Public Works Amendment Bill

I move, That the Public Works Amendment Bill be now read a third time. The Public Works Act is an essential tool for delivering the roads, schools, hospitals, electricity infrastructure, and other public works that communities rely on. This bill includes a package of amendments to streamline and update land acquisition processes in line with the delivery of modern infrastructure needs.

Again, I would like to thank the members of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee and all those who took part in the submissions process for their role in helping to refine the bill we see in the House today.

At this final stage, I’ll briefly set out the principal reforms the House has been asked to enact. The bill makes targeted improvements for efficiency, effectiveness, and clarity. It retains appropriate protections for affected landowners and establishes a new process. It supports the restoration of public works damaged by severe weather and other emergencies. Importantly, this bill contains key protections for landowners’ rights. It does not change the fundamental requirement that Public Works Act users must first try to acquire land by agreement through good-faith negotiations before any compulsory acquisition may occur.

It streamlines land acquisition processes. It better enables a joint approach to project delivery. One Public Works Act user will be able to acquire land for another when their projects are connected. The bill makes targeted improvements to objection proceedings in the Environment Court. It improves compensation for landowners, introducing an incentive payment as part of the standard process, and it increases the existing additional compensation payments for home loss and land loss.

The bill ensures that the Public Works Act is better able to support communities to recover from emergencies, as it creates an accelerated land acquisition process to restore public works damaged by weather and other emergency events. It also makes improvements for owners of Māori land. It introduces a requirement for consent from either the Ministry for Māori Development or the Minister for Māori Crown Relations: Te Arawhiti before protected Māori land may be compulsorily acquired by the Crown.

In closing, I thank members across the House who have contributed to the scrutiny and improvement of this legislation. This bill provides a more modern, workable, and balanced framework for acquiring land for public works. It will help infrastructure providers to deliver the works New Zealand needs so we can build for the future. It improves readiness for emergency recovery and provides a clearer and fairer process for landowners. I commend the Public Works Amendment Bill to the House.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. The devil is always in the detail, and I have to say that this is quite a technical bill, and it’s looking to reform what has been a longstanding and reasonably effective, if not sometimes frustrating, piece of legislation, because it gives the Government the right to take land from the private land owner. We are very mindful of those rights, unlike the ACT Party, which seems to be quite happy to have this bill ride over them. We’ve been cautious all the way through of making sure that any amendments to this bill don’t go too far or indeed open the door to what we see as a coalition Government agenda—and they’ve been at it for 2½ years—to move to privatise parts of the Public Service, and to open up opportunities for many of their mates, and sometimes that comes at the expense of the wider public.

So we supported the bill into Parliament and to the select committee on the basis that, of course, any piece of legislation can probably be modernised with the changing technology, and we’ve been aware of things like Mt Messenger, where there have been major conflicts, I guess, over farmers’ rights to hold on to their land when they have the Crown drive through and put in place a bit of core infrastructure that was necessary.

So these are major dilemmas and major points of conflict. Any piece of legislation has to find the right balance, and not having been on the select committee but having read the report back, the commentary on the bill, I see that there were changes made that the select committee judged were necessary to bring a fairer balance. That is, that the bill as introduced was pretty gung-ho. It was really determined, or the intent of it was to drive through efficient taking of land from private land owners, and the committee said no and that we had to put in place a few changes and a few protections and slow some of the systems down. We had to make sure that dispute resolution and compensation payments, which were part of the original bill, would be rolled through with good intent.

Then the bill came back into the House—and I acknowledge the Minister; he’s done as good a job as he can. I also acknowledge Chris Penk, who was the first Minister in charge of the bill, who brought the bill in with good intent. But this is a coalition Government with a number of different kinds of plays. The ACT Party wants to privatise everything, the New Zealand First Party just wants to privatise some things, and, in the middle, National doesn’t know what it wants to do.

But it’s all done under this kind of so-called drive to efficiency. We’ve had things like Cyclone Gabrielle, where there’s been a requirement to take land for the realignment of a bridge or road or whatever, and so the emergency recovery provisions in here were sensible proposals. We’ve had electrification of our economy, so the pressure on the Transpower network is growing, and so the idea of actually facilitating their ability to put more pylons in the ground is probably sensible as well. However, we’ve also had Invest New Zealand going out around the world—and New Zealand First has supported this—and knocking on the doors of trillionaires to bring money into the country and to sell off our assets, particularly infrastructure assets.

That’s what the objective of Invest New Zealand is. New Zealand First has supported it, ACT is ecstatic about it, and National is quite happy with it. We’re not.

Our concern as we went through is that this bill, which is public-good legislation, opened the door to private benefit. We’re not saying that private benefit is not part of our economy and shouldn’t go ahead, but we shouldn’t have legislation that overrides other people’s property rights just so some private people can get all the benefit. We’ve seen many, many proposals around the country—fast-track proposals, in fact. The fast-track proposals have been supported and put forward by people who have been happy to actually support the Government of the day—or the three parties in Government.

So what has made the Labour Opposition uneasy about this is the level of political donations that have come into political parties in Government, many of them linked to fast-track proposals. We believe that that kind of pressure and influence is dangerous.

When you have a core piece of legislation like this—it’s bad enough to have fast track, that kind of pushes aside the environmental obligations. But you know, we had a fast track, with environmental obligations, to try and facilitate housing. So we understand the objective. But when you take away some of the safeguards and the handrails and you just drive it through, and then you pass a piece of public works legislation, then it’s all set up for people to railroad through what could be huge private opportunity.

So we’ve been a bit wary of it. As I say, we’re not trying to say we can’t improve the process and ensure that fair compensation goes to people who will have to give up their land—and sometimes with huge emotion attached to that. We are saying that we need to develop better infrastructure across our country, and we have to do it in a collaborative way, and in a way that is actually non-partisan—that is that we have to agree across the House what infrastructure is needed.

“Roads of National Party Significance” are not always needed. Road maintenance across the country is needed. Renewable electricity generation is needed, and some of those projects are sensible. But what concerns me is the judgment on which one should go into fast track—the judgment of that made by parties and Ministers who are the beneficiaries of political funding and donors. And you just say, “Join the dots—follow the money.” [Interruption] Well, I’m sorry—ask the public out there. They are concerned, and I’ve been around here for a while: I am disturbed and concerned about democracy in our country. So this piece of legislation, which, in normal times, would be supported by the Opposition because it’s helping infrastructure move ahead, our question is: for who? Because it’s not all for the public.

Take a scenario of a large—let’s call it Winton—property development somewhere in the country. It could be Queenstown; it could be up in Auckland. They go and build a few thousand houses, or propose to, but we’ve got to get a road to it and we’ve got to get some drainage to and from it and some other infrastructure. So, yes, that is public infrastructure, but it’s actually done for a private purpose, done by the public—that is, by the council.

So we’re concerned that that cute alignment is not the intent of the Labour Party when we supported this bill into Parliament. Time has moved and so has some of the fast-track applications, so has the ongoing increased donor generosity to the ACT, National, and New Zealand First parties. And so I’m having to say that the alignment is something that we are concerned about. We are talking about millions and millions of dollars. We should not, in this Parliament, be here for private purpose; we should be here for public purpose.

This piece of legislation says, “Public Works Amendment Bill”, and that’s good. But what we’ve discovered is that the opportunity for private investors and infrastructure promotors to piggyback on that, in our view, is too great. I think that will be the reality.

The members over there look a bit uneasy. They should—they should look uneasy, because look at the political donations and look at the fast-track applications. We in Labour are not prepared to support this piece of legislation that is likely to put in place core infrastructure for those projects. That’s why we oppose this bill.

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. I’ll start by saying that during the submissions on this bill, the Law Association of New Zealand said they were—and I quote—“concerned that the bill goes well beyond procedural streamlining and introduces substantive changes that significantly affect the exercise, oversight, and accountability of compulsory acquisition powers.” My guess is that the ACT Party didn’t look too closely at this bill because I think it would really be concerning to their usual stated values around respecting the rights of landowners.

There’s a couple of things. Firstly, I’m just going to talk about and give a shout-out to Tony and Debbie Pascoe who, through 20 legal battles, fought to not have a highway go through their land. Tony was born on that land in North Taranaki. I went and visited him with Celia Wade-Brown and he showed us the land and we looked closely at the proposal and everything about the Mt Messenger bypass project smells fishy—like everything about it. And that carried on under successive governments.

But what we’ll find is that this project was totally not the right project. And this landowner—the Crown has tried to acquire the land and failed. They don’t have money. They don’t have professional lawyers. They had volunteers and whānau and self-taught people just showing up and helping them because of the passion they had to retain the land he had been born on and his absolutely astute recognition that it’s not a good place to put a highway. It’s actually an absolutely ridiculous place to put a highway.

I invite every member of the Government parties to go visit Tony Pascoe and look at what’s happening with this Mt Messenger bypass project. It’s absolutely disgraceful. There is a tiny percentage of vehicles using that road every day. There could have been a much more moderate proposal that didn’t take new land.

The only people who benefited from this are the contractors who were working on the project, who deliberately pushed the most expensive, complicated project possible. The Public Works Act, the way it was drafted, actually did enable people to stand up to the power of the State that was trying to do something ridiculous, which I mean, frankly, the project is going to cost over a billion dollars by the end of it—and it’s only 6 kilometres.

It should be an embarrassment to anyone in the National Party or the ACT Party that they’re supporting that project, that they’re using public money to pay for an outrageously expensive, unnecessary project that is going to struggle, it’s going to suffer from slips, and, on top of it, they tried, but they failed, to take the land from Tony and Debbie Pascoe.

So through 20 legal battles, in the end, in a landmark Supreme Court case, the court found that Land Information New Zealand had not followed appropriate procedure. I guarantee you that is what this this bit of legislation is about. There’s a couple of other streamlining things in it that are totally fine. But this bit of legislation is going to make it possible potentially for the New Zealand Transport Agency to go back and take the land, which is really horrific, from my point of view.

And, actually, I’m entirely certain that ACT Party Minister Nicole McKee went and visited these people when she was in Opposition and claimed that she was going to do something to help them. Well, she’s a Minister in Cabinet that’s approving this legislation that is going to make it easier for the Crown to take the land.

I can’t imagine what they went through. The proposed highway is going to cut their family farm in half, so it impacts 155 hectares of their land. In the Supreme Court battle—a landmark decision—the Supreme Court ruled that Land Information New Zealand and its officials had failed to follow proper statutory processes by outsourcing good-faith land negotiations to external private consultants rather than conducting them directly.

The Crown has withdrawn its specific notice of intention to take land, but the Government has maintained its objective to ultimately secure the land to finish the highway project that never should have been. And Waka Kotahi—totally complicit in a very bad process. I’m sure that the Mount Messenger bypass project is one of many that have been subject to external audit reviews because of irregular budget control, because contractors were totally taking the proverbial—don’t want to get in trouble with Madam Speaker here. I’m trying to think of a—I’m just struggling to think of—

💬 Arena Williams: Taking the mickey.

Taking the mickey—thank you, Arena. Taking the mickey. So we’re really concerned.

Not only that, there’s another issue with this, which is that, although many submitters supported the idea of having an incentive payment where the Crown would have to pay—or the local authority would pay—up to 10 percent extra to acquire the land quickly, the reality is that this is increasing the financial burden on councils at a time when this coalition Government is taking away the ability to raise revenue. Local authorities could be out by quite considerable amounts of money and, with the rates cap legislation that’s been put forward by this Government, it’s going to be more difficult for them. Because it will make projects more expensive, the land acquisition will be more expensive.

Now, maybe that would be OK. We understand the idea of having these incentive payments. The main issue there is (1) the rates cap, and (2) the fact that central government isn’t just devolving more funding to local authorities, which it really should be. I completely agree with my colleague the Hon Damien O’Connor in his speech. I welcome the Labour Party’s vote against the bill. I think that’s a wise change. I hope that we are, in short order, after this horrific term, which has actually been a total assault on the whole idea of democracy, where we’re here constantly month after month—

💬 Andy Foster: What do you think the last Labour Government did?

No, actually, Andy Foster, go look at the record of how much urgency was used in this term versus last.

💬 Andy Foster: Look at the record of the last Labour Government. It was a shocker.

Yeah, I have. There is no term in Parliament—oh yeah, well, there was also a pandemic with lockdowns. You have no idea what you’re talking about, Andy Foster. No—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): This is not a debate across the Chamber. You are addressing the Speaker.

Madam Speaker, this term of Parliament has seen more use of urgency than any previous Parliament. There’s not been a single actual disaster that merited the use of urgency. There hasn’t been a Christchurch earthquake. There hasn’t been a pandemic with lockdowns. The Government parties may tell themselves the story that the previous Government abused urgency and it is not—it pales in comparison.

There was actually a reason for using urgency under the last Government. Under this Government, the reason is that the people in power believe that they can ram their agenda through with less scrutiny and they actually do no longer respect democracy. Any member over there who believes that their Government is upholding the normal rule of law and democratic principles needs only to consider the amount of submissions that have been presented to select committees. I know there’s a lot of first-term MPs over there. I think they should wake up to the fact that they are complicit in a Government that has been the least democratic since Robert Muldoon. They should be ashamed of themselves. They say it all the time—they say it all the time—that they care about localism. What a joke—what a joke. This is the exact opposite.

They supposedly care about property rights, and, yet, here they are, supporting a change to the Public Works Amendment Bill that’s all about making it easier to take land from people for inappropriate projects so that the court, the Environment Court, doesn’t have to consider whether sufficient alternatives have been considered.

That’s who these people are. They’re little Trump-adjacent, fascist-adjacent, ignorant people who believe that they’re doing stuff for the best interests. Maybe they really believe they’re doing stuff for the best interests of New Zealand, but I’ve been here 15 years and I can tell them they’re the worst Government I have ever seen. Not only are they perpetuating overseeing absolute destruction to the New Zealand economy while they claim to be good for the economy, they’re all about taking away power from ordinary people and giving it to those who have the most power already and overseas corporate interests, because that is the hierarchical society that they support.

They are the new feudalists. We all need to bow down and worship to the landowners who already have the most, who are going to keep acquiring more. They’ve changed the enrolment rules for totally cynical reasons. Talk about copying the American Republicans. We cannot wait to see the end of this pathetic, power-hungry, abusive Government.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise to talk on the Public Works Amendment Bill.

Wow—gosh, I don’t really know where to start. I mean, tonight we’ve been lectured by the Greens on democracy—wow. I don’t think they actually understand what democracy is. Then, we’ve now got the Labour Party taking an interest in property rights. I’m really pleased that the Labour Party is taking an interest in property rights. I’d like Rachel Brooking to actually help out some of her other members so they can actually understand that regulatory takings is actually affecting a property right, but I’ll let her worry about educating her other colleagues later.

Look, in ACT, we’re about unlocking New Zealand’s potential. From time to time, there is a need to use the Public Works Act to get projects going. My colleague Simon Court sat on the select committee, has been over this legislation, and is happy about how it actually manages to balance private property rights, the right to fair compensation, those being recognised against important public projects.

We’re very pleased to be supporting this bill, which is, really, updating the Public Works Act, bringing it into the modern era, and making some very sensible changes. We will be commending it to the House.

Madam Speaker, thank you. As I said in the second reading, taking land by compulsion is a big deal, but this is about trying to make sure that we actually have a more efficient, more effective way of doing that, rather than the way which we’ve had in the past. I’m really disappointed to hear what I understand is Labour’s about face on this particular piece of legislation. They haven’t supported it through the select committee. The Hon Damien O’Connor seemed to me to be really struggling to find this private benefit.

If I can just illustrate one thing—because I think public works have been clearly defined for a long time and understood for ages—the big difference here is that we’ve included Transpower, which is a public entity. If you think New Zealand First would ever support the privatisation of Transpower, hell would have frozen over before that would have happened.

If you look at the report back from the select committee, we did have quite a number of utility operators that said, “Well, if Transpower, then why not us?”—why not the lines companies and so on—but, if you look at this, we said “Enabling Transpower to use some aspects of the PWA will meet its specific need to build and upgrade a large amount of electricity infrastructure. Network utility operators have a range of ownership models,”—range of ownership models, and some of them private, some of them are public—“and we think that extending land acquisition powers to them would exceed the targeted focus of this reform. We do not recommend that the bill be amended to expand access to PWA powers by other network utility operators.” We thought about that, we heard submissions, we thought about that and we said, “No, we won’t do that.” So I think you’re making things up, Labour Party, on that particular matter.

The speech by J-A-G, the Hon Julie Anne Genter—O-M-G is all I can say. That was a piece of fantasy about the last Labour Government in terms of anti-democratic behaviour. That was the ultimate anti-democratic behaviour. What they did and the lives they destroyed, and some of those are still—people are still trying to put those lives back together again. Julie Anne Genter, we were there. We saw the impact of what—[Interruption]

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Order! I’ll turn your mikes off if you don’t behave, please. Andy Foster, continue, please.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): You’re addressing the Speaker. No one else in the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I just want to finish off by talking about the Mount Messenger project. That project could have been sorted out years ago, had the then Minister of lands made a decision to actually activate the Public Works Act and actually allow that project to go ahead in a much easier way. What they’ve had to do is build amazing structures to actually get over the mountain and cable-car the construction material down into that area. The Minister of lands at the stage, who could have saved this country hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, was the Hon Eugenie Sage. I commend this bill to the House.

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. It’s my pleasure to stand in solidarity as the Opposition and oppose this legislation, opposing it and knowing that our communities have very real impact in the North. We have impacts in whenua Māori, and we have impact in general title lands. Now, we’ve tried to litigate, interrogate, and discuss this legislation, and yet we never got a chance to fully dive into the detail. Yet, we’re at this point now where we can see that no matter what arguments we have put up, it’s going to be pushed through the House. That’s the disappointment that we have on this side of the Whare, because what we know is that Public Works amendment legislation should not be fast-tracked. That’s what this bill is doing; it’s speeding up the process. Landowners should have the ability to come to the table with adequate support, technical and legal, to have a fair negotiation. That’s not necessarily guaranteed.

When we were here in the committee of the whole House, trying to discuss with the Minister in charge, I was getting passed around, saying, “Oh, that’s not my part. That’s another Minister.”—te mea, te mea. That’s the problem, Public Works covers so many different ministries. We’ve got Land Information New Zealand; we’ve got just Justice, for the Māori Land Court; we’ve got Māori Development, for whenua Māori; we’ve got the Treaty negotiations Minister; we’ve got Crown-Māori negotiations; and we’ve got the one Minister who has this big kete all bundled up in what is the Public Works Act. It’s a wrecking ball of raupatu whenua once again. The fast-tracking actually undermines the ability for whenua landowners to sit at a table fairly and have a discussion/negotiation—without carrots being dangled in front of them—to discuss whether we can find a middle ground. If we don’t find that middle ground, we’re then forced into a process whereby you can’t go to the Environment Court.

That’s what I heard really clearly from whānau who are impacted right now by the four-lane highway coming into Te Tai Tokerau; it’s that they’ve been sitting there for about a decade now with that sitting over their land title. They can’t leave. No one will purchase their house or whenua because of the designation on their title. That’s a lot of landowners—that’s a lot of landowners. That’s what we have in the North right now. We have 489 landowners left in limbo because of the awesome four-lane highway coming into Te Tai Tokerau. People are continuing to talk about it and ask for time with members of Parliament to express their deep concern. This isn’t just general Māori landowners, this is just average community members. In talking with them—and then they’re bringing out their papers and they’re showing me their letters—they feel completely handicapped and undermined in being fairly addressed as the landowners who are impacted in a very material way. That’s the issue. They don’t have the skills, they don’t have the technical ability, to enter into conversations fairly. Where is the justice and where is the fair process? Where is the resource for them to come into conversations with Crown officials and know that someone’s got their back? It’s not happening.

Māori, we’ve done this before. We have to acknowledge our aunties and our grannies who have come before, like Patricia Grace, who in 2014 came and she fought the Public Works for her whenua in Waikanae for the Kāpiti Expressway. Patricia Grace had to go through the Environment Court and suffer for years trying to fight to retain their whenua. We’ve tried, as the Green Party and members of this side of the House, to amend legislation. Catherine Delahunty, in 2018, tried a petition to work a new system of Public Works to protect whenua Māori; Te Ururoa Flavell tried it himself, too. I’ve tried it in my member’s bill, but still we are just mainstreamed; we are just pushed into a system. It’s apparently meant to be a modernised system here, but we were told quite clearly by the Minister that it is still the same standard as it was in the previous Public Works Act.

So what’s changed? What’s changed, particularly, for the whenua Māori space? The Māori Land Court is still an instrument for alienation if we don’t have our representation sorted, if we don’t have the resource and adequate support into the Māori Land Court to help the Māori landowner and ensure that all the landowners who are going to be impacted have informed consent. When we oppose, we are undermined. That’s the issue.

After I listened to the Labour Party and Green Party contributions, now I understand why New Zealand ranks near the top of the OECD on infrastructure but ranks nearly at the bottom for delivery, efficiency, and value for money. They are the primary obstacle preventing our country from moving forward. All they want is to tax and punish hard-working Kiwis. On this side of the House, we are fixing the basics and building the future. I commend this bill to the House.

Thanks for letting me speak about—I can assure you that I don’t want to punish the hard-working Kiwis; I want to do exactly the opposite. I want to make laws for the many, not the few. My worry here is that this law is for the few, for the mates of this Government, because that is just typical of their lawmaking approach.

Now, we came to this bill in good faith. You look at the Transport and Infrastructure Committee report, and it says: “The bill would amend the Public Works Act … The changes are [intended] to modernise [the PWA] by creating an improved and fairer land acquisition and compensation system. They are aimed at making it easier for the Crown and local authorities to undertake public infrastructure projects.” That sounds great. We’re all for that, totally, because that will do better for the many, not the few. However, we have had a lot of other legislation going through the House in urgency recently. Well, in fact—

💬 Hon Member: What would that be?

Well, there’s too many to talk about. The whole term of this Government has had all-stages urgency, or urgency like this when you’re going from one reading to another to another, or a huge amendment is dropped in the committee stage. That is not good lawmaking.

One of the urgent pieces of legislation that we have looked at recently has been the Planning Bill. Now, we were in the committee stage of the Planning Bill and I was in the Chamber for 30 hours of debate on that bill, and the other related bill, the Natural Environment Bill. I might have escaped during some voting, but otherwise I was in the Chamber, and I do not believe that we debated, in the committee stage, Schedule 5 at all. Government members voted to close the debate.

Now, that is important, because we’ve had an Amendment Paper here today that will try to mirror the changes in that Planning Bill with this Public Works Amendment Bill. That can sound innocuous on one level; the Resource Management Act and the Public Works Act have a long, long relationship, and it’s been well understood. There haven’t been concerns that somehow, via things being designated in the Resource Management Act, that was somehow leading to works that weren’t public works being able to use the provisions of the Public Works Act to take land. That is important, and we thought that this would be a continuation.

However, one of the answers in the committee stage from the Minister was that there is a widening in the Planning Bill from the Resource Management Act, and that means that there is a potential for a wider range of projects that may not be being presented by public authorities, to then get into this Public Works Act process. That’s important for a number of reasons. We’ve discussed in the other readings how taking somebody’s land is a big deal. I was surprised that the ACT Party was so enthusiastic about this bill when it seems to be making it a bit easier to do some of that taking of an individual’s private property rights, but then I asked this question in the committee of the whole House stage, and it appears that these “other ventures” are going to be able to take via the Public Works Act.

It appears to me, my analysis of the ACT position is that, whilst they talk a lot about private property rights, if some of their big mates are going to have the ability to maybe do a private-public partnership or maybe just do a private initiative themselves, that they’re more for those big guys being able to take the little guys’ land than they are about their so-called principle of defending private property rights. That’s interesting—interesting indeed.

That goes back to the National speaker before me, Dr Carlos Cheung, saying something about “hard-working Kiwis”. That is exactly who I am interested in. That is exactly who the Labour Party is interested in. It is certainly not what the parties over there are interested in.

Now, let me tell you about the kinds of projects that might be able to come in via the amendments—via the Planning Bill that is not yet enacted, but somehow, in this bill, there’s going to be some Orders in Council that change both bills somehow. I don’t understand the language of it. It doesn’t seem to work very well.

The Planning Bill talks about core infrastructure. I mentioned some of this in one of my contributions in the committee of the whole House stage—but it includes the distribution of petroleum, and it includes some other things that we would think of as public infrastructure. What is interesting, then, is that the Minister may approve core infrastructure operator is designating authority and this is for a particular project and it’s got to be done through regulations and there is some sort of public interest test, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be a public project. It says a project is not precluded from having a significant public benefit just because the operator charges a fee for access or obtains a commercial benefit from it.

We’re clearly talking about commercial benefits to private providers here, and then the different things that can be considered as other infrastructure that can become core infrastructure and include facilities used to process manufactured gas. That makes me think of what this Government’s trying to do for a few of its mates. That is an LNG terminal. That was probably a facility used to process manufactured gas, so are we going to see this Government used the Public Works Act to take land to do an LNG facility that they are going to make consumers pay for? Those little guys that I was just told they care about, but we know they do not—we are caring about the hardworking Kiwis.

Now, there’s some others. There’s aerodromes, there’s navigation installations, there’s all sorts of other things in this list, and these are things—many of them I’m sure are benign or they’re good things to have. But they are not the sort of thing that we would imagine that in New Zealand’s political situation or political history—they are not the type of activity where you can say, “This justifies overriding your private property rights. This justifies the State coming in and saying we’re going to take your house. Sorry about that, but we’re going to take it.” That power, I think it’s an important power that the State has—that the Crown has—but it should only be used when it really, really needs to be used, one, and for things that are public things and that are for the public benefit.

We were given no comfort by the Minister in the committee of the whole House stage that these amendments to another piece of legislation, and I acknowledge that the Minister is not the Minister for that other piece of legislation, but his amendment has incorporated those changes that are coming in another piece of legislation, and that seems to have the ability that if Ministers want it to apply, then that could apply to our Public Works Act. That is a significant change. It is a surprising change, because it’s not what’s in the tin.

You know, what was on the tin was the Transpower changes. Yes, that seems like a sensible change. We agree that Transpower meets those criteria that I was just talking about. We saw that the compensation criteria have been updated. That’s a good thing. Nobody is complaining about that. What we are complaining about is this sneaky ability for this Government to do things for its mates, to do things for the few and not the many.

It’s a pleasure to be at the third reading of this bill, which has been through a full select committee process and is based on a previous law around critical infrastructure. It’s pretty much a carbon copy, albeit a minor change through the committee of the whole House, but it’s great to be here. It modernises how we acquire land. The incentive-based payments is going to go down well—very well—with our communities. I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, for the opportunity to take a call on this, the third reading of the Public Works Amendment Bill.

On 26 August 2025, Chris Meehan, the CEO of Winton Land company gave an update to his investors via a call. He welcomed the investors to his meeting and explained the strong earnings for the company. He then went on to say that the Mill Road upgrade was fully funded by Government and described this as a great thing for us. The best thing about the investors meeting was the news that the Government had taken on the full cost of the Mill Road upgrade and had consented it.

Winton now has fast-track approval for 3,854 homes in an area which is flood-prone and will result in flooding in the Manurewa electorate that I represent. A 47,000 square metre industrial and business park, a 7.7 hectare town centre, and other commercial developments have been approved in that. The approval specifically includes 19.4 hectares for the Mill Road stage 2 upgrade, paid entirely by Government and bought from Winton’s investors with public money.

Public works should be for the public benefit. This is a public works acquisition which the Government was forced to do by legislation which all in this House opposed except the coalition parties who have taken donations from developers, including Winton Land. This is an example of developers directly benefiting not only from planning law changes but from money paid by Government for land which has been publicly acquired.

Not only that, South Auckland landowners and homeowners have had to give up their homes for the expansion of Mill Road. They did not want to, they did not ask to sell their properties, but they were forced to by the Public Works Act taking laws in this amendment.

It is unfair, it is unjust, it is a misuse of the legislative process, and it is something that the National Party will have to wear in the electorates. Because all around the country, not only homeowners are affected by this, where the National Party will take your home when you do not want to sell with new powers—but they will also benefit developers who are not the little guy. They’re not the mums and dads who are buying houses to make six or seven town houses. They are not even the middle-sized developers who are looking to make 10 or 20 homes in their communities. They are the big end of town where Steven Joyce sits on the board and collects millions of dollars in payments.

This is an example of a Government that is not afraid to use the legislative process for gain for some and not for others. The Public Works Act should be something which is supported by all in this House because it is one of the most sensitive pieces of legislation we have. Governments should be very careful about taxation and they should be very careful about public works takings. We should be able to do both of those things for the public good. We need hospitals, we need roads, we need schools, we need libraries. That is what those powers are for.

The Public Works Act should be about enabling communities to live together well, because only Government can provide things like roads and bridges for them. Ordinary developers and consumers together cannot group up to be able to offer those things to the communities and to the generations that come after them. Only Government should have the power to be able to acquire the land and to build those things.

But if we don’t have provisions in law which everyone respects and which everyone can get behind, where there will be some losers and some winners in any of these public decisions, then what are we? What kind of country won’t provide the basics of life for communities on a fair basis? What kind of country will give private developers tens of millions of dollars overnight when they pass legislation which is deeply opposed by the community? What kind of Government will put up with the use of the legislative process which punishes ordinary homeowners by taking away their homes for the benefit of one of New Zealand’s most profitable and largest development corporations?

This is wrong. That is why we oppose this bill at this last third reading. Let it be known: New Zealanders can vote in a Government that will stick up for them this November. They must vote out National.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s good to be able to rise and speak on the Public Works Amendment Bill. It is going to make the process of acquiring land much more efficient where we have challenges. It’s also going to make it fairer with better compensation. This is a positive outcome for New Zealand. I’m disappointed that the Labour Party and the Greens, in particular, are in a completely different space on it, but our Government wants progress. We want to make this a better country, and we need to get things built. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you. It’s been a very interesting process, this piece of legislation going through. I stood up in the last reading and Labour was supporting this piece of legislation. We went through a committee stage where there was some inquiry under urgency that significantly unsettled the Labour Party. I want to go through that situation and how we got there, because it comes down, fundamentally, to a values issue. As Damien O’Connor stated, the devil turned out to be in the detail on this one. We had to unbury that kind of detail.

The first thing is the Labour Party was supporting this bill because we would agree with the purpose of modernising this bill and increasing compensation to people and incentive schemes. That involved negotiation in good faith. All those are good things. Nobody is going to mess with that. Those things are good things to have, and the Labour Party supported the idea of a Public Works Act where appropriate for public purpose, because we believe in the common value of things to people and the common ownership of many things to people.

You would have heard that I had a rather interesting dialogue in the last reading on this with one of the ACT members about my worry that the ACT Party, which is supposed to be all about private property rights, was, in this situation, very enthusiastically supporting this piece of legislation. I talked about how there was another piece of legislation, which was the Regulatory Standards Bill, where in fact there was a real attempt to—in fact, there have actually been a few different pieces of legislation go through where there has been a consistent attempt to suggest that people have property rights they’ve never had before and then compensate them if the public messes with these new rights they had.

There are a lot of things I was suspicious about when I saw the support of this piece of legislation. My colleagues did a valiant inquiry into what was going on here. We’re really unsettled and New Zealanders should be too, and consequently, we are changing our vote tonight.

Now, we are changing it because of the basic value that is instilled in the Public Works Act, or it has been until now. That is that it is the public benefit that is the reason why we will override people’s private rights, and it is in very limited circumstances. What was apparent, actually, when we looked—I think Julie Anne Genter talked about the Law Society’s submission. They were raising a warning bell. They were saying that it does more than that—it’s expansive in a way that you don’t understand. It is not just a modernisation in that way.

Then what we had is an examination of the Minister for Land Information, and the Minister has not—I think it was described as “given us comfort” over the things that we were concerned about. There is a really simple example that we will have heard repeated tonight several times, which is the example of a big developer like Winton who are rich-list people. They’re not people in the mum and dad investor category. If those big developers are doing a development which is going to bring in a lot of money to them—it’s going to make a lot of money—they are going to be able to get a road built by the public authorities and it’s going to actually exponentially increase their profit. They will make big money if they are allowed through that door.

What we are going to have from now on in this piece of law is the right of the Minister to make a decision about that and suggest that it should come in here and people who are our ordinary owners of property are going to have their property right overridden because it benefits the Winton owner. If it benefits the Winton business, they will have to give up their land.

Now, that’s a really interesting scenario and New Zealanders will have to make up their minds whether they agree with that. But that’s a big difference. They will make huge amounts of money out of the use of this law and it wasn’t possible before. Who is protecting property rights in this House? Who is protecting private property rights of ordinary New Zealanders? Actually, it’s the Labour Party and the Green Party tonight. That is who is protecting property rights for private people. Do you know why it is that that is going on? That is happening because we know what it’s like to have built a connection to land and to just have a limited amount. We know that it’s important to people.

Now, I want to take a minute to talk about the discussion that came from the Greens, the passionate discussion that came from the Greens about Māori land. I want to remind the House that this is also an issue that needs to be put into the balance because what was already in play from the Green Party early on and the reason they were opposing it was that issue over Māori land and the connection to land. What I talked about in my last speech was the fact that we had gone from 100 percent Māori-owned land in this country in 1840 to, at the present time, 5.5 percent at best of the land in this country. There is trauma and economic disadvantage—huge economic disadvantage—in what was confiscation after confiscation after confiscation. The State took the private land and the consequence of that is huge amounts of poverty, huge amounts of trauma.

It is not a good thing to take people’s land. It doesn’t work. There are consequences. It is a very complementary argument. The argument that has come forth in the committee stage is a new one, but it is complementary. It is about taking seriously the property of people in New Zealand—taking it seriously, not giving it to your mates, not giving it to people who are already on the rich list, not using the mechanisms we have here to actually feather the nests of people who don’t need their nests feathered. I’m sure that is based on a very old-fashioned trickle-down theory that we’ll all somehow be much better off if Mr Winton has a superyacht, and we won’t. We won’t be better off if we do that. We’ll be better off if we are respectful of people’s private property and the limited resource they have and we work with them, and sometimes we will be better off when we balance that with the needs of our community, because we are our community.

We are a community of people with limited resources, and they are our resources. We have seen far too much legislation come through this House which has stripped that resource from ordinary people and sent it to the super-rich. That’s what we have done this term. That’s what the Government has done. It has sent huge amounts of our hard-earned property, our hard-earned capital, off to people who already have way too much already. It is time to turn that around in this country. It is absolutely a critical time for New Zealanders to look at something like this, take it seriously, know what has been uncovered tonight, and to change things in the next few weeks when they have a chance to vote. It’s not too late, but I am very fearful of another three years of this. Because once you start pulling apart all the blocks—and this is not the only law we’ve seen this in.

💬 SPEAKER: No, I won’t be doing that.

Sorry, sir. Once the process has started of dismantling all the things that protect the ordinary people of this country and look after them, once that process has been dismantled for some pie-in-the-sky trickle-down theory where maybe one day they’ll get to be rich too, and yet they’re not—once that’s dismantled, it’s really hard to put back together. We need to make sure that we change this Government now. We can’t afford to wait any longer. We need to go back to first principles, which is to make sure people have enough to eat, they’re not going to food banks, and they have decent jobs. Thank you. I do not commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. This bill, believe it or not, is actually about building roads, building the transmission lines, and being able to compensate very adequately, if they choose to do so, at an early stage the landowners on which the imposition is being put. So let’s get real about what this actually is, and just understand that this is another way that National is fixing the basics and building the future. I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I commend the bill to the House.

💬 Hon Dr Duncan Webb: Mr Speaker?

💬 SPEAKER: We’ve used up all our slots, by quite some distance.

💬 Hon Dr Duncan Webb: The calls are entirely at your discretion, Mr Speaker. I thought perhaps you might want to give me one, seeing as the National Party didn’t really use their time and I have something to say.

💬 SPEAKER: Is that a point of order or are you seeking leave?

💬 Hon Dr Duncan Webb: No, I’m asking for you to exercise your discretion.

💬 SPEAKER: No, I’m not going to step outside Standing Orders. Are you seeking leave?

💬 Hon Dr Duncan Webb: Yes. I seek leave to make a call on this bill.

💬 SPEAKER: Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection?

💬 Hon Members: Yes.

A party vote was called for on the question, That the Public Works Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

Ayes 67

New Zealand National 48; ACT New Zealand 11; New Zealand First 8.

Noes 48

New Zealand Labour 32; Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 11; Te Pāti Māori 4; Kapa-Kingi.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a third time.

💬 SPEAKER: I declare the House in committee for consideration of the Pae Ora (Healthy Futures) (3 Day Postnatal Stay) Amendment Bill and the Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill.

Pae Ora (Healthy Futures) (3 Day Postnatal Stay) Amendment Bill

Committee of the whole House

Clause 1 Title

CHAIRPERSON (Tom Rutherford): Members, the House is in committee on the Pae Ora (Healthy Futures) (3 Day Postnatal Stay) Amendment Bill and the Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill. Members, we come first to the Pae Ora (Healthy Futures) (3 Day Postnatal Stay) Amendment Bill. Clause 1 is the debate on the title. The question is that clause 1 stand part.