Resource Management (Duration of Consents) Amendment Bill

on behalf of the Minister responsible for RMA Reform: It gives me unexpected pleasure to be able to—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O’Connor): That is not an acceptable way of actually getting the attention.

Hon ANDREW HOGGARD: I move, That the Resource Management (Duration of Consents) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

It gives me unexpected pleasure to be able to start the speaking for this. Look, this bill is a very urgent, time-critical measure to support businesses and communities while we transition to a new, modern resource management system. The new system will deliver a more efficient consenting process. Until then, this bill provides certainty and avoids unnecessary cost for consent holders.

The bill makes two key changes. First, it extends resource consents set to expire before the new system is in place. Second, it reinstates and extends recently expired consents where a replacement application has already been lodged. This bill extends these consents until December 2027, aligning with the transition provisions for the new resource management legislation.

We’ve heard some talk around what is the proof. I have visited many farmers up and down this country over the last year and a bit. As Simon Court mentioned, myself and David Seymour visited with the Clarks. But it wasn’t just the Clarks I’ve visited. There have been numerous farmers who are under absolute stress and pressure—sitting around people’s kitchen tables with them nearly in tears over the cost that they’re expected to somehow manage to pay. We’re talking about, in some cases, over $200,000 for lawyers, for ecologists, for planners, for all of this sort of stuff to carry on farming. These are not intensive farming operations; these are often some of our most iconic extensive farming operations. I recall one in Ashburton Lakes.

Hon Damien O’Connor: Rubbish.

Hon ANDREW HOGGARD: Well, if you got off your motorbike and actually stopped occasionally, you might talk to some of these people. Ashburton Lakes, the farms I visited there—very extensive properties. They are facing massive costs in terms of being able to re-consent their farms. They have a challenge where they’re expected to somehow reduce water that is coming out of the hills at 0.3 parts per million of nitrogen down to 1.6. As it goes through their farms, it’s going down to 0.22. These are very, very extensive operations, the stuff you see in Country Calendar. These people are in absolute despair over the cost that they are facing. How on earth can they get the money off their bank manager to pay for this when, in fact, this adds nothing to their profitability?

Also, another farmer, previous winner of the Balanced Farm Environment Awards, is going through exactly the same process—again, the costs potentially in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is what we’re trying to avoid. As Simon said, these are “zombie laws” and these farmers are facing having to go through this incredibly expensive process, but for what, when they won’t need to do this in the new system, most likely?

This is why it is so important to give these farmers and people all up and down this country who do stuff some certainty about—they don’t need to waste money on a process that isn’t going to be around, and they can just get on with producing stuff for this country and making us move forward. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Look, I just want to pick up on a few things that that Minister said—noting, of course, that the many questions I asked in my first speech were not given any answer to in the Minister’s second reading speech. But I will comment on the “zombie laws”—that, somehow, the Resource Management Act is a zombie law, when it is a law that this Government brought back. There are many plans that many councils have been implementing for a long time that relate to these resource consents that Minister Hoggard was just talking about. Of course, that Minister—Minister Hoggard—has been very involved in changing aspects of the Resource Management Act to suit some of his constituents. Some of those changes have been made without advice, without regulatory impact statements, without some groups being able to submit on them.

This is consistent with that kind of lawmaking, and it is very poor lawmaking. But what he said—what I think is really interesting is we’re being told, “Oh, we need these transitional provisions, because the new system is going to be so different. It’s going to be so different that the farmers”—that that Minister was just talking about in terms of nitrate pollution—“are not going to have to worry any more.” He said, “most likely”. That is the quote: “most likely”. Of course, that Minister can provide no analysis on whether or not something is going to be most likely or not, and what it is that he is talking about—what are these consents—because there has been no analysis.

We see that this little “no, no, no report” from this Government was dated 23 October 2025. It seems that some of this legislation was rushed—I’d like to give the other Minister, Chris Bishop, the benefit of the doubt on that, but, given that it’s 25 October, it’s not that rushed. There was certainly time to consult with other parties. There was certainly time to do more analysis and talk about the types of consents that would apply here, but that has not happened, so we are going to have to spend some time traversing those issues when we get to the committee stage.

Going back to this, what Minister Hoggard says is “most likely”. This is the real concern, now, that I have about this piece of legislation, and I’ve had no comfort for my concern from the speeches of the Government members, whereby many of them have referred to a man called John—

Grant McCallum: David.

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: David Clark, rather. I have to say I know many David Clarks, but the point here is that the farmers are most likely not going to need consents under the new regime. That is not something that we’ve heard loudly from the Ministers who have been developing their new regime, which, they’ve said, in all their press releases, is going to improve the environment. So what is it: are we improving the environment or not? That is my very simple question that I would like the Minister to address in his contributions.

Now, we also heard from Minister Chris Bishop when he was doing the all-stages urgency motion that it was outrageous that Sir Geoffrey Palmer could condemn this Government for using urgency an awful lot. I want to point out to that Minister and anyone who happens to be listening that what this Government is doing is using all-stages urgency. That is, we walk up to this Table to get the bill when the Minister starts speaking on it, we get the other documents that have not been made available on the internet, and then we have to go through reading after reading, committee stage, and then the third reading all at once. That is a very bad way to make law, whatever you think of the policy.

That is a huge problem with this bill. We do not know exactly what it will mean, because there has not been the analysis. We are not getting any clues from the other side of the House, except that they seem to think that it will “most likely” mean that people who currently need resource consents will not need them in the future as it relates to pollution of our waterways. That is the specific conversation that we’ve been listening to—

Grant McCallum: They’ll move into the new Act—you know that.

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: Will there be environmental bottom lines in the new legislation? We’ve been told that there are going to be environmental bottom lines. Surely, then, if there is going to be pollution to waterways, that will still need some sort of consenting—so there is not the need for this transitional provision, and this bill that is coming before we’ve even discussed the new pieces of legislation. It’s very unusual to be talking about the transition provisions for an Act that Labour repealed, that this Government brought back, and now this Government says it’s going to repeal and replace with two other pieces of legislation, but we haven’t debated those two other pieces of legislation yet. They have not even been sent to select committee; they were only made available this afternoon, but, somehow, we are talking about the transitional provisions of them already. It seems a very strange way to be doing things.

Of course, I don’t know yet about the ability of councils to review these resource consents that will be rolled over. Again, we need to know how big some of these consents are, because whilst the members on the other side talk about a “family farmer”—I think it’s what they were talking about—who is having some expense with the Resource Management Act, what about the big irrigators? What about the factories that still—some of them—discharge into rivers? What about our waste-water treatment plants that often have discharges into water bodies, as well? These are all important factors, and they do go to human health. We know that our rivers are polluted.

In the 2017 election, Labour campaigned very strongly on the ability to swim in rivers again, because, unfortunately, one of the problems with the Resource Management Act and why it hasn’t worked is that those rivers have got more polluted, and that is a great stain on our country and all of us here. The last Government tried to address that with the essential freshwater package that included regulations and national direction, both in policy statement and environmental standards relating to water quality. The regional plans were to implement this, but what happened the day before the Otago Regional Council was going to implement it is that this Government, by an amendment at committee stage, put a stop to it. Then, this Government, again, in an amendment to a different bill, put a stop to any councils getting ahead on any plans.

Then we have some muddled statements about what might happen to regional councils and the roles of mayors in them. But all of this goes back to the point that this Government does not have any aim of rivers that we can swim in. What this Government is interested in is enabling further pollution of those rivers so not only are they not swimmable but they will be unusable for many other uses. We know that this is a resource that people are interested in, because you can choose: are you going to use your water to pollute or are you going to use it to provide for mahinga kai?

Grant McCallum: Solutions are on the table—you know that.

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: What is it that you’re going to do? Is it going to be used for a town drinking supply?

These are all arguments which mean that the resource consents around water, whilst they have a limit of being able to go for 35 years, many of them do not, because of all the uncertainty in everything that goes into water. We know that with a changing climate, this only gets more pertinent. I do not understand why it is that we want to roll over these issues if, as Grant McCallum was just saying on the other side, that Government does care about the quality of our water.

It was very naive, actually—very naive. I really thought that Governments of any stripe had a duty of care to the environment. I think what is most disappointing about this bill is it can be easy—and I get it, because I see this area around us, and there’s lots of papers and artificial lights—to forget about the actual outcomes on the ground and the impact that decisions like this have on those places and those people. Particularly, having had some time as a regional councillor on Environment Canterbury, I know from firsthand experience that it’s those places like that tiny remaining dry land patch of vegetation and kōwhai that’s littered with indigenous species, that no one actually might know was that important. It’s processes like consent renewals that allow council or community or the landowners that are involved to actually understand the values that they hold on their own properties or in their communities. It’s those little patches of wetland where, yes, we absolutely have issues with identifying and delineating what can be grazed or not grazed and everything like that, but it’s blanket bills like this that make them valueless. It means, on the ground, the message is that these places don’t have value and that, actually, you can do whatever you need to get rid of them for a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and it’s that constant degradation and decline that is exactly how we’ve gotten into the situation where we have such isolated remnant pockets of biodiversity instead of mountains to sea corridors and where we have water quality that is so pervasively polluted across every environment that we have. Those are the realities that this bill completely misunderstands and just doesn’t seem to have any awareness of.

I really want Kiwis to know that this bill is so clearly demonstrating what the Government’s priorities are. Really, that’s about this big drum-up and this constant war on farming and all this kind of rhetoric to avoid any form of environmental improvement, no matter how small. A lot of these improvements that would have materialised if these consents were actually going through the processes that they would have, where they were needing to be renewed, and new planning instruments, where the community has actually deliberated over months, over years, and sometimes decades to get better environmental improvements, better environmental laws, and better environmental standards and practices—they just suddenly don’t apply, and we’re going to just kick it down the road for another half decade. In the meantime, things will get worse. We will be losing more of these remnant patches of biodiversity, and our water quality will be declining, because there’s not that direction and drive to actually improve the environment, and the actual direction and drive, which would mean the very investment in innovation and improvement that we so desperately need in this country, is not there. It’s about more delay and more kicking the can down the road, and that is hugely disappointing.

I wanted also to pick up on the realities of just some of the environmental aspects which will be affected by this bill being rushed through under urgency tonight. We have a network of over a thousand groundwater monitoring sites, and we know that 12 percent of those failed to meet the New Zealand drinking water standard for nitrates on at least one occasion over the last five years. Now, what that tells us is that these issues are pervasive, and we actually need tangible solutions to address them. We also know that over 45 percent of our nation’s total river length was not suitable for swimming between 2016 and 2020. You hear these stats, and it’s like, “Oh, yeah”, but we know, every summer, that the places where we used to swim and enjoy safely—people can’t take their families there anymore, and they don’t, and it’s really, really sad. It’s exactly because of bills like this, which is how we’ve got there. I think the disappointing thing is this next phase of these resource management changes, and these two new bills, in theory, could change that. Yet, here, we’re locking in these consents again—blanket extensions out to 2027 or even, like the press release says, “Based on current expectations, this means most consents will be extended to 2031.” Where is that going to get the country? It’s going to take us backwards.

It’s really extremely disappointing, particularly as someone who has been involved in this area for a long time and has seen a whole heap of delay. I’ll tell you what, as well: there’s a lot of fantastic landowners, particularly farmers, who are doing the right thing, and I want to acknowledge them, and I want to acknowledge the councils, particularly the council staff, who know their communities and their environments like the back of their hand. They know the disappointing and hugely damaging impact that this will have. We’re talking about consents that could be coming up for renewal that haven’t had, ever, environmental standards or conditions put on them, and now we’re pushing it out another half decade. That is completely unacceptable. I think what this Government has really misread with this is that Kiwis care, especially going into summer, when we are so much more connected to our natural environment, we’re out there with our picnics, we’re camping, we’re swimming, and we’re fishing, much more than earlier in the year. I hope Kiwis understand what this Government is doing tonight and are absolutely preparing themselves to send a very clear message that this is not the country that they want for our future, because it’s exactly what the Green Party feels about this.

I think the really unjust part of this, as well, is the fact that particularly iwi and hapū are often invited in when these consent renewals come up—these aren’t necessarily just your minor consents; these are serious consents with actual implications—and they will no longer be able to feed into this reconsenting process. Just like many other things that this Government are doing, it just means less community voice and less great outcomes. When it comes to the environment, that’s just particularly disappointing. It’s taking decision-making power away from communities when they’ve spent so much time and so much money on these. The Government go on about how they hate wasteful spending and all that, and yet they’re scrapping all the things that communities have put in place. This was the outcome of it; the plans and the rules and the processes were the outcome of it. This is terrible. We don’t like it.

Well, there’s been quite a lot of, I would say, unwarranted anger, particularly from the member Lan Pham, who just resumed her seat. The reality is that in any new system, there has to be a transition. What we’re doing is going from the Resource Management Act (RMA), which has been the law of the land since 1991, through to a new system. Clearly, that is going to be challenging. There’s no way of sugar-coating that. We have an existing regime, and there’s going to be a new regime, and the new regime will be better, but in the meantime, there’s going to be quite a process. It’s going to result in the fundamental change to plans, to national direction, to district plans, to environmental plans—we’re going to have spatial plans. There’s an enormous amount of work to do. Frankly, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, the bills we’ve just introduced are the start. It has been stressful enough getting the bills ready, but in the next three years there is an enormous amount of work to do.

In the meantime, as many of my colleagues have said, there’s a whole bunch of people out there saying, “Well, hang on, what does this all mean for me?” One thing Parliament can do in those circumstances is say, “You’re all good for the next two years”, which is what this bill does. There’s quite a lot of stuff from the other side about consents and the environment. We get all that and acknowledge concerns around that, and there’s an ability through the actual bills—the Planning Bill and the Natural Environment Bill—to have a debate about that and make sure the transition is effective and done in a smooth and sequenced way. We’re happy to have a debate about that, because it is difficult to get the exact sequence right and get the transitions right. We’re very happy to engage and have a debate about that, but in the meantime, as colleagues have said, there is a bunch of people who have applied for consent renewals and have had consents that have recently expired. Frankly, there’s a bunch of people being farted around by regional councils, who are putting them through hell.

Grant McCallum: Is that a technical term?

Hon CHRIS BISHOP: Well, it’s not a technical term, but it’s certainly accurate, and the Government does not wish that to happen.

It’s not a long list; it’s not a 50-year extension or out to 2030 or anything like that, as others have said. It’s a two-year consent extension for a narrow class of consents, and Rachel Brooking said before, “How many?” Well, the honest answer is that we don’t know, because, again, that’s part of the problem with the RMA: we don’t actually know, because there’s no centralised, accurate monitor or level of information around all this stuff. It’s all done at a devolved, regional level. That’s, again, part of the problem. In the new system, we’ll have a digital e-plan for the entire country and a digital back end, where everyone uses the same kinds of standards and the same technology to port into. We’re going to know far more in central government around what’s happening at a local level. Decisions will be made locally, but we’ll know far more in central government. That’s a good thing, but that’s all coming. That’s one of the reasons why we need to move to the new system. We don’t know exactly how many consents it’ll be. It’ll be, probably, a couple of thousand, roughly, I’m advised.

It’s a two-year extension, from now through to December 2027. Literally, that’s it—that’s all the bill does. Despite all the heat and noise, that’s it. It’s a two-year extension. It’s a five-clause bill. That’s all it is. It’s a temporary transitional measure as part of the Government’s resource management reforms. With that, I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to support the Resource Management (Duration of Consents) Amendment Bill. This is like putting the presents under the Christmas tree: we are setting up New Zealand with this new Resource Management Act (RMA) replacement legislation, but, first, we’ve got to put this in place. It’s a twoyear extension, out to 31 December 2027. It gives some certainty to people that are in the process under the old RMA that we know is broken, that this Government is going to fix up. We also know the costs to those people are overwhelming. Why go through a process when the Government is going to change the legislation, change the RMA for something better? I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you. I rise to oppose this bill, and it’s a pattern: it’s imposing things, without discussion, on local government.

I want to say a few things about e-plans and the Resource Management Act (RMA). Plenty of councils, including the Wellington City Council, already have an e-plan; this isn’t some brave new world that this Government’s bringing in. In fact, if this Government hadn’t wasted everybody’s time repealing the two bills that the last Government put in place, urban planning and environment, maybe they could have modified them, maybe we could have had some intelligent discussion with Local Government New Zealand, with Taituarā, with iwi. But, no, bang! Out of the blue—just how this Government wants to centralise decision making about resources.

One of the things that I would like to highlight in our opposition to this bill is the idea that consents would necessarily go for 35 years after the date the consent commenced. If that relates to water, some of our aquifers are changing very rapidly. Many of our awa are terribly over-allocated, and quite often that has not been allocated either on good environmental grounds or on what is the best and highest economic use. Is it going for dairying? Is it going for manufacturing? Is it going for orchards? Are they as efficient as they could be, or did they just happen to be the ones that got in first? I don’t agree with just rolling over for 35 years. I understand that there has to be some transition.

I would like to say that in the new or maybe rehashed resource management planning—that, as I say, the previous Government actually made some significant improvements to the RMA. But oh no! You couldn’t say anything that the previous Government had done was OK. You just had to throw that out and bring the changes in rather than working with the people that are most concerned. Going from—there are possibly too many plans, but going to 17 plans is going to be quite hard for local councils and local people, local iwi, local environmental groups to deal with. For example, in the Wairarapa, the reforms mean going from a perfectly good combined plan—so you’ve got three councils covering a huge geographic area, but not many people. The Wairarapa combined district plan was three councils working together. Now what’s going to happen? It’s going to be thrown out in favour of a whole-of-Wellington-region plan. That will mean that Mayors Little, Baker, Zee, and Laban will have more power over what happens in the Wairarapa than Mayors Cretney, Johnson, and Wilde. That is not fair on the Wairarapa people.

This very short notice bill, with its reinstatements and extensions, is bad lawmaking. It’s brought in under urgency—again—without offering the opportunity for people to say, “Should it be a 15 years extension? Should it be 35 years extension?” Why are you so scared of listening to what people think? Is it because the last few bills you put out have had anywhere between 80 percent against them and 95 percent against them in the submissions? I don’t think that this is going to help our resource management one little bit. The Green Party opposes this rushed legislation.

Before I take the call, can I just remind the member not to bring the Speaker into your debate as much as you do.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I have a challenge for the members opposite who are wondering about the “why”—why we are doing this. I challenge them to go down and talk and meet with the farming communities and the farming families—for example, in Canterbury, who are stressed out in dealing with this expensive, elongated consenting process. They’ve got no idea where their future may lie. That is why we’re doing this. Go down and actually talk to them and see what they have to say. I commend this bill.

Madam Speaker, thank you, and I’d like to follow on from that speaker as to why this is happening. This is a desperate bill under urgency, which would suggest that perhaps it’s not the smartest piece of legislation and it may not be the most well-thought-through.

The reality is that this Government—the farmer’s Government, to refer to the previous member’s speech—has mucked around for over two years, or two years thereabouts, saying they’re going to promise Resource Management Act (RMA) reforms, and they’ve taken too long, and this piece of legislation is necessary because, yes, there are consents that are up for renewal under the normal process.

There’s no regulatory impact statement, there’s no select committee scrutiny, and indeed, as I read through this piece of legislation, it seems quite confusing—quite confusing. I’m not sure that the Minister has actually clarified anything in this area. I go to the Associate Minister of Agriculture, Mark Patterson, who got up and spoke about this and said that this is going to give farmers certainty. Well, it’s not, not at all, particularly if he misleads the House by saying that Clark’s farm is not intensive. It’s one of the best, I’d suggest, cropping farms that I have ever visited; highly intensive, probably—hopefully—profitable, although the industry is going through some challenges at the moment, and one that does require a consent. Now, I’m not aware of the details or the costs, other than in the area of mid-Canterbury where that farm is located, there are a number of environmental issues. Lake Hood is toxic or goes through periods of high toxicity, and people haven’t quite worked out why that is the case. If you go further down into South Canterbury, we have the Waimate water supply, which is toxic as well, and so people are scratching their heads.

The Associate Minister also misled the House in saying that the Ashburton Lakes were not affected by any level of intensification. I’ve been up there a number of times. Some of the properties have been through 10-year review. What has happened is some of the high country has been retired and the farmers have concentrated on the lower, flatter areas, and most of them are very good farmers, but they have intensified, and these are shallow lakes that, unfortunately, are seeing high levels—

Joseph Mooney: Point of order.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Just give me a chance. I’m not taking the point of order.

Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: These lakes are shallow, and the nitrate levels and some of the turbidity issues and that are increasing, and the council, because the lakes belong to everyone, is forced to take a look at this.

What is most important in this whole discussion and debate is that we are honest and we face up to the challenges that we have as a country. We hear from the Ministers and from the Government and coalition partners that they have resource management reform focused on property rights. While property rights are interesting, they are not just a piece of land. In fact, they are rights that accrue to each and every New Zealander, and so when we talk about protecting property rights, the members on that side of the House have to appreciate the fact that that is also protecting the rights of New Zealanders, not just those who are lucky enough to own land. While we have, of course, committed to reform of RMA—in fact, we had a process that, arguably, will probably mirror much of what the Government’s going to table in the next couple of days, from what we see—we have to acknowledge that if the Government’s reforms are focused on property rights, it’s going to create a lot of tension, a lot of debate, and a lot of dispute. If we think that it’s going to magically remove the costs of continuing to operate in an evolving environment, then we’re kidding ourselves.

I’d suggest that the council costs might be reduced temporarily, but the cost of lawyers is going to go up as we move through a judicial process to work out whose property rights are more important, a landowner’s or their adjoining neighbour or the wider public or the property rights that accrue to environmental protection or environmental integrity.

There’s a lot to work through, and what concerns me with this particular piece of legislation is it’s hastily put together, it’s not got any regulatory impact statement, it’s not had any proper assessment. I guarantee that there’ll be provisions in this bill that will be faulty. The absence of any proper select committee process, even if it had been a short one, means that we’ll pass a faulty piece of legislation that the Government will have to hastily change during or after it brings in its major reforms.

It is the reality, thankfully, that as time progresses, so too does knowledge. Our information and our analysis of some of the impacts of what we do as humans on the environment evolves. As we learn more, we must—we hope—implement better practice, and most farmers in this country have done so over the last 150 years. We were doing a lot of things even 20 years ago that we now consider abhorrent—bobby calves, cows’ tails. We’re working through a practice on tailing for lambs, protection of waterways, protection of biodiversity. All of these things now are more important, and successive Governments have altered legislation to take on board that knowledge. If we just bury our heads in the sand like a bunch of Neanderthals and think that we know it all now and what we do today, these consents, which is what we’re referring to in this piece of legislation, are appropriate for another 35 years; let’s just roll them over and not take on board or take into account the impacts—can I say that it is important that we take on board the knowledge that we have, and the assumption that just rolling over consents and moving into another regime of property rights or where property rights are paramount, I suggest, will result in a terrible outcome down the track. I am perhaps looking ahead, making some assumptions about the changes to the Resource Management Act that we’ll see, I’m not sure, maybe next year or not. But the rollover of these consents without any possible adjustment to take on board the impacts of what we’re doing is irresponsible—is irresponsible.

Some of these consents are going through a process of renewal. There’ll be quite a bit of money spent on them already—

Grant McCallum: Wasted.

Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: Not wasted at all. Say you’re in the Waimate area, where you get water from that area, you may be stuck—say, Glenavy. I was down there quite a bit, because that was where the outbreak of Mycoplasma bovis was. We moved to protect the people who were farming in Glenavy. The reality is that actually we have seen a lot of dairy investment, and that’s great. We’ve seen some impact on water quality to the point where people sourcing their water from the Waimate water supply are being advised not to drink it.

It is essential that we move as quickly as possible to adjust consents, and if there are any consents going through the process at the moment, just to roll them over and not take on board that wisdom is irresponsible. That’s why we have concerns about the passage of this legislation and that the direction of this Government is taking won’t offer certainty to farmers, because the reality of some of this we cannot ignore—we cannot ignore.

What we would like to do, and would have done through a select committee process, is make sure that the changes here are sustainable and enduring. This bill is a short-term, desperate piece of legislation under urgency that is not being scrutinised by this Parliament in the way that it should be. If farmers are thinking this offers certainty, then they should just take some careful advice from people around them, because there’s emerging knowledge and practice that must be adjusted to move into tomorrow’s world of sustainable farming to ensure that their investments are, indeed, protected.

Just before I take the next call, can I give some careful advice to the member who’s just resumed his seat about claims of members deliberately misleading the House. I draw your attention to Speaker’s ruling 47/4.

Hon Damien O’Connor: Point of order. Look, I appreciate the point you made. I didn’t say deliberately at all. I said it was misleading because it wasn’t actually true to facts, but I take your advice.

This bill is about supporting our farmers to farm and our growers to grow. Horticulture exports and red meat exports have hit record levels in Hawke’s Bay, and this happened through reducing bureaucracy, enabling our growers to grow, and enabling our farmers to farm. We need certainty for those consents for our growers, and that is what this bill is about. I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. From the heckles from members opposite, one would think that their view is that this is a transitional bill and a short-term bill and that therefore it is OK to pass it under all stages in urgency, with us not having seen the bill until it was almost meant to be debated at first reading. This is a second reading debate. We would generally be talking about what the submitters had said through a select committee process, but, of course, we’re here under urgency for all stages of this bill, and so we can’t really discuss what submitters have said.

This is a bill that isn’t going to a select committee process, not even a short one, and, as Sir Geoffrey Palmer has said quite recently, in fact, this is a pattern. This is a Government that is passing way too many bills in a way that circumvents public scrutiny. It is allowing the bills to skip multiple stages and public consultation, and I don’t really see the necessity for this level of secrecy with this bill—I mean, to the point that we didn’t even know what the bill was that we were going to be debating in the House today. The link to the departmental disclosure statement in the bill wasn’t even working until we started discussing or debating this bill in the House. This is incredibly shambolic. This is a shambolic Government—and I’ll get to that point in a minute—because they didn’t need to put in place this transitional bill in the first place.

This is bad lawmaking. It was very clear in the departmental disclosure statement, once we got hold of it, that the lack of analysis is because this is a rushed piece of legislation. Minister Bishop has said previously that the fact that the Government doesn’t know how many consents this will refer to is because of the lack of information that is available in the system, but the disclosure statement is very clear that there is no analysis on the size of the potential costs or benefits of this piece of legislation, and that’s because of the urgent time frame for preparing this legislation. It has been constrained, and broader analysis of this bill is therefore constrained, as well.

It’s just really shoddy lawmaking again from this Government, and the fact is that they had two years to actually come up with their resource management reform. The fact is that they repealed Labour’s Natural and Built Environment Act and Spatial Planning Act back in December 2023—a good two years ago—and they have spent that time up to now to come up with two separate bills of their own where, largely, the difference is their ideological emphasis on property rights. Because they’ve taken all that time to come up with this, now they have to push through this rushed piece of legislation in order to provide transition—

Hon Member: Rushed, or too much?

Hon PRIYANCA RADHAKRISHNAN: —and, as they say, some sort of certainty. Yes, it’s rushed, because you wasted all that time that you’ve had in Government, and therefore now you’re going to have to rush through with this piece of legislation.

As environmental NGOs have pointed out, there are concerns. There are concerns when it comes to having blanket consent extensions, and so as much as members opposite want to say until they’re blue in the face that there is really nothing to see here, that it is just short term, that it is just transitional, and that it is just about certainty, it is not, because having blanket consent extensions could raise a number of issues. It could pose serious risks to water quality, to biodiversity, and to marine biodiversity.

What they’re really doing is locking in outdated conditions where they have the opportunity to make progressive change, but of course they have chosen not to do that. By putting in place blanket extensions, what they are doing is preventing updates that could reflect progress when it comes to new science, when it comes to the impact of climate change on biodiversity, and when it comes to changing environmental conditions.

There were options that this Government had. Instead of having blanket extensions, they could have looked at, for example, having a risk-based review. They could have looked at progressing lowrisk consents very quickly. They could have looked at accelerating even those that had significant concerns by still putting in place some sort of a review period. They could have looked at having shorter extension periods, as well. But they have chosen to do none of that. They have chosen instead to go with the blanket extensions, which will continue the war that they have been waging on the environment.

The member’s time has expired. Katie Nimon—welcome back to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. What a day to come back to the House—it’s Resource Management Act (RMA) day. I’m thrilled to be here. It’s almost as if the Opposition is opposed to a productive economy, because that is what we are hearing from their mouths. Actually, it’s almost as if they want councils to have more work, because, ultimately, this is all about reducing the workload for councils, giving them certainty, giving landowners certainty, and consent rollovers that are giving us the necessary time and the necessary certainty to get the very important RMA and planning reform under way and across the line. That is what this is about—let us not forget. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you. I didn’t expect to get to second reading on this bill so quickly, but, then again, many of us didn’t expect we’d be in urgency for this bill. I want to also acknowledge the member who’s just returned to her seat and welcome her back to the House. It was a great opportunity where she could have actually sort of elaborated a wee bit on some of the issues that she thought were being expressed in the Parliament.

Grant McCallum: Couldn’t wait to hear your contribution.

TANGI UTIKERE: Sorry, what’s that?

Joseph Mooney: Two-year extension job done.

TANGI UTIKERE: Oh, right. OK, well, we’ll see about that. Now, we’re still yet to hear from—the Minister talked about, yes, it’s still unknown as to how many consents we’d be talking about here. The fundamental concern, of course, is that every consent does provide an opportunity for consent holders to undertake an activity—an activity that has been assessed and an activity that has been considered with conditions to be above board. What this is seeking to do is to basically roll over a significant number of consents, regardless of any change in the operating environment, regardless of any consideration to what might be in the immediate vicinity. As we know, in any sort of environmental aspect, there will be changes, and for consents that have been in place for a number of years, on face value you might say, “Oh, well, an extra two years or three years or four years or whatever it might be is a small percentage of the lifetime of the actual consent.” But the receiving environment or the operating environment could be quite different. That very much is a concern.

It is a light bill, but it has significant implications. This is the fundamental issue that we have a concern around in terms of the House or the Government utilising the House’s time and urgency to, effectively, ram these changes through. Again, it is a transitional measure, but why was the Government not prepared to have things in place? They’ve got two other bills that have already been introduced. They knew this change was coming. Why is it that the changes that this bill is seeking to, effectively, fast track was not foreshadowed as part of the Government’s consideration in that space?

The only information that we have in front of us, apart from the bill, is the departmental disclosure statement (DDS). There is no regulatory impact statement, and I’ve covered that, so I don’t intend to go through it. But there are a number of noes that are contained within the DDS, but there is actually one yes, and the yes pertains to retrospectivity and whether this bill affects the rights, freedoms, or imposes obligations retrospectively. It says yes, it does. Any moment that there is an imposition, whether it be retrospective or not, on the ability for someone to exercise their rights or their freedoms, does raise some questions. That’s exactly why the Resource Management Act system, in terms of these consents that have been approved and will be rolled over, would have been, at the time, considered alongside the scope of different aspects, whether it’s in a regional or a district plan, around what could or couldn’t be done. That is a legitimate point that needs to be brought into this consideration as well.

The other thing of interest is that this—and the reason why I’m relying on the DDS is because, as my colleague the Hon Priyanka Radhakrishnan had said, at this point in the process, we would have actually been talking about what the community had to say about this, what the views were of consent holders about what this impact would mean for them, if anything. Now, they might have been quite happy with that. There might be others that think, actually, no, there was a chance to pursue this quite differently. Because we don’t have that in front of the Parliament or in front of the House, we can really only rely on what it is that Government members and the Minister himself have actually provided in terms of contributions, and they have been, to be fair, fairly sparse up to this point. There is an opportunity for them to change that and to change tack to provide a bit more information and context rather than saying, “Well, we’re here to roll this over and commend the bill.” Our job is to ensure that the legislation passing through this Parliament is consistent with some of the obligations and concerns that would be expressed by the communities that we all represent.

When I look at page 6 of the DDS, there is a very clear indication around the consistency with the Government’s Treaty of Waitangi obligations. Of interest, it says that extending consents without engaging Māori raises Treaty implications, as the Crown is generally obliged to consult on proposals affecting Māori interest. Automatically, this is a Government that is not prepared to lend any weight in that particular space. However, it says, to address this, the Minister intends to inform Māori groups about the proposal.

Well, how rude is that? Not going to engage—going to inform Māori groups about the proposal. Well, he’ll be doing it within the next 24 hours, perhaps, as this has been introduced, first reading, currently on second reading. Who knows when this will end? I just think this is just poor process. It is poor process when their own departmental disclosure statement indicates that, actually, don’t worry, we’ll get around that. The Minister will address it by informing Māori groups. I think that is a sham in terms of the way in which the partnership with Māori is being reflected in the context of this particular bill.

The other sort of aspect here is the fact that this is not being subject to the normal scrutiny, which means that it leaves the Parliament without a very clear or firm or deep understanding of the evidence that exists around the costs that this change would lead to. Now, it might be that the costs that would be borne—and the Minister believes that there are no costs associated with this, except the costs of the time of the Parliament. Maybe we should rack that up to see how much that actually costs—how much the Government is prepared to spend our taxpayers’ money on urgency, because it’s a bit of a common theme at the moment. But where those costs actually fall—and with that, I think there will be some unintended consequences.

There needs to be analysis as to what this would cost and who would actually carry those costs. If it’s actually going to be that these consents are going to be rolled over for a period of time, I’m sure that everyone expects that there would still be a monitoring opportunity for councils and territorial authorities to still undertake, or is it the Government’s expectation that they’re going to roll over these consents, and only for rolled-over consents, those consents and the operations would not be subject to any ongoing monitoring or evaluation? If there is monitoring and evaluation, there will be a cost associated with that. If it’s expected that local government as a sector—and therefore councils and therefore households, through rates—are going to bear those costs, then that is something that the Government is quite happy to do. Now, that might be the position, but simply saying that there are no costs associated with this change I think is a little bit far from the bullseye in terms of where things need to land.

The lack of consultation with iwi, with local government, with stakeholders in the environmental and in the development space—I mean, this would be an opportunity for them to feed into this process. Alongside the fact that these are significant changes in terms of time, we are talking about thousands upon thousands of consents that would be an authorisation to continue activities, with conditions or without, where there has been no analysis as to what the future implications might be. If a receiving environment has changed to the extent where, actually, the nature of that activity is significantly compromised or the impact or the effect on the environment of the receiving environment is going to be so different, surely that should be subject to some form of assessment. What this bill is doing is basically preventing that opportunity by doing a blanket rollover opportunity.

I support the comments that have been expressed by the Hon Priyanka Radhakrishnan in saying that there are other options here. The transition period could be for a shorter period of time. There could be some other ways in which transition could be given effect to. I think that these transitional provisions could be dealt with in a way where councils would be able to engage with consent holders or they’d be able to approach the renewal of consents, effectively, on a case-by-case basis. There might be, actually, a suite of consents that would fall within some form of identifying feature where that was not so much of an issue. Simply saying, “Well, we’re just going to roll all of them over”, without any consideration as to changes in the environment or operations over that period of time, I think is a very, very dangerous thing. It’s not to say that it shouldn’t happen in terms of the extension of a consent, because I think we accept that there needs to be some form of transitional phasing, but this sort of blanket approach that the Government seems to want to take under urgency is one that I think is dangerous and not the way to go.

Again, I think it’s difficult given that we haven’t had an opportunity to engage with the public over this. I don’t think many members in this House will think that this is a good use of urgency, given this has been well signalled by the Government. We will continue to oppose it.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to speak on this bill. Whilst I, obviously, strongly disagree with the previous speaker, this is simply a pragmatic bill while the most significant piece of legislation in a generation rolls through the House. It offers a patch-up that enables smooth continuity for our farming community and those consent holders. I’m pleased to commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise to make the final speech on this bill. This is a simple bill which extends consents up to two years. I would invite other members who don’t understand the point to get reading comprehension lessons. I commend this bill to the House.

This bill is set down for committee stage immediately. I declare the House in committee for consideration of the Resource Management (Duration of Consents) Amendment Bill.

In Committee

Clause 1 Title