Court Simon; Rurawhe AdrianSIMON COURT (ACT): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's true that there is a problem with housing and ACT is pleased to see that it's acknowledged it is a supply issue. We need to get this right. There is a problem with housing affordability. It's an intergenerational issue of fairness opportunity and overall welfare of people who cannot afford to buy a home. But this bill won't solve these problems. As Minister Parker described when he spoke on the second reading what he didn't realise is that it's actually possible to have better planning laws and still oppose this bill which does nothing to improve planning laws and actually get more houses built.We believe a bipartisan approach to solving issues is not a bad thing. But it would have been helpful hearing that there was a regulatory impact statement back in May to have actually taken that to the people who build houses and who develop land and to the local government people who could tell you about all the faults that they brought to the select committee and told us about over five days—in an awfully compressed period—when many of those people were working under level 3 lockdown conditions at homes with children at home and trying to manage businesses under those awful lockdown conditions.Now submitters were able to laser in on the problems with this bill because they are glaringly obvious to practitioners and people who actually develop and build homes. They pointed out that poorly crafted deals hatched in secret between political rivals which lead to rushed law changes may have missed something particularly when they're brought to the House and pushed through under urgency. That is not the kind of lawmaking which is enduring and will actually fix housing supply.Councils and developers actually pointed to issues like a lack of infrastructure that allows them to intensify in existing town centres close to the community services where we understand more people should be living because that's where it's good to live. But the infrastructure is missing.Hamilton that relatively young city—a city of the future even—actually lacks capacity for infrastructure in the older parts of the city where they want to build up but are severely constrained. They estimated $4 billion just to meet the intensification requirements for the existing National Policy Statement on Urban Development. But this Government has given them $320 million through the Housing Acceleration Fund. That's less than a tenth of what they need to actually deliver the homes that could be built right now in Hamilton so the Government appears to have its priorities wrong. That's why ACT believes we actually need to reform infrastructure funding and financing in order to unlock land for housing. That is something we've campaigned on for years.The submitters who came to the Environment Committee told us the same thing over and over again. We heard examples. We heard a Grey Lynn artist of all people bring up infrastructure in Grey Lynn as the reason why more homes couldn't be built. She pointed to a project to separate hundred-year-old sewerage and stormwater as the reason why you couldn't build more houses in Grey Lynn. That project's 10 years overdue and everybody who lives there knows you can't swim anywhere around there because of the sewage overflows. So zoning to add thousands more potential homes is a complete waste of time and it's terrible for the environment.We heard a developer tell us that if they want to put up the first five houses in the street and there's a pipe big enough they can connect and all they pay is the standard development contribution. The guy who comes along with the next five is told Sorry there's no more capacity. But if you upgrade the entire network in the street and maybe a bit further and you spend a couple of million bucks doing it we'll let you build your five houses." Well guess how much that adds to the cost of a new dwelling? In some cases—not $85000 like Auckland Council is asking for—hundreds of thousands of dollars.Developers pointed out that their master plans already allow for mixed-use higher-density apartments and terraces with an average density of around 40 homes per hectare. That's very very high by international standards. This bill means years of infrastructure planning and environmental and geotechnical investigations goes in the bin because by applying the medium-density residential standard to those developments all of their infrastructure design all of their planning and all of their environmental discharge modelling goes in the bin and they can't use it.Hamish Anderson from Adare group—he's a guy who's in charge of a 7000 home development at Peacocke in the east of Hamilton. He estimated that this bill will delay even if they go ahead and redesign do all that stuff that this bill will allow them to do—and I see members opposite who sat on the committee with me shaking their heads still in denial. Hamish Anderson said that this bill through redesign would cause a delay of 36 months and add up to $4 million for a development that's literally months away from proceeding. Nigel McKenna from the Templeton Group formerly Todd Property with $8 billion worth of projects in the pipeline and Bill Loutit from the Beachlands South consortium—which actually includes the Government's own New Zealand Superannuation Fund as a major funder—told us exactly the same thing. Delay delay; cost cost—houses won't be built any faster. In fact this bill risks extinguishing development projects altogether.The other thing they told us was that this bill appears to have been designed by planners for planners in central government because the developers—all they want is access to fast-tracking the same so-called privileges that the Government is according itself and these tier 1 councils but these exclude private developers. They'll be stuck with the existing Resource Management Act (RMA) processes which can take years to progress plan changes.They also pointed out something that is so perverse and confounding I had to ask a number of them to please repeat it and that was that there'll still be an RMA process that they have to go through. They're going to have to go through two planning processes. Auckland Council said they're going to have to set up a whole new department to run this new planning process in parallel to the RMA process they still have to go through. If Minister Parker thinks that supporting this bill will actually get more houses built and reduce red tape well unfortunately Mr Parker that's not what's going to happen.Now ACT asked the committee for more time to consider submissions and work to improve the bill. We want to make planning laws better so we can get more houses built. The National Party and the Labour Party voted down our motion. ACT asked the committee to please write to the Business Committee and seek to have infrastructure funding added to the bill and have the bill expanded to become and omnibus bill but both the National Party and the Labour Party voted down ACT's motion. Today ACT proposed a motion to send the bill back to select committee for a full hearing because we do want to work to reduce red tape to get the bill right. The Government and the National Party voted that down but we do appreciate the support from the Green Party for this proposal.It's clear that in this bill and the amendments the urban design features are being negotiated away between the Government and the National Party. We know this because we can read about it almost hour by hour in the mainstream media as the horse-trading about whether it is 6 metres or 5 metres or 4 metres in height to boundary and all of these things are literally being negotiated in the media. Now that's not how good laws are made in a democracy. That's not how enduring laws are made which actually solve really complex problems. As a civil engineer who came to Parliament to solve difficult problems to find ways to change laws to get things built faster to deliver infrastructure more affordably and to reduce barriers to get stuff built I was shocked. I am shocked. So were the submitters so were the people who do want to get more stuff built—they were shocked. Now ACT has proposed a number of policies over the years and it turns out many of the submitters to committee agree with us. We had Urban Auckland propose 50 percent GST sharing between central government and councils. We heard that—the Infrastructure Commission—private sector investment in the form of public-private partnerships would be very very helpful to get more large-scale infrastructure built to free up the capacity for more housing. We heard that fast-tracked planning and consenting processes should be available not just to councils and Government departments like Kāinga Ora but to the private sector too.ACT opposes this bill in its current form but we do want to work to improve it. That's our offer. Parliament needs to deliver a better—DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member's time has expired."