Brooking RachelRACHEL BROOKING (Labour): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's been quite a while since we did the inquiry on the Natural and Built Environments Bill and this debate has been postponed many times so it's excellent that we are here today. I want to start from the start before we got into our inquiry at the Environment Committee and that starting point is really about the Resource Management Act (RMA) and the problems with it. It's an Act that this House has looked at many different times and has amended many different times. There's been a problem with both environmental degradation and also troubles with getting development through and by development" I mean all sorts: hard infrastructure soft infrastructure—the works. The problem has been really around the status quo of the RMA so it's hard to change what we've already got and to do better. So for these reasons the last Government set up an expert group to review the RMA and it had a very wide ambit. We've just heard Eugenie Sage the chair of the committee refer to that as the Randerson review which I will do so as well. What that Randerson review recommended was three Acts—not just one but only one really to replace the RMA and two others—so I think it's important just to briefly touch on those. One is to enable spatial planning. The Randerson review called it a strategic planning Act. So the idea here is to link the infrastructure funders with the planning decision-makers and to look at long-term planning so that will help with climate adaptation and help with population growth—where do we want people to go and where do we not want them to go and what infrastructure needs to go with that—and by "infrastructure" I'm not just talking about roads; I'm talking about schools and hospitals and everything that goes with it. Another piece of legislation is one for addressing issues with climate adaptation. There is a real difficulty in the current legal framework that we have for existing activities that we know will be affected by climate change in the future but we don't necessarily know when and there are a lot of equity issues about how decisions are made what work needs to happen and where it needs to happen. So that's a separate piece of legislation. Then there was the replacement of the RMA with the Natural and Built Environments Act. So this was to move the planning system to an outcomes focus to move the energy in the planning system so that all the GDP activity that happened from consents at the end stage of the process to plans—so more at the start of the process—to actually recognise the built environment properly in the legislation to have more of a role for mana whenua for them to be at the table rather than sort of just being consulted and to enable better climate mitigation and a whole range of other things. This is an ambitious programme. With these three Acts the Government decided as a first step to have this exposure draft of the replacement RMA the Natural and Built Environments Bill. So it wasn't fully formed but it was very much done so in the context of that Randerson report and it's an unusual process to have an exposure draft before we see the full bill. In this case we're going to see two bills both the Natural and Built Environments Bill and the strategic planning one with the spatial plan. This exposure draft process gave the select committee and all the submitters a real chance to feed into that bigger policy development that we don't normally get as non-members of the executive and I think that is was really useful. It was of course not perfect because we only had part of the bill but it was very useful and we've heard from the chair a range of different suggestions for the things that we thought could be improved. I also acknowledge the timing of this inquiry that we did. We were going to travel around the country and talk to submitters but then there were some COVID lockdowns so that didn't happen and it was on Zoom. Like the member before me I would really like to thank all of the staff that helped us with it both the policy staff the drafters and of course the staff of the committee some of whom have changed since then. I know that some of them will be watching today and I really want to thank them for the hard work in having organised the travel and then it all being cut away. So thank you Madam Speaker."