Natural Environment Bill

I move, That the Natural Environment Bill be now read a third time.

There have been moments in which I thought this day would never come. It has been a long process to get to this point. There have been some who say, “Oh well, isn’t it bad that the Government is moving to repeal the Resource Management Act (RMA) on the final”—or second to last—“sitting day of the Parliament.” And it has taken a long time.

It is perhaps worth reflecting on the amount of progress that has happened in this term. In these three years, the Government has passed fast track in its first year, with 34 projects approved under fast track. We have passed the biggest series of changes to national direction under the RMA, ever—in three years; a new national policy statement for infrastructure, which we never had before; a much more strengthened and reliable national policy statement for renewable electricity generation; new national standards for granny flats; for the first time ever, a national environmental standard for papa kāinga housing to allow iwi to use their whenua to build papa kāinga for whānau; national environmental standards for telecommunications, that have just been promulgated, that will make it easier to build telecommunication towers; national environmental standards for electricity vehicle charging infrastructure, to stop ChargeNet and Meridian and all the EV charging companies having to go out and get individualised resource consents for projects that are, basically, functionally the same around the country; national environmental standards changes to freshwater; and a variety of other environmental changes through the national direction. All of that, and fast track and some changes to the RMA to allow for more housing in Auckland, and now today: the second of two bills—a duo of bills—to finally repeal and replace the RMA, once and for all. The RMA will be “gone-burger”—once it receives Royal assent.

I want to reflect on the environment, because the RMA—and I think this is now widely understood—has been a disaster for infrastructure and housing, and we’ve canvassed that in the Planning Bill, but it’s also been a failure when it comes to protecting the environment. Most metrics have degraded since 1991. Study after study shows two-thirds of our rivers have impaired ecological health. To the contrary to what members opposite, I think, sometimes say—or perhaps even believe—the Government’s view is that we can have a growing, thriving economy and we can do that whilst protecting the environment. In fact, the two go hand in hand. We should not pretend that it’s some binary choice between the environment and the economy. Actually, both work together. New Zealanders share pride in our pristine environment. We have a joint national collective belief in protecting this very special part of the world for our children and our children’s children.

I want to spend a little time in this speech talking about how this new system will better protect the environment. One of the failures of the RMA has been the inability to introduce proper environmental limits. We are introducing environmental limits through the new Natural Environment Bill to improve resource efficiency and improve the environment. Enforcement will be more effective and consistent. We’re considering a national regulator with a regional presence to monitor and enforce environmental rules.

There will be a huge focus on data-driven decisions through a digitised planning system. This hasn’t received a lot of attention—and that annoys me a little bit—but the Government has invested considerably, and will continue to invest, in a digitised back end for councils and for central government to drive better decisions, better monitoring, and better measurement. It’s extremely important, and I’ve been flabbergasted, frankly, over the last three years at some of the gaps in our information, the gaps in our knowledge. But with better data, you can make better decisions.

I want to be clear on what Parliament’s intent is when passing these bills into law. On environmental limits, central and local government decision-makers will be required to set binding environmental limits informed by data and community aspirations. National limits will protect human health. Regions will set ecosystem health limits for fresh water, coastal water, land and soil, and indigenous biodiversity, using methods set out in national standards. Ecosystem health limits will make sure that communities who know their rivers and waterways the best are able to make decisions over how they’re managed. It’s their aspirations for the environment that matter most, and they should be the loudest voices.

Requirements to manage limits through a cap on resource use have been removed—that is true. That does not prevent caps from being used, but means councils and Ministers have flexibility to decide best how to manage resource use to a limit. Limits will have effect the moment the relevant provisions in a natural environment plan become operative—not in 10 or 15 years’ time, as some in the Chamber continue to claim. Councils must take all reasonable steps to avoid breaching a limit. Where a limit is breached, the decision maker must set a target date for remedying the breach. If the target is more than 10 years away, temporary interim limits must be set to apply over 10-year intervals. These must be accompanied by actions to be achieved. Both the target date and interim limits must be credible, achievable, and avoid unnecessary delay.

Limits cannot be token. Decision makers must set limits and, in doing so, must prioritise the most urgent and important matters by considering the scale and pace of environmental degradation and the difficulty reversing that if action is delayed. The limit-setting process requires a deliberate, informed, and transparent decision about what level of environmental protection is acceptable. Decision makers must have regard to the impact of the proposed limit or method, including on communities, economic, social, environmental aspirations; the existing capacity of the natural environment to withstand or recover from pressure; and a cost-benefit analysis of the proposed decision. This way, any economic, social, and environmental trade-offs are surfaced and considered up front rather than being relitigated every time someone wants to develop. Limit-setting is a policy choice which includes a range of considerations. It is not intended to be a wholly scientific decision. The current state of the environment will be a relevant factor in this decision, but the limit may be set at above or below this level.

Let me be really clear: limits are critical to the Natural Environment Bill. They are the most important tool in protecting the environment in the bills, but they are not the only tool. The starting premise of the environment bill is protective in that the use of natural resources is not permitted unless allowed by a national standard, a rule, or a permit. Not all things are best managed through limits, and for these other things the intention is that plan rules and national standards can be used to manage impacts on the environment.

In relation to freshwater farm plans, we’ve made changes to create a simpler, cheaper system focused on real risk. A farm will be required to have a farm plan if it has more than 50 hectares in pastoral, arable, or viticultural orcharding land use, or more than 5 hectares in horticultural production that is not viticulture or orchards.

Farm plans are required to be certified and audited in three scenarios: first, if they’re undertaking activities prescribed in regulations as high risk, and in this situation, only the activities that are prescribed are subject to certification and auditing; second, where the catchment is prescribed in regulations; third, where the farm operator is using the freshwater farm plan to meet other regulatory requirements.

In relation to upholding Treaty settlements and other arrangements, Treaty settlement legislation gives effect to redress and arrangements that interact with planning processes and is independent of the provisions in both the Planning Bill and the Natural Environment Bill. There are provisions in the Planning Bill and the Natural Environment Bill to ensure this redress can be upheld in the new system, including by requiring the Crown to work with post-settlement governance entities (PSGEs) and other entities, if they wish to do so, to seek agreement on how settlement redress can operate in the new system.

The bills also set out specific requirements that relate to more complex arrangements—for example, aspects of Te Ture Whaimana. Until agreement is reached, decision makers in the new system are required to give the same or equivalent effect to Treaty settlement redress as it had under the RMA to the greatest extent possible in the new system. Some Treaty settlements include redress relating to wildlife. For wildlife approvals, I want to be clear that permit authorities must notify only those iwi authorities or PSGEs where necessary to give effect to Treaty settlement redress. A relevant iwi authority in this context is limited to one with relevant Treaty settlement redress. There is no requirement to notify iwi authorities or other Māori groups more generally.

The explicit intent of these bills is to deliberately reshape how we interact with the planning system. We are purposely and deliberately creating a system where we incentivise earlier participation at the planning stage, including in regional spatial plans, with more focused and targeted participation at later stages, consistent with the funnel concept. That includes iwi engagement. Iwi should not be consulted as a right on each and every consent. They don’t want that, the public don’t want that, and it erodes social licence for the planning system. Iwi should have a role in contributing and shaping plans for a region, not a role in consenting unless that consent directly affects them—in other words, the same as everyone else. This applies across both the natural environment and the planning bills.

If I could just take one more second to say that these reforms signify a large shift in how we plan and manage our land, environment, and development—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): The Minister’s time has expired. The Hon Rachel Brooking.

Thank you, Madam Speaker.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Before you start, can I just say that the question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you. Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m interested in some comments that we’ve just had from Ryan Hamilton about the Planning Bill that is related to this bill. He called Labour’s reforms, our Natural and Built Environment Act and Spatial Planning Act, the Resource Management Act (RMA) 2.0, but then he didn’t explain why, and then he listed a whole lot of things about this legislative scheme, which is the same as what was in Labour’s legislative scheme. Those good things—the spatial plans, the standardisation, the moving the focus of the system away from consent by consent, very expensive processes into the plans and into the national direction—those are all things that we agree with, and that is all the stuff that was in what that member called RMA 2.0. What does that make this legislation then? Is this RMA 3.0, given that logic?

Now, I’m interested in the Minister’s comments, just then, about limits. The Minister has said that the RMA has not worked for the environment and the environment has got worse. I totally agree with that premise, and that is why Labour undertook its reforms. Now, Labour had a limits-setting process in our legislation, and the Minister has made a lot of the fact that this legislation also has a limits-setting framework. But what we heard in the committee of the whole House stage of this bill, and what we saw by amendments that were made by the majority in select committee and then by subsequent amendments as well, is that any limit is going to be able to be avoided, which rather defeats the purpose of saying there is a limit.

A limit is a limit. If you’re driving your car at 120 and the limit is 110—you’re on one of those fancy new roads—then you are breaching the limit, and you can’t do it. But that is not what the limits mean in this legislation. The limits mean in this legislation that the Minister can just decide that something can ignore it. That’s not a limit. We also heard in the committee of the whole House stage that when deciding what these limits will be, at some point in the future—we could have already had the limits in play, but, no, we’re going to put out those limits further and further—that they’ve got to go through a cost-benefit analysis. How much is this going to cost some users of the system? Presumably users of the commons—that is users of a water resource—how much is it going to cost them? And if it’s a bit too much, we won’t worry about the limit. That is what Simon Court was talking about in the committee of the whole House stage. It is laughable that Government members come to this House and say that this new regime has limits and that it’s somehow going to help the environment, because it just simply is not.

We are very suspicious of this Government’s approach because what we have seen happen throughout this term of Government—and the Minister was speaking about it—is that there have been little strikes on the Resource Management Act and anything that goes to any environmental protections. We have seen that in one amendment bill and then in a second amendment bill, and with the fast-track legislation and then with an amendment to the fast-track legislation. Where has that led the country? Well, what we have seen, just last week, in urgency, is the Government having to do some sort of fix-up for development contributions for those fast-track projects that the Minister was just in this House skiting about. Those projects include huge housing developments on flood plains without any provision for development contributions. What that means is that ratepayers are going to be paying a whole lot more for infrastructure. It is just typical of this Government’s arrogant approach to lawmaking, that they speed things through, they say, “Oh, we’re listening in select committee.”, they plop out all these changes by majority, and then it doesn’t work. If only they’d listened to all those submitters who said, “It just won’t work.” But, no, they don’t do that.

We’ve also seen in the media, today, the Minister objecting to an article that’s been in The Post, where I have called this Government’s approach “reckless”—because it is reckless. We saw in the committee of the whole House stage giant Amendment Papers from this Government doing a whole lot of policy changes. Now, sometimes you can have giant Amendment Papers that reorder the bill to make it more logical, that do some little typo fix-its or fine referencing fix-its. But that wasn’t what this was. Instead, we had major policy changes coming in after the select committee process. The Minister says, “Oh well, we told people about it. We put out a press release about it.” That is not good lawmaking. Putting out a press release is not the same as scrutiny at a select committee. Again, it goes to this Government’s arrogance.

Plus the Minister said, “Well, there were 30 hours of the committee stage, and so these things would have been scrutinised.” But those members, on that side of the House, closed down the debate. They closed it down on the part of this bill when we would have discussed the schedules, and what was in those schedules? Just these farm plans that the Minister was talking about. Were we able to discuss that? No, not in any real way. Did we discuss the wildlife approvals? No. Did we discuss in any detail the huge changes to fisheries that came in after the select committee process and by Amendment Paper of the Government? No, we did not. We had articles this week by Andrea Vance about the huge loss that people are feeling about theMotiti decision and how that’s all been upended by changes that this Government made under stealth, not in good faith. That is so typical. Nothing is ever in good faith by this Government.

Then we also have this removed resource cap. That comes in after the select committee process. Plus, we had a decision made by the Environment Court about the Waikato Regional Council’s plan, and this plan would have been implementing some policy statements, the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management. It would have been doing better for our rivers and for that environment. The Environment Court decision came back. A couple of people with some phone numbers in their phones didn’t like it. So what did they do? They lobbied this Government to change the law. And what did this Government do? What a surprise. What a surprise. Just like they’ve done time and time again, they changed the law. They did it by Amendment Paper in this House where they said, “Oh, the court wants to do something. You know what? We think we’ll just overturn it. Oh, we won’t say we’re going to overturn it. We’ll just say, ‘we’re just pausing it for a few years.’” There was something that was going to decrease pollution, there was a plan that was going to do better for our environment, and what did this Government do? Well, just like they had done with the two previous amendments to the RMA and their fast-track legislation that they had to amend and then they’ve just had to amend it again, what did they do? They said, “Yes, we want more pollution.” It’s so typical. They don’t want to do anything about improving the environment. They don’t want to do anything about reducing climate change pollution. We’ve seen in these bills, “You can think of it as a positive effect, but at no other time can you consider it.”

Now, what is the future that we want on this side of the House? I think everybody here agrees that we want rivers that are swimmable. We want to reduce the pollution and we want to think of those things that are our commons, about how the public can benefit from them, rather than the private few that have the phone numbers of those members over there. We want to increase biodiversity; that is, we like Freddy the frog, we like the bats, and we need to do better for them. But on that side of the House, no, that’s not what they want. They’re happy for species to say goodbye to different species and that is a disgrace. That is what these bills are doing, and in no way should they be passed in this form. We need to make strong amendments, as I tabled, before the committee of the whole House stage.

Debate interrupted.