Dunne Peter: Debate on Prime Minister’s StatementText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDunne Peter: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement[Sitting date: 10 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:1386. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PETER DUNNE (Leader—United Future): I am pleased to support a large proportion of what is contained in the Prime Minister’s statement and generally to work with my colleagues in National ACT and the Māori Party towards its attainment. But there is one area that my predecessor David Seymour outlined that I could not disagree with more and that is his argument about changes to the Resource Management Act. The suggestion that that is a silver bullet to our housing crisis is risible fatuous and unbalanced and those that proclaim it deserve that title as well.I think that before people put the Resource Management Act into its grave they ought to think about what it replaced. No one wants to go back to the days of 54 different pieces of planning law and of the Town and Country Planning Act which was derided up and down the country as cumbersome ineffectual inconsistent and chaotic. There is a majority in this House I believe—a clear majority—for making sure that the Resource Management Act is fit for purpose in terms of its procedures and practices. That can be achieved and it could have been achieved as long ago as 2013 when the National Government first proposed changes if there had not been the intention at the same time to change the purpose and principles clauses—particularly clauses 6 and 7—of the Resource Management Act. There is no need to tamper with those provisions to achieve the efficiencies in the legislation that the vast majority of the members in this House would seek.I say to the Minister for the Environment that he should look to every editorial writer in New Zealand; he should look to everyone who has expressed impartial concern on this—not the developers and the commercial interests but people who have expressed an impartial concern. They have all urged him to move with caution. I say to the Government that if it chooses to do as the Prime Minister himself said last year and proceed with moderate and pragmatic changes it could well attain significant support in this House. But if it continues with the attitude that it has shown to date on this issue it will get it through at the very best by one vote. That would be a travesty and that would be a mark of inconsistency because all of the case law built up over the last 20-odd years of the Resource Management Act would go out the window. The certainty that is being proclaimed for change would be replaced by the uncertainty of having to start all over again. It is a simple nonsense and yet the Government could resolve the matter fairly quickly were it not prepared to want to have its cake and eat it too.I want to talk about a couple of other measures that were contained in the Prime Minister’s speech that I think deserve the House’s paying some attention to. In the statement there was a reference very late in the day to the appalling situation now developing as a result of the barbarous activities of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. No one can condone what has been occurring. No one can say that it is in any way acceptable or meets any reasonable standard of human behaviour. The difficulty comes in what an effective solutionis. When one looks at the Middle East generally the immediate conclusion to be drawn is that Western intervention over the last century be it from the time of the Balfour Declaration right through to now has had one universal outcome: failure division and more intense bitterness and rivalry than was in place before it started. So when we determine as this country what our response to that appalling situation should be we need to be guided by the history. Maybe Sir Tīpene was right and Pākehā often do not know their history if we seem determined to blunder in and repeat the mistakes of the past.We need to be working alongside responsible Governments in the area encouraging them first off to seek solutions to their own issues and to seek their own solutions not have them imposed upon them by us acting in a “We know best” sense from the outside. It is a difficult balance because we cannot stand by and let barbarism continue but at the same time we cannot act in a way that is simply going to fuel those fires more strongly for the future. One of the challenges that New Zealand faces is to draw that responsible line.I must say in this regard that the intervention last week of the British Foreign Secretary on his visit here was anything but helpful. This Chamber carries the plaques that remember the consequences of the last time the family acted together: Gallipoli and the mindless slaughter of Australian and New Zealand troops in the pursuit of a British objective; Passchendaele; and the Somme. So to come here and say to New Zealanders today: “We love having you on board. You’re part of the family but you’ve still got to queue up at the aliens gate at Heathrow.” is unacceptable in the extreme.I would have thought that a well-briefed visiting politician would understand the sensitivity of New Zealanderson these issues. After all in the 1980s the more the United States administration of Ronald Reagan told us what our anti-nuclear policy was not to be the more we embraced the stand that the New Zealand Government was taking. We are like that as a people. Here is this patronising figure from abroad loftily telling us that we are in the club that we are part of the family and that it would be lovely to have us along for the next round of unmitigated slaughter. It is simply unacceptable. New Zealand should draw the line very strongly when it comes to that.There is one other area that the Prime Minister touched on that is also extremely important and I think we can actually start to make some progress. There is to be a review this year of our security legislation. I think that is good. It is proper. But it needs to be conducted in a transparent and open way. There are two steps that I think need to be taken sooner rather than later. The review has to be established by 30 June this year. I think the form of the review needs to be made public well before its establishment and I think the draft terms of reference need to be published and socialised around this House in the first instance and more broadly before they are adopted.This is not a political issue; this is a New Zealand issue. We are talking about New Zealand’s security interests—New Zealand as a nation our domestic security and our international security. It is not a game of political one-upmanship but a game of ensuring that those who operate in that very peculiar world are accountable are transparent and have very clear lines of operation that Parliament has ordained for them. Last year the then-director of the Government Communications Security Bureau gave an extraordinary speech where he spelt out the objectives of his agency as he saw them. One of them was advising the Government on military strategy. That is not the role of an intelligence agency. It might be the belief of those who like wearing trench coats and walking around in the shadows and what they think is the role of an agency but it is not the role of a responsible agency today particularly against the backdrop of the revelations that people like Edward Snowden have made and that various other whistleblowers around the world have shown about the way in which these organisations operate. No one is actually saying you do not need them but everyone seems to be saying they need a more open and accountable environment.The review this year provides that opportunity and I sincerely hope that the Government takes the chance to ensure that what arises is a robust credible set of organisations that can meet both the test of public scrutiny and the test of time because increasingly as tensions grow the challenges that they will face in terms of providing credible independent intelligence to the Government of the day will also grow. If there is any doubt about the competence of that then I think we are in a very sad way.So 2015 is the centenary year of the forging of our first nationhood really on the rugged hillsides of Gallipoli and the start of the campaign where New Zealanders first became part of the world through their participation in World War I. The year is shaping up to be an extraordinary one. I think that an improving domestic economy and the opportunities that that will provide in terms of jobs and future opportunities for young people in particular are important. But the whole rate of technological growth and the way in which things are changing—I saw a thing before I came down here today that said that the top 10 jobs in industries in Australia did not exist 10 years ago. That is the rate of change. We are positioned on the cusp of that. Broadly speaking the measures that the Government has been following over the last few years position us well to take advantage of the new opportunities that will arise. There are no blank cheques in politics and as I have said there are issues that I think are important that do need to be addressed along the way.