Spatial Planning Bill

I present a legislative statement on the Spatial Planning Bill.

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

Hon DAVID PARKER: Thank you, Madam Speaker. I move, That the Spatial Planning Bill be now read a third time.

The Spatial Planning Bill is an important part of the new RM system—resource management system—and it works in tandem with the Natural and Built Environment Act that the House has just passed. The Spatial Planning Bill has a single function: the creation and implementation of integrated regional spatial strategies.

Time and again, through the RM reform process, we’ve been told by developers, environmentalists, councils, that the absence of regional planning is a major problem in the current system. It was also a strong theme in submissions to the Environment Committee. Those who want more predictability and less uncertainty think we need better regional spatial plans to identify where trunk infrastructure and the like should go, what land should be next released for development, what areas are not suited for development. There’s a lot of time and money currently being wasted as wheels spin on these issues, and spatial planning at the regional level will be a big step in overcoming this and then help mobilise the necessary private and public sector investments to make these things happen—as cities develop, for example.

Regional strategies help achieve the purpose of the Natural and Built Environment Act (NBEA). They are prepared by the same regional planning committees that are established under the NBEA with the addition of a central government representative. Using the same committee was a recommendation of the select committee that has been adopted. The participation of a central government representative was at the request of councils who otherwise find it hard to pin down central government agencies.

Regional spatial strategies are required for each region, and they’ll set out a vision and objective for a region’s development over a 30-year period. They will focus on the big issues and opportunities facing the region. They’re essentially a large map. Regional spatial strategies become a vehicle for delivering infrastructure in the right places at the right time, providing clear investments to the private sector as well as local and central government agencies responsible for things like transport and housing. Obviously, if you identify or require transport corridors early for protection, you’ll get better outcomes.

A regional spatial strategy will also identify areas that are less amenable for development. These could be areas of significant biodiversity; could be highly productive land. It might be better to direct development in the future on areas of less productive land—the high-productive land should be protected from subdivision where possible—then it might be that there are areas that are at risk for natural hazards like sea level rise that can be identified so that you have fewer battles about those things at the local plan level.

A regional spatial strategy isn’t intended to be a document that sits on a shelf, but rather it’s a blueprint for action. Implementation agreements are provided for, and progress on action can be monitored and reported on annually. Plans under the NBEA will put the detailed policies and rules in place to implement the regional spatial strategies. The NBEA is, of course, making process improvements like designations being able to be delivered more efficiently.

In the end, quite complex mixes of housing infrastructure, corridors, schools, hospitals, commercial developments identified in regional spatial strategies will flow through to NBEA plans as permitted activities. This is one of the ways in which there will be fewer consents required under the new system—or fewer notified consents.

The legislation allows the regional planning committee to use different public and stakeholder engagement approaches for different issues, but the process must include some specified steps, including a hearing of submissions on a draft strategy. Enabling local democratic voice was a significant area that the select committee received submissions on and made suggestions which have been incorporated so that local aspirations via statements of community outcomes and statements of regional outcomes are incorporated—and regional planning committees are required to report on how they’ve taken these into account.

The central government appointee on the regional planning committee will be responsible for communicating central government priorities. These regional spatial strategies, then, you can see how they deliver an integrated approach, identifying the areas where future growth is likely to occur. On occasion, they might list a population trigger after which these things are released for development—and also identifying the areas where development ought not to occur. This will help infrastructure planning with the investment signals being clearer for those who have to provide the money for infrastructure and housing, for example.

Much of the discussion around spatial planning has focused on urban growth and the need to ensure integrated investment in housing, transport, other infrastructure, and, for example, the green spaces that you need around new urban areas. But spatial planning also has the potential to address other community needs—including, perhaps, how we deal with major tourism destinations to help them deliver sustainable tourism, and how we provide a future pathway for delivering resilient infrastructure in rural communities.

Spatial planning could also help deliver catchment, restoration, and collective efforts to improve our natural environment; could include landscape scale management programmes that involve multiple parties over a long period of time such as Predator Free or Wild + Pine programmes. An integrated approach can also be achieved for port development, integrated with inland ports, addressing shipping lanes, dredge dumping sites, coastal ports as well as inland ports—as I mentioned—and connecting rail and road infrastructure.

Various forms of spatial or strategic planning have been under way in parts of New Zealand and they have included urban growth partnerships and collaborative processes. In many cases, these have been undermined by not having a clear legislative basis, so agreements reached aren’t held to, aren’t implemented, and don’t link into implementation mechanisms such as transport planning and investment—and there are linkages in the Act through to those other transport planning legislation. Work currently under way on some of those spatial strategies can carry through into the regional spatial strategies under this Act.

We will continue on natural hazard planning work which we need as a country, and of course that can also feed into spatial strategies. Work by potential investors, infrastructure agencies, and community groups to identify what they want to achieve will be optimised by long-term spatial planning. We do need to get on with this bill without the delay that the members opposite now seem to want. There was a strong consensus in submissions to the select committee that spatial planning of this sort is needed. I find it unclear as to why members opposite want to repeal this legislation. It’s a recipe for uncertainty and extra cost.

Can I take the opportunity to thank everyone who’s been involved in what has been a big project—the resource management reform process—bringing these two bills to fruition? Can I add my thanks to others; to the Environment Committee members? They put an enormous amount of work in. Can I name, particularly, the Hon Eugenie Sage, whose competencies and hard work were evident; members of the Randerson panel; ministerial colleagues—this has been a cross-Government programme—including representatives of Treasury, transport, housing; and, of course, local government who implement most of the system have been an essential partner. Māori groups, environmental NGOs, industry and business groups, and the public have all contributed to this legislation.

Stuart Smith, in his last contribution, made the assertion that there’s been lots of Supplementary Order Papers to these pieces of legislation. He’s just wrong. The work was done at select committee. It is a matter of practice that, to aid the House, the changes made at select committee are shown in a tracked version of the bill which was in the House—and that was done here. Those amendments were 90 percent - plus done at select committee.

Can I, particularly, acknowledge the hard work and long hours put in my officials at Ministry for the Environment and at the Parliamentary Counsel Office? This has been a big piece of work and they’ve worked hard on it.

One of the criticisms that seems to be made here is it’s a long Act. I’ve noted previously that the legislation isn’t actually long compared with the status quo. But if you look at other areas of legislation, whether it’s the cornerstone legislation for tax or customs or the companies legislation in the Commerce Act, legislation does have to—or the Health Act or the Education Act; none of them are short. This is the cornerstone piece of legislation that affects both the environment and development, and obviously you have to do it thoroughly.

The other side moaned for decades about the Resource Management Act (RMA). They did nothing about it. They said they were going to repeal the RMA—never did it. Nine years, fiddled—made it worse. The ACT Party and the National Party could never deliver, and it does seem like there’s sort of a little bit of jealousy here that they can’t admit that we’ve delivered what they failed to achieve in over nine years.

They do have some issues that they have made clear in respect of Treaty-related clauses. It’s fine for them to differentiate them. Stuart Smith’s wrong about the uncertainty caused by a clause that refers to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi. Those same principles were previously referred to in the current legislative package. It’s just that the members of the—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): The member’s time—

Hon DAVID PARKER: Madam Speaker, I thought that there was a mistake made by cutting that short. Have I got that wrong? I commend the bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Well, I actually do want to hear what the Minister was saying. Was there an issue with the time? We’re not sure? OK—all right. Well, I was going to seek leave for the member to have a few more minutes.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Sorry, could the member please explain what his question was around the timing? You can stop the clock.

CHRIS BISHOP: Oh, sorry—well, point of order. Sorry, Madam Speaker. The Minister seemed to indicate that he thought he had more time than he had; there might’ve been a stuff-up with the clock. I was actually quite interested in what he was saying at the tail end of his speech. You seem to be shaking your head and saying no, he had the full 10. Well, I mean, I seek leave for the Minister to have two more minutes to finish his contribution.

Thank you for that. Before I put the leave, I just want to be very clear about what has happened here, because the Minister has raised an issue around the timing. I’m not across that, so just let me talk to the Clerk for a moment.

Look, thank you for your forbearance. I’ve checked. I understand, and I’m advised, that the timing that was allocated to the Minister was entirely appropriate. However, the member has asked for leave to—well, would the member like to put the leave?

Hon David Parker: Well, I think, appropriately, I have to seek—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Well, if the member wants to speak, would he like to take a point of order?

Point of order, Madam Speaker. I think I have to seek leave for myself; a member can’t seek it for another. I seek leave for a two-minute extension.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? There is none.

Hon DAVID PARKER: Thank you, Madam Speaker, and can I thank Chris Bishop for that suggestion. I was actually dealing with the issue of Māori rights and interests, and I can see from the debate around this Chamber that there is a legitimate debate around those issues. I would make the point in respect of Stuart Smith’s comments that the reference to the principles of the Treaty is very common across the legislation in this country, and the change relates to from “taking into account” to “giving effect to” the principles of the Treaty, not the reference to the principles of the Treaty. Members will probably be aware that there is quite a bit of jurisprudence as to what those principles are, and a concern that if you go directly to reference the Treaty itself rather than the principles, you actually create more legal uncertainty and outcomes that might be a surprise because of new jurisprudence.

In respect of some of the other issues that I know Chris Bishop has raised in earlier issues relating to the debate, I think there is room for argument around those issues, and I can see why parties might differentiate that and want to change some of those provisions, but the overall scheme of this new legislation, which moves from an effects-based regime to outcomes with regional spatial plans, with plans decreasing from over 100 to 16 Resource Management Act plans, and with a more coherent articulation of outcomes, including outcomes for development, I think there is wide societal agreement that it is appropriate. So it saddens me that the Opposition threaten to throw the baby out with the bathwater and say start again rather than just making minor changes that they could make if they were elected and were so minded.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you very much, and I thank the Minister for that useful contribution, which was slightly less vituperative than his contribution on the Natural and Built Environment Bill. Look, the National Party opposes this legislation but we do so with less hostility towards it than the Natural and Built Environment Bill.

For some of the reasons that the Minister has outlined, everyone’s in favour of fewer plans—there’s no doubt about that. We have too many, they’re too long, the process around changing them is too difficult, and they increase complexity. I think the Minister has talked publicly about—well, it might not have been the Minister but it was certainly someone from the Government side—various different housing rules being different in Lower Hutt compared to Upper Hutt. They are only 15 kilometres down the road as the crow flies—builders in both patches have to have different specifications. That sort of stuff’s nuts and we all want to reduce that and there’s not really a debate about that and nor is there a debate about doing spatial planning better. And actually, as the Minister himself said in his contribution, it happens now and essentially what’s happened is councils and communities have just got around the Resource Management Act and actually come up with some quite sophisticated structures with central government already. So I think of—

Hon David Parker: But they don’t stick; they’re forever re-litigated.

CHRIS BISHOP: Yeah, sure, sure. Yeah, I accept that. But the structures are there and so I think about the Waikato, for example, which I spent a bit of time in recently, a forward-leaning, pro-growth region and, frankly, some of the Wellington city councils—

Hon Louise Upston: The best in New Zealand

CHRIS BISHOP: Well, Louise Upston says the best in New Zealand. Certainly, in some respects they are and, frankly, the Wellington Regional Council, which seems to be going out of its way to stop housing being built anywhere in the Wellington region and involve itself in an endless debate about the fantasy of light rail, could adopt some of Waikato’s and Hamilton’s pro-growth mind-set. But Waikato is getting on with it and actually, to acknowledge the Government, some of that work was started by the Hon Phil Twyford when he was the Minister of Housing.

I think about some of what’s going on in Tauranga now, for example, where the commissioners are have upended a sort of anti-growth mind-set which has resulted in some of the most unaffordable housing prices in the developed world in Tauranga as Tauranga transitions from a small retirement community into what is a city, a big city and a growing city, in the heart of productive New Zealand, situated very, very close to Hamilton and Waikato and the so-called Golden Triangle.

So some of that stuff is happening already and so the question is how you give effect to that. And the question that this bill poses is: is the superstructure created by the new spatial planning regime that the right way to do that? We’re as yet unconvinced that that is. We worry about the over bureaucratisation of the process. There were legitimate concerns expressed by local government around the anti-democratic nature of some of this. Now, I am not someone for whom local democracy is the be all and end all of existence. There is clearly a balance and a tension between central government’s legitimate policy goals and local decision-making.

To take the most obvious example, central government spends $4 billion a year on housing subsidies, $4 billion: $2 billion in the accommodation supplement, $1.5 million and change on the income-related rent subsidy, and the rest of it on emergency housing—$4 billion a year is an astonishing sum of money. The reason central government has to spend all that money is in large part because of council planning rules that have stopped cities from growing. And we bear all the consequence of that in central government, and local government just, you know, says no to housing and so there’s clearly a legitimate role for central government to compel regions to grow.

Hon Phil Twyford: MDRS?

CHRIS BISHOP: Well, you know, the medium density residential standard is still there under National’s policy; it’s just more discretion and flexibility. But the point is they’ve got to go for growth—they have to go for growth, and our policy is the same as yours was, Mr Twyford, back in 2017 when the Government gave a Speech from the Throne saying the metropolitan urban limit would be smashed. And six years later, the metropolitan urban limit is still in place in Auckland. In fact, the future development zone in Auckland doubles down on the restrictive planning rules stopping Auckland from growing. And the future development zone—there’s an article just by Todd Niall in Stuff this morning in which a succession of councillors and planners in Auckland are boasting about the fact that Auckland will not grow as much. It’s just demented, actually, because Auckland house prices are some of the most unaffordable in the developed world and the idea that Auckland can just put a ring around itself and basically just hope for the best is, frankly delusional. So thank you for that interjection, Mr Twyford. It allowed me to have a bit of a vent.

The Minister mentioned natural hazard planning and he said we need to get on with it. Well, we agree. With respect, where’s the bill? Because we were told there’d be a trifecta of bills; we’re on to the second one now. Where’s the third bill? I mean, we’re up for that, on this side of the House and we do want to have a genuine bipartisan conversation about it, because it’s really important, as the Minister says, and the Minister seemed to be implying the National Party was opposed to it. We’re not. We want to talk about natural hazards and proper planning around that. We’re just waiting for the bill which, as yet, is yet to materialise and we want to see that. Maybe, if we have the privilege of forming a Government, we’ll get to have a look at where the work’s got to. So we wait and see for that.

Can I also just, in this quite potpourri contribution speech, acknowledge Eugenie Sage, who’s a departing MP, for her chairpersonship of the committee. She did do a good job, as the Minister says. We have our political differences, but she’s a very fair minded and genial person who’s made a big contribution to Parliament, and I, for one, will miss her.

On the Māori rights and interest thing, I think the point is not so much that the bill gives effect to the Treaty. The point, I think, is the change from “take account” to “give effect to”, and I do worry about that, because it sounds like a subtle change but I worry about what effect that will have on our planning regime.

I also worry about clause 7, “Iwi and hapū responsibilities in relation to te taiao”, because, as I got into the Minister in the committee stage, the subheading is “Iwi and hapū responsibilities”, but the actual clause says “All persons exercising powers and performing duties and functions … must recognise and provide for the responsibility and mana of each iwi and hapū”. So the clause is actually wider than that and I worry about that, from a planning point of view and a certainty point of view.

Just finally, as we close off these two bills, with respect to the Minister, it’s not jealousy that the Government is reforming the Resource Management Act (RMA) that National opposes it. National has always been up for RMA reform. In fact, we tried and the Minister knows it. We tried in Government. We never had the numbers, thanks to the Hon Peter Dunne, who should hang his head in shame over his behaviour on the RMA. But we never had the numbers and the Government now does have the numbers. We wrote to the Government—this is all on the record—saying that we were up for bipartisan RMA reform; this stuff is really important. And we never really had a response. So we are where we are and the Government has charged off in their own direction, and I feel confident in saying that there are Government members who are worried about aspects of this legislation and concerned about it.

I do think clause 3 of the Natural and Built Environment Bill, which is linked to the Spatial Planning Bill, will prove disastrous. We will have to change it, and much of where the Government has landed is wrong-headed. So it’s not that we oppose it for its own sake. It’s not just party politics for the sake of it. I am really—and we are really—concerned about where this is going. The Government has decided to pass it through before the election, while they have the numbers—we know that—and maybe things will be different after 14 October; maybe they won’t. But all we can do before the bills before the Parliament right now is just put on the record our opposition and our intentions, and we’re being completely up front and transparent around that.

We oppose the bills. We do think they should be off the statute book. We are up for RMA reform and, as I think have indicated, we are up for regional spatial planning. There are some really good things in this bill. There are some sensible things in this bill. Maybe some of them will carry over to the new regime when the time comes, but for now, we oppose.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, for the opportunity to speak on this bill, the Spatial Planning Bill. As we discussed in the committee stage, it’s not the “Strategic Planning Bill”, but the spatial plans do have to be strategic.

It’s a really good bill, and it’s a really important thing that we do by making these statutory spatial plans at the regional level. As the Minister for the Environment just mentioned, there are a lot of spatial plans that have already been developed around New Zealand. Some of them are with central government and local government and mana whenua working together: some with different combinations, some focused on roads, some focused on housing, and some focused on both, but, certainly, none of them are focused on all the matters that are in clause 17 of the bill, which is “Contents of regional spatial strategies: key matters”.

But before I draw some attention to those key matters in clause 17—which, for me, is really the heart of the bill—of course I want to again reference the fact that the word “map” is now in the bill, and I say thank you to the select committee for that work. This is because, of course, when we’re thinking about these spatial plans and a lot of the layers of data that will be involved in them, they will need to have a visual component to them—in fact, I would say that that’s the main component to them for the users—to be able to see how these key matters play out by the people who are making this spatial strategy.

Some of those key matters include things like areas that are appropriate to be reserved for rural use because, for example, they contain highly productive land; areas in the coastal marine area that are appropriate for development or change in use; matters relating to infrastructure, including existing, planned, or potential infrastructure that is or may be required to meet current and future needs; opportunities to make better use of existing infrastructure—that’s something that’s often forgotten about. We have a lot of existing infrastructure that may be able to be used in a more effective way, and we shouldn’t just always be thinking about building new things.

Also, there is climate change mitigation, at clause 17(1)(ja): “matters relating to climate change mitigation, including—(i) indicative locations for infrastructure that is or may be required to support the production of renewable energy or other measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions:”. That is very specific and important for doing the energy transformation that we need to do in New Zealand by electrifying the country.

Also, at clause 17(1)(ja)(ii): “areas that are suitable for land use change that would support reductions in greenhouse gas emissions:”, and we’ve talked a lot today over the debates on the two bills about natural hazards, as well. Paragraph (jb) has “matters relating to risks arising from natural hazards and the effects of climate change, including—(i) areas that are or will be vulnerable to those risks:”. It’s very important that in the spatial strategies we’re identifying those areas that people shouldn’t be building new houses on, for instance.

I also want to note, going back to those spatial strategies or spatial plans that already exist, that they don’t have a legislative standing at the moment, so it’s been very difficult for—well, some of them have a little bit of legislative standing, but a lot of them don’t. So it’s been difficult for people doing their Resource Management Act plans to really make those spatial strategies inform those resource management plans. By having this Act work with the Natural and Built Environment Act, that relationship is clear, and that is very important.

We heard in the last speech there about “Where’s this other piece of legislation regarding the climate adaptation?”, and that is a difficult piece of legislation to do, because the idea or the intent of that is to deal with areas where people already have existing activities and there needs to be some change to those. Part of the problem or part of the complexity of that issue is, of course, the expense. It’s expensive to move and to change, and there are questions about who pays and how much.

Those are all difficult and important questions that do need to be answered, and, in my opinion, they need to be bipartisan as well. So James Shaw, the Minister of Climate Change, has just announced, I think, yesterday that he’s inviting the Environment Committee—a very good select committee, and we’ve heard about them a lot today—to look at that issue and report back, obviously, after the election.

I note also that the previous speaker mentioned the difference between “take into account” and “give effect to” when talking about the Treaty principles, and, in an unusual admission, I do agree with Chris Bishop on that point. It is an important change. It’s a big change to go from “take into account” to “give effect to”, and it’s done on purpose.

My last point I think I’ll make on this bill is the importance of the central government person or representative that is going to be on the planning committee. So when the planning committees are making the natural and built environment regulatory plans, they don’t have a central government person on them, but when they are making these spatial plans, they do have a central government person on them, and the point of that central government person is not to tell everybody what to do because they’re from central government, but to try and coordinate what is often a very siloed environment. I’ve been involved in many plans being made over the years, and often you’ll have very different voices from central government representing quite different ideas. So as to the idea that central government can be cajoled, they have a coherent message and can be clear about what plans are there for various different types of infrastructure—and by “infrastructure”, I of course do not just mean roads, but the schools, hospitals, and the stormwater that I was talking about earlier in the previous debate.

So, again, this is great to see this here at a third reading. Like the other speakers have also said, I do want to thank the select committee for their hard work on it and thank all of the officials and always, obviously, the Parliamentary Counsel Office but also the officials of the select committee as well. The select committee has spent a long time on these bills. It has listened to a lot of submissions and had a lot of to-ing and fro-ing with the advisers, and that meant that the clerks on the committee had a lot of work to do. They of course did a great job, and I’m very grateful for that work. I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Well, here we are on the Spatial Planning Bill, after the Natural and Built Environment Bill this morning and this afternoon.

It has been a big job actually listening to all the submissions—almost 3,000 submissions on both these bills—but it was really interesting when the submissions come through between both of the bills, the submissions were very intertwined, all of them, because actually that’s what the two bills do. They’re designed to work together, and it’s not surprising that most of the submitters chose to intertwine their submissions rather than do separate ones.

I would like to note that as a committee we were able to make changes to the bill. The officials were very willing and, as I said before, we didn’t get all the changes that we might have liked to have made, particularly with the other bill. But I think when it comes to this one, when I said before that the natural built environment and resource management planning is hard—and we know that there’s a third stream to this which is going to have to link in, in many ways. That’s actually going to be much harder because it’s going to be a huge disruption to the status quo for many people. I saw a presentation just recently around how difficult it would be and how many Acts it interacts with, and so if we think this part is hard, going forward into further parts is going to take a huge amount of thinking because it’s going to cause a lot of disruption to many people’s lives.

I think probably where a lot of the objections have come in around both of these bills is around the legal aspects of it. I’ve not got a background in resource consenting, but I know others have and there is quite a bit of concern from a number of people that there will be some legal challenges around this. Other people will have varying different views and they probably vary quite a bit as you work your way around the House. But I do think when it comes to long-term planning, it is important to put a strategy before the structure, and I think going from 100 plans to 16 plans has to be a good move. If we think about how our regional councils sit now, if we think about regional boundaries, if we have the opportunity as regions to look each other in the eye and do some face-to-face work, we can often come out with some good things.

Now, there’s a question around local voice and local council and local communities and how they might react to these regional planning committees, but the idea of regional plans in itself makes a huge amount of sense. And I think not just from a regional planning perspective but also from a series of connected maps, because no region is ever an island. If I look at an area like Taranaki, it’s quite a nice, compact little region where it’s very easy, with the maunga in the middle, to be able to interact. It’s not too far to drive. It’s much more simple than—and I know the Waikato region and all their good planning has been mentioned this afternoon. If I look at the Waikato region, it goes from up in the Coromandel up where Scott Simpson lives—which has largely been affected by cyclones over recent months—right down to Mokau, which is at the north end of Taranaki, and it fits all into the same regional council and there’s a huge amount of varying differences. So spatial planning for that one region in itself is going to take quite a lot of thought into how that works.

But then of course each region then links with other regions. And I take note of what Minister Rachel Brooking said before about the map, and we had lots of discussions at the Environment Committee about a map. I think that makes a huge amount of sense to start with a map, look what the area entails, and then have people identify opportunities within that map to show what they see is happening in their region. Because it doesn’t make any sense to do it bit by bit by bit. Because whatever we do for nature, nature always wins. Nature is hard. And in terms of planning, we saw the Hawke’s Bay floods, we saw pictures of where the historic wetlands were, and then we saw overlaid aerial photographs of where the water sat after the houses had been built. And then we wonder as human beings when we build in some places, without giving it too much thought, why things wash away when we have a cyclone. It’s not to point the finger at any particular person, and I’m sure there will be examples in the Auckland flooding, there will be examples in Tairāwhiti. There are things where we say, “Why did we do it like this?” And I think spatial planning really is one of those things that will give us the opportunity to look at what we have and do it differently in the future.

We also had, as a committee, the opportunity to work with the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment around planning where green spaces might have been, and we looked at how the water didn’t drain away in some of those places when we had copious amounts of rain. But also, some of the other things, when we look at the heating up and the climate change, that we can cool streets down quite effectively by having more trees than what we might have had in the past. And there’s some very good examples of streets where they’re not very far apart, particularly in warmer places, and we saw some examples in Australia where trees make such a huge difference. So it is really important that we think about—we see lots of current housing plans and pictures of sub developments where we just have house by house by house. So it gives us a very good opportunity to stand back and look more closely at where we put things.

It would have been easy, as a country, when we look at highly productive land to stand back and go, “Well, this would be the best place to put it; this place would be the best place to put it; and that place would be the best place to put it.” But now that we’re already moved as a population in time, there’s no way that you can actually then stand back and do that as simply as you could if you had a blank map. So we need to think quite carefully around that. But the climate adaptation bill is going to be a hard one to fit in, and it will take some spatial planning, it will take quite a bit of spatial planning to figure out if we’ve got to shift people from where they are now, shift activities from where they are now to where they need to go. And we’re going to have to have a jolly good look at each region and each spatial plan to figure out where and how and why we would be doing things. Because what we don’t want to do is make the same mistakes in the future.

There has been some concern around the people appointed to the regional planning committees and having one central government person. It has been explained to us that that would be a link back to the Government departments and to be able to make those connections with our Government departments in order to help the Spatial Planning Bill make the spatial planning committees do their work. I think it would be unfortunate if we did go to regional spatial planning and then had a central government overlay, which then goes back to the way Governments actually—and Governments of both colours do this. I know that councils and regional councils, in an endless process of planning and long-term planning—before you know it the central government changes the rules and you have another plan in place and another plan in place, and I dread to think how much as a country we would have spent over a long period of time on long-term planning, which actually doesn’t turn out to be long-term planning because someone else puts a new idea in the middle and before you know it things are rolling over.

And yes, we have to evolve, but we’ve spent a lot of money on planning over the years, and so if this—well this bill will pass today, if this does come into place, you know, National has signalled that we would be repealing and taking another look at this. But if this was to be in place, I would hope that it would last a lot longer than what the current situation is, because as a country we can’t afford to keep undoing and redoing and undoing and redoing all our plans. We have to actually think years ahead, put some longterm plans in place, and get on with it. So hopefully that’s what we can look forward to as we progress with more long-term planning.

I think it’s probably fair to say that it is the Natural and Built Environment Bill that is the harder one for National to accept. This one has some things in it that would need fixing, but we do believe in spatial planning. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Well, it’s good to follow Barbara Kuriger, an outstanding member of the Environment Committee. In the last term of Parliament, as Minister of Housing and Urban Development, I instigated and oversaw a series of regional planning initiatives also known as the urban growth partnerships, starting in the mighty Waikato, Wellington, Bay of Plenty, and the Auckland-Hamilton Corridor. The approach that we took was to get multiple councils: regional, city, district, together in the room. Mana whenua there right from the beginning, looking out over a 30 year horizon. Central government in the room with local government and iwi. High level spatial plans, maps, looking out into the future, taking into account growth projections for economic growth and population growth, dealing with climate adaptation, natural hazards, infrastructure—the network infrastructure, roads and water particularly, and the protection of ecological and cultural assets. It’s basically the approach that is reflected in the Spatial Planning Bill.

I saw the enthusiasm and commitment that all of those actors, local government particularly, brought to that enterprise. They were keen as to get in the room with all of the other players, to do spatial planning way beyond the governance boundaries of their councils, recognising that land markets, housing, the movement of people, transport take no account of those boundaries—they are a hindrance. There were two real standout performers—people have mentioned the Waikato councils, but also the Bay of Plenty were fantastic, and they demonstrated a willingness to work together, to think about long-term growth projections, to reform zoning in order to deliver more housing and more urban growth, and also to consider how to futureproof and modernise the transport networks to support the kind of growth they wanted.

This bill, the Spatial Planning Bill, enshrines that approach in law and puts it at the heart of the new resource management system. It’s an excellent approach. It’s long overdue. The regional spatial strategies that will be produced by the planning committees will inform and provide direction and context for the natural and built environment plans. I believe that these regional spatial strategies will significantly improve the environmental outcomes. They will give communities more of a say in the really important choices and challenges facing our regions. They will make it easier for our towns and cities to grow, particularly by identifying the important corridors for future growth, the early marking out of grids for roads and network infrastructure like water, and this will enable the supply of land and development opportunities that will make our urban land markets more competitive, something that has been sorely lacking under the existing planning system now for several decades. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Spatial planning is an important tool if it gives people, businesses, and communities information so they can plan where to build. The previous speaker, the Hon Phil Twyford, once had a good plan himself. That was to abolish Auckland’s metropolitan urban limit—what a fantastic idea. It was even included in the Speech from the Throne in 2017 because it would have liberated Aucklanders from the artificial constraint of being told where they are and are not allowed to build. But, like so many of Mr Twyford’s good ideas, unfortunately, it’s disappeared in a puff of smoke. But don’t worry, Mr Twyford, ACT might just bring that back.

Now, there is a problem to solve that spatial planning tries to solve. It should reduce the number of consents and the complexity of any planning or application process so that people who own land—private property owners or developers, whether they be property developers or asset infrastructure developers—can get on with building the things that we need to actually deliver social benefits. Even though engineers, like me, love watching bulldozers push dirt around, we love watching concrete get poured and buildings go up, actually, all of that infrastructure is for one specific purpose, and that is to deliver social outcomes.

What does this bill do? Well, it doesn’t make it easier to build. In fact, what we heard from the Minister for the Environment is that the plan will identify where future growth happens, and it will provide a triggering mechanism so that land will only be released for development—around existing urban areas, for example—when a trigger is hit under a regional or spatial plan. So instead of property owners deciding “I want to build something somewhere because it’s needed.”, they won’t.

This bill adds divisive co-governance to regional planning committees. A minimum of two out of six of the appointed, not elected—two out of six appointed or elected people on regional planning committees will have to be appointees representing iwi Māori. And you can’t vote these committees out, unlike now. If you’re unhappy with the plans the council makes and a community decides they’re not delivering for them, they can vote the council out—you’ll never be able to vote out these regional planning committees. If you think the regional planning committees are doing a bad job, just wait, because this bill also gives the Minister for the Environment, who will become the most powerful Minister in a future Government, the opportunity to tell these regional planning committees what they want them to do—absolutely removes democratic local control from the way communities have planned and decided the way they develop.

This bill also will allow these plans to limit how people use their land. For example, what we heard from officials, what we’ve heard today from Labour Party representatives, is that the bill will say where you are and are not allowed to develop. Now, they use the very important information around, say, where sea levels might rise, where there are coastal hazards, where there are flood zones, and where there are risks of slips or volcanoes or seismic risks. Of course a spatial plan needs to convey that information to people who are building or planning for the future. But colouring in the map in a way that sterilises potential resources, like quarry resources—sand, rock, and all kinds of minerals that planners today don’t know are there—is incredibly unhelpful.

What is much more helpful is if a regional spatial plan actually outlined places that are so special, that have such high environmental values, for example, that we would actually delineate them and say “No, there won’t be any building there.” But, of course, if they are on private property, that would actually require the Government to pony up with taxpayer funds if they are proposing to acquire somebody’s private property rights or take some of those property rights away by colouring in a map saying what they are and are not allowed to do. This Government doesn’t know about private property rights—they don’t understand what they mean. So, clearly, that’s probably why they’ve omitted mention of private property rights from this bill.

The Associate Minister for the Environment, the Hon Rachel Brooking, also mentioned how wonderful it would be to have one representative from central government sitting on a regional planning committee. Of course, there are so many parts of Government that want to build things and sometimes they don’t all talk to each other or the local council that does the planning. Well, can you imagine one representative of central government sitting on a planning committee and trying to work out where everything should go, like a game of Tetris, or like a teenager playing SimCity, a teenager obsessed with central planning and central control? Imagine the health department, the education department, road, rail, ports, airports, and council parks and recreation all having to tell this committee what they want to build and when it is going to be. It’s going to be one central government representative who’s going to help them coordinate it all—I mean, it’s fantastical. I’ve seen Parks and Recreation—it’s hilarious—but that’s not the prescription that New Zealand needs.

Now, what is the purpose of spatial plans? Well, to convey information to people who need it, so, when they go to build, they can take account of natural hazards. Or, of course, if a transport agency or a railway operator or a port or an airport wants to expand or build, people will know that when they go to build there—that airport, for example, have said, “We’re going to build a second runway. You need to know that planes might be flying over a house you build there.”—very, very, very useful.

But what this Government appears to assume is that by doing the spatial planning, that’s enough. They talk about how this planning process will enable infrastructure. Well, how is infrastructure enabled? An infrastructure operator, an asset owner, has to create an infrastructure delivery programme that says what they’re going to build, whether it’s four-lane roads, whether it’s ports, or whether it’s rail—whatever it is they want to build, it has to be on a programme held by that asset owner, that infrastructure owner. And while it might be on a programme so that they can accommodate future growth—whether it’s a whole lot of kids coming to live somewhere, so they need to build a new school, whatever it is—unless they have funding and financing locked in, unless they have a long-term horizon, none of this stuff can happen. This “spatial planning equals infrastructure” is a “magic happens” approach to solving some of New Zealand’s underlying problems, such as how do we deliver more service land at a more affordable price so that housing can be delivered more affordably to people who need it where and when they want to live.

That brings me to another problem with this bill. This bill, the Spatial Planning Bill, when passed, will, essentially, extinguish the opportunity for private developers to progress private plan changes that have delivered some of the best, highest-quality master-plan communities for people who want to live around New Zealand—outrageous. Telling people that you can’t plan and deliver fantastic communities, build town centres, or build public transport facilities because it’s not where a Minister or an unelected co-governance panel of planning tsars tell you you’re allowed to.

So what would be better than this? Well, you could say just about anything. But we do acknowledge there is an important role for spatial planning—it conveys information. But the bit that’s missing is the infrastructure funding and financing component. Now, here’s the tell: when this bill, one of three, was first proposed, it was called the Strategic Planning Bill. Maybe that’s the tell. Strategic planning involves working out the “where” on a map with the “how”, which is the infrastructure delivery programme. Again, far too complex for a Labour Government staffed by a cadre of inexperienced Ministers to ever hope to get their heads around.

But don’t worry, the ACT Party and our friends in the National Party are going to be able to restore the balance. We won’t just be colouring in the colouring-in book like Labour have. We’ve got plans to deliver infrastructure, to fund and finance it, and to reform resource management law in New Zealand in a way that upholds private property rights, guarantees customary rights to people who have them, and allows Kiwis to get on the building. [Holds up document] And it’s right here: ACT’s solutions for building New Zealand and conserving nature. People watching at home or listening on the radio can download it at ACT.org.nz. I highly recommend it. It’s a practical prescription for progress. That’s what New Zealanders are asking for as we go into this election in October 2023—they’re asking for practical solutions to problems. That’s what ACT is offering. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

E te Māngai o te Whare, tēnā koe. Thank you. I’m really pleased to take a call on the Spatial Planning Bill, and I think this bill has got huge potential to improve the way we plan in Aotearoa and the way we develop new urban areas, our towns expand, where we put infrastructure, how we look after nature, our rivers, and our coast, and how we respond to climate change, rising sea levels, and increased flood hazard events.

We are very fortunate that the Parliamentary Counsel Office is very skilled at drafting law in plain English. So this is a more manageable bill, as I’ve said before, than the Natural and Built Environment Bill, partly because it’s a lot shorter, but it’s also very easy to read. The purpose of it is to get these regional spatial strategies, which will have a life of planning for up to 30 years and longer, and to ensure that there’s more strategic direction to how we manage nature, and how we develop and how we use natural resources.

It is about being strategic and it is about integrating with the Natural and Built Environment Bill and the outcomes in that bill. It’s about having these strategies developed in a slightly different way from the way we’ve done planning to date in terms of having a very sort of staged process of everybody putting in submissions, going to a hearing, then potentially going to appeal after decisions have been released. There is a strong thrust in the legislation that the regional planning committees will run a really good and solid engagement process to really get the public’s ideas about how do they see the region developing, what are the areas of nature that really need to be protected, and how should we respond to things like rising seas.

So, as other members have noted, the fact is that we are now putting into law a requirement for spatial planning. Councils working together have endeavoured to do it, but they’ve had to develop their own governance arrangements. It has often relied on the initiatives and the personalities of particular councils, lucking on a good independent facilitator or chair. Now this bill is requiring it, except in the Chatham Islands, where it’s optional because of the size of that area. So I think and I hope that with regard to the practice that’s developed under the Resource Management Act regime, people can draw on what’s been best in that and put it into effect as the bill gets becomes law and is implemented.

One of the key changes, as the Hon Rachel Brooking has noted, is that there will have to be a central government representative on the committee that develops the spatial strategy. Now, ACT has thundered against that, and ACT’s comments fail to recognise that you have one person there, but you can’t have them making all the decisions just in the room. But they are the connector to ensure that if Waka Kotahi funding is needed for roads, there is a link-in with the planning that is happening around where the urban development and subdivision is to be, where we need new busways and that that’s integrated into that, new cycleways—that the funding then gets bid for in the Budget process, so you get an integration which is not always obvious to date.

The bill sets out the key outcomes for and contents of the strategies in clauses 16 and 17, the key matters that they have to deal with. There were quite a few changes that the select committee made here. There was a strong push by Horticulture New Zealand and others for stronger protection of highly productive land, and that is one of the changes that we made, because we do not want urban sprawl to compromise soils that are valuable for food growing. Sprawl, despite what the ACT Party says around plan changes, also leads to transport systems that are not nearly as efficient and are much more expensive and infrastructure that is more expensive. So taking that long-term view of 30 years or more, as councils do with their asset management plans, is about being strategic.

I guess I’m a little frustrated, because what I heard from the National Party was some very measured contributions, and I think Chris Bishop said National was opposed with less hostility to this than the Natural and Built Environment Bill—everyone is in favour of fewer plans. So it is a tragedy that the select committee process was not used by National to highlight the things that they saw as needing change in this bill, because everyone agrees about the need to plan well, and so there was the potential for there to be cross-party agreement on that. But, once again, there’s been a political position taken at the very outset which has prevented that.

Hon Gerry Brownlee: Oh, well, that’s unreasonable.

Hon EUGENIE SAGE: So—sorry, Mr Brownlee, I didn’t hear that.

Hon Gerry Brownlee: Yeah, it’s very unreasonable.

Hon EUGENIE SAGE: So we do want this to work well. I’m looking forward to the guidance that the Ministry for the Environment provides to the regional planning committees in terms of how to implement it but I would really encourage the public and others to actually read the bill, because it is very readable.

I guess the other thing is, in terms of the key matters that are to be included in these regional spatial strategies, it’s also areas of cultural heritage and areas with resources that are important to Māori. We haven’t had that in our planning law. This means that mahinga kai, for example, will get flagged and protected through the planning process. It’s taking planning to a new level, so I am very supportive of the bill and commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m delighted to stand, once again, to speak in the House on the Spatial Planning Bill. We worked through this bill concurrently alongside the previous bill we’ve mentioned today, the Natural and Built Environment Bill. It was an interesting process to do that, because I completely agree with the member the Hon Eugenie Sage; the difference in the two pieces of legislation are quite marked. This is a much simpler piece of legislation and, in fact, a piece of legislation that people across the country have been asking for.

I spend a lot of time with developers and builders etc.; of course, we have a family business doing so. One of the things that in the community of Tauranga, the Bay of Plenty, we worked across Government and across regionally to work with the UFTI group—the Urban Form Transport Infrastructure group. The biggest ask in that group was that the Government was at the table alongside the central and local councils.

That was really important that they were there, and this one of the things that this bill does. Essentially, it’s giving that long view of what a community or place-making should look like. It’s that up-to-30-years plan, and it’s important that we have this oversight. It’s about making the right decisions for our communities. It’s cutting back from about a hundred plans to about 16; that tells us, really simply, that we need to start thinking about our communities as not being discreet and individual, but also connected. I think this is a really useful piece of legislation.

Just before I take my seat, I do want to acknowledge the long—many long—hours that the select committee took, but also for our officials from the Ministry for the Environment, who worked weekends, who worked all sorts of hours to bring us really sound and good advice, and our clerk team, as well, who were there organising and orchestrating the constant movement that occurred; a tremendous effort. To the Hon Eugenie Sage and the Hon Rachel Brooking, as well as the Hon David Parker, this is a good piece of legislation that all three of you have shepherded through this House. I utterly commend it to the House.

The next call is a split call. I call on Tama Potaka for five minutes.

Thank you for this opportunity to speak to the Spatial Planning Bill at the third reading. As mentioned, National supports reform of the Resource Management Act (RMA) and endorses spatial planning as a concept, but respectfully opposes this very readable bill and also the legislative ram-raiding that has resulted in the bill accelerating through this House.

The bill continues to be negligent, with illusory and ill-defined commitments to Māori concepts: legislative chicanery at its finest. A proverbial Pied Piper of resource management has emerged and there is a clamouring of consultants, lawyers, academics, and potential committee members awaiting their hungry feast. I’ve previously socialised what I believe is the Government’s unreasonable stumble to maximise kāwanatanga, often uncosted at the expense of rangatiratanga and common sense. This bill does nothing to allay my concern.

Kāwanatanga takes over more here, except we call it “regional planning committees”. On a Treaty theme, can I refer to clause 5, which mirrors clause 4 of the Natural and Built Environment Bill. The bill doubles down on that powerful clause in reference to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and thanks to the Minister, who confirmed there is no intent to confuse those applicants and decision-makers who are affected by its provision. But the problem here that I respectfully signal again is that the interpretation of Treaty principles have often generated more hope and a lot more dissatisfaction. The Ngāi Tai ki Tāmaki Tribal Trust and Department of Conservation decision at the Supreme Court reinforces this observation: lots of resource, years of effort, a major judicial decision, and no genuine partnership between the Crown and Ngāi Tai. Kakī hōhonu; pāpaku uaua, e hoa. [Deep throat; shallow muscles.] 

A Treaty reference is useful when it results in action, and I’m sceptical about how regional planning committees, in some regions, will genuinely accommodate and deliver on the diverse aspirations of iwi and Māori outside tribal narratives, place names, and some tree-planting programmes for planning purposes. The regional planning committees, set out in this bill, comprising individuals that are appointed, not elected, appear to just be another layer of bureaucracy. It will have the effect of convoluting planning and decision-making and compromising rangatiratanga further, because there are not enough seats for all the iwi and Māori organisations that might wish to be on them. The democratic principle of one person, one vote—which we heartily agree with—is gone; gone by lunchtime, and further shadowed by appointing more and more bureaucrats to join more and more and more committees and make more and more decisions. Who’s going to pay for them? Nowhere have I heard what the actual costs for these kumu on more seats in the corridor of decision-making actually constitute.

As drafted, these planning committees have more than a symbolic and cursory function. Through my uneducated and thick lens, they look like they’re overtaking the responsibilities of councils—who should be really delivering on these issues? They seem under-democratic, time-consuming, faceless, and unreflective of communities of interest. Hamilton City Council—which, by the way, sports three oxen, two pūkeko, and the Waikato River on its coat of arms—opined in their submission that their own decision-making process will be severely compromised with the current drafting. Actually, what will our council do, David Bennett, if 10 waters, RMA reform, and other Government objectives are legislated? Hosting more world rugby finals and more darts nights is simply not enough to keep our mayor and councillors happy.

Hon David Bennett: Bring the V8s back.

TAMA POTAKA: That’s right, the V8s—that $40 million question. We’ve opined previously on section 7, which refers to mana, but we’re none the wiser about what mana means in this third reading. Honourable use of the terms, yes; unclear use, definitely. During a previous incarnation of this speaker, I spoke to the wisdoms of the wisdoms of that well-known Labour legislator Geoffrey Palmer, former Prime Minister, and his concern with our law being too fast. Sir Geoffrey Palmer referred to New Zealand lacking the checks to prevent constitutional slippage—slippage and ambiguity is the hallmark of this triplicate legislation.

If we can’t get these terms clear, like “kawa”, and “tikanga” and “mana”, how do we expect the Māori gold and pounamu miners, the Māori corporate dairy farmers, and the Māori aquaculture specialists to actually get things done and get the country back on track? If we can’t get those terms clear, how do we expect to rely on the reliable, independent bench to actually get our country moving? I don’t know; I don’t know, Mr Smith. But at the moment, what I’m looking at is a series of terms, a series of planning committees, a series of concepts and terminology that have been rushed through a process that’s determined to fail—

Angie Warren-Clark: Five years!

TAMA POTAKA: That’s what I see. Five years. And with that, Madam Speaker, I’ll take alight and sit. Kia ora.

It gives me great pleasure to rise in support of the Spatial Planning Bill, although my credulity has been stretched listening to some of the speakers earlier—not from this side of the House, I hasten to add. I was really making reference, as one would understand, to the other side of the House. I would really refer to the previous speaker, Tama Potaka, who referred to his “uneducated lens”, and that pretty much sums it up. When we compare the input of the Hon Rachel Brooking, who has had in excess of 20 years as a resource management lawyer, and the many, many years this legislation has been in the creation.

I do want to acknowledge and thank the extremely hard-working Environment Committee. I am not a part of that august committee, but I have had the great privilege of sitting on it as a substitute member of Parliament and to acknowledge the hard work of the Hon Eugenie Sage and, of course, the Minister, described as “inexperienced” by Simon Court, the Hon David Parker, elected in 2002 and a Minister for two parliamentary terms, as well as being our Attorney-General. “Inexperienced”—interesting!

This bill is going to tackle problems, such as lengthy delays in consenting development applications, high consenting costs—even those for relatively straightforward development plans—inconsistent and poorly written district plans, a lack of national direction and guidance to councils, and patchy, inconsistent, and ineffective environmental protection across the country.

This bill will allow for planning for positive outcomes. It will condense 100 district plans into 16 regional plans. It will allow new standardised conditions with fewer bespoke consents. Stronger, more consistent national direction is something that developers across the country have been pleading for for many years, and that is why I would like to commend this bill to the House.

It’s a pleasure to take a short call on the third reading of the Spatial Planning Bill. The Spatial Planning Bill has a single function, and that’s the creation and implementation of regional spatial strategies. This will do a few things, including national consistency across key aspects of all those strategies.

I’d just like to touch on the regional spatial strategies. They will help achieve the purpose of the Natural and Built Environment Bill, which is intertwined. And while the Spatial Planning Bill is a separate and new part of the resource management system, it’s intrinsically linked to the Natural and Built Environment Bill. And as the Minister David Parker said in his opening remarks, regional spatial strategies will become a vehicle for the delivery of infrastructure in the right places and at the right time. These are needed to provide a clear direction to the private sector as well as local government and central government agencies like those responsible for transport and housing.

The regional spatial strategy will be unique to the region. I’ve subbed in on the Environment Committee on a number of occasions when this bill was at the committee stage and there were some good submissions, particularly around light pollution around the Tekapō area. Those of you who have been down to that fantastic part of the country will be aware that Tekapō and the surrounding areas are a light pollution - free zone which lies below one of the largest international dark-sky reserves in the world, only one of four such reserves in the world. So whether it’s areas that should be protected from light pollution or areas with significant biodiversity or productive land or even the risk of sea level rise, this bill protects those areas well into the future. So it’s a good bill, a pragmatic bill, and I commend it to the house.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It is a great pleasure to speak on the Spatial Planning Bill. I want to take up a couple of points that were just raised by Dan Rosewarne, the list member from Waimakariri, right on the southern border of my electorate. It’s only a 3½ hour drive from my house to that end of the electorate, and I’m not at the top of my own.

I take his point about dark sky reserves and spatial planning. Actually, Kaikōura is seeking a dark sky reserve because the Hutton’s shearwater doesn’t like lights at night and they fly into them and it causes all sorts of problems. All of those things were never thought of, of course, when lights or street lights were put in—and still not even thought about today. KiwiRail has put in some lights that are quite disruptive to the Hutton’s shearwater. They didn’t do this deliberately of course; it’s just that no one knows unless they’re told, do they? The Hutton’s shearwater only need them at a certain time of the year when they try to leave after breeding and their chicks have fledged. They head off out to sea. And that is the point, I guess, of spatial planning—to get those things right at the beginning. But, unfortunately, things change over time and people aren’t aware of those things initially.

I think one of the great examples of spatial planning gone wrong is actually what happened with the red zones in Christchurch, where land was built on that probably never should have been, and, in fact, developers often pestered the council when the council really didn’t want them to be built there. But the legal mechanisms to stop that were not available to them and we ended up with whole lot of housing and we know what happened in that area when the earthquake struck.

In my own electorate, we had similar issues with people under terraces and banks where the ground opened up, rocks came down, and those houses were then deemed to be uninhabitable even though they weren’t damaged. So getting the spatial planning aspect of our Resource Management Act type of legislation is absolutely essential. However, it’s not that simple, and I think while we don’t violently disagree with this bill, we’re not very happy. Of course, as you’ve all heard on the previous bill, the Natural and Built Environment bill, they do go together and we do have to have spatial planning legislation. But there are concepts in there, as my learned friend Tama Potaka alluded to in a far more learned way than I could appreciate, about the different terms used in both of those bills and that they are not actually clear at all and open us up for, perhaps, what could be endless litigation.

I think we have to be careful when we put words into legislation that it’s actually the words that are needed to make the legislation and get the outcomes that we need, not just paying lip service to them by adding them in. Now, an adaptation bill will come but spatial planning will be a part of that. We’ve got areas in New Zealand that are susceptible to sea-level rise or in my case in my electorate actually in most of the Kaikōura Coast, went up recently, although some small parts of it went down.

We have the oldest site of known human habitation in New Zealand on the Wairau Bar—1280 AD, it’s estimated, for the remains that were found on the Wairau Bar. That bar is a gravel bar with fish traps that were circular, and at high tide the water and the fish would flow and they close off the traps and then the tide would go out, and they’d go and catch the fish. Those traps are above sea level today, or round about the level that they could have been useful 800-odd years ago. So we are in a situation where we don’t know exactly what’s happening in New Zealand, with such a dynamic coastline because of the tectonic forces that are at play there.

So exactly how we deal with those particular issues—we won’t solve them all. We will find out that areas that we didn’t think were susceptible to sea-level rise will be because of earthquakes, or those that we think that will, might not be because the earthquakes may lift that land up. We certainly know that that the Hikurangi subduction zone is likely to go at any point and there’s potentially a magnitude 9 earthquake along that point, and it will push the land up because it’s been dragged down at the moment. So we know that the sea level will change, but this piece of legislation doesn’t necessarily make that a better situation.

The regional planning committees—I think that’s one of the real bones of contention that we have on the National Party, and we do stand for one person, one vote. We believe that all those people that represent us have to answer to us—that is, the ratepayers and the voters in New Zealand. There is a move to lower the voting age to 16. Well, that’s going to be of little used to the 16-year-olds when they don’t have the vote for the people on those planning committees that will have an effect on their lives and the environment that they live in, and they’re going to be living in that environment for much longer than any of us in this House. So what’s the point of having regional planning committees with appointments that are not voted on? That does not stand up to the test of democracy We have to remember that going back for decades, over 100 years, people have fought and died for the right to protect our democracy, for freedom of speech, for freedom of expression, and for the right to vote—one person, one vote.

These planning committees do not meet that test. Why should we accept that? There may be a good rationale in the mind of the person who put this forward, but it does not mean the one person, one vote principle, the level of democracy that we have all benefited from. And while people might argue, and they often do, about members of Parliament and their councillors as to how good they are or not, they have an opportunity to make a decision to get rid of us or support us, and that’s coming up on 14 October. We know we’re all looking forward to that in this House. Yes, Shanan, I’m looking forward to it too, and we just wonder how many people are going to be back here. I’m certainly looking forward to 14 October.

But when are the planning committees going to stand up for their opportunity? That is the ultimate test. We get the ultimate in a performance review every three years. We’re not getting that with these planning committees. We have to sit up for that test, and so we should. I think every one of us in this House accepts that test. That’s what we come here for. So why should we put in place a piece of legislation taking away the right for New Zealanders to judge the people that make the decisions on their behalf?

So I think that’s a really poor part of this legislation and that is one of the reasons why we oppose this bill. As I said, it’s not as bad as the Natural and Built Environment Bill, but it is bad. That said, I would like to acknowledge, as I did on the previous bill, the Hon Eugenie Sage, who chaired that select committee and has done a fantastic job. I thank the permanent members on the select committee for the work that they did. I came and went on that select committee. I had little to do with the Spatial Planning Bill, but I do accept and respect the work that the committee members did. I’d also like to thank all the submitters that gave up their time to come along and submit on this very important bill. So while this bill is a good attempt, I do not support it.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. As the final speaker for the Government on this side of the House, I support the Spatial Planning Bill in the third reading. I want to thank the fabulous contributions, particularly on this side of the House. I want to thank all the select committee members, the officials, and especially acknowledge the chair Eugenie Sage. On that note, I commend this bill to the House.