Smith Nick: Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill — Procedure Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Smith Nick: Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill — Procedure Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:657;Page:6217] 
Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister for the Environment) 
: 
 It is extraordinary that we get this flamboyant rhetoric about the mowing down of trees and Draconian measures from Mr Clayton Cosgrove. I invite Mr Clayton Cosgrove an MP from Christchurch to reflect on whether he thinks Christchurch is a Draconian city. The truth is that Christchurch a city that prides itself on being called the Garden City does not have any of these rules. 
I want to point out to Mr Cosgrove an interesting thing around the issue of development. I suspect that he knows absolutely nothing about this area of law. A number of Labour members have made the extraordinary claim that if somebody applies for a resource consent this means that he or she will be able to bowl the trees away. Let me tell members exactly what happens in Christchurch. People apply for resource consents involving blocks of land with trees on them and every year the council provides protection under those resource consents for hundreds and hundreds of those trees—that is what it does. That works perfectly well and anybody who thinks there will be a chainsaw massacre— 
Brendon Burns 
: Different quality of people there. 
Hon Dr NICK SMITH 
: I ask my colleague Brendon Burns from Christchurch whether there is a great chainsaw massacre as the evil people of Christchurch try to take advantage of a law that Labour does not want to be imposed on other parts of New Zealand. Of course there is not. The provisions of the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill are not Draconian. There will not be any wholesale flattening of trees; there will be a bit of common sense applied. 
The situation is as simple as this. From 1 October one will not need resource consent in Auckland to trim a tree. 
Grant Robertson 
: Nikki Kaye’s not cheering! 
Hon Dr NICK SMITH 
: Absolutely National members are cheering. The second thing is that over the next 2 and a bit years the council will be able to put the bureaucratic effort that is going into processing a whole lot of resource consents for tree trimming into identifying the really significant trees in Auckland that deserve protection. Members on the Labour benches have said that this means the council will have to individually catalogue every tree and apply through the system for it to be scheduled. What total nonsense that is! Every council around New Zealand that has gone through this process—and I note the member for Palmerston North is having a chuckle—does it through its plan and it does a large number of trees in a group by neighbourhood. That is how councils should do it under this legislation. I really think this is a case—I ask members to excuse the pun—of Labour not seeing the wood for the trees. 
I have found it extraordinary in this debate that there are huge changes set out in this bill to the way in which we consent to major pieces of infrastructure so that we can get on and build the electricity water and transport infrastructure for New Zealand and we have not heard a squeak from Labour about that albeit those reforms are very significant. I simply say the Labour members should put their money where their mouths are and to make my day by promising that they will reverse these changes. I tell those members that that will guarantee this Government a further term. If there was a reason that Labour was rejected by voters it was that New Zealanders were sick of the nanny State laws whereby ordinary Kiwis had to spend hundreds of dollars on getting a resource consent to trim their trees.