Sage Eugenie; Salesa JennyHon EUGENIE SAGE (Green): E mihi ana Ranginui rāua ko Papatūānuku. E te Mana Whakawā tēnā koe. Ngā mema o te Whare Pāremata tēnā koutou katoa. [I acknowledge Ranginui and Papatūānuku. Madam Speaker greetings. Members of Parliament greetings to you all.]I would like to touch on some of the issues around one of the biggest reform programmes in front of this Parliament and that is the reform of the Resource Management Act (RMA) and its replacement by the Natural and Built Environments Act the Strategic Planning Act and the Climate Change Adaptation Act that the Hon David Parker announced this morning and discussed earlier in the House in his contribution.Now this Natural and Built Environments Act is going to be the core piece of legislation replacing the RMA and is going to be progressed first. The proposed purpose of the new Act according to the December Cabinet paper which the Minister released this morning is to promote the quality of the environment to support the wellbeing of present and future generations and to recognise the concept of te mana o te taiao: the mana of the environment.The RMA has been the foundation of our environmental legislation for the last 30 years and its purpose in sections 5 6 7 and 8 in Part 2 of the Act—that whole concept of sustainable management the matters of national importance such as the preservation and protection of the natural character of the coast the margins of rivers significant indigenous vegetation and habitats—has been hotly debated and contested in front of councils and the courts. The drafting of the purpose statement of this new legislation needs to be done with enormous care and skill and I really hope that it's a focus of submissions on the exposure draft which the Environment Committee will be considering.I share some of the concerns of the Hon Simon Upton the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment which he raised in the Salmon Lecture to the Resource Management Law Association last year that those broad words which Labour is proposing as the purpose don't specify that safeguarding the biophysical environment is paramount. As Mr Upton noted the clause is directed to enhancing the quality of the environment as a whole rather than just the natural environment. So supporting the wellbeing of people rather than of ecosystems becomes the overriding goal of the legislation. And potentially such a purpose statement leads us down that well-trodden path under the RMA to balancing competing outcomes to trading off the environment and nature against human wellbeing when decision makers are forced to make an overall broad judgment which contains quite a strong element of subjectivity. So a focus on human wellbeing creates an enormous uncertainty that nature will in fact be safeguarded. Mr Brownlee was talking about increasing the amount of housing simply by ensuring that a few of the adverse impacts on the environment were dealt with and then just going ahead. This fails to recognise the severity of the nature crisis and I would recommend to Mr Brownlee and others to take a look at the major report which the British Treasury released earlier this month. It's a landmark report The Economics of Biodiversity by Cambridge University economist Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta. It's a 600-page review report which needs to be as influential as Nicholas Stern's 2006 report on the economics of climate change because in that report Professor Dasgupta presents a whole new economic framework which is grounded in ecology and which provides a basis for humans to live sustainably. He's made it very clear that we need a radical change in the way that we do economics the way we assess the state of our economies across the globe and that we need to elevate nature as a key element of economic planning and to recognise as I know the Minister for the Environment does that the economy is a subset of nature not the other way round. Because the RMA enables economic development and use and because economics influences policy the thinking in the Dasgupta review must influence the drafting of our new Natural and Built Environments Act because that review shows that by bringing economics and ecology together we can help save nature at what is potentially the last minute and by doing so save ourselves. There's enormous research that has provided the basis for this report and the fact that its conclusions are that our economic progress has come at a devastating cost to nature. We've had the coronavirus pandemic. We've had the economic dislocation that's been associated with that. That's just one example of what happens in terms of our impacts on nature. We need to take the conclusions of that review and include it in our new legislation.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): The next call is a split call. I call Ginny Andersen.