Logie Jan: Resource Legislation Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Resource Legislation Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 03 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8572. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. Tēnā koutou e Te Whare. I rise as the Green Party spokesperson for local government to take a short call on this the Resource Legislation Amendment Bill 2015. I do need I think to comment on the previous speaker the Hon Peter Dunne and acknowledge and echo his sentiments expressing the importance of this piece of legislation.The principal Act is our primary environmental protection legislation. Without our environment we have no economy. Without our environment we have no well-being. This legislation is absolutely essential to us as a country. Increasingly I feel as if I am standing up in this House talking to legislation and of concerns about a sense of the legislation being rushed and ill-thought-through with many provisions that seem inconsistent and arguing against each other and with some things that might be good and some things that are fundamentally deeply concerning. This is another piece of legislation exactly like that. Although our select committees are certainly not bowing under the load of work and this Government does not seem to be producing much legislation increasingly what is coming to the House is of a very worrying level of quality.My colleague Eugenie Sage has already spoken and outlined a lot of our concerns around the environmental conservation impacts of this bill so I would like to focus my contribution on the democratic aspects of the bill. Of course we will be very interested to hear from local and regional councils during the submissions stage of this bill and to examine the many provisions that will impact and potentially erode their decision-making power. I want to acknowledge up front too that the bill will require local authorities to consult iwi authorities on the appointment of commissioners with an understanding of tikanga Māori. It will require councils to invite iwi to form an iwi participation group early in the plan-making process. This sounds good to us in principle. For this to succeed however it obviously needs to be sufficiently resourced so that iwi can properly and professionally engage rather than relying on overstretched volunteers as the Crown and council so often seem to expect sadly. But we definitely support these aspects of the bill as it is clear that we need different structures to ensure the constitutional rights of mana whenua and mātāwaka to participate in our local government. We would support legislation with these provisions that did not erode environmental and other democratic rights.So for me as local government spokesperson the heart of opposition to this bill is that it is giving extraordinary powers to the executive to the Minister to be able to override local decision-making and to interfere in what seems like quite an ad hoc way where we are not even being given details of the philosophy behind when a Minister might intervene. Democracy and care for our environment go hand in hand as democracy and community-building go hand in hand. There is a connection between democracy and sustainability. That has never been clearer than in what happened with Environment Canterbury. The elected councillors were removed from Environment Canterbury because the people of Canterbury started to vote for councillors who wanted to restrict the dairy sector. It is as simple as that. That was stated pretty publicly by the agriculture Minister at the time. So this Government acted to override the concerns of the community—the environment—with its own agenda and the agenda of profit over people and environment.So some of the specifics of this bill are of concern. They may not seem so big on the face of it but they are of concern. Smaller changes to improve the plan making may be worthwhile but simple consents are defined as likely to have reduced council scrutiny. There are many aspects of this that are deeply worrying. I hope they will have scrutiny—proper scrutiny—through the select committee process.