Brooking RachelNATURAL AND BUILT ENVIRONMENT BILL Third ReadingDebate resumed.Hon RACHEL BROOKING (Associate Minister for the Environment): Thank you Mr Speaker. I'll try and talk over the din here but I am very pleased to be speaking on this third reading of the Natural and Built Environment Bill. It's a single environment—at one point it was going to be the environments bill.Why I'm so pleased to be speaking on this is because it's such a good piece of work—as opposed to what the last speaker Chris Bishop was saying—and it really deals with a lot of tricky issues that we haven't been able to fix with the Resource Management Act (RMA).So some of those things that it does I'm going to talk about. It sets out the outcomes that it wants—and these are similar to sections 6 and 7 in the RMA but a little bit different. But there are many of these outcomes and of course there will always be conflict between those outcomes. So it's very clear in this piece of legislation—particularly at clause 3A—that there is to be a national planning framework. When the RMA was implemented it was always supposed to have good national documents but they didn't really come along for a long time apart from the coastal policy statement. So the national planning framework is going to be there and it's going to really try and knock out some of the planning conflicts that you're always going to get in anything to do with planning law. Of course though the bill also has some environmental bottom lines and the purpose clause we heard about from the previous speaker of te Oranga o te Taiao.Then there's the regional spatial plan. So at the moment New Zealand is pretty terrible at planning for infrastructure. We'll have these spatial plans—that's in the next bill that I'll talk about separately but that that's an important change as well. Then we're going to have the regional natural and built environment plans—or the regulatory plans—which are similar to the current RMA plans. That's where you look to see if you are going to need a resource consent or if you can or cannot do something. At the moment we've got over 100 of those plans both made by regional councils and by district councils or territorial authorities. Instead we're just going to have one per region. You may be aware that we have some unitary authorities such as Auckland and Nelson now Marlborough and Tasman and Gisborne and Nelson and Tasman—they're going to go together but Marlborough will go it alone. So we'll have many fewer plans for users to have to deal with which is a good thing.Other changes from the RMA—much stronger on climate change. It also links with the Climate Change Response Act and you see that and the outcomes that I just referred to. Also stronger on hazards—and there is a national direction coming on those hazard provisions. I understand that there will be a national hazard planning framework and a national policy statement on natural hazard decision-making. So these will provide guidance to local government on how to consider natural hazard risk when making decisions on plan changes and resource consents. This is when they relate to new developments such as housing and infrastructure. The national policy statement is expected to limit new building in areas that are at very high risk from natural hazards as well as require mitigations for areas at moderate risk. So the ministry is working on those at the moment.Related to natural hazards and climate change of course are trees and green space and the Environment Committee heard a lot about urban trees—and I note that I'm sitting next to one of my West Auckland colleagues the Hon Dr Deborah Russell and certainly a good number of her constituents made submissions about trees in the beautiful part of the world that she's from. Also though what we've been thinking more about this year is the importance of green infrastructure and green spaces and the ability to soak up stormwater. We've also of course been thinking about stormwater as well.We've seen changes from the select committee and in the Supplementary Order Paper during the committee of the whole House stage so that the national planning framework (NPF) that I've been talking about—clause 58—gives some other specific issues that the NPF can include and that now includes trees and green space. Green space is not defined and of course the Ministry for the Environment will need to do some further work and thinking in that but I encourage them to do that as well and as quickly as they can—it's a very important issue.Also on green infrastructure for designations now accepted infrastructure as natural and green infrastructure is defined at clause 497 as infrastructure that uses natural systems such as plants or soil or mimics natural processes to avoid minimise or remedy the environmental impacts of activities". It's a very good step in the right direction.We heard from the previous speaker citing many submissions that were opposed to the bill. Of course there were many submissions that wanted changes to the bill—I totally accept that point. But when talking particularly about renewable energy there were many submissions saying that proposed short-term consent for hydroelectricity was going to cause problems for that sector of our economy and our energy production. This was amended by both the select committee and the Supplementary Order Paper.That's a really important point to make—that there's been a lot of listening a lot of responding and a lot of dialogue in the creation of this piece of legislation. It of course had a process with the Randerson review; it had an exposure draft; and then it had an extended select committee process as well. It's important legislation—it deserves all of that. The previous speaker also said that it was naive to think that this piece of legislation would solve all the problems of the RMA and the planning world. But I think given that process you cannot say that this is a naive piece of legislation nor is it a naive idea to think that we can do better with our planning by doing better at both the national level and the regional level.I do accept though that implementation of it is incredibly important. That didn't happen with the RMA as I just mentioned. We didn't have the national planning direction that was also always considered necessary for the good implementation of the RMA. There is money that's been budgeted for that in this implementation.It will be done with some regions going first so that central government can work with them and work out what works well and what doesn't work so well so when other regions roll out we will learn from that implementation and do it as efficiently as possible. It's also crucial for that implementation that both the national planning framework and those regional plans—both at the spatial level and the regulatory level—do make those difficult trade-off decisions and take the community with them when they're doing that which of course the bill provides for.So it's one of those days in life where on a personal note I wasn't sure that it would necessarily come but it has come and I'm very pleased to be standing here in front of you and commending it to the House."