Court SimonSIMON COURT (ACT): Thank you Madam Speaker. Look this legislation has been rushed into the House but it's still late—it's over four weeks since the state of emergency was declared. The ACT Party will be supporting the legislation. We think that the provisions to extend food licensing for hospitality businesses make sense we think that the provision to allow councils to have meetings via Zoom makes sense and we think that the changes to the Resource Management Act (RMA) which allow farmers to get on with some of the clean-up do make sense.But it's actually what's not in the bill that is of greatest concern to the ACT Party. What the Government should have done is declare a special economic zone in the same ways the Government did in 2010 and 2011 for the Canterbury earthquakes and in 2016 for the Kaikōura earthquake and all the damage that was done to that part of the country. A special economic zone—as ACT proposes in our 15 Urgent Ideas for Recovery—actually would allow for cutting red tape and overriding the regulation that slows the recovery because this is not a normal time. This is not a normal situation where you can investigate plan design and obtain consents for things. Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of sediment has come down from the hills; entire parts of forests have come down from the hills. And all of that material—along with the fencing posts wire electrical cable smashed cars and entire homes—are all spread out and mixed up into the most awful mess across Hawke's Bay Tai Rāwhiti Gisborne and other places around the country. So a special economic zone would allow for people to get in and clean up and also to get their businesses back on track. One of the advantages of the legislation say for the Kaikōura earthquake recovery was that it actually allowed the road and rail to be reopened much quicker because it allowed for complete bypassing of the normal resource consent requirements. In Kaikōura—where entire hillsides had fallen down and blocked the road blocked the rail—they just got bulldozers in and they dozed all of that material into the sea and they formed a new structural platform for the rail and the road.Now can you imagine trying to get a resource consent trying to tread carefully through the RMA all the cultural impact assessments everything else you'd need to sneak through in the Environment Court—and maybe a High Court challenge maybe all the way to the Supreme Court—to be allowed to widen the road by tipping natural rock into the sea? The ACT Party says Look while we appreciate some of the improvements; some of the things that will make it easier for people in Hawke's Bay and other regions to recover we are disappointed by what is missing from the bill."But I just want to come to some of the suggestions that ACT made at the Governance and Administration Committee and what we think would help actually improve the legislation. We were concerned that major asset owners—Waka Kotahi KiwiRail and the experts at the Infrastructure Commission—did not appear and give evidence. We heard from officials that they had been spoken to but the committee members never had a chance to ask them. The things that Waka Kotahi KiwiRail and the Infrastructure Commission said were important: did those actually flow through to the legislation? We don't know that. We're also proposing as a first principle when it comes to the Resource Management Act that any emergency stabilisation or activities to ensure safety; or improve resilience restore access or services; or rebuilding activity should be a permitted activity. But in fact what this legislation says is that you're still going to have to get consents for it; you're just going to have to come back six months or a year later and prove to your local council—the regulator—why you should be allowed to do something that you've already done. Some of the people who testified who came to the committee on behalf of councils said that would put an onerous and completely unnecessary burden on the regulator and on councils to have to go through a consenting process for stuff that's already been done and is highly unlikely ever to be undone.Submitters including Federated Farmers and Horticulture New Zealand pointed out that landowners are facing clearing huge amounts of timber slash—entire trees whole areas of entire forest mature and partly grown have come down and are strewn all over the countryside. What they've asked for is the ability to be able to pick this material up pile it into burn piles carefully and they're happy to follow a management plan to do that. What they've asked for—this is currently a prohibited activity—is to be able to burn this waste material which litters the countryside and not risk being prosecuted because of the presence of a little bit of plastic coated copper wire or the odd tanalised timber fence post.I do take the point that the Green member Eugenie Sage made that in Christchurch they were able to bring all this material to a very large processing facility and sort it out and then find other ways to divert it—some of it's gone to the Golden Bay cement factory for example where it is burned in a cement kiln at high temperatures. They just don't have the luxury of sorting it all out carefully. These are not homes that have been destroyed although there are some; this is a whole mixture of material that looks like a giant's crazy game of pick-up sticks.So look the ACT Party recommends that allowance be made for incidental contamination in burn piles but we also recommend that there is a really up-to-date site management plan and process available to control the human health and environmental effects of that and that is if we followed the US Army Corps of Engineers 2022 guidance for open-air solid waste burning in contingency locations. That was developed by their Engineer Research and Development Center; it's the latest up-to-date process for managing the effects of large-scale burning of waste materials in contingency situations—in other words when you've got no other practical options. So there are really good standards we could adopt right now.Something else the ACT Party disagreed with was a recommendation from the majority on the committee to amend the bill to require landowners to seek prior written consent from those who had interests in sites with cultural significance for Māori. Now what we do know is that wāhi tapu are typically registered on certificate of title and they should be known to landowners but what the recommended change to the bill means is that although landowners won't have to apply for consent to do stuff for six months or 12 months under the easing flexible provisions of the bill they won't be able to do anything until they've got local iwi or hapū to sign off that it's OK and that it doesn't breach any cultural significance requirements. That seems to be completely at odds with the intent of the bill.There's another matter that ACT would like to see some amendments to. We'd like the amendments to the food regulations to also include extending the time that people's liquor licences are valid for because it's going to be some time before businesses are able to rebuild and get back to their normal traffic and normal revenue-generating activities. We think that their liquor licences should also be extended out to at least 31 March 2024.We think the amendments to the Local Government Act which allow councils to repair and rebuild their three waters assets—which were extinguished by the water services legislation last year—is a great idea. In fact we applaud the Government for allowing councils to continue to invest in repairing their three waters assets but we further recommend that the bill be amended to allow councils to have sole decision-making as to how they put back their assets and improve them for their communities and not have to go and consult with the pesky Department of Internal Affairs and their meddling National Transition Unit. We think they should be able to just get on with rebuilding their own assets. In fact if we're going to go a step further we'd say "Look the three waters legislation reform process should just be stopped altogether." It's completely inappropriate to be carrying out those reforms during this cyclone recovery period.Now there are other matters which we think could've been addressed by a bill such as this. The ACT Party's concerned there's a large number of people who are homeless who were tenants who were renters and that the healthy homes standards mean they won't be able to move back into their homes—which are yet to be renovated because their landlords could be prosecuted under the healthy homes standards. So the ACT Party would recommend this omnibus bill if it could be be amended to include an exemption from compliance with the healthy homes standards so the largest number of people can get back to living in their communities. Thank you Madam Speaker."