Twyford PhilHon PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): Thank you Mr Speaker. I'm very happy to be able to take a short call on this momentous occasion as the Parliament ushers in this bill which sits at the heart of the new planning system one that I believe will serve this country well in the decades to come. This Natural and Built Environment Bill once it becomes an Act will I think reflect and take into account many of the really important lessons around how we live with and in our natural environment. It reflects a stronger more urgent desire that New Zealanders have today to protect our natural environment for future generations. It's learnt many of the hard lessons from the last 30-odd years on how the planning system messed up our housing markets and made it really difficult for us to deliver enough quality affordable housing for the people of this country. It seeks a lighter more agile process. One of the very tough lessons of the Resource Management Act (RMA) era was that a heavy slow bureaucratic and costly system dragged down people both those who were wanting to protect the environment and those who were wanting to do things like build our towns and cities. It also reflects the contemporary desire for better and more Māori participation in the public life of this country. I believe this law will better protect the environment. The notion of environmental limits are at the heart of it and I think about Te Wai o Pareira the river that runs through the middle of my electorate in West Auckland and how polluted it is not only by the failure to invest in decent infrastructure but by the failure of the planning system to protect the taonga that our community loves so much but it has become so polluted. By investing more time and energy in plan making the democratic process of our communities and our institutions—people coming together to plan what kind of development they want and what places in our country should be set aside and protected from development—it will mean that we will have far more non-notifiable activities. There will be fewer consents needed and that will result in significant cost savings for people for businesses and for the country as a whole. It will be a lighter more agile system. National direction: through the national planning framework which is central to this new law we will have comprehensive and regularly updated national direction. One of the great failings of the RMA was that successive Governments failed to actually provide the national direction that that system was built around and as a result we saw some terrible consequences both environmentally and in terms of our built environment in the growth of our towns and cities. The planning that will be done by councils and their communities and mana whenua under the Natural and Built Environment Act will be collaborative. Development transport corridors water catchments and regional economies pay no heed to the boundaries of local government and that's why we are regionalising through this bill the planning process. It will force people to collaborate and to come together and to plan the kinds of environments and the towns and cities that they want. That is a huge step forward. Finally moving away from the approach of the RMA which was of managing the effects of development and towards a more deliberative and deliberate planning approach that will allow our communities to come together to say what kind of development they want and what kinds of places they want to protect is a move away from the neo-liberal thinking of the 1980s which said We're going to manage the worst effects of development and otherwise we're just going to let the market do everything." That hasn't worked it was never going to work and it was really at the root of many of the problems of the RMA. This bill really is in sync with the modern thinking that actually doesn't consider "planning" to be a dirty word. We know we can think together we can plan and prioritise and we can build the country that we want and this bill gives us many of the tools to do that. I want to acknowledge the outstanding leadership and work of David Parker as the Minister for the Environment. This is a huge piece of work and he has been right across it the whole time. He has shepherded it through and taken people along with him and it's also important at this stage to recognise the professionalism and the talent of the Hon Eugenie Sage in chairing the Environment Committee who also I think did a tremendous job on that. I commend this bill to the House."