Brooking RachelRACHEL BROOKING (Labour): Thank you Mr Speaker for this opportunity to speak on the Prime Minister's statement and the year ahead. Before I get started into what I'm really wanting to talk about I would after that last speech like to acknowledge as I have done over the past few days whenever encountering a police officer and thank them for the great work that they are doing. In terms of the year ahead hopefully we can focus on some other issues as well. For me I'm excited. As somebody who is particularly interested in urban planning biodiversity housing and climate change this is going to be a big year. It's a big year for the environment. We have on the work plan the replacement RMA—that's the Resource Management Act. That's with both the Natural and Built Environments Bill and the Strategic Planning Bill eventually to become Acts. This is a big deal—reforming resource management. Resource management is intrinsically difficult. There are always trade-offs to make. There are always people who have the status quo on their side. They don't want to change the system. There are few incentives to protect the environment. There are lots of plans there are complicated concepts—often introduced by resource management lawyers in case law—and of course the fault of this place is that the legislation has been amended frequently. There are many inefficiencies and perverse outcomes.So the changes need to be outcomes-focused and user-friendly have environmental bottom lines have explicit trade-offs and enable councils to work together. In addition there's also the need for strategic planning in the much longer term so that we can look across a region for the planning of infrastructure growth areas and climate adaptation among other things. We'll hear more about this in part in a debate in I think our next sitting week where we'll discuss the Natural and Built Environments Bill exposure draft. That was an interesting process that the Environment Committee has already gone through and that's feeding into the legislation that will come into the House later this year. One of those issues in terms of the spatial plans is looking at where growth should go and we all know that housing is of great importance to the country. We have our $8 billion Housing Acceleration Fund in use. There's planned public housing of over 2000 houses this year. There are programmes towards warmer homes healthy homes initiatives and there are commitments for Government buildings themselves where they're over a certain value to be certified as Green Star buildings. We've also got the Commerce Commission looking into building supplies and late last year we passed the enabling housing legislation. This year councils will be putting out their plans in August to enable more of those houses and the National Policy Statement on Urban Development.There's also a lot going on in terms of climate mitigation. We have the first emissions reduction plan providing many opportunities to New Zealanders and businesses this year. There's a focus on innovation and clean technology and being at the heart of the transition to a low-emissions economy. We're going to have emissions budgets for the next 15 years and it's important here to reiterate that decarbonisation is important not just for the international agreements that we've signed up to—both sides of the House—but also for our trade and for our exporters because the markets are changing. On that I note that the Prime Minister will be undertaking some visits this year. She intends to go to Australia Asia the United States and Europe. We know that there's already been very good progress on the UK free-trade agreement and hopefully we'll get further with the European one.There's a lot of work going into decarbonisation with support to move to clean industrial processes—that's with the Government Investment in Decarbonising Industry Fund. There's a planned new national environmental standard prohibiting new low and medium temperature coal boilers and beginning the phase out of all of the existing ones.This Government is dealing with a range of very tricky and difficult issues. It's not putting its head in the sand and doing nothing. Thank you Mr Speaker.