Simpson ScottHon SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): Thank you Madam Chair. I'm delighted that the Minister has confidence that because something happens in Australia it might happen here. Well I'm not so sure and I remain to be convinced.But I think partly the issue that we have on this side of the House is that what we've heard just from the chair of the Environment Committee about the Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) being delivered to the Table literally 15 minutes before this debate commenced—Hon David Parker: That's not this one.Hon SCOTT SIMPSON: It's not this one? Hon David Parker: No.Hon SCOTT SIMPSON: Well I'm interested to know then what was the SOP that the chair of the select committee was referring to. But indicatively that's part of the problem and has been from the get-go with this piece of legislation. It is that it is being amended on the fly and has been for the last six or seven month that it's been considered either through the initial Randerson report through the initial draft piece of legislation that we saw and considered at the select committee and then to the actual legislation and then to the submissions and then officials changing their mind and rewriting and re-wording all the way through. It has been very much a moving feast and continues to be. I think that's really the essence of some of the problems that we have with Part 1 of the bill. I want to go back to some of the issues that my colleague Chris Bishop raised in his earlier questioning of the Minister and it relates to the inclusion of this whole new unjudicially tested concept of te Oranga o te Taiao. Now we've heard the Minister talk about the rationale for inclusion of that and it goes back to Randerson and we understand and get that but we haven't actually heard why—why it was that this terminology was used. At the select committee we heard from many submitters who thought that the wording should be different. There were some who were interested initially in the original wording which was that te Mana" be used rather than "te Oranga". So there was a change there along the way somewhere and I'm keen to know in some detail about what that change was. Then we also heard from a number of iwi and hapū submitters that they felt that they should be able to define the phrase rather than letting the Parliament define the phrase. My concern is that it won't be the Parliament or indeed hapū or iwi who end up doing the definition; it will be an activist judge somewhere or a whole bench of activist judges somewhere that will make a final determination as to what the interpretation of that phrase means and what its implications are because they flow through the rest of the entire statute. And then the Minister rightly points out that clause 3(3) then goes on to define what the meaning is. Well I'd say that's not so much a definition; it's more of a description rather than a definition. The potential for judicial interpretation is going to be obvious and it's going to be long and it's going to be expensive. And I just pity the poor schmuck that is going to be the first test case for the interpretation of some of these new phrases the new terms. We all accept that much of the existing Resource Management Act is not serving us well. But to consider that a whole new phraseology and new terminology is going to somehow clarify that I think is folly and I think it's going to create even more problems than we have heard to date.I don't doubt the sincerity of the Minister. He's very good and I respect his knowledge and his expertise both from a ministerial point of view but also as a former practitioner in this area of the law; he knows what he's talking about. But most people don't. Lay people don't and many of the legal practitioners don't. The challenge I think for us when we are preparing legislation of this sort is that the terminology the phraseology should be wherever possible consistent with that which has already been interpreted by the courts. And it would have been useful if we could have had wording that was consistent tested and understood by lay people by practitioners and by developers and also by environmental groups NGOs and the like who obviously take an interest in all these matters. So we are concerned on this side of the House about the use of new terminology what it means how it's going to be interpreted. And the Minister said that really a purpose clause is nothing more than a statement of generalities. Well actually that's true to a point. But the trouble is that those generalities then have to be interpreted and made to work in practical terms. What we will be testing as we go through this clause by clause part by part over the next day or two is: what does this mean in practical terms? What is it going to mean for someone who wants to build a development a housing development? What does it mean for a local council that wants to do some development? What does it mean for someone who just wants to build a house? Does it make it easier to get things done? And we on this side of the Chamber have some real concerns about that. So my questions to the Minister relate again to some further probing of the use of the new terminology. Yes I understand that this is terminology that was first conceptualised in the Randerson report. But what we don't have is an analysis of why Randerson necessarily should be carved down as some kind of a tablet from upon high as being the be-all and end-all. We have never accepted that on this side of the House and we still don't today. So I'm keen to delve into what that was all about. Thank you Minister."