Mackey Moana: Walking Access Bill — First Reading 
Mackey Moana: Walking Access Bill — First Reading 
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MOANA MACKEY (Labour) 
: 
 I am happy to stand and talk to the first reading of the Walking Access Bill and of course the bill will be coming to the Local Government and Environment Committee. Speaking for Labour members on that committee we are not afraid of a bit of hard work. Yes we are a busy committee because we have a group of people who have exceptional expertise. I see Mr Blumsky sitting across the Chamber and he joins us whenever we discuss local government issues. I am sure we would enjoy having Mr David Carter on the committee. He may not hold it in such high regard as he holds his own select committee—the Primary Production Committee—but I can assure him that we take this issue very seriously. The Local Government and Environment Committee is indeed an appropriate committee to be considering this issue. It is a busy committee but Labour members are often the only members to turn up to every single meeting for the entire time. Speaking for those Labour members I can say that we are very much looking forward to the select committee process and will be able to fit the bill into our work programme. We welcome any members from the Primary Production Committee who want to join us as we do acknowledge the expertise that exists on that committee too. As a former member of that committee I can vouch for that. 
This is a very important bill that had a very long gestation before being introduced into the House. I acknowledge the work of the former Minister of Agriculture the Hon Jim Sutton and the work that he did. It certainly was an issue that he held very dear to his heart and he spoke of it in his valedictory. I thought that he spoke very eloquently about needing to remember some of the values and some of the principles that we hold very dear in New Zealand and about how aligned those are with being able to access our waterways whether that be the ocean rivers lakes etc. 
I endorse the comments of Minister O’Connor that many New Zealanders do not really appreciate the reality out there when it comes to the legal status of many of these waterside tracks and the access of them across private land. At present there is no public agency that is responsible for the provision of this information whether it is to landowners or whether it is to members of the general public who want to access waterways. There is no one place that they can go to get this information. There may be some people out there who say that this is not an issue but maybe they are not talking to the people who think it is an issue. Maybe the people who think it is an issue just are not coming to see them. I have had people come to see me—more often from the general public—who want to get to waterways and who are concerned that more and more private land is blocking access to the foreshore for example. That is not deliberate; it is just the fact that the private land is there and it is privately owned. 
The general public are uncertain about what they need to do. They say that they go to see the private landowner but sometimes the landowners are absentee landlords so the person who is in charge of running the farm or the lifestyle block does not know whether they can give permission to someone to cross that land especially because they know that it may create a precedent. They know that that person may tell someone who tells all these other people and all of a sudden we have a quasi-public walkway across private land approved by someone who does not own that land. So one can understand the reticence of some of these station or farm managers to give that permission. 
I think this is becoming more and more of an issue. I welcome a body that would be set up primarily to deal with this. Some people have suggested that maybe Land Information New Zealand could already carry this out but it is primarily responsible for the maintenance of legal records about land ownership not so much about public access across it. Land Information New Zealand produces topographical maps that people can look at but again it focuses on the physical characteristics of the land; it does not focus on the legal status of where any public walkways might be. We know there is an issue with the unformed legal roads; people can see them on a map. A lot of local authorities do not know what they are meant to do with them when people come to them and say: “I want to get access through this unformed legal road to the beach but there is something blocking the way.” Often councils do not feel that they necessarily have the tools to be able to deal with those issues and this bill addresses that issue as well. 
As the Minister pointed out there is a popular belief in New Zealand that a Queen’s Chain exists around our coastline around our lakes and along our rivers. In reality that is not the case not because there has been any concerted effort to stop people getting there but because over time the Queen’s Chain has been eroded—sometimes that is literally the case sometimes erosion and accretion have meant that what was formerly the Queen’s Chain now is not really appropriate to be called so. Again I come back to the fact that we have no one agency board or whatever that someone can go to to get clarity on this. This is just as important for landowners as it is for the general public. I know that a lot of landowners have concerns about any liability they might come under if people are crossing their land—be it illegally or be it on the legal unformed roads—when they are not aware that those people are there and when there are things being carried out on that land that are potentially dangerous for anyone who is not aware of them. 
All those things require clarification and I congratulate the Minister on bringing this bill to the House because as the speaker before me acknowledged this has not been an easy issue. There has not been an easy pathway towards this legislation; it has been an exercise in finding a compromise and a way through. This Labour-led Government believed that this issue was important enough that we wanted to find a way through and we wanted to find a way to make it happen. Finally we got to a point where we acknowledged—and can I say the Labour-led Government acknowledged all along—that there is a lot of goodwill out there amongst landowners. There is an awful lot of goodwill amongst landowners to allow people access across their land. But we are kidding ourselves if we think that landownership in rural areas is not changing because it is changing. We need to make sure that we are ahead of that change and that we take this issue firmly by the horns to create some kind of legal environment where landowners and the general public can know where to get advice where the general public can know where they are entitled to cross land and where councils can know what their legal rights are when it comes to legal unformed roads and what kind of things they can put in place. 
I think that in terms of members of the general public in New Zealand who value our outdoors highly and want to be able to use it and enjoy it this bill going into the future will be seen to be an incredibly important bill for the national identity of this country. We value our waterways but increasingly New Zealanders are finding that they are having less and less access to them—as I said not for only one reason but for a number of reasons. 
I welcome National supporting the bill to the select committee. I am a bit confused by the fact that its members say it was their idea all along yet they are giving it only tentative support. I am not quite sure what that means. One would think that if it is what they wanted us to do all along they would be endorsing it wholeheartedly. But I guess they are not quite sure—maybe from day to day—what their position will be on this bill. I welcome the input from all members across this House particularly at the select committee. Obviously this is a bill that has been contentious in the past. I think we have made a very good compromise here. 
I too would like to acknowledge the work that has been done in producing this bill—particularly Mr John Acland and his team for getting us to this point. This bill shows what kind of good legislation can come from working through a process from working with all stakeholders from keeping cool heads and from not just picking a political advantage and going through and taking advantage of that in a cynical way. I look forward to the support of members in this House. As I said the Local Government and Environment Committee will consider this bill very carefully—as we do all bills that come before us—and I commend the bill to the House.