Simpson Scott; Parker DavidHon SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): The elephant in the room in terms of this review has been the Government's response to the Randerson report. And my question to the Minister is that after initially having told the public in this Parliament that his Natural and Built Environments Act (NBEA) exposure draft would be released in March of this year and then subsequently in April and now we're into May—can the Minister update Parliament on when this exposure draft will be complete and if he still expects the NBEA to be introduced this year and then passed by the end of 2022?Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): I'm not sure that's strictly a matter for the annual review because it's this year rather than last year.Hon SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): The point is that the Government's response to the Randerson committee was covered extensively during the select committee's review and therefore it absolutely falls in scope. So if he can't tell us when his exposure draft will eventually find its way to the select committee can he tell us when he expects that his Strategic Planning Act will be passed?Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): Well I can. I was just making the point on what this debate's meant to be about. In respect of the Natural and Built Environments Act my recollection is that we were never aiming to have it in select committee by March. We were aiming for May; it's probably going to be June. And the reason for that is that we've decided that the scope of what we want to put to the select committee is going to include a little bit more of further consideration of what we're doing to put together the regional level plans. What's happening is that the number of plans is going to jump down from over 100 to about 14 and the mechanisms of doing that were not fully worked through in the Randerson report. We did consider leaving the exposure draft blank in respect of those particular provisions but on reflection thought that it was better to work up some of that detail before we put it to the select committee inquiry which is why we're taking another month to do that properly.Hon SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): So if that timetable is now in place then it seems unlikely that the draft exposure will be presented to the select committee until June. The likelihood of it being eventually passed through this House in this sitting term is heroic. What then will that mean in terms of actual implementation for planning changes to councils who may then take another several years to actually implement legislative changes?Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): Well for a start the member's wrong if he doesn't think we'll still be passing the replacement legislation during this term of Parliament. I'm still expecting both the Natural and Built Environments Act and the Strategic Planning Act to be passed during the term of this Parliament and we're on track to do so. In respect of what happens in the meantime the law is the law. I hear people saying that they should just take a deep breath and wait until the law changes before they do anything. It's actually one of the reasons why we didn't immediately embark upon the Resource Management Act (RMA) reform. It was that we needed to get cracking on water quality on issues relating to climate and also on development opportunities for housing which we've done using existing instruments under the RMA. We've updated the National Policy Statement on Urban Development and the councils are required to make more room for house-building opportunities both through intensification and where necessary at the margins of growing urban areas and that work's flowing through. We of course have already promulgated a real increase in the standards that we expect of those who are using land and are causing harm to waterways. I heard the Hon Mr Bennett asking questions about that. In reality what we inherited was a situation where twice as many rivers were degrading in New Zealand as were improving year by year according to the macroinvertebrate index which is probably the most accurate measure of aquatic health. So in advance of changes to the RMA we thought it was necessary to make changes to cause those problems to be brought under control. And I'm happy to answer questions about that because in fact that did happen during the year under annual review.Hon SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): The committee at review spent quite a bit of time investigating and prosecuting questions relating to the Government's Jobs for Nature programme and I'm keen to know from the Minister what the methodology is that the ministry uses to determine how many new jobs have been created and what the criteria is for determining whether a job is a job.Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): Again that information's already publicly available but essentially we measure the number of people who are in employment at any one time and we report on that. We also measure the total number of full-time equivalent jobs for a year based on a number of hours of employment. That information is also available on a website and is updated regularly.