O'Rourke Denis: Debate on Prime Minister’s StatementText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeO'Rourke Denis: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement[Sitting date: 10 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:1412. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENIS O’ROURKE (NZ First): People in future generations will look back and curse the Key Government—not because of the massive debt that they will inherit not because of a lack of genuine economic development not because of the legacy of a 1960s-style transport system not because of the failure to diversify the primary sector not because of the stratification of Kiwis into a have-not and have society and not for the many other negative results of a backward and neglectful neo-liberal Government which future generations will be left to cope with. It will be because the worst legacy of the Key Government will be the impacts of its resource management reforms. Those impacts will have a very long-lasting effect and will be largely irreversible.It was a National Government actually that finally enacted the Resource Management Act although it was the Palmer Labour Government that really can take credit for it. For the first time it meant that modern forward-looking legislation put environmental security first and it made the assessment of environmental impacts on development proposals effects-based. In so doing it provided a sound basis for planning in New Zealand. This was especially so for local government which then produced district and city plans to ensure that land and other resources were well used which avoided significant degradation of that land and those resources and provided a sound basis for continued economic development. All of that is now under threat from the retrograde policies of the current Key Government.New Zealand First agrees that the Resource Management Act processes need significant improvement. We agree that there is too much silly red tape. We agree that there is too much unnecessary delay. We agree that costs are far too high. We agree that there is too much duplication between territorial and regional councils and we also want the Resource Management Act processes to be much easier to use so that the need for lawyers can be minimised. We pledge our support for anything that will put forward those objectives. For example proposals directed towards reducing and simplifying planning documents do have merit and so do fixed time limits for the processing of straightforward non-notified consents. So would approved exemptions for technical or minor breaches be helpful in the case of urban land use consents.But—and this is the big but—the Government wants to go much too far by undermining the effects-based decision-making under the Resource Management Act and it wants to put economic development equal with environmental security. That of course is actually impossible. One must logically have priority over the other. What it really means is that the Government is going to have poorly restrained economic development in priority in effect over environmental security. That is actually fundamentally what it is doing. It is bad and it is wrong.Nick Smith’s recent media stunt—in which he stood before a stack of district plans to announce his attack on the Resource Management Act—convinced very few thinking people that the proposals will in fact do anything at all to solve the housing crisis while at the same time stripping away too many of the Resource Management Act provisions for environmental security.In particular a number of the probable changes will substantially limit the ability of submitters to put forward evidence as to the environmental impacts of proposals and for that evidence to be properly considered. Even more troubling are the probable proposals for greater central government intervention in planning and consent processes. That really means that the Act will become activity-directed instead of effects-based. So that is a fundamental and very negative change to the Resource Management Act which I hope people out there in the community are really starting to understand.We are expected to believe somehow that these dangerous and fundamental changes will result in a fast build of the homes the country needs. The Minister for Building and Housing used the Motu report to try to convince us that there are 40000 fewer homes than there would have been had the Resource Management Act already been amended as proposed and that the lack of such changes adds $30000 to a new apartment or $15000 to a new home. That document was not a cost-benefit analysis of the Resource Management Act. In fact it was nothing more than a review of how developers felt about what the additional costs were. It is non-scientific and is utterly meaningless and yet the Minister used it as his justification for the proposals. In fact all planning and regulatory imposts including the Resource Management Act processes account for only 4 percent of the cost of a new home according to Local Government New Zealand.So the Government wants to unnecessarily compromise the fundamental working of the Resource Management Act without doing anything positive in those methods to solve the housing crisis. People will not save anything like $30000 on the cost of a new apartment nor $15000 on the cost of a new home. In fact Nick Smith has not even claimed that they would. In fact little or nothing will be saved and no more land will be made available than under the existing provisions of the Act under which social and housing needs are already perfectly adequately accommodated.So what we are seeing on one level is just more incompetent National Government willing to compromise the Resource Management Act with no benefit to go with it. On another level we are seeing an elaborate smokescreen—a hoax—to cover the fact that housing has become unaffordable to a very large sector of first-home seekers because of a failure of Government to actually intervene in the housing market. In actual fact this Government did absolutely nothing for 5 years while the housing crisis developed.It reminds me a little bit of the past Argentinian dictator Juan Perón whose Government built elaborate facades to be filmed and shown to the masses without any actual substance behind them—a very good analogy I believe.Stuart Smith: A very boring one though.DENIS O’ROURKE: This is in sharp contrast to what a New Zealand First Government would do. If anyone wants boring just look at that member over there. He is the epitome of it.New Zealand First would ensure not just sound planning but also that the Government was involved directly in the housing market. We would have a State agency to buy land and see that it was appropriately developed and sections would be sold on concessionary terms. There is a lot more that we would do to make sure that something genuine was done to assist New Zealanders into homes. There is absolutely no excuse for this country to attack the provisions of a well-working piece of legislation the Resource Management Act. We should improve its processes but there is no need at all to change the fundamental provisions of the Act.In a nutshell this Government is simply not doing enough. It waited 5 years as I have said before it did anything at all and then it has done too little. Now it wants to put the Resource Management Act up as a straw man to knock down and to use as a smokescreen to pretend that it is doing something about the housing crisis. But the last laugh will be on the Government itself as more and more Kiwis see the magnitude of the Government’s ineptitude over Resource Management Act reform and its utter failure to deal effectively with the housing crisis. Shame on Mr Key. Shame on his Government for even considering that path.