Court SimonSIMON COURT (ACT): The ACT Party won't be supporting this bill. I thought I'd ask: what is environmental sustainability James Shaw? I mean it could be defined as the ability to maintain an ecological balance in our planet's natural environment and conserve natural resources to support the wellbeing of current and future generations. Well that sounds really nice in a sound bite doesn't it? But this bill is actually an attempt to legislate for that same 1970s socks-and-sandal vision of a Green world that has failed. It's failed when it's been tried in New Zealand.In the 1960s 1970s greenies like James Shaw believed that civilisation would end because we'd run out of water we'd run out of food and we'd run out of energy; it turns out we didn't. Not only were those greenies wrong then but since then billions and billions of people have been lifted out of poverty by making one simple decision as nations the Governments that led them—that they were going to get access to the mineral resources they were going to use their water they were going to do things more efficiently like the people in Singapore who had very scare resources. They were going to get these oil and gas resources out of the ground and they were going to lift billions of people in the developing world out of poverty. Well James Shaw is saying Oh no we shouldn't do that—we shouldn't do that." that the environment somehow should have a human right or humans should have an environmental right. It's the most confusing incoherent approach to environmental management and actually delivering for people. It's totally incoherent.Now Australians are much wealthier than New Zealanders because they've chosen to utilise their natural and physical resources. You know what? You can only dig the iron ore up once but then you can sell it to somebody else for money and you can use that money to build better hospitals better schools and better roads James Shaw.Food production has increased so much over the past 30 or 40 years it's likely—now I'm just reckoning but no more reckoning than this bill is that might work—there's probably more obese people in the world now than there are starving because we produce so much food. That might be radical but it's probably true.If all of these nations had to decide "Do we raise our people out of poverty now or do we lock up our resources and stay poor and unhealthy?" James Shaw would choose the latter. That's what his bill is driving for. Now instead could we use our resources to generate wealth to treat water to deliver energy so that we can heat our homes healthier homes? Could we build landfills instead of dumping waste in estuaries in the sea? These are all trade-offs that James Shaw's bill would make impossible.Adding another law which imposes costs on communities and individuals without any understanding of the benefits—that's the trademark of lefties and greenies like James Shaw the Green Party and the Labour Party. No idea of the costs or the benefits from a former Minister of Climate Change who was part of the Government that banned oil and gas generation and then just shortly after millions of tons of coal started arriving from Indonesia; set up a climate commission to provide sterling advice like banning natural gas connections from new homes for hot water and cooking.Now we just have to look back at this honourable member's track record. The Labour-Green 2017 agreement shows you what they mean by "sustainability". I just clipped a few things from that agreement: reduce congestion and carbon dioxide emissions by cancelling the East-West Motorway Link—that's a piece of roading that's supposed to get heavy trucks off local roads so that urban development can occur. That's what he means by sustainable development: keep those heavy trucks on local roads. And what about "begin work on Auckland light rail"? Well cancelling transport projects to get heavy trucks off roads and spending hundreds of millions of dollars on colourful drawings won't get us to where we want to get to even when it comes to human wellbeing or environmental improvement.We've tried James Shaw's method. It's called the Resource Management Act. It's failed us for 33 years. This approach is totally unsuited to resolving inherent conflicts between people the wellbeing we seek and our desire to protect the environment and those special places.The result of New Zealand's socks-and-sandals sustainability experiment is that every year New Zealanders spend $1.3 billion trying to consent infrastructure so we can build more affordable homes and build transport—even infrastructure that's desperately needed like water treatment plants held up.Every generation's going to have to work hard to grow their health and their wealth so we can feed our children first. That's the legacy we want to leave to our children and grandchildren not this nonsense."