Resource Management (Consenting and Other System Changes) Amendment Bill

I present a legislative statement on the Resource Management (Consenting and Other System Changes) Amendment Bill.

SPEAKER: That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Hon CHRIS BISHOP: I move, That the Resource Management (Consenting and Other System Changes) Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

This is a momentous day, in some respects, and not just because I’ve been out in Upper Hutt this afternoon with the Prime Minister, turning the sod on the Te Papa Biodiversity Research Centre, although that—

Grant McCallum: It could be the Melling Interchange.

Hon CHRIS BISHOP: Well, my friend Grant McCallum says that it could be the Melling Interchange. Not all good things come to those who wait, Mr McCallum—a little bit like your Northland Expressway. It’s not just because of that, but because we are going to pass this very important piece of legislation. Members will be aware of the fact that we have a three-phase programme to reform the Resource Management Act (RMA). Phase one was done, phase two is well under way, and complementing this bill is a suite of changes to that national direction, which the Government has just finished consulting on, and we will be moving to get that into law as quickly as possible.

What we’ve been trying to do throughout the programme of reform is achieve some quick wins to make sure we can unclog the arteries of growth in our economy while we lay the foundations for the full-scale reform of the RMA, and this is one of those ones that creates targeted changes that will make a difference. The bill and the Government’s amendments, which met with the House’s approval yesterday and on Tuesday, will make it easier to consent new infrastructure, including for renewable energy. It will make it easier to build houses and for the primary sector. It will enable investment in renewable energy to bring to life this Government’s Electrify New Zealand programme to meet our emissions reduction targets. It will implement reforms to pillar one of our Going for Housing Growth policy to release land for housing and build infrastructure. It will facilitate the development and the efficiency of our ports to strengthen our international supply chain networks.

The bill will make it easier for farmers in the primary sector, including the very important marine aquaculture sector. I acknowledge my good friend and colleague from New Zealand First the Hon Shane Jones, who has worked so hard on that particular part of the legislation.

Generally, the bill will simplify and streamline the consenting system and make it much more efficient, particularly around enforcement and compliance. We have tried to focus on things that will have the largest impact in the short term, and there are some things that we’ve deliberately left to phase three of our reform programme. As I say, we’ve tried to walk the line the whole way through between making sure we can get things done quickly because people elected this Government to get things done, but we also want to lay the foundations for longer-term reform.

Can I start by talking a bit about Auckland housing. We are making Auckland Council enable greater development capacity around our City Rail Link (CRL) rapid transit system. At $5 billion, this is the biggest transport project ever completed in New Zealand. Mayor Brown and I are both ambitious to make sure we take advantage of this opportunity, and we have an opportunity—a confluence of events or a confluence of factors—that enables us to bring this together through this bill. The confluence of events was the desire by Auckland Council to withdraw plan change 78, which has been under way for a couple of years now, or for at least a couple of years, in Auckland. Auckland Council wishes to withdraw that plan change because they wish to downzone particular parts of Auckland as a response to the Auckland floods, but the law doesn’t allow them to do that. That’s a legitimate request.

At the same time, we have the City Rail Link coming to its conclusion, and it will open at some point next year, and it’s the Government’s view and also the view of the majority of Auckland councillors that it doesn’t make sense to not take advantage of that opportunity by allowing for more housing around City Rail Link stations. I don’t know of many people in Auckland, or, in fact, many New Zealanders, who don’t think that if you’re going to build a $5 billion new rail connection with these fantastic new stations at Mount Eden, Kingsland, Aotea, and other places, it doesn’t make sense to not also zone in a way that allows commercial and residential mixed-use facilities around those railway stations.

I was very fortunate last week, with the Prime Minister, the Minister for Rail, and a range of other people, to actually go on the first test train. It was very cool—it was very cool. I’ll tell you what, when the City Rail Link opens, Aucklanders are going to be blown away, and they will use it. It will, I think, be quite transformational for the Auckland CBD but also the surrounding areas, including Mount Eden. Actually, some of the biggest benefits are going to be seen out West, and I know that some of western—

Steve Abel: West is best.

Hon CHRIS BISHOP: That’s an interesting “West is best” from a man wearing a keffiyeh around his neck—I’m not sure whether the member really thinks that. Some of the biggest benefits that the CRL is going to going to provide actually go out West because the travel time savings are on the western railway line. I know this might sound quite strange, but, actually, one of the biggest benefits of the city rail loop or link is that it massively creates time savings for the western line, and you are going to see—in fact, you’re already seeing it in advance of this. You are going to see growth along the—

Hon Dr Deborah Russell: Yeah, but what about the level crossing at Avondale? That’s going to be a problem.

Hon CHRIS BISHOP: Well, the member asked about the level crossing. I am very concerned about the level crossing, and this Government—not the previous one; this Government—has, alongside the city council, put quite a lot of money into investing in level crossings. One might well ask what the Auckland members of the Cabinet were doing for the last six years, in which the level crossing problem was known about and precisely nothing was done.

In fact, one of the great challenges in this area is that we’re having to grapple with, one, the level crossings because, to fully take advantage of the City Rail Link, you have to remove them. Nothing was done for six years. We are grappling with that. Secondly, the land around Mount Eden station, which is currently a large car park—and when the CRL opens, it will be a large car park because the previous Government had a foundation agreement that involved carbon zero and wellbeing initiatives and a whole bunch of airy-fairy nonsense, and there was a whole lot of uncoordinated, disconnected activity that has resulted in precisely nothing happening.

It’s the Mayor of Auckland and I—following on from the work that Simeon Brown did as Minister of Transport—who are actually getting on with making sure we can take advantage of those opportunities. Sadly, the CRL will open and Mount Eden will probably look exactly the same way it looks right now. It could have been so much different if the last Government had not spent five years farting around on a fantasy light-rail programme and had actually thought rationally about the City Rail Link and about making sure that we could take advantage of those opportunities.

Anyway, it’s all good—it’s all good. People elect National-led Governments to fix screw-ups by the last lot, and that’s exactly what we are doing. Anyway, I got slightly sidetracked in relation to Auckland housing capacity, but the member makes a very important point.

Another big benefit of this bill, if you can just indulge me for 30 seconds: goneburger to the Gordon Wilson Flats. It’s a very exciting day. This eyesore on the vista of the Wellington skyline will be no more. It was very unusual to use primary legislation to get rid of the Gordon Wilson Flats, but I’m looking forward to getting out the TNT.

In fact, I’ll tell you a story. The other day, I went to a quarry and I got to blow up some stuff. I got very excited because I thought I was going to be there with the TNT—like literally blowing the button—but it turns out that you don’t do that any more. It turns out that they line up all the TNT and then it’s all electronic, and I thought I was going to get to push a button. Well, I did push a button, which is literally a thing on an iPad. But I pushed the thing, and it went “Boof!” It was like “Boomfa!”

Grant McCallum: Do that again. How did it go?

Hon CHRIS BISHOP: “Boof!” Anyway, it’s going to be good, because once this bill passes, Victoria University won’t need a resource consent. It’ll be a permitted activity to demolish the Gordon Wilson Flats, and I’m going to be the first down there, not to hit the TNT, but to at least push the button on the iPad, and it’ll go “Boom!” It’s going to be good—it’s going to be good.

The Gordon Wilson Flats are sort of emblematic of the wider problem around heritage, so there are provisions in this bill, as a bit of a stop gap, to make it easier for councils to delist buildings—for example, the heritage-listed gas tank in Miramar, which the council has listed, in its wisdom, which they also want to delist. If members have other examples of other silly things like that, they can direct them to their local councils. It will now be easier to delist those things and replace them.

There is regulation-making power for the Minister to modify or remove RMA policies or plans that hinder development capacity. The bill also puts in place our plan stop provisions, which will be very important as we transition to the new system. It’s a bit of a pot-pourri of changes, but it’s very important in advance of RMA phase three. I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Well, as we’ve heard from the Minister—in between some coughs, and I hope that he recovers soon—it is a bill that covers a lot of different areas.

Labour was supporting this bill when it was introduced and even at the second reading, despite having concerns about some of the changes that were made at select committee, and that was largely because, of course, Labour repealed the Resource Management Act (RMA), unlike this Government, which has brought it back by repealing Labour’s Spatial Planning Act and Natural and Built Environment Act (NBEA). The Natural and Built Environment Act did many things to both, with a dual purpose of improving our environment—something this Government seems very disinterested in, and, in fact, wants to actively do the opposite on—and making the system more efficient, because it was incredibly inefficient.

Some of those aspects of the NBEA, the Government is now bringing across into the RMA, piece by piece—dripping it all in front of us. Some of those aspects related to designations and insurance for prosecution, and a lot of the renewable energy consenting was similar as well, and so we are very supportive, on this side of the House, of enabling renewable energy. But something happened on Tuesday morning, and that was that a very large Amendment Paper was dropped and it made significant changes to the bill, changes that we were not even able to debate in this House because Government members chose to stand up and close the debate on these very important aspects.

One of those aspects is changing the special privileges that renewable energy was going to get in order to include thermal, and at first look, you might say, “Thermal? Oh, that’s a bit like geothermal. That might seem like a good thing.” But, no, it is about coal. This—

David MacLeod: Baseload.

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: Oh, I’m hearing people saying “baseload” from across the House, and I asked the Minister specifically if it could be restricted to firming, but no—no, no, it cannot. So this is open slather on thermal electricity. This is all about burning the coal. I am not surprised when the Minister says that carbon zero is airy-fairy nonsense, as he just did, because he is clearly trying to go in the opposite direction.

This bill and other bills have been an opportunity for this Government to demonstrate some commitments to carbon zero—some commitment to enabling things that will reduce emissions. You may say that, well, the renewable energy was one of those things, and yet it has just been undermined in one fell swoop by this Amendment Paper that we first saw on Tuesday, which was also the day when we were debating this in the committee of the whole House stage.

Hon Priyanca Radhakrishnan: Shameful!

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: It is shameful.

Now, there were other changes, as well, that came at that stage. One of them relates to section 70. We were opposed to the changes to section 70 throughout the progress of this bill, but an additional change came to section 70 to say that regional councils can now permit discharges that have floatable or suspended materials. This is not just a little bit of pollution; it is a very strange change in direction of the Resource Management Act, which is there, in its purpose, to achieve sustainable management, but now regional councils will be permitting floatable or suspended material.

We also, at this very late stage, had the ability for the Minister to now stop plans. In fact, it’s not an ability for the Minister to stop plans; all planning must stop. There are some exceptions and the Minister gets to decide whether or not those plans could come through, and there is a deep irony to be standing here a year after this Parliament—again, with a late-notice amendment on the day that something was being discussed in committee stage—stopped the Otago Regional Council from notifying its land and water plan. That plan was stopped, and now all the other plans have been stopped too, but this bill, in its amendment at the last minute, now says that the Otago Regional Council has to notify some changes. It must notify changes, and so it’s going in totally the opposite direction, because, of course, the Otago Regional Council’s plans are deeply out of date and it needed to be notified. But this Government is saying, “No, no, no—just wait. Wait until the end of 2027 before you do anything else, except Otago Regional Council, who we made stop last year, but now need to get going again.”

This is a terrible way to make laws. This House has to spend so much time tidying up the mistakes of this Government that are made hastily, that do not go through select committees, and that members see only on the day that we are going into the committee stage. It just is so disrespectful to this House, to all the people who submit on those bills in the first place, and to the public, who then have no say on them.

Another change that was introduced in that last-minute Amendment Paper was that the Minister can now just intervene in anything that a council is doing, pretty much, and this intervention—it’s all based on money. We’ve heard the Minster say that it’s about things that hinder development, and that’s what it is all about—hindering development—but, of course, the Resource Management Act is there for sustainable management. It is not a development Act. Of course, there can be some development under the Resource Management Act, and we all agree with this, but now the Minister is making it all about development and not about the environment. That bit is, again, forgotten. The Minister can intervene, and those decisions are all based on the economics of a situation, with nothing to do with the environment, and we did not get to test that in the committee stage of the House.

There are some other changes I want to touch on briefly. We support the more efficient consenting of infrastructure. We all know that the country has a huge infrastructure deficit, but, again, the Government members added, or the select committee came back with natural gas being included in that infrastructure that could have these special consenting requirements.

We also see hazards being amended, as well. Hazards are something that we all know New Zealand is very prone to, and there does need to be—and there seems to have been in the past—agreement across the House that we need to do better at enabling councils to stop new development on areas where there is a hazard and where there might be, say, new flooding. I see across the House members from the Hawke’s Bay, who are very aware of this issue, as are my colleagues from Auckland. There are parts of this bill that do better on hazards, and that is a good thing. However, some of this has been undermined in the select committee process, again, by enabling infrastructure to be exempt from one of those hazards provisions.

We also see that whilst we wait for the Minister’s new version of the RMA, we wait for stronger hazards provisions, because in the last term of Government, there was work going into national instruments about hazards, and that work, we were told, was continuing, but now it’s on the back-burner again, waiting for this next stage of reforms. That is a real disappointment, and I think that should go more quickly.

We’ve also heard from the Minister about housing, and one very useful exchange that we did have in the House was about the Auckland plan and the intensification there, and qualifying matters do need to be site-specific for that. That was a useful conversation, and I thank the Minister for that during that debate.

But, overall, we see again this terrible process and these last-minute changes, and it is all about doing worse for the environment. This Government calls it pragmatic, and they call us ideological. I say, please, can we just try and do better for our environment.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m really reflecting today on this point in Aotearoa’s history, because this Government has this absolute onslaught when it comes to rushed, ill-thought-out legislation. In all of that rush and overwhelm, it can be easy to forget that this Government actually has choices, and the choices that it continues to make, particularly even with bills like this, are to focus on distraction.

We’ve just seen it right now, with the Minister talking about this bill. He was either glossing over the very significant parts, which do have significant implications for our communities and our environment, or he was just completely ignoring them. I think he called it a pot-pourri of legislation, and that is accurate. But I think, more accurately, it would be called piecemeal, and so many submitters in the process who took the time to actually submit on, again, this absolutely rushed bill pointed that out. It was that the role of this legislation is unnecessary. It’s going to, in the interim, make things more complicated for councils, not simpler, and so why is this Government still pushing ahead with this? It is so frustrating to see.

I want to also touch on the context of this legislation, specifically this week, because, just taking this week, we’ve had further last-minute amendments that have come in and that threaten, again, the very purpose of another core environmental bill—the Hauraki Gulf / Tīkapa Moana Marine Protection Bill—in terms of the Government allowing these last-minute amendments to allow commercial fishing in the high protection areas. Just before that, we had the Local Government (Water Services) Bill and, again, that was completely missing the opportunity to secure significant investment in water services for the health of our people and the health of our environment. Instead, they’ve chosen not only to leave behind communities but to allow more sewage to discharge into our rivers, streams, estuaries, and beaches, not just today, but for the foreseeable future, when that bill locks in investment decisions.

This bill, unfortunately, is no different when it comes to its failures, and yet the Government has choices and it has chosen to go this way. Now the first choice it has made, which is the most disappointing one for me, as someone with a background in fresh water, is it has completely and utterly failed to protect fresh water for all Kiwis. Now, this is not a political thing. This is a duty of care that every Government has, and the really bizarre thing about it is that those members are actually overriding their very own legacy of the National-led Government of John Key, which put in the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management, and they’re systematically dismantling it. This is part of it, and I want Kiwis to know that not only is it illogical but it is absolutely disingenuous—the way they have put forward these last-minute Amendment Papers to make these protections worse.

Now, what I’m referring to when I talk about the removal of these protections is the changes to the section 70 discharges. This is so significant that for the first time in the Resource Management Act’s (RMA’s) history—an Act that was set up to deliberately avoid, remedy, or mitigate environmental impacts—this bill now directly allows and permits significant adverse effects in our most degraded waterways. Now, we’ve had some rationale bandied about for these changes—you know, there was a lot about “Oh, it would cause farmers to need to get consents”—

Mark Cameron: It would.

Grant McCallum: 2,500 of them.

LAN PHAM: —and the thing that is completely missed from all of that is that—and it’s so clear that they have no concept of why. Why do you think they need consents—why do you think they need consents? They need consents because our environment is deteriorating to a point where significant adverse effects are present as a baseline, and that’s what triggers the need for consents. It is the actual physical, chemical, ecological changes that are impacting our precious rivers, our lakes, our estuaries, our streams, and our beaches right now, today. It’s all of those areas down at the local river, the beach, and estuary that we used to be able to swim in, we used to be able to go catch some fish in, gather kai, and now we cannot do that.

So what does this actually mean in practice, because it can kind of sound quite technical. To paint a picture at home for Kiwis—especially those Kiwis who are already on boil-water notices because their drinking water is polluted, and those Kiwis who like to take their kids and whānau out for a swim or go fishing and have got sick as a result—what it looks like is that when this Government is faced with a pollution tap that is going full bore and the environmental bucket is overflowing and causing all of these issues that we see in our environment today, the Government’s approach is not to just turn off that tap to actually address that pollution. It’s to smash a hole through the bottom of the bucket and call that a solution—“back on track”. People are seeing this for what it is and rejecting it, and I’m so heartened to see the strong response—particularly from our environmental groups, and iwi and hapū—because they’re absolutely seeing that.

Now, if those changes to section 70 weren’t bad enough, we also saw with these last-minute amendments that the big lobby groups—I’m talking about Federated Farmers, and I’m talking about DairyNZ and Beef + Lamb—wanted the Government to go further in terms of the pollution. My colleague Rachel Brooking has pointed out those issues when it comes to changes to the literal visual clarity of the water to the extent that water can now be unfit for stock to drink.

Now, from someone who’s not from a farming background, but who has spent the better part of decades working alongside farmers on their own farms and their own private land, that looks like the bottom-of-the-barrel stuff to me. This longstanding baseline protection that’s been in the RMA to make sure that the water that our stock has access to is fit to drink is now gone, and I wonder how these changes impact on drinking-water protections. I wonder how they impact on source water protection, our fair-trade agreements, and our economy, when it comes to the rest of industry who actually rely on clean, safe water to operate, but we don’t know. We don’t know the answer to this, because they have been introduced at the last minute, when lobby groups have gotten another bite at the cherry, and that is completely unacceptable.

The second choice that this Government has made with this bill is, unfortunately, just as significant, and it’s pointed out really clearly in the supplementary information that talks about the disclosure statement. It talks about the immense powers that this Government is granting itself, and, ultimately, what this Government, again, has made the choice to do is that it has decided that they are local government. It has decided that it should be up to the Minister to be a gatekeeper on what councils can and can’t do. So it’s what the hey with democracy—it’s gone out the window, and that’s completely unacceptable.

The other really concerning part of it is that the Minister for the Environment is involved, but they only have to “be satisfied that the provisions have a negative impact on economic growth, development capacity, or employment”. Those are, apparently, our environment Minister’s new roles. There’s nothing about the environment in there from our environment Minister, and it absolutely demonstrates how warped these Government members are in their perception of their roles and responsibilities. Lessons are not being learnt, and Kiwis will have no choice with this next resource management bill—if this is how the Government is going to carry on—but to take their example, drill a hole in the bottom of the bucket, and drain this Government out.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Well, that was a bit of a sombre moment from that side. Let’s cheer it up a little bit, because this bill, the Resource Management (Consenting and Other System Changes) Amendment Bill, is about one thing: getting things done. For decades, the Resource Management Act (RMA) and our planning and consenting system have been the biggest handbrake on developing land for housing, building infrastructure, and rolling out renewable energy. It has tied up good projects in years of paperwork, cost blowouts, and frustration. Today, that starts to change.

This bill is not an end game. It is a vital bridge in the full repeal and replacement of the RMA with a new system based on property rights and environmental limits. But New Zealanders can’t wait five years for that relief. They need that change now, and so this bill delivers some short-term wins: faster consenting, simpler processes, clearer permitted-activity rules for farmers so that thousands of them are not lumped with expensive consents and driving up the costs on farms. That means more homes, more infrastructure, more energy projects delivered, and happier farmers in the communities around them, delivering what Kiwis need sooner, cheaper, and with less bureaucratic drag.

ACT believes that development is a right, not a privilege. As long as it meets the clear rules that protect people and the environment, this bill empowers local councils to make decisions within safe harbours. It is giving communities a voice, but stopping the endless contradictions and delays, and, yes, it trusts builders, farmers, and business owners to get out and do it right, without having to ask Wellington for permission every step of the way.

We are not giving a free pass to bad actors. This bill strengthens enforcement. It has higher fines and no more insurance to cover those fines, and it considers the applicant’s compliance history when issuing these consents. That means that cowboys are held to account—cowboys on site or cowboys on the farm. That means that people who don’t follow the rules are not holding back those who do.

This bill has a principle right in the middle of it that makes it simple: let’s make it easier to build. If you want to build a house, install a wind turbine, or expand a port, you deserve to know what the process is, how long will it take, and what it will cost. This bill delivers consents lasting up to 35 years, it doubles the lapse period for consents, it extends permits for ports—very important, as the Transport and Infrastructure Committee looks at our maritime sector—it gives one-year default consenting for renewable consents, and, yes, it gives one-year default consenting for thermal electricity.

Now, some members on the other side might be confused by thermal electricity, as we’ve heard in the speech from Rachel Brooking, but it is a massive win for the energy and manufacturing industry. What has become clear is that the wonky race to net zero has left us without the security of coal and gas thermal firming up electricity markets, and without that firming, you cannot go out and build the renewable energy, because getting contracts without firming is very difficult, as our generators have found. Generators that are wanting to renew consents or to seek new consents to build gas-fired or coal-fired power stations have access to the same one-year priority consenting pathway that wind and solar are getting, because they go hand in glove.

ACT, in Government, is making sure that the lights stay on and that this country has plenty of electricity to power homes and businesses in the years to come. It’s common sense—and you’d think everyone in this House would support common sense, but you can hear a few members getting nervous about losing their favourite red tape.

This bill clears the decks for growth. It unlocks opportunity, protects property rights, and delivers results faster. It is the first step towards an RMA replacement that will actually work for New Zealand, not against New Zealand and New Zealanders. Our country cannot afford to spend another decade stuck in a consenting malaise, a maze, while housing costs rise, infrastructure crumbles, and renewable energy waits in line. This bill is the start of turning that around. I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Look, this has just been described as a pot-pourri of initiatives. They are all very, very welcome, and I love everything that my colleague Cameron Luxton has just said, but I want to focus on one particular, for me, very welcome component, and it’s extending the licence to occupy for ports.

I think very, very few Kiwis would actually realise that in September next year, every single one of our ports—I think maybe one will be exempted because of special earthquake legislation—will lose its licence to occupy the space in which it is in, which means, effectively, that it will become unconsented and it will become unlawful. I’d just ask you to think about what that would mean, because there’s been complaints from the other side of the House about this being a rushed bill. So what do we want to do: do we want to wait for that year to expire, and then say that, well, all our ports have now lost their licence to occupy?

Let’s get real about this. We want our ports to be able to continue to operate, and one of the things that this bill does is extend that right to occupy to 2046. Now, frankly, I think that should be permanent, and I’ll come back to that in just a moment. But when you think about what our ports mean to our country, something like 99 percent of our exports, by volume, and over 80 percent of our exports, by value, go through the ports. If we switch that lifeline off, our country will die, and die very, very quickly. We cannot afford for that to happen, and so it’s essential that we fix this issue.

We make life so hard for ourselves. That red, green, and brown tape that we wrap around ourselves is slowly killing our country. What it does is it kills the lifestyles, it kills the living standards, and it kills the ability. We have the Opposition regularly saying that we want more money for this, that, and the other. We’ve got to earn that money—we’ve got to earn that money. We can’t just expect to keep borrowing it from the rest of world. We have to earn that money, and we earn that money through exports. We have to have our ports operating to deliver those exports.

We often hear what I see as being a very, very shallow, binary nonsense, which is that we either cut services or we increase taxes—no. The answer—and New Zealand First is very, very clear on this—to what we need to do is we need to grow our economy. That is absolutely essential. All of these issues, whether it’s mining or whatever form of economic development it is, are about growing our economy, and New Zealand First is quite unashamedly willing to intervene and willing to reduce regulation to improve the way in which we’re able to do our work. As a Government, we are determined to reduce the barriers that there are to doing business and to being able to grow the wealth, which is good for all Kiwis.

We’ve just talked about the extension of the right to occupy, but there is something that’s missing in this bill, and in the committee of the whole House stage, I asked about dredging. Almost all of our ports—I think all of our ports, actually—have to dredge, and for some of them, many times a year. If you think about that, if they’re not able to dredge, effectively, what that means is that those ships—the bigger ships, at least—are not able to get into those ports. That would slowly strangle our economy.

We have a dredge that goes around the country and is literally sort of operating at one port after another after another to keep our ports operating, but at the moment, to get the right to do what they call maintenance dredging, you have to get a new consent, and the problem is that those consents, increasingly, are becoming contested. As they’re contested, often the people that are contesting them say, “Look, we’ll go away if you give us some money.” That is extortion.

We have to deal with those things, and being able to dredge a port to keep the port operating has to be part of the port’s right to operate. That is something which I’m assured is going to be dealt with in the larger stage of the Resource Management Act reforms, but I think it’s important to put it on the record that this is an essential change that needs to be made. It needs to be made in that legislation and we need to get on with doing that, and it’s an important message that we send not only to the ports but also to the export community that operates through those ports.

I also want to say that there’s a lot of talk about water quality, etc., and that’s important. But what we also do in terms of anything that’s got its feet in the water, we’ve given them, essentially, temporary or short-term consents, which they’ve got to then go and reconsent again. It doesn’t matter whether it’s irrigation or whether it’s dams—and we saw what the cost of reconsenting dams on the Waitaki was. We understand that it was at least $180 million, and it may have been more than that that we don’t know about. That is money that comes off electricity users. We complain about the cost of electricity—well, hey, here we are imposing extra costs on ourselves. These are the kinds of things that we’re doing.

We’ve just been having a long debate about local water, and, again, that same thing occurs. Because it’s got its feet in the water, we have to go and reconsent it, and the standards that get applied to reconsenting it are astronomically high. One town that we visited recently—Jamie and I—has 30,000-odd people. The cost of taking that waste water from a perfectly environmentally appropriate system for water and putting it to land was $500 million to $700 million between 30,000 people. If you think about that, that is utterly unaffordable. If we want to make the boat go fast, and if we want to even allow the boat to get into our ports to make the boat go fast for “New Zealand Inc.”, we have to change these things.

I’m delighted to see these changes are here. We need to fix our consenting system. If we want to be a wealthy country in order to afford the lifestyles and the living standards that we want and to afford the quality public services, we have to do these things. I commend this bill to the House.

This is a split call.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Sadly, this is another example of this Government’s intent to remove crucial environmental protections in the so-called facilitation of vested interests whom they represent. The member opposite made a point—

SPEAKER: No, no—I’m going to just interrupt the member there for a minute. That might be something that could be said on a campaign stump, but it’s not something that could be said in the House. No one in this House can be accused of being in the pocket of anybody else. It’s a longstanding convention in the House, so we won’t be changing that today. So if the member would refrain from making that type of statement, he will carry on with no loss of time.

STEVE ABEL: Sure—thank you, Mr Speaker. I appreciate that. Let me express myself differently, then.

My colleague opposite—Cameron Luxton—made the point that development is a right and not a privilege. May I suggest that it is the duty and the responsibility of the legislator to protect the commons and the common good. That means that where you are allowing the facilitation of industrial activity of businesses and what have you, it must be done in a way so as to not harm the commons.

One obvious example of the commons that this legislation specifically fails to protect is fresh water. Now, you on that side of the House get sick to death of us talking about fresh water all the time, but we will keep talking about it, because this is a Government that at every turn has taken the opportunity to remove protections from fresh water.

Fresh water is the most fundamental commons that humans have. Next to oxygen, the next most necessary ingredient in life is water, and this Government has, through this legislation, weakened freshwater protections once again.

Let me give one example of that. It has removed the requirement of farms smaller than 50 hectares to have freshwater farm plans. Now, what does that mean in practice? Freshwater farm plans are practical steps and guidance for farmers so that they can avoid critical source areas of drinking water, for example, so that they can protect the environment through the way that they do their farming and where they graze their animals. It’s a very sensible thing to have a freshwater farm plan as most farmers, I would say, are genuinely concerned about how they can have the least negative impact on fresh water. This legislation removes the requirement for farms smaller than 50 hectares to have freshwater farm plans. That means that a third of farms in this country won’t need a freshwater farm plan. That is extraordinary—that is a third of the farms in this country. Why is the Government so against freshwater farm plans?

What is more, in clause 57 of the bill, it introduces an amendment which allows the Minister for the Environment to approve industry organisations to provide certification or audit services, such as for freshwater farm plants. Industry themselves have said to Minister Hoggard that they did not want to audit farm environment plans, so all the other farms that are required to have freshwater farm plans can now have those plans certified by an industry body. That is what I mean when I talk about the problem of the influence of vested interests on Government policy. I mean, it’s hard to deny that this is what seems to be playing out, because there’s no question that the good of the commons—the public interest—is protected by water protections, and why is it so important for us to protect water? Because rivers, lakes, and aquifers are the sources of our drinking water, among other things.

This is a critical issue for us right now. In Southland, where we’ve seen dairy intensity, and in Canterbury, where we see dairy intensity, we also see the highest rates of elevated nitrate contamination in drinking water. That is contamination that most affects rural people—800,000 New Zealanders exposed to hazardous levels of nitrate are living in rural New Zealand. It is the very farm pollution that goes into the aquifer that ends up in the drinking-water bores of rural New Zealanders that is threatening them with methemoglobinemia—blue baby syndrome—with pre-term birth, and with bowel cancer. This is a critical issue, and it is exactly why it is the duty of the Government to protect something as fundamental as fresh water. We will not be supporting this legislation.

Look, this bill is about action, development, and progress. The current Resource Management Act (RMA) is ineffective and it’s a handbrake on our economy. We are releasing the brake so that we can get things built and consent things a lot easier.

This change to the RMA is going to be better for infrastructure, renewable energy, housing development, and the primary sector. It’s backing our farmers and our growers, and supporting the growth in our economy.

Look, it’s a common-sense approach. It makes some practical changes around natural hazards and emergency responses. When disaster strikes, we want to be able to respond quickly, effectively, and efficiently. This bill makes some very practical changes, and, coming from a region which was devastated by Cyclone Gabrielle, this is welcomed.

We’ve already heard about the changes to heritage and many other things, particularly renewable energy. We need more solar farms and we need more wind farms, and this will make it easier to consent. This is about getting the wheels moving in our economy. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I want to begin with an emphasis, I guess, around the process that we saw at the committee stage. The process around this bill was poor, and I think there’s no denying that on either side of the House. The Government’s Amendment Papers 347 and 348 were tabled only on the day of the committee stage. Both of those Amendment Papers contained pretty substantive changes to the bill, and, in fact, Amendment Paper 348 contained controversial changes to the bill.

By tabling these Amendment Papers so late, just when we were about to debate them, at the committee of the whole House stage, that meant that the Government chose to bypass public scrutiny on those amendments—again, substantive and controversial amendments. It chose to circumvent select committee scrutiny on those issues, and these are issues of significant public importance. I do want that on the record.

Really, what that did was to change the trajectory of the bill and the trajectory of our support for the bill, because, largely, this is a bill that started out being rather sensible. It drew a lot of its content from Labour’s Natural and Built Environment Act, and so we were at a position then where we could support the bill and what it was aiming to do, while also bearing in mind that it does bring in more efficient consenting for infrastructure. That is something that, on this side of the House, we support. I also acknowledge that parts of the bill do better when it comes to natural hazards, which is also something that we support on this side of the House.

But that balance was tipped, and it was tipped by those last-minute Amendment Papers. The bill was derailed by the poor process that this Government chose to go through with those last-minute amendments, and so the scope, I believe, has been undermined by the process that we’ve seen here today.

To make matters worse, the responsible Minister, Minister Bishop, said during the committee stage that he had publicly announced a number of those changes previously. He said—and I quote—“members have had a good opportunity to kick those issues around.” That is not the same as actually seeing the detail in the Amendment Papers before us, being able to hear public submissions for and against the amendments, and considering the expert advice that we would have seen had these amendments gone through select committees. It’s not great lawmaking, and it was further undermined by the Minister during the committee stage.

On some of the issues that we particularly oppose, I will begin with the amendments around energy. Now, Minister Bishop has consistently framed this bill as a way to promote renewable energy—he said that time and again during the committee stage, as well—and yet the amendment that we finally saw added coal and gas. It added “thermal electricity generation” to the “specified energy activity” definition for streamlined consenting. Inclusion of natural gas pipelines when it comes to the “long-lived infrastructure” definition undermines our climate goals, and, on this side of the House, we don’t think that that is “airy-fairy”. We do think that we have a duty of care to address climate emissions and to progress our climate goals.

Fossil-fuelled power generation will now be fast tracked through the normal Resource Management Act (RMA) consenting process and the fast-track process, as well. This is really not the trajectory that New Zealand should be going down, and, through these amendments, this Government is taking us further backwards.

It is taking us further backwards also when it comes to freshwater protections—I did touch upon that during the committee stage, asking the Minister questions around section 70. That is the amended rules about discharge. We opposed this change when we considered the bill at select committee because we felt that we have a duty of care here as well, to ensure that our rivers are swimmable and not just to say that, just because rivers are polluted, we can continue to make them worse and pollute them further. That is what this bill does, and that is why Labour had a differing view at select committee, and yet it just blew my mind that those last-minute amendments took us further backwards when it came to freshwater protections.

In fact, it includes, now, rules “that allow as a permitted activity a discharge of contaminants that may allow the following effects in the receiving waters: any conspicuous change in the colour or visual clarity [and] the rendering of fresh water unsuitable for consumption by farm animals.” Those were the amendments that were tabled at the eleventh hour that take us even further backwards than the position that we disagreed with at the select committee stage. The Minister’s response to my question there was that Waikato Regional Council would have to consent over 2,500 farms for activities that they were currently undertaking as a result, if that change wasn’t brought in at the last minute.

I do acknowledge the point made by Steve Abel, and I agree with that point—other members, I believe, have made it. We’re not saying that we want the farms shut down—nobody is saying that—but the resource consenting process, and my colleague the Hon Damien O’Connor made this point during the committee stage, would have just required a resource consent process that would have then ensured that those farms took the steps that were reasonable, that were needed to improve freshwater quality, and that is what we would have supported. He also made the point that many farmers around the motu have been focused on improving freshwater quality and acknowledged that—

Grant McCallum: They still are.

Hon PRIYANCA RADHAKRISHNAN: They still are, absolutely, but this amendment plays to the minority of farmers who aren’t, and it allows them further degradation of our fresh water, and we don’t support that.

Mark Cameron: Oh, I wish you people went to the country.

Hon PRIYANCA RADHAKRISHNAN: The final point that I wanted to make was the issue around a third of our farms not needing freshwater farm plans. The importance of freshwater farm plans was something that the National Government underscored in their blue-green document prior to the election. In that document, they talked about the need, and they waxed lyrical about the need, for increasing freshwater farm plans. Yet now they could have changed the threshold such that lifestyle blocks weren’t included, but a third of farms were excluded from this requirement.

In closing, I will say, I know members opposite—one in particular keeps yelling that we need to live in the real world and has done so during the committee stage as well. Really, what this Government is showing, both in terms of the process of pathetic lawmaking from the other side when it comes to controversial and significant changes that are in the public interest—is that they are so out of touch with New Zealanders; that they are fine to make promises in the election campaign when it comes to progressing environmental protections for New Zealand but, when it comes to delivery, they will go back on their word. They will break their promises, they will take us, as a nation, backwards by systematically dismantling environmental protections, all in the name of economic growth. We’re not against economic growth on this side, but we want to see a better balance of the two.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Well, it’s a great pleasure to rise and take a call on these important changes to our resource laws. As chair of the Bluegreens caucus, I can say that we are very focused on having a pragmatic balancing of the environment with the economy. They have to work together—that’s really, really important—and the area that I want to focus on that this bill has addressed is where it will allow us to electrify New Zealand. It’s about building renewable energy, and not importing Indonesian coal, like the last Government specialised in. This is all about building renewable energy.

In Northland, as you drive over the Brynderwyns to the Far North, way up there, we’ve got the opportunity to actually develop a whole lot of renewable energy and, therefore, supply Auckland as well as Northland, and to grow our economy. This bill will allow us to do that in a much more pragmatic and efficient manner, and I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, and thank you for the chance to take a short call on this bill. We find ourselves in a little bit of an odd situation, don’t we? Not that long ago, this was a bill that we would have been able to support and now we simply can’t. That original sort of bipartisan potential has just kind of been derailed really. That’s a shame because, as my colleague the Hon Priyanca Radhakrishnan has said, much of the original bill was from our own Natural and Built Environment Act, and there was some good stuff in there. I don’t think anybody on this side of the House, or certainly anybody in here, would disagree that the economy is incredibly important—of course the economy is important, and fundamentally the economy is about people, and fundamentally the economy is there to work for people and for good. There’s no divergent thoughts or feelings about what’s important. It’s about how we get there and what we’re prepared to sacrifice on the way.

I do fundamentally believe in a world where there’s generally the opportunity to have your cake and eat it too. There’s plenty of ways to negotiate sometimes really big problems, and this bill reeks of short, sharp, cheap, and nasty as if very little thought has gone into it, all because of those last-minute amendments. It’s poor process. The lack of scrutiny, I think, is embarrassing and the Government should be embarrassed. Government members have made very brief contributions singing, heralding the virtues of this bill as if it was somehow well planned, well thought out, and well organised. And yet the need for some last-minute amendments—Amendment Papers 347 and 348—certainly demonstrate otherwise.

I noticed a couple of members from the Government have got a bit huffy and have feigned a little bit of umbrage at the slight reference to the fact that there may have been some influence in those amendments coming through, but what’s the alternative? What’s the alternative? Just lazy and shoddy? I’m not entirely sure that either scenario is something to be proud of. Certainly, the very brief contributions that we have heard from the Government today don’t necessarily blow us over with really robust knowledge either, do they? The previous contributor’s very few words that he had to say about renewable energy are certainly a case in point.

As I said, the original bipartisan potential has well and truly been derailed. We could have supported this bill if it hadn’t been for those last-minute amendments. That is important. It is important for us to maintain that integrity of that process and we cannot therefore undermine what could have been some reasonable intentions by doing that. Fossil fuels fast-tracked, climate goals undermined—that was how someone that I was looking just before rising to my feet has just summed it up.

The Minister promised a bill that would support renewables, but these amendments now fast track coal and gas power generation and include fossil gas pipelines in “long-lived infrastructure”—there is an assumption that it’s here for a long time, not a good time. This is a sunset industry, and whilst there were plenty of ways to communicate, via this bill, a real commitment from New Zealand Inc. behind the concept of renewable energy and good clean green energy, doing this, I think, sends a dangerous signal to undermine that. Fundamentally, what that could have and should have been about was about good green jobs. That is the way of the future, and allowing these amendments to go in, which is the reason that we won’t be supporting this bill, is a shame. I wish the Government members making contributions would read up a little bit more about the energy sector so that they can some more sensible contributions.

What we are doing by passing the second Resource Management Act amendment bill into legislation very soon is to allow sectors like renewable energy—boosting housing supply and reducing red tape—to grow. That means growing New Zealand. That means reducing the cost of living for New Zealanders. That means providing reliable energy. This is why I support the bill to the House.

Kia orana, Madam Speaker. Thank you. It’s a duty rather than a pleasure to rise and take the final call for the Labour Party on this particular bill, the Resource Management (Consenting and Other System Changes) Amendment Bill. I say that because in the last 48 hours, there have been a couple of examples of what is a pretty poor, shoddy, sloppy process from the Government over there, and this is one of those shining examples.

The reason I say that is because this was a bill that actually came out of the Environment Committee with bipartisan support. It was a bill that carried the support of the New Zealand Labour Party, amongst others, and that was because the select committee had diligently worked through the issues, the end result of what came out of the select committee was consistent with our values and our thinking when it comes to the environment, and it also had a lot of the content that existed in a previous piece of legislation in this space that Labour was responsible for, and that was the Natural and Built Environment Act. That’s why we were able to support it when it came out of the select committee and that’s why, when going into the committee stage, we thought that we would be supporting it again, and then what happened was we saw this shoddy process from this Government, basically, requiring us to do a complete U-turn on that. That’s not something that we wanted to do easily, but, really, when one looked at that last-minute Amendment Paper that had been dropped by the Government, there was no other option but for us to simply indicate that we could not support the changes that the Government was seeking to advance.

I want to indicate, alongside other colleagues, that it was a last-minute amendment—well, actually, it was not just one, but it was a last-minute Amendment Paper that contained a suite of changes that really made it quite different. It is highly irregular that you get something out of a select committee that has some sort of multiparty level of support for it, and then, basically within a 48-hour period of the bill receiving its third reading, there is a complete U-turn because of the lack of bipartisanship around this particular approach. So that is disappointing.

One of the interesting things, of course, is that this bill has a significant impact on local government, and what we are starting to see, of course, from this Government—and, really, it shouldn’t have come as any surprise—is the way in which this Government have a real sense of disdain for the communities around Aotearoa New Zealand. They have that strong sense of disdain because of the inability for them to value what communities bring to the whole picture here.

It’s interesting, you know. They like to sort of bellow from the sidelines there, but they’re not prepared to sort of tell us what it is that they really think, and I’ll tell you what—I’ll give the Government something. I’ll give the Government something: at least they’re consistent. At least they’re consistent in not contributing to the conversation much—certainly when it comes to the committee stage—but at least they’re consistent. So we’ll give them that.

But one of the things that this bill does is it really does change the role and responsibility of local government. This was something that I did challenge the Minister responsible for RMA Reform on during the committee stage, and do you know what he said to us? I will tell the House what he actually said. He said that these are decisions that have been publicly announced and that, really, it was up to members to kick them around for themselves. Well, since when did we have something coming out of a select committee process with complete changes that was now a responsibility for members of the Opposition to kick it around amongst themselves when the Government is not prepared to play ball in this particular realm? So it is very lazy in that sense.

This is a bill that does create a very significant change for local councils. Basically, it will call a halt to many of the planning preparations that councils are under way with, and I think that that is really, really unfortunate. When we think about the opportunity that councils have been through around district plan changes, there is a lot of resource, there is a lot of energy, and there is a lot of time, actually, that goes into that. I know that there are other members in the House—and there are certainly members opposite—who have local government experience, and they will, I’m sure, attest to the roles and responsibilities that exist within that particular sector. What’s really interesting in terms of this change—and our colleague Lan Pham talked about this—is that, actually, when you step back and have a look, the focus is on economic growth, the focus is on the need for employment—

Grant McCallum: Jobs—creating jobs.

TANGI UTIKERE: Yeah, and that’s something that this Government is clearly failing in. I mean, we hear Mr McCallum say that the focus is on jobs. Well, the Government really needs to be doing something about that, because people are leaving this country faster than this Government would like them to remain. So this is not going to be the answer to, basically, the huge job losses that this Government is delivering for communities around the country. Of course, Christopher Luxon promised to make things better, but he is making them worse. This bill does not have the sort of thread of the environmental aspect alongside economic growth and the role of employment and jobs, and so that’s pretty disappointing.

The final thing that I wanted to say is that I think that the approach from the Minister in response to questions put in the committee stage for why the new section 80V in new clause 23A is to be included, around—you know, there are some exemptions for the planning process that wouldn’t land, necessarily. Some of them are automatic, and I think they’re pretty straightforward, but there are some that actually require the authority to apply for an exemption. The Minister has, basically, indicated that under the criteria, there is a catch-all—it’s really over to anything that the Minister thinks—and if we’re looking for the legislative provision there, it’s in new section 80V(2)(h), and the Minister has cited that himself when saying, basically, that if it’s any other reason that the Minister considers appropriate, then that’s what will carry.

So it is unfortunate that the Government has changed its tune when it comes to trying to address an issue in communities that is so important that it wants to turn its back on communities by landing an Amendment Paper and putting in front of the Parliament a bill that is completely different to the one that came out of the select committee. On that basis, alongside many other concerns, I do not commend that bill to the House.

It’s rich of the previous speaker, Tangi Utikere, to blame people leaving the country on us. There’s this thing called the lag effect. There’s been so much damage and abuse to this country, it takes time to fix things. Within 18 months—if you go back to the election, it was so dark and bleak and people were drowning in red tape and green tape and they couldn’t see where they were going—we repealed the Resource Management Act too, we introduced fast track so developers and builders have some certainty and clarity around design and consent.

Today, we introduced part two of the legislation, which provides certainty around energy, infrastructure, housing—Gordon Wilson Flats, gone—and very soon part 3, so New Zealand can go and grow, and we will attract and retain people in this country like never before.