Genter Julie AnneJULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): I am very pleased to be able to take a call in this debate. It will be my first call in this debate because I have spent the day being the MC for the New Zealand Planning Institute (NZPI) Young Planners Congress which is taking place in Wellington. Of course with my planning background this is an issue that is very very dear to my heart. Minister Nick Smith might recall that 2 years ago at the NZPI conference I asked him then whether he would consider a royal commission of inquiry or some sort of broad-based inquiry into the Resource Management Act (RMA) as had been called for by one of the Act's original authors Sir Geoffrey Palmer. At that time the Minister said: Oh no we wouldn't want to do that. Of course the Opposition would be very happy with a commission of inquiry because it would slow down the process." I think that the Minister is far too cynical and what he has not realised is that 2 years later now that this bill—which is really a bit of a shambles—is coming to the House it has not really addressed the fundamental underlying issues with the RMA that I am sure all New Zealanders would agree need to be addressed. Some of those were drawn out by the Productivity Commission recently in its report Better urban planning. So I would put it to the Minister that if he and the National Government really wanted to fundamentally fix the issues with the RMA it would have been better to get broad-based support from all parties in the House and to do it through an independent process like an independent inquiry so we could actually get to the bottom of the issues and not just gloss over them and treat them in a narrow ideological sense. This bill—just like many other bills that his Government has brought to the House since it has been in Government—by trying to tinker with the RMA is actually making the Act more and more difficult and less likely to deliver on the objectives that we actually want. What New Zealanders actually want I am sure everyone would agree is to protect the environment—they care about the environment—and to ensure that we have sound urban planning in place so that we have complete communities. Although it is vitally important to address the housing crisis we cannot do it simply by removing all regulation and allowing developers to subdivide and build a bunch of houses out in the middle of nowhere because houses in the middle of nowhere are not of any use to people. People do not just want an affordable house. They need a house that gives them access to jobs and gives them access to amenities and it needs to be where they have close proximity to parks and where there is decent stormwater infrastructure so there are not going to be problems with flooding in the future because we know that there are going to be increased floods as a result of climate change in some places. Minister I think it is unfortunate that you did not take the opportunity that you had having been in Government now for nearly 9 years to have that broader-based inquiry into the RMA. Although the Minister has regularly accused the Greens of opposing changes to planning rules that would enable more development in affordable places I think he can quite clearly see the constructive contribution from the Greens that I have brought to him on many occasions. In this particular debate it is in my Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 288 which proposes to amend SOP 274 which is in the name of David Seymour. Some of the most costly planning rules that have resulted in unaffordable housing inefficient use of land and terrible congestion in our towns and cities are the rules that require huge numbers of car-parks for every new development. Of course there are far more efficient ways of managing car-parking in a way that means that people can actually access the parks when they need to get somewhere but more importantly the valuable land in our towns and cities is used in ways that are actually good for people. Whether that is homes or businesses or schools or shops or parks the things that really make our communities worth living in are not tied to storage for motor vehicles. If we can use less of that land—because at this point in time there are about three empty car-parks for every one that is being used in New Zealand so that is a massive oversupply of car-parking and most of that land is valuable urban land that could be used for more productive uses. Simply by adopting the SOP that I have proposed it would mean that councils could use far more effective management-based approaches to managing demand for parking rather than oversupplying the land for parking. That is just one simple step that the Minister's Government could adopt by working proactively with councils to use far better management practices for managing parking which would free heaps of valuable urban land. That is only one small step because there are a whole lot of other things his Government needs to do. But in order to do so—to truly address the housing crisis—we have to let go of that ideology that says Government cannot do anything because in the housing markets that are working well they do not have a lack of environmental protection or a lack of planning rules or a lack of collaboration. In fact they have the opposite. If you look at Germany it has highly collaborative planning practices which means that the community actually gets input into new developments. If you get the community on board early on even if it makes the process seem a little bit slower in the end it is a far better outcome because everybody has participated and you get something that has the buy-in of the entire community. I know that the New Zealand Council for Infrastructure Development—not an organisation I normally agree with—went around consulting and proposing this after it did a study tour in Europe and suggested that for major infrastructure projects it would be better to have a more collaborative process rather than one that gets drawn out in appeals. [Interruption] But no what is proposed in this bill is not taking us in a direction of more community input and it certainly is not taking us in a direction where the Government is actually going to be more proactive about master planning. That is what is needed. Developers have their place but if you leave it to them they are just going to maximise profit from a particular piece of land. What we have seen is that they are not providing integrated communities which is what people need for the long term. The only place where that is happening right now is in Hobsonville and that is because it was an initiative of central government under Labour with the Waitakere City Council and Housing New Zealand. They master-planned it they got community input and they actually provided a complete community with a range of housing options with schools with public transport and with all of the infrastructure that you need to have a good place to live. That is not happening anywhere else right now in New Zealand because of this ideological approach taken by the National Government that says: "Government does nothing. We just stand aside. We remove the red tape for developers and we let them go wild." They maximise their profits but where is the long-term community the place for people to live and for them to work that is truly affordable? The Minister has continually gone on about land supply but not all urban land supply is equal. Houses on the fringe are far more expensive in terms of transport and access to jobs and amenities and the infrastructure that has to be provided by local government. Until his Government acknowledges that transport and housing affordability go together and the Government needs to be leading the way with infrastructure first and by supporting development coordinating development and having a master planning process for new developments and redevelopments and by then allowing the private sector to develop within the parameters of what the community wants—but most importantly the lost opportunity was that when his Government came in in 2008 and 2009 all the building slowed down and there were people who lost their jobs. That was the perfect time for the Government to invest in housing and State housing. Counter-cyclical building is what every other country with a well-functioning housing market does and his Government did not do that. That is why we have a shortage of supply right now. It is not to do with the RMA; it is to do with the lack of action on the part of the National Government to build at a time when the private sector was not going to build. The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Come back to the RMA. JULIE ANNE GENTER: The Green Party has made numerous constructive contributions. We would have liked to see a royal commission of inquiry to get broad-based support and I think we are still going to need that if we take seriously what the Productivity Commission has said. I do not believe that this bill as drafted is going to take us at all in the direction that all of the planning experts know will work to deliver affordable quality development for the long term. What New Zealanders really want is environmental protection and for development to be able to happen in a long-term way in a way that—you know do it once do it right. That is not something we have done in New Zealand for a really long time but we can again if we change the Government."