Simpson ScottHon SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): Well thank you Madam Speaker. This is a significant debate on a very important potential change to our legislative and regulatory framework that really forms the foundation stone of New Zealand's natural environment our planning legislation what can be developed what can't be developed where it can be developed and how and also how our natural environment is maintained protected and enhanced.And of course the Resource Management Act (RMA) as we know it today is cumbersome it's expensive to administer it's complicated laypeople literally have no understanding of it and are required to use expensive consultants and lawyers to work their way through the maze that the original legislation from the early-1990s I don't think ever really intended to occur. But the RMA in its current form has been amended something like 18 or 19 times significantly it now runs close to 900 pages of black-letter statute and it's completely no longer fit for purpose. There was an agreement at the last election across the Parliament that in its current form the RMA's time had come and that it was time for a new fresh look. So this Government has embarked upon a process that has led to this debate today. As the previous speaker the deputy chair of the Environment Committee has made the point the concept of presenting an exposure draft for submissions and hearings to a select committee is a little bit unusual but I think it's been a useful process if only to identify the holes that exist in the plan that was presented to us. I think it's important that people who are listening to this debate and who may not have had the benefit of participating in the select committee process understand that the exposure draft document that was presented to the select committee and to submitters for consideration was a very short piece of work in terms of the substance of it. It had some big concepts contained in it but there were more pieces missing and more questions asked arising from the exposure draft than there were answers. If I can make an analogy: we were presented as a committee and so were the submitters with a document that I think from memory ran to about 17 or 18 pages might have been 20 pages but had a significant number of placeholders in it; places where clearly the policy work was either not complete or had not yet been agreed by either officials the Government its Cabinet or the Labour Party caucus. At the end of the exposure draft process we were none the wiser for that. It was kind of like asking the select committee and the submitters to do a big jigsaw puzzle with many of the key pieces missing and to be wearing a blindfold at the same time as you're trying to do the jigsaw puzzle with the pieces missing. It would have been enormously helpful if the second piece of legislation could have been considered at the same time. It was originally going to be called the strategic planning legislation"; I understand it's now going to have the name "spatial planning". But it would have been very helpful to have had that piece. We expect I think to have the adaptation piece the third leg of the trifecta—we could have had that too but that's clearly a work in process as well.So our support on the National Party side for this process was conditional in a way in that we wanted to see what the primary piece of work was and we weren't given that. We weren't given the certainty the surety that we were looking for and nor were submitters of whom there were some 3000—and we heard just over 300 in person or via Zoom sessions. Those submitters as the chair of the committee said put in an awful lot of work; much of it I fear was kind of wasted work because they too didn't have the full complete picture of what the Government's agenda is for the replacement of the RMA.Now the Minister has said on a number of occasions that he's going to stick very closely to the report of the committee chaired by retired appeal court judge Tony Randerson QC. That report from that committee was a very extensive report; very detailed. If that is the road map that the Minister's using then we have some concerns on this side of the House because we think there is an argument for a different way of thinking; a different focus completely. The House needs to understand I think that notwithstanding the academic ability of the chair of that committee his background and experience or the members of that committee it represents what is effectively very much 1980s' thinking.What is being proposed in the Randerson report has received almost no critical analysis or detailed work in any meaningful respect. It's largely been accepted by the commentariat and officials and the Minister as being the guide and the road map to a future pathway. We remain unconvinced of that pathway and we really wanted to see something that was more suited to this century rather than last century. And this process of reforming our resource management framework provides the Parliament and the people of New Zealand with a magnificent opportunity to update our thinking to not use the blinked thinking of the 1980s and do what amounts to pretty much grand tinkering of the current scheme on a massive scale. I think that is a wasted opportunity.So the National Party's support for this process is conditional and the Government needs not to take it for granted because we are not convinced that this process upon which he has embarked is the right process and I don't want this to be wasted effort on behalf of officials submitters councils and even the Randerson committee ready to be tossed out by an incoming National-led Government who are not satisfied with this legislation who are not satisfied with the direction it takes and who are not satisfied with the outcomes that it is potentially going to produce because our reading of this so far indicates that so much remains uncertain so many of the flaws with the existing RMA are just magnified and made potentially worse by the proposed exposure draft that we've seen. So we'll be looking for some significant change and I think the onus is upon the Minister to actually think outside the Randerson report be more bold forward-focused thinking and to think about a legislative regulatory framework that is purpose built and defined not for the 1980s but for the 2020s 2030s 2040s and beyond because what we are confronted with at the moment is a piece of backward-looking change that I don't think potentially serves the future of New Zealand's natural environment well—and I don't think it serves the future of New Zealand's built environment particularly well either. There is for instance in the exposure draft no voice from the entrepreneurial business development sector in this legislation—plenty of voice for other stakeholders plenty of voice for all sorts of community groups for submitters all that sort of stuff—nothing that says "We want to make New Zealand a better place and we can do it in a way that is constructive and positive while at the same time maintaining enhancing and looking after and protecting our beautiful natural environment." So as we go through this process the National Party will continue to look very carefully at the legislation that eventually comes into the House later this year and I'm pleased that the Minister has indicated that the two pieces the Natural and Built Environments piece of legislation and the spatial planning legislation will come in simultaneously. That'll be a juggling piece of work for the select committee to do. It's not beyond our wit or ability to do that—I'm sure we can do that—but the underlying message I want to send to this Parliament and to the Minister is: do not take the National Party's support for this reform for granted; we want to see something far more ambitious far less costly far less cumbersome and far less confusing than what has been put on the table so far. We don't want to have decisions made by judicial activism and interpretation because so much of what is being put into this legislation at the moment is ill-defined unknown—words phrases and terminology that have no common-law tie. We made some mention of that in our report but still the potential for actually the courts to be deciding what the framework for our natural and built environments should be remains enormously high in this area. We are utterly unconvinced that the pathway that the Minister is taking is the right one but we are prepared to continue engaging and we want to work with the Government constructively if we can."