Court SimonSIMON COURT (ACT): New Zealanders agree on the problem to solve: the Resource Management Act (RMA) has failed New Zealand in the past 30-plus years. The Resource Management Act has been the single biggest handbrake on developing land for housing. It's made it harder to build warm dry and affordable homes. It's led to a range of social problems: people living in cars but not just living in cars people considering whether they want to move towns move cities or regions for a better job and finding they can't find an affordable home that matches what their ability to pay is.The Resource Management Act has made it much more difficult to build transport infrastructure. In Auckland I can think of a number of projects including the East West Link which still languish in the Supreme Court awaiting determinations; projects that are absolutely vital to get trucks off local roads improve productivity and allow people actually to get on with building businesses rather than wasting money on expensive consultants and RMA lawyers.The RMA has resulted in less competition even between supermarkets until recently—higher prices for everything lower productivity. If you can't build efficient roads what that means is trucks spend longer delivering materials to site or to supermarket—we need to put more trucks on the road to achieve the same volume of work it leads to traffic congestion and lower productivities. Ultimately the Resource Management Act and I hate to say it Minister Parker for all the work you've done the replacement bill will only lead to an ongoing decline in standards of living. This is not going to work because what Labour has done is take the advice of people with vested interests; the same lawyers and the same advisers who advised on the Resource Management Act back in the 1990s were the same people engaged to tell this Labour Government how to fix the Resource Management Act. And you know what happens when you let a fox into the hen house? It has a good old feast on the hens and that's what's happened for the last five years of consultation on the RMA—very very disappointing for practitioners for people like myself who have come from the building and construction sector to see what Labour and what Minister Parker has delivered.This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reform the resource management process—the way we use land the way we protect the places that are special to us—but instead Labour has doubled down on some of the things that have frustrated development. It's extended the red tape. It's included metaphysical concepts in the Natural and Built Environment Bill spiritual and animist concepts like Te Mana o te Wai. The purpose of the bill being to uphold te Oranga o te Taiao. It's a novel term. Lawyers told us at the Environment Committee that it could take a decade or more to unravel what that means. This bill includes undefined terms like mātauranga Māori" and "tikanga Māori". Well you can go to court and ask a judge what it means or the Minister might have agreed with me when I tabled an amendment to this bill at the committee stage that we could include a very simple definition of what traditional Māori knowledge is if that's what mātauranga Māori means. But the Minister refused.This bill will carry over national policy instruments that have been one of the greatest handbrakes on moving on and developing productive land in New Zealand—getting on with building. The freshwater plans that national policy statement which defined three bulrushes in a paddock as a wetland—three bulrushes in a paddock as a wetland—is one of the national instruments that's going to be carried over with David Parker's enormous 1000-page bill. Now when I pointed out to the Minister that three bulrushes in a paddock are a wetland and getting consents to disturb a wetland was prohibited the Minister belatedly after 18 months finally changed the definition of a wetland in that national policy statement. Eighteen months of quarry developments—we depend on the aggregates we depend on the sands and other materials to make concrete to build roads. Eighteen months of developments not able to get consent because the Minister accepted the advice from officials that three bulrushes in a paddock makes a wetland. All of that nonsense is being carried over in the Natural and Built Environment Bill. Counter-productive policy that slows New Zealand down costs money. The Infrastructure Commission made a good point in a recently released report: consenting alone stacking up the documents to apply for consents spending their time in court—Environment Court High Court Supreme Court—cost New Zealand infrastructure- and asset-owners $1.3 billion in the year that they assessed; $1.3 billion just to get consents not to do the bat survey not to put up the silt fence not actually to sort out the traffic management—$1.3 billion on consenting. Completely unacceptable. That is what is holding New Zealand back. This bill will make it worse much worse because it will take 10 years to work out what half of it means.So what do we need to do? What could we have done differently? Well a different policy approach that was rejected early on in the consultation by the Minister was to separate environmental protection of our special places from building and construction from urban development because it doesn't make any sense to apply the same environmental protection principles and approach and framework and tests to say somebody who wants to build a gondola up the side of Mount Cook as it does to somebody who wants to build an urban motorway through a paddock or a subdivision. But that's what the RMA did with its integrated approach to land-use planning and environment with sustainable management that 30-plus-year failed experiment. The Natural and Built Environment Bill which will soon become law doubles down on that approach.What would ACT do differently? Well we would say it's time for a radical reset. When I came to Parliament I gave a maiden speech. I said I'm not here to just cruise along with the status quo. I said I was a radical environmentalist and that's because we need to take a radical approach if we want to solve the problems of environmental damage and pollution and loss of biodiversity. We need a separate environmental protection Act that just focuses on environmental improvement and we need a separate urban development Act so we can get on with building infrastructure that actually allows our cities to grow allows our regions to be connected to ports to workers and to markets. ACT would do that through our proposal for building New Zealand and conserving nature. You can find it on act.org.nz. We spent 18 months researching this.DEPUTY SPEAKER: Mr Court—déjà vu. You know where to go—back to the bill.SIMON COURT: Thank you Mr Speaker. The opportunities that this bill neglected were actually to change the focus; instead of having more people decide how you use your land to go back to the principles of common law and private property rights. So the presumption should be not that we have to beg for permission from a planning tribunal or from a judge but instead we have the right to use our land as long as we don't affect our neighbours or discharge to the commons. Now there are different ways to regulate discharges to the commons like to fresh water or to air than having to apply for permits over and over. The Natural and Built Environment Bill will soon become law and will still require people to get consents and permits for things that they can simply cut and paste from a code of practice. What ACT would say and what the Infrastructure Commission said in advice they gave to the Minister when preparing this bill is that 80 percent of consents are unnecessary because we already know how to carry out those functions. That's why ACT would say "Let's avoid all the consenting nonsense and for common activities—in fact all of those except for the most high risk in the most sensitive environments—you shouldn't have to get consents at all". ACT can reduce the cost of consenting permitting under any type of resource management law from the $1.3 billion a year to a fraction of that.Now what are the opportunities to come? Well this bill will be passed. Councils will have to face this problem of how they implement something not knowing whether it will proceed. In fact most likely it won't because there will be a change of Government and a Government that involves ACT has an alternative solution. So all of this transition cost all of this wasted effort all of this five years may be lost—or it won't because all the good advice we have will go into ACT's policy prescription for resource management reform. Look forward to sharing it with you."