Brooking RachelHon RACHEL BROOKING (Associate Minister for the Environment):Thank you Mr Speaker for this opportunity to speak on the Spatial Planning Bill. I want to touch on a couple of points made by previous speakers but first start with saying why we wanted this piece of legislation in the first place. That is because New Zealand—all Government colours—has not been great at linking up our infrastructure with our town planning. Part of that is because of who funds the infrastructure and as the Minister said before the idea here is that the regional planning groups will have somebody from Government on those bodies and that is because Government obviously is a funder of much infrastructure along with councils and other groups. Now we heard earlier—the Hon Scott Simpson was saying in the previous bill's debate—that this reform package was supposed to be three Acts and two of them don't work without the third piece. That third piece is the climate change adaptation bill that we haven't seen yet and that piece of legislation is to deal with existing activities or houses or businesses whatever you want to think of it that are going to be impacted by climate change. So that is because they are low lying and there's going to be sea level rise at some point in the future. What do we do about the existing people who live there? Part of the Natural and Built Environment Bill does some work in terms of being able to extinguish existing use rights. It's limited. Of course these pieces of legislation both the Spatial Planning Bill and the Natural and Built Environment Bill allow for stopping new activities because of climate change hazards. How you deal with those existing activities how you fund them all of those aspects—that it is difficult and that is something that we need to continue to work on I think in a cross-party way. But it doesn't undermine the purposes of these two other pieces of legislation: the specific one that we are talking about which is our planning to link in infrastructure with our town planning and to do it on a longer time scale. So not the Resource Management Act plans of a 10-year time frame not the Natural and Built Environment Bill plans of the 9-year time frames but to really be looking out 30 years or longer.I just want to touch on that previous speech as well—by Chris Bishop—that was saying that National is keen for resource management reform and they tried to do substantive resource management reform in the past. I really want to challenge that. The bills that I saw as a practitioner they did not try and address the status quo and they did not try and address these difficult issues of long-term planning in infrastructure funding. These reforms do and that is why they're so important. Now speaking again in reference to the Hon Scott Simpson's previous speech I also do want to agree with him that the Hon Eugenie Sage has done a marvellous job of chairing the Environment Committee for both of these bills. Also I want to say that I think every member of that select committee was incredibly hard-working and again I want to thank all the submitters for making their submissions.Now of course the select committee has recommended some changes to the bill and one of them is around the Water Services Entities Act and we just heard the previous speaker mention that. Now clause 3 is the purpose section and that is to promote the integration and the performance of functions under the Natural and Built Environment Act the Land Transport Management Act the Local Government Act and now the Water Services Entities Act 2022. So what the select committee has done in their report back is put that new infrastructure Act into the relevant provisions of the bill.Another thing that I want to highlight is that at clause 16(3) there is now the word map". I'm excited about the addition of this word. It was I think slightly odd that a bill talking about spatial planning didn't mention maps; it now does. I think that is what most members of the community imagine a spatial plan will look like; there will be some maps. So well done to the select committee on that.Of course the select committee has also made changes that reflect changes also made in the Natural and Built Environment Bill and some of the technical changes. I think another important change that the select committee made was at clause 15(1)(f) that the spatial plans are now to link to limits and targets where they apply that are set under the Natural and Built Environment Bill.So this is a really good bill to do better in the things that New Zealanders aren't great at doing which is linking that infrastructure and the town planning. So I commend it to the House."