Wood MichaelRESOURCE LEGISLATION AMENDMENT BILLIn CommitteeDebate resumed from 4 April.Part 2 Amendments to Reserves Act 1977MICHAEL WOOD (Labour—Mt Roskill): Thank you Mr Chair—excuse my tentative standing there; I shall aim to improve. I would be very happy to take a call on Part—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): The member can improve a lot.MICHAEL WOOD: Ha ha! I remember the wise words of former Assistant Speaker Ross Robertson who said: Courtesy is contagious."The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): The member can live in hope.MICHAEL WOOD: Ha ha! I am always hopeful and of course I am hopeful about this bill and the capacity of this Committee to look at improvements to it in this Committee stage as well. It is in that vein that I rise to speak about Part 2 which refers to a number of changes to the Reserves Act. Of course we sort of had the main act yesterday in terms of the Resource Legislation Amendment Bill. A lot of the significant changes that have attracted a great deal of public attention were in the earlier part but it is nonetheless important that we also give scrutiny to the subsequent parts.I personally feel very strongly about this part. I have got a background in local government over the past 6 years and one of the things that I have learnt in that time is the importance and the preciousness of our parks and our open spaces; the reserves which make our cities and towns good places to live to experience recreation and to provide protection to important ecological areas and wildlife. The fact is that we often have those reserves because of the legislative protections that we have in the Reserves Act. I have just got the purpose here of the Reserves Act which I think is useful to reflect upon when we are looking at these possible changes here. Section 3(a) of that Act describes the purpose as "providing for the preservation and management for the benefit and enjoyment of the public areas of New Zealand possessing—(i) recreational use or potential … (ii) wildlife; or (iii) indigenous flora or fauna; or (iv) environmental and landscape amenity … or (v) natural scenic historic cultural archaeological biological geological scientific educational community or other special features or value:".So we turn to the bill under consideration and what it actually does in this area. Effectively what it does is give the option of considering and consulting upon Reserves Act exchanges alongside plan changes. That is effectively what we are talking about here and this does deserve some scrutiny. There are a number of submissions that point to some of the potential issues that come to the fore when we bring those two things together. Essentially the problem—and the issue and the reason why the Labour Party has a problem in this area—is that if we go back to that purpose of the Reserves Act that I talked about and then we look at the underlying objectives of this bill which are effectively to encourage and support development those objectives do not necessarily line up well. Under the Reserves Act that we have and the body of jurisprudence that has built up under it there is always a fundamental and strong protection and interest in the reserve itself always making Reserves Act decisions especially in relation to exchanges under the Reserves Act with the benefit of the reserve at the very centre. So the question is that if under this amendment bill—and we are talking here about the changes in new section 14A of the Reserves Act inserted by clause 163—we potentially confuse and dilute the two purposes there because if you are running the two processes together that is questions about whether it is appropriate to exchange reserve land and plan changes which are almost inevitably about developing upon the subsequent land that has come about as a result of the exchange how do you preserve the primacy of the interests of the reserve when you are running those two processes together?If you look at the current process we first go through a Reserves Act exchange process and that gives us the opportunity to say: "Is this exchange of reserve land appropriate? Is it in the interests of the reserve land and the community that it serves?". Now the answer may very well be yes it is and in that case you can potentially then move onto the plan change process and look at development on that land. But I can only think that putting those two processes together puts additional pressure on the decision makers to think about the potential development when actually what we should be focusing on in the first place is the land that we are considering under the Reserves Act.So I have got real concerns here and these concerns are reflected in some of the commentary around the bill and in some of the submissions. I refer—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Before I go to Mr O'Rourke I am going to remind the Committee that we are talking to Part 2 and we are talking to what is actually in Part 2 now not what might have been in it earlier. We are talking to Part 2 as amended and any amendments to it but there are not any yet. It is a very narrow area and does not actually even include the section that the member is referring to which was changed at the select committee."