to pick up the tab, and we’re not even enabling catchment groups to take charge and be part of this. Those who know and understand the dysfunction of the system oppose this. These bills should never commence. It’s such a missed opportunity, and I’m extremely disappointed about the whole process and the duty of care that this Government’s failed on.

Committee of the whole House

Committee of the whole House

Committee of the whole House