Twyford Phil: Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTwyford Phil: Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 17 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8302. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): I just want to acknowledge that tantalising intervention by the Minister in the chair the Hon Louise Upston—just enough to get members interested in some real debate and information—but I do not want to deter the Minister from intervening again because there are a number of questions that have been put on the table. I did notice that we have been joined by the Minister of Local Government. She must have been following this bill. I am pleased that she has taken time off from her busy schedule of vilifying State house tenants to join us for this debate.I want to talk about clause 5 of the Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill and note that section 144 of the principal Act provides that “The Hearings Panel must make recommendations on the proposed plan after it has finished submissions”. It has to hear all the submissions all the deliberations and then make its recommendations and its findings in one go at the end of the process. We have been hearing about you know 5000 site-specific zoning submissions by the people of Auckland that the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel is desperate to get through so it can report in time on 22 July next year. I think we all understand the logic for this but it does raise certain questions and I would really appreciate the Minister paying attention to this and giving us a response. There is no doubt that clause 5 adds some practicality allowing recommendations to be passed on to the Auckland Council in a kind of drip-fed way which will expedite the whole process by allowing the council to consider recommendations as the panel goes through its work. I think we can all understand that.But clause 5 also raises whether matters will have been properly considered in the whole because none of the issues that the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel is considering sit in isolation. That is the whole point of the Auckland Unitary Plan. It is a holistic approach. It is an integrated exercise in spatial planning. All of these things are connected: all of the zoning considerations land use and so on. They all impact on each other. I think that the risk here with clause 5 is that you will get a piecemeal consideration of issues in isolation and the hearings panel may find that by the time it gets to the end of the process and it has made all its recommendations it may not in fact be happy with the tenor or the tone or the emphasis of some of the early recommendations that it made on the basis of considering submissions and deliberating on just one topic. So I would really like to hear what consideration the Minister and officials in preparing this legislation for the House gave to that issue because I think that is something that needs to be considered.I want to speak to my tabled amendment that Eugenie Sage just made some comments about. It deals with clause 5 and it replaces new section 144(5) with the following sentence: “The Hearings Panel is limited to making recommendations only within the scope of the submissions made on the proposed plan.” I think this takes us back to the principal legislation. When the amendments were made to the resource management reform legislation they allowed the hearings panel to make decisions that are beyond the scope of the submissions that they have received on the proposed plan and on any matter identified by the panel. This was controversial at the time and we debated this in the House because this is a break with normal practice under the Resource Management Act. It is an extraordinarily broad power that it gives to the independent hearings panel and that is significant because the nature of this bespoke process and intrinsic to the whole idea of the independent hearings panel is that it truncates public consultation. It reduces the say that people have. It cuts the Environment Court out of the process so we have to be extremely careful in ensuring that we balance the desire to streamline and speed up and simplify with ensuring that there are the proper protections about sound decision-making and consultation. If you look at the Environment Court the normal process—