Sage Eugenie: Resource Management Reform Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Resource Management Reform Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 31 July 2013. Volume:692;Page:12184. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Chair. The Resource Management Act has always been about how we resolve conflicts in our increasingly overpopulated world between short-term economic gain whether it is from a new subdivision or a new goldmine and the long-term health of our environment which supports our lives and our economy. The Resource Management Act is supposed to be about people having a say in what happens in their neighbourhoods the places where they live and work and the places and landscapes they care about. It is supposed to be about local democracy about local plans about local councils developing plans with their communities and about the councillors being accountable through the ballot box every 3 years for the decisions they make on those plans.Under this Government and the previous Government there have certainly been shortcomings in the way the Act has been implemented. There has been a failure to provide enough national leadership through national policy statements that are effective and national standards. We have not had consistency around New Zealand. Regional councils have been far too slow in controlling the land uses that lead to water pollution—yes Jacqui Dean the intensive farming that leads to water pollution. The Resource Management Act is about providing a place and a process where we can have sensible debates about how we use nature to ensure that there are sensible controls and to ensure that we look to the needs of future generations. But this bill the Resource Management Reform Bill tramples across quite a lot of those provisions and in my first call I would like to make some general points about why the Green Party is opposing the bill.We are opposing it because it is promoting very speedy decisions rather than sound decisions. It is doing that because of the much tighter and more complex deadlines that the bill is imposing—the 6-month deadline for medium-sized projects yet to be defined. It is using legislation to try to define good practice rather than to provide guidance to councils through things like the Quality Planning website into which the Ministry for the Environment has not invested very much in the last few years. We are also opposing the bill because it puts private property rights ahead of community benefits. It is goingto reduce the amenities in our cities and towns with its attack on urban trees and by giving landowners virtually free rights to fell or severely prune trees on their land unless the council has gone to considerable trouble and expense to identify and schedule in the plan individual trees and give them a legal description.We are also opposing the bill because it is anti-regulation. Those are the changes in clause 69 which are the changes to the section 32 cost-benefit analysis. We think that the Government and councils need to be able to put in place strong smart regulation to safeguard nature. But these changes to section 32 the new criteria which look at economic growth anticipated to cease and employment anticipated to be provided or reduced will mitigate against good rules because the councils will be focused in their plan making on looking at the economic cost of that. That means that when we get a desire to have strong rules or strong national environmental standards the much more easily quantifiable economic cost will mitigate against those rules being put in place.We are also opposing the bill because of the way in which it cuts across the decision making of local authorities and reduces their roles and their responsibilities. Councils are elected to represent the wisdom of their communities yet the changes in the bill mean that councils are far less likely to be the decision makers on important infrastructure projects. That is because of the changes around medium-sized consents and the ability for those to be called in by the Minister for the Environment. So it is not just proposals of national significance that will now be able to be called in but medium-sized proposals too. We do not even know how those are going to be defined. They will be defined by an investment threshold that is to be set in regulation. It is not in the bill. That will mean that we will have more boards of inquiry appointed by the Minister rather than councils making these decisions. That is a major step yet another one in the centralisation of power that we are seeing under this Government rather than getting a nanny State which National is so critical of. At least a nanny State cares. Here we are getting a command-and-control State which is taking away the powers from local councils overriding local democracy and taking those powers for itself.One of the other aspects in Part 1 that is so noxious is the attack on urban trees. Members of the Opposition know that urban trees contribute very much to the liveability of our cities and towns. They help create a sense of place and identity they provide habitats for indigenous and introduced species and they help reduce the heat island effect and yet because this Government puts individual property rights ahead of community benefits it is going to make it much harder for councils to protect our trees in our cities and towns. Indeed it benefits the developers and the Property Council. How does it do this? It means that a council can have plan rules to protect trees—by requiring a resource consent if a landowner wants to fell them or trim them—only if it goes through and puts a schedule in the plan that individually identifies and legally describes those trees. That means that we cannot have plan rules that identify a class of trees like coastalpōhutukawa and have those protected. Councils like the Upper Hutt City Council have estimated that preparing the schedule would cost over $100000 if they were to include rules in their plans to protect urban trees.We have seen the Government introduce these changes in response to the Environment Court decision by Judge Jackson in 2009 which took a broad view of the previous changes by the Government to the Act in the simplifying and streamlining amendment where it tried to attack urban trees as well. The Environment Court said that you could have these broad plan provisions so what does the Government do? With this bill it is cutting right across that. These changes once again impact on local democracy. Quite a lot of the submitters said that it should be local councils that make the decisions about which urban trees are to be protected; it should not be central government interfering and telling councils that they cannot have rules in their plans toprotect urban trees unless there is a whole lot of detail attached to those provisions. This is yet another example of the Government imposing quite significant costs on local authorities. Those costs mean that these plan schedules are unlikely to be exhaustive. It means that a lot of trees will be missed out which means that those trees will be vulnerable to being pruned or felled with impunity by landowners.Supplementary Order Paper 282 in my name “would enable councils to use more cost effective tools to prepare plan schedules by allowing trees to be identified by a notation on an aerial photograph GIS map layer or similar.” We would prefer not to have the provisions amending section 76 in clause 12 but the Supplementary Order Paper is an attempt at compromise and we would like the Minister for the Environment to seriously consider it. If you have notations on an aerial photograph the trees are still able to be accurately identified. It would be clear to both landholders and the public but it would be potentially much less costly to councils than having to go through the scheduling process using legal descriptions of every single tree or small group of trees.The other thing that Supplementary Order Paper 282 does is make clear what the provisions should be around Conservation Act and Reserves Act reserves. The status of bush protection zones on Crown land is unclear in the bill and the status of continuous vegetation which is identified as significant in terms of section 6(c) of the Resource Management Act is also unclear. This Supplementary Order Paper makes it clear that councils can continue to use general rules to control the clearance of significant natural areas that councils have identified where the vegetation is continuous.We ask that the Minister seriously consider this Supplementary Order Paper which is a compromise and which would reduce the cost to councils of preparing the schedules otherwise councils will be burdened by quite considerable costs and doing these schedules will be much more complex. The Government says it is all about reducing complexity when it is not. The Supplementary Order Paper would actually help ensure that more of our urban trees are recognised and protected.