Sage EugenieEUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Chair. This is another Nick Smith special. It is all about snaffling public land public reserves for more housing. When we have got intensive urban development residential development in our cities and towns and particularly in Auckland those areas of green space become absolutely critical for providing respite for getting back to nature for allowing people to relax for providing oases of green in the city to help—Hon Maggie Barry: That's what gardens are for.EUGENIE SAGE: —reduce heat pollution in summer for providing trees—and I hear the Minister of Conservation attacking the protection of trees. It was this Government of course that changed the Resource Management Act (RMA) to allow private property owners to cut down a lot more trees—that stripped out the urban tree protection provisions in the RMA and substantially weakened it here.The Green Party believes in good urban parks and reserves to provide a network of places where people can enjoy nature and where nature can thrive because accessible and pleasant public reserves contribute to people's well-being and sense of amenity. These places have got to be people friendly and they have got to protect natural values but what this part of the bill is doing in conjunction with Part 1 which made residential development and subdivision and unplanned subdivision much easier is introducing a new process where instead of going through the usual processes under the Reserves Act around land exchange where the Minister of Conservation is the final decision maker it bundles it up with the resource consent process.Hon Maggie Barry: Not true.EUGENIE SAGE: It does. The Minister obviously has not read the bill.This part of the bill ensures as Denis O'Rourke has pointed out that the applicant only has to claim that there is a net benefit for recreation and that could be putting in a new walking track or a new cycle track and the applicant for development in the reserve—for using the reserve for housing as the Minister wants to happen in the Point England Reserve—is able to say there is a net benefit to the community because a few more people will be able to walk there.What this part of the bill fails to recognise is that once an area of public reserve has been sacrificed for housing and building development the opportunities for future generations to use that reserve are gone. The opportunity for green space is gone for present generations. It is much less accessible. So this is sacrificing intrinsic values and opportunities for future generations to determine how public land should be used just so we can have short-term housing development.We should be able to plan our housing development in our cities and towns so that it is more intense so that it is situated around public transport corridors with good planning but this bill in toto is not—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! [Interruption] Order! I am now going to—interjections were sort of going pretty heavily for a while but when it starts crossing in front from New Zealand First to National of the member who is trying to speak it makes it almost impossible for us to hear and I am sure it does not assist the member. I mean one set of interjections you can handle but having two happening at once from different sides is quite hard.EUGENIE SAGE: Thank you Mr Chair. So we want good well-planned cities but those cities do not occur—Hon Anne Tolley: With no houses—with no houses. They'd rather have cows grazing than houses.EUGENIE SAGE: —without the sacrifice of public lands and reserves in the short term for housing. Minister Tolley is claiming that the Point England Reserve does not have any value because it has cows grazing on it and has open space. If the Minister had listened to the submissions at the Local Government and Environment Committee she would have heard that a lot of people value the land because of that—because it allows access to a farm experience in the city.Anyway getting back to this bill it cuts right across using reserves for public recreation and amenity and introduces a short-cut process for enabling them to be subdivided and thieved from the public to use for housing. So that is another one of the reasons that the Green Party is opposing the bill.