Stanford EricaERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): Thank you Madam Speaker. I'm pleased to take a call on the Resource Management Amendment Bill.I'd just like to start by saying that there was a really interesting comment a couple of debates ago when we were debating the emissions trading scheme (ETS) bill where James Shaw the Minister in the chair said he hoped that the ETS bill wouldn't end up like the Resource Management Act (RMA). And I thought that was very telling because it indicates that not only Labour and National but also the Greens and I think most people in this Chamber and in this Parliament believe that the RMA has become sort of unwieldly difficult hard to navigate legislation that has had its day and needs to be repealed. It makes planning and building houses more difficult and it certainly isn't getting the environmental outcomes that we want.We all know that significant change is required to the RMA but this bill this RMA bill can be quite well summed up as a delayed and incoherent mess. This is a Government that remember campaigned vigorously on building houses and sorting out housing affordability and dramatically increasing supply and so we got KiwiBuild which is one of the biggest failures of all time—and I think Megan Woods is realising it's getting worse by the day as she's forced to put out fire after fire. And now we have RMA reform.Here the Government has the opportunity to make some really meaningful changes to the RMA in order to get houses built more quickly and more cheaply. But what we have here which is their heralded RMA reform is basically the Government kicking the can down the road; it's just stage one. In my first reading speech I said that I suspect it's a tinkering-around-the-edges bill. After the select committee process what I thought was confirmed because this is just the entrée—the meaty stuff that they're planning on doing is coming at some further stage down the track maybe in the future.So in a nutshell this Government have spent three years developing a bill that basically just reverses all of the previous changes to the RMA made by the last National Government changes that we made to make the process easier fairer quicker and cheaper so that we could get on and build affordable houses. But this bill just basically undoes all that. It quite clearly will make the process of building houses more complex more time consuming and more costly. It won't go in any way to addressing affordability.The initial briefing we received from officials in the environment select committee was very telling. They took us through an overview of the changes including removing regulation-making powers reversing the changes repealing the—all the R" words I won't go into in detail; speakers before me have talked about it at length. But the point is that the words "remove" "reverse" "repeal" come up a lot in this bill.But what makes these changes completely incoherent and frankly a joke is that while this bill increases costs and delays and does nothing for housing affordability there are two other major pieces of reform that are doing exactly the opposite. Jacqui Dean stated before me that already the Urban Development Bill currently before the Environment Committee gives the Government the power to fast track development by removing barriers to planning constraints or having to deal with the RMA. And the Minister in May took a paper to Cabinet proposing the COVID-19 Recovery (Fast-track Consenting) Bill which again is basically designed to bypass the RMA. It proposes a non-notified consenting and designation process in the main for Government-led projects. So the Government knows very well the constraints of the RMA in building and development and they threw these two very bills that they are proposing to carve out RMA exemptions for themselves. But in this bill they make it far more difficult to get on with building houses for everybody else by undoing the changes that we made to make things easier.It's like I said an incoherent mess. Minister Parker needs to explain. He said in this Chamber quite recently—I remember him saying—that the RMA causes delays and it causes costs. So why is he bringing a bill to this House that adds more delay and more cost? And to add to more of the chaos we've got this working group this RMA working group that's been under way and was supposed to be reporting back this month; we hear it's another two months away. That's supposed to give the Government all the answers. So why is it that this is all backwards that they're introducing a bill that makes minor tinkering changes around the edges making things far worse for building houses but they're still waiting on this big chunky report to tell them how to do it properly? It's an incoherent mess and we cannot support this bill."