Resource Management (Duration of Consents) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Resource Management (Duration of Consents) Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

The issues have been well canvassed in the first and second readings and the committee of the whole House, and I want to thank members of the Opposition for their good engagement during the committee of the whole House stage. I think we had a good, robust interrogation of the various clauses—including the first, and I’m sure not the last, time we had a debate over what the word “is” means from Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan. He’s fast gaining a reputation as the master of—oh, here he is—niche questioning. Some would call it esoteric, others would call it pointless, but reasonable people can disagree on all of these issues, and, anyway, we enjoy it.

The intention of this bill has been well canvassed. It’s a short bill, six clauses only—five, maybe—to provide certainty as we go through that consent transition process laid out in the Planning Bill and the Natural Environment Bill, which were laid on the floor of the House today. They will get a first reading next week, and we will have a chance to have debate about those next week and send them to select committee. In the interim, it is clear that the Parliament needs to send a clear signal to people with that uncertainty around what happens to their consents as we approach the onset of the new planning system, so the consent extensions are through to 31 December 2027. That’s a belts and braces approach—a bit of a backstop. The new regime will take effect at some point mid - next year, which will kick into the whole regime.

I think the issues with that have been well canvassed, but it’s a really short and sharp bill. It is a temporary bill; it is a temporary transition measure. I think it will be widely welcomed by many people around New Zealand.

Grant McCallum: Absolutely.

Hon CHRIS BISHOP: Absolutely, says Grant McCallum; farming communities, says Grant McCallum. The others as well. I commend the bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I want to remind everybody who’s watching that this bill was introduced today—Tuesday—in the afternoon, and we did not see any of the accompanying documents until the Minister stood up and started speaking. We’re now coming to the third reading, and tomorrow morning—

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Which will still be today.

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: —which will still be today in parliamentary time. You’re right—you’re right, Madam Speaker. But we will still be on this bill, and then it will be sent off for Royal assent. This is a terrible way to make law, and that is why Labour has been opposing this bill. It was not signalled to us at all. To give the Minister some credit, he has engaged on the other two pieces of legislation, but not this. This came as a total surprise today, and here we are, already on the third reading.

There’s just been no analysis with this bill, so we do not know what the consequences of it will be. We’ve heard the Minister say, “Well, it’s a Christmas present to people.” We’ve heard other members say, “This is going to be great for farmers.”—but why is it going to be great for those people, and what are the implications for other resource users? Most resource consents that have an expiry date on them are for water takes and discharges—that is, if there is some pollution of a waterway or if water is being taken, it could be taken for all sorts of wonderful reasons. But if you take water, then that will often have an implication for other users of that resource, because there is not all the water that everybody wants in all of the places, and so different consents will go for different periods of time and they will impact on other people’s uses, as well. They might be future users. It might be a new farmer who wants to get a consent to do something with water and they might not be able to, as a consequence of somebody else having their consent go for another two years without having to apply for it. It might be that the water continues to be polluted when it wouldn’t have been otherwise.

There’s a whole lot of “mights” here—and this is my point. I don’t know what the consequences of this bill will be, because we were presented with zero analysis. All that we heard was that there would be some thousands of consents affected. That was it. Not the types of consents, not the implications on other consents—none of that analysis was there. We heard from other speakers around this side of the House, as well, about how communities very much care about waterways and how they’re relevant to Treaty settlements. They’re very important to iwi; they’re mahinga kai areas. If someone continues to have a consent that is polluting or is taking water, that might have—when I say it “might”, again—an impact on the amount of tuna in the river. It might not—I don’t know, because nobody has told us.

This legislation, whilst the Minister can wave it about and say, “Well, it’s only five clauses; it doesn’t really matter.”, it does matter. We don’t know how much it matters, though, and had we been able to take this to a select committee, I could have asked those questions. I could have asked those questions of officials: “What are the implications of this? Where is your analysis on who is going to be impacted by these changes?”. But I’ve not had the opportunity to do so. It seems that it’s just for some sort of political joking around about the importance of Christmas, which I just really think undermines our parliamentary democracy and is not a reason for using all-stages urgency.

Now, I say whenever we do these bills under all-stages urgency—when there is no emergency, but even if there was an emergency, I would still say it—there needs to be a post-enactment review of what we’re doing here today. But, yet again, we have another piece of legislation that has no postenactment review. If there was a compelling argument for why this Christmas gift of certainty was needed, then at least we could come back in the new year and ask those questions of officials: “Well, how many people is that going to affect?” That would be difficult, of course, to do that. We would do that, but it would be very unlikely that this Government would then want to undermine those rights that they’d just given. I do acknowledge that, but I think it goes to the wider point that we should not be passing legislation in this way.

We should have had time to ask the select committee what it meant—who will be affected by it. We heard the Minister say, “Oh, there’s been good debate.” We’ve heard very little from the Government side in their contributions—maybe we will hear some more from them in the third reading—because almost every contribution, except from the Ministers, has been about farmers and how this is going to help farmers.

Suze Redmayne: The engine room of the economy.

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: Oh, and I’m hearing it’s the “engine room of the economy”. Well, farmers often have arguments with other farmers about these resources. But, also, not all of these consents relate to farmers. There are giant other parts of our economy that this bill relates to, and they might be totally benign users; there might be very good things that we all want to continue on with for two years—but we don’t know, because there has been no analysis. That is very poor, and it’s incredibly annoying to just listen to the people across there go on about how it’s all going to be great for farmers, without turning their minds to what this piece of legislation might mean and who might be affected by it. I have not heard one speech address that issue, so I’m very hopeful that the future third reading speeches will address that.

Now, another way to approach this bill could have been “OK, we want to give people some certainty as a new regime is coming, but we know that some consents are more proportionally.”—and the Minister is talking about proportionality in his new legislation a lot. You might say, “Well, we know that some consents have much bigger environmental impacts than other consents.” If you’ve got a little take of water for your household, or you have to feed your cats or something, then you might not need very much water, but if you are taking for a massive hydro scheme, then that is going to have—or could have; depends how long the consent has been around for—some very big environmental effects, and those are the effects that I’m concerned about here. If the Minister wanted to do this, there could be legislation that said, “We are going to extend consents that are below some threshold.”

Of course, that would require some thought to work out what the threshold is, and to work out what that threshold is, you’d have to be more explicit in the thinking and the analysis of the type of consents that are affected by this piece of legislation. Of course, that hasn’t happened. But that would be a way of saying, “No, no, we realise that a small family farmer who’s got some consents that may not trouble the river that much.” That might be entirely appropriate for them to have a two-year extension in this, whereas a very large project that perhaps the consent conditions were made a long time ago—perhaps it’s one of those consents that was made 25 years ago, when conditions were of quite a different form than they are now. With that resource consent, it might not be appropriate that those conditions remain for another two years now.

Simon Court: It’s going to be fine for two years.

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: We don’t know it’s going to be fine, Mr Court. That is the problem.

This debate is interrupted and is set down for resumption tomorrow morning. The House is suspended until 9 a.m. tomorrow.

Debate interrupted.

Sitting suspended from 9.59 p.m. to 9 a.m. (Wednesday)