Brooking RachelRACHEL BROOKING (Labour): Thank you Mr Speaker. I have to say that I am very excited to be speaking on this first reading—this will be of no surprise to anyone here—of the Natural and Built Environment Bill noting that there is no s" on that "Environment"; excuse me if I accidentally add one in. We've heard already that this bill has been a long time in its development. We've had people practitioners talking about how the Resource Management Act (RMA) is a problem for a long time people in this House talking about how it's a problem and then Minister Parker established the Randerson review chaired by Tony Randerson.Chris Bishop: Who was on that?RACHEL BROOKING: Who was on that? I had the great privilege of being on that before I was an MP and it was a very interesting process to be involved with. Of course that group considered many of the issues that have made it into this bill and the one we'll be discussing later. And then of course it's been some time in the development of these bills since those reports so my point there is that this has all been very well thought through. It's important. It's complicated. Planning is always complicated because people want to do different things with their land and there will always be conflicts.So some of the things that I wanted to talk about quickly: one thing is that some commentators have said that this this piece of legislation is no different from the RMA; that it just all looks the same but it's a slightly different shape. But I think when you look more closely you see that it's actually very different because the focus here is on outcomes not just effects. We've had the previous speaker Chris Bishop talk about some of those outcomes in clause 5. There are those differences with giving effect to the Treaty and I agree with the last speaker that it is a big change. There are also smaller changes that are harder to see and that is in things like the definition of "environment". There's no longer any reference to amenity and that's a very fundamental and important difference.However the drafters of the bill have been careful not just to get rid of concepts that are well understood and change the names for changing the names' sakes. So we still have consents—admittedly we don't have non-complying or restricted discretionary. We still have designations we still have plans and we now have a national planning framework.So I think it's important if we just spend a little second on those outcomes. Some of the outcomes are to address climate change and this is the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions the removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and the reduction of risks arising from and better resilience of the environment to natural hazards and the effects of climate change. That is very important.As to the previous speaker Chris Bishop saying that there's not much about development one of the outcomes in clause 5(i) is the ongoing and timely provision of infrastructure services to support the wellbeing of people and communities and of course at clause 5(c) where we're talking about land being available for housing and in fact there is the ample supply of land for development to avoid inflated urban land prices. So all those things are quite different.There are also of course limits—specific limits that are going to be set by the national planning framework. There are also targets. And in clause 6 just staying in the purpose part of the bill we've also got to recognise the positive effects of using and developing the environment to achieve the outcomes. That's a big change as well.We've heard about the one plan per region. It's important to note that it's not the regional council in charge of those plans; it's all the different councils within one region making a plan together. We also hear that it's going to take 10 years to implement and that's because there are 15 regions the way that we're going to use it in this bill because we're putting Tasman and Nelson together; they're both unitary authorities. It's going to take 10 years because we're not going to do everyone all at once; there's a region-by-region approach. In the Randerson review being part of that group and talking to practitioners it was very difficult for the practitioners in New Zealand to do both the Auckland unitary plan and the Christchurch plan at the same time. So there has to be some thought about that transition that this bill reflects.We need to do this. It's easy to say "Well National wanted to do it last time but they didn't do it." Here it is. It's had a lot of work that's gone into it. The select committee is going to spend the proper amount of time examining this. Everybody wants it every speech that I've heard so far tonight. Everybody wants it to work and wants it to be efficient to do both looking after our environment and providing for the needs of our communities. Thank you Mr Speaker."