Fitzsimons Jeanette: Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill — Procedure Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill — Procedure Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:657;Page:6185] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Green) 
: 
 The Greens have put forward a number of Supplementary Order Papers on the notification provisions of the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill and I would like to run through them so that members will be able to support them. 
I ask members to turn their attention first to Supplementary Order Paper 43. It removes altogether clause 68 which makes the changes to notification. Basically these clauses have become a mess. It is confusing. It is not at all clear. We know that it somewhat raises the bar for notification but it is very unclear how it will be interpreted. It is creating a legal mess. We should go back to the position we had earlier. It was not ideal but at least we were getting some case law around it and it was better than what we have now. 
That brings me to some comments made by Louise Upston. She talked about people having difficulty getting resource consents to build a garage. Most garages and house extensions need a building consent but they do not need a resource consent. It would have to be an unusual kind of garage—one that shades people’s sunlight encroaches on the boundary or bulk and location requirements or whatever—to actually need a resource consent. People certainly would not be notified beyond the immediate neighbours. So it is a very bad example. I give members an example of something of much greater impact that does not get notified at all: an open-cast coal mine in the Waikato. An open-cast coal mine was regarded as having effects so minor that it did not need notification at all. I ask members to try that next door! 
If Supplementary Order Paper 43 fails which I am sure will not be the case we have Supplementary Order Paper 45. It clarifies that in a case of limited notification where the restrictions on who gets notified are quite narrow an organisation representing the public interest when there is an impact on that public interest by the development should be regarded as affected persons. Because the definition of “person” under the Resource Management Act makes it clear that organisations are persons under the Act we would think that an organisation representing the public interest would be a person affected anyway. But some have argued that only natural persons can be affected in the sense of the Act and that therefore organisations representing the public interest could be excluded from the limited notification provisions. That is why we have said for the avoidance of doubt that these organisations should be regarded as affected persons. If that organisation is the tennis club and water quality is being affected then it would not qualify. But if the local environment group has done work on water and water quality will be impacted then it ought to be notified. 
Supplementary Order Paper 45 also omits new section 95D(a)(ii) inserted by clause 68 which has the peculiar effect of saying a person “must disregard any effects on persons who own or occupy—(ii) any land adjacent to that land;”. So people can cause effects on their immediate neighbours and they do not get notified but people cannot cause effects further abroad. That seems to be bizarre and we propose that that new section should be omitted altogether. 
Supplementary Order Paper 43 removes clause 131 which is the clause that repeals the right under section 274 of the Act to join an appeal brought by another party. I dealt with this issue somewhat in my second reading speech where I said that the ability to join an appeal brought by somebody else will never be needed by a large developer with full-time lawyers. They will be in there right at the beginning. The people who need section 274 are the people who are holding down jobs and looking after families. They are volunteers they are part-time and they just do not see the deadline coming up in time to get into the original case in front of the council. Therefore they lose their right to appeal. As the law stands section 274 allows them when someone else appeals to join that appeal and to bring their information and evidence for the benefit of the court in order to make a better decision. I quote the case of the Cypress mine appeal where the Buller Conservation Group under section 274 joined as an interested party the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society which had appealed. They were able to fund a lawyer an ecologist and a landscape architect and that helped the environment movement produce a well-rounded case in that appeal. 
The Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society and groups like it sometimes use that ability to join a case. In this case a national environment group brought an appeal and then the local group was able to join that appeal and bring its local knowledge. Local knowledge is really important in a case like this. I have already mentioned in my second reading speech the case of the local people who knew that the land on which a mining tailings dam was built was unstable and would slip. Unfortunately they were not listened to even though they got as far as court and the land was unstable and slipped and it cost $20 million. The mining company might wish that it had listened at that stage to the local group. So we believe that section 274 adds a useful provision to the Act and should not be repealed. 
If all of this fails finally we have Supplementary Order Paper 44 which clarifies that even if section 274 is repealed a person representing some aspect of the public interest that is affected by this case can appeal against the case. I recommend those Supplementary Order Papers to the House. 
I will talk about trees. We do not have laws on murder because we think every good citizen of Auckland will go out and murder people. We do not have laws against theft because we think most people are thieves. We have those laws because there are a few who might be. Likewise we do not need tree protection laws because we cannot trust the householders of Auckland; we need tree protection laws because in Auckland above all other places a lot of infill development is going on whereby developers buy a section they have no real connection with do not intend to live on and have no attachment to in order to build as many apartments as they can fit on to it and the trees are in the way. This is a totally different situation from a person with a beautiful magnolia in his or her front garden who is unlikely to chop it down. That is not who this rule is for. We are talking here about the areas that have the most intense development pressures. Of course we are not losing trees in Christchurch! Developers are not trying to cram multiple apartments into every tiny corner of Christchurch. It is not growing at quite that rate. We have those pressures in a few parts of the country. Councils can use this tool in the public interest where it is necessary to have some control over trees in those areas that are being densified quite fast. 
The Minister for the Environment said there were 5000 applications per year to trim trees. If the Minister is right then what he is saying is that all of those 5000 cases would not have had to happen if he had accepted my amendment which excluded trimming trees and allowed a blanket protection only for felling removing or destroying trees. But the Minister would not accept that amendment at all despite the fact that it would have dealt with those 5000 applications which he said were about trimming trees. My suspicion is that roughly half of them were about trimming trees and roughly half of them were about felling trees but in either case it would have dramatically reduced those compliance costs. 
In addition councils could delegate the decision to an officer on site who goes out visits and makes an assessment. The officer says yes signs the piece of paper and says: “Off you go.” There is no need for the mass of paperwork that goes on at the moment. It could be done very quickly and simply. It is just a matter of having a check. The scheduling will create very much greater compliance costs because every single tree scheduled is open to appeal by people who do not want it scheduled. The council will be tied up in a nightmare of compliance red tape cost and paperwork trying to get its schedule and most councils simply will not try.