Brownlee Gerry: Greater Christchurch Regeneration Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBrownlee Gerry: Greater Christchurch Regeneration Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 29 March 2016. Volume:712;Page:9942. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon GERRY BROWNLEE (Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery): I just wanted to respond to three speakers who have raised the issue of ministerial or chief executive powers in the Greater Christchurch Regeneration Bill and they come under clause 11. Those powers as are prescribed there relate specifically to clauses 47 53 59 60 61 62 and 75 of the bill. In each case they interestingly would give effect to some of the matters that have been raised by each of the speakers.If we start with clause 47 we are talking there about the ability for either the chief executive or a Minister to be able to ensure that certain works are done at a certain time in a certain place. So if you think about a city that is still discovering at this point undiscovered damage then having that ability to get something done very very quickly is fairly important. It would be I think a stretch to image that either a Minister or a chief executive might go around looking for opportunities to use a provision like this. It would be with some disappointment that there was a necessity to exercise this particular power. None the less I think it is quite a reasonable sort of power to have.Clause 53 deals with temporary buildings. Anyone from Christchurch will know that at the moment although temporary buildings are starting to recede a little bit from our landscape they have been pretty much a norm—an accepted arrangement—for the last 5 years. There may still be occasions when in order to achieve some regeneration of an area some temporary building may be necessary and this simply ensures that. Going through all processes remembering that Christchurch City Council is a 50:50 partner at the start of this legislation’s life and by the end of it it will be 100 percent the controller of Regenerate Christchurch then I think you would expect that this would be a very seldom-used power.Then we go to clause 59 which is also fairly prescriptive. It talks about the acquisition of and other dealings with property. It simply means that if you are to have a regeneration plan that is going to require a small bit of land somewhere or a variation to land—in fact the next two powers all deal with that right through to clause 62—then there is the capacity to do that through firstly discussion with the owner but ultimately the whole of the regeneration plan could not fail for someone perhaps holding out as often happens in various commercial arrangements already around the country.We then jump to clause 75 which deals with the disposal of land. Just before I do that let me talk about clause 67 which is also covered where we are looking at—if you think about the comments that were made about the red zone by people wanting that land to become much more amenable to the community as well as perhaps being an area where some cost recovery may occur where you have got thousands of titles it will be necessary to amalgamate some of those and that is one of the other powers that a chief executive has through a Minister.There is then the final issue where powers lie around the disposal of land. It simply makes it clear that a chief executivemay with the Minister’s approval dispose of lands held by the Crown as acquired under the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Act which is the one that this bill replaces. That seems to be—in my opinion certainly—an eminently sensible thing to do where someone else might be able to do something with that particular piece of land that is of value to the community. All of this will be quite tempered by the views that Regenerate Christchurch has about the reshaping of the city.So some of the fears that I think people have not necessarily expressed but have pointed to—concerns rather than fears—I do not think should be seen as anything other than mechanisms to be able to achieve the goals that Regenerate Christchurch itself will take to the communities throughout Christchurch as it goes about its work. In the end these are backstop powers. They are not foremost as far as the plans to regenerate the city are concerned. If you think again of what I said before the structure of this bill has been for the first few years of the existence of Regenerate Christchurch sort of a 50:50 membership appointed by the Crown and appointed by the council. Although I have to say that it is the Crown that has provided a place on Regenerate Christchurch for Ngāi Tahu and the Crown has agreed with the Christchurch City Council on the chair position—so that is an agreed position. Between us we have also agreed that appointments will be made to the regeneration board from the two other organisations that will be active in the city—so that is Ōtākaro Ltd and Development Christchurch. So you are getting a full circle of integrated organisations working through that Regenerate Christchurch lens and I think that some of the concerns about the indiscriminate use of powers under the bill need not be as prominent as some might suggest.I would also point to the fact that the House very generously gave a lot of powers to Ministers and the chief executive under the former Act the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Act which expires on 18 April this year and many of those powers were not used. They were described by some as wartime powers “Henry VIII” powers and all sorts of things but very few of them have been actually used. They were there as a backstop to ensure that there was capacity to actually get things done. I take the point from Denis O’Rourke that in the end we have to have legislation that allows things to be done while taking into consideration the views of the wider community.So I would simply say that although the bill itself has changed over the last couple of weeks it still has and did have Regenerate Christchurch at the centre. I reject the idea that the new arrangements have put it back in. I see the Green Party is saying: “No no that’s not true. Look what we did.” Well in part that is true but by and large what we have ended up with is a stronger affirmation of what was already in the bill in my opinion.