Stanford Erica; Parker DavidPart 1 Preliminary provisionsERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): Thank you Mr Chair. I'm pleased to take a call in the committee stage. I want to talk to my Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 531. In my second reading speech I alluded to the fact that I would be speaking to the issue of the sunset clause in this bill. In Part 1 clause 3 Repeal of this Act" states: "(1) This Act is repealed on the second anniversary of the date on which it receives the Royal assent." Now my SOP is to take this out to five years. And the reason that I want to do that—and this side of the committee wishes to do that—is because we heard from many submitters who made the point that the two-year provision simply isn't long enough. You will have heard my colleague Chris Bishop at second reading in his speech speak about the fact that it takes a considerable amount of time to get a project to the point where it is ready for resource consent. And I can talk to just one project in my electorate the Glenvar Road project which has taken actually about 20 years to get to the point where they're ready now to apply for resource consent. There are many more projects like that around. And we need to acknowledge the fact that if we are serious about creating jobs and serious about a post-COVID economic recovery we need to extend the time out to five years. It's been noted many times in this House by both sides by both the Government and the Opposition that the economic effects of COVID-19 will be felt for many many years. We've just borrowed $140 billion and in order to pay that back we are going to need another rock star economy. And the way that we get there is in part through this bill—by creating jobs and projects that will provide economic benefit for many many years to come. The time frame of two years in our opinion is far too short (a) to get projects to the point where they can apply for resource consent but also the number of projects that we would see needing to go ahead in order to give us that rock star economy to get people employed to pay back some of those billions of dollars that we've borrowed. We've all acknowledged that the Resource Management Act (RMA) isn't doing what it should do and that's why we've had to do this a number of times put these fast-track consenting bills in place and this is an example of that again. It's been mentioned that there is the Randerson report that's coming down the pipeline and that will make some changes but we've had this Government now for three years and they haven't made a significant RMA reform to get us to a place where we can get projects under way that are going to assist our economy to recover from COVID-19 and I doubt whether or not we're going to get that in the next term of Government after the Randerson report given we know on this side of the House how very difficult it is to get the numbers to reform the RMA. I think this Government have realised that as well—how difficult it is to get in an MMP environment the votes to be able to push it through. So acknowledging how difficult it is to reform the RMA—and that's acknowledged across the House—two years is not long enough for us to get projects under way to help our economy post-COVID. So this SOP will seek to move that two years to five years. I would invite the comments from the Minister in the chair Minister Parker on his opinion and what advice he's had; why he came up with two years. Perhaps he may support an extension of that out to five years given the fact that he knows how very difficult it is to reform the RMA and how we need this bill to help with our economic recovery. I'd be pleased to hear his comments on that.CHAIRPERSON (Hon Ruth Dyson): Just before I call the Minister for the Environment could I say that the member who's just resumed her seat while speaking very appropriately to the bill has reverted to the old way of committee stage debate and had her target firmly set at five minutes. That's not the agreement of the House on how we do committee stage debate any more. We're having more of a conversational debate so the member would ask specific questions and the Minister is expected to answer them and the member can then expect to get another call if she has further questions.Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): Responding to the questions raised by Erica Stanford the two-year period has been chosen because we expect by then that we should be through the worst of COVID the economic response. The effect of the provisions that are put through to the panel under referred projects during that two-year period will of course be a lot longer than that two-year period both because proposals that are put through the second track which is by Order in Council to these panels will still proceed through those panels even after the two-year period if they started before that two-year period expired. And also the actual projects once commenced will often take much longer than two years—some of these large projects.In respect of the question as to why only two years this bill really does—and Lawrence Yule commented on this earlier—take powers away from local authorities and gives them to a panel set up by local government removes appeal rights except on matters of law or judicial review to the High Court. So it does amount to a significant truncation of citizens' ordinary rights and local authorities' ordinary rights and we thought that whilst that's justified for a period of two years those extraordinary overrides are not appropriate long term. In respect of why it was that the last Government couldn't overcome the difficulties they saw in the Resource Management Act (RMA) I've sort of summed up my view of the RMA as: it takes too long costs too much and hasn't protected the environment. The National Party's proposition in their last term of Government was to cut through length and cost but to undermine the environmental protections that are in the RMA and we didn't think that that was appropriate. It's notable that the coalition Government of the Labour Party New Zealand First supported by the Greens has managed to bring forward and pass an RMA amendment bill to agree largely this bill; and commit us to the Randerson review terms of reference."