Kuriger BarbaraBARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki-King Country): Thank you Mr Speaker. So here we are on the third reading. It has been a very long process for this Natural and Built Environment Bill and it actually goes way back before I started on the Environment Committee. There was an exposure draft earlier on. I joined this process in about the end of January or the start of February this year. It was a really interesting process when we looked at how we do things in our country as we went through the process of the cyclones. We were sitting there in live timing actually thinking about where the flooding in the Hawke's Bay had sat where things had happened in West Auckland where there wasn't enough room for the water to go. We wondered how as humans in this world we had got some things quite wrong over a period of time to the point where there were a lot of people in this country who were going through personal suffering at the loss of their houses and their businesses. It wasn't particularly due to anyone's fault. It was just the way planning systems have worked. It has been in our rush to get housing built. I think that we all would agree that the old Resource Management Act (RMA) process that we currently have is not actually working to full effect to protect either the environment or the people who live in it. I think the big thing about this is that all of this work is hard. We're looking at an integrated statute for resource use. We've got two bills at the moment: we've got the Natural and Built Environment Bill and then coming up after this the Spatial Planning Bill. They have to fit together. Then when we get the climate adaptation bill—that has to fit in and lock in along with it. Alongside that we're doing the Local Government Act Review and the Water Services Entities Amendment Bill and the three waters which is now 10 waters; there's a lot of stuff going on in this space. People want to be absolutely assured that whatever is put in place by whatever Government—whatever colour it might be—is going to work and that it is not going to legally be able to take years and years of I guess discussion going through the court system as has been the case in the past. So it is hard and there is a diagram in the legislative statement that was put up by the Minister this morning. So what we're taking into account as we do this process is the natural environment. Of course we need development. We want the system to be efficient. We need climate adaptation and mitigation and that certainly—as I said before—took up a lot of our conversations. Then of course there's Te Tiriti and the mātauranga Māori aspects of it all. So we've got quite a neat little diagram here that looks at how we put the national planning framework into place how the regional spatial strategies are going to fit with it along with the Natural and Built Environment Act plans the consenting system. The Minister actually said in the House this morning when he spoke that there should be a 20 to 40 percent reduction in consent processing. Now if all worked well under this new piece of legislation I think a lot of people would be hand clapping and going This is a really good idea". I think the questions that still stick in people's minds are: how is this going to work and how is it all going to lock together? There's still quite a lot of question marks out there. The good thing from most people's perspective is that this is actually now going to be a system which takes a shift from managing adverse effects to promoting positive outcomes. Personally I've long been a fan of catchments being able to do their own—you know we've got to have a bottom baseline of where we want our water quality to be achieved our land quality to be achieved all of the things that go on in our catchment our carbon sequestration all the rest of it. We need to have a system where we know what the outcomes are that we want to achieve. What we've had up till now is a system where we've had so many regulations thrown at us so that often when people are looking at regulations they don't know if the one that's coming down yesterday is going to complement or be contradictory to the one that is likely to come down tomorrow. I think that's what we've done to people not just in the farming community but over a range of various business sectors. Everything is tied up in red tape. We've never looked up—very actively—to see what the outcomes are going to be. So I think the change in mood and the intent of this bill is heading in the right direction in terms of people just wanting to get up in the morning not wanting to tick millions of boxes—so I hope certainly that that is going to be a really positive outcome of this piece of legislation—but actually putting their work clothes on and going out to work whether it be farm gumboots or whether it be some business that's undertaking a mining industry aspect. You know if you can't dig it graze it extract it or grow it and it's not a fish we really don't have it. I say that time and time again and I've challenged lots of people in many rooms to give me something that doesn't fit in one of those categories. So the people that are undertaking those as well as people who want to develop housing developments as well as people just wanting to build their own house want to know "What is the outcome that is expected of me?" rather than ticking a whole lot of boxes which is something that has traditionally happened in the past. Look I know even in getting roads built—I've got Mount Messenger in my electorate and it's good to see it's coming along. There are cranes everywhere. From the time it was put in the Budget process in 2016 it actually took six years to get that started. It's no wonder that we can't actually make some progress. There's still appeals going on and there's still things happening in that place. So I think we have to get much more swept up in this space. So the intent of the bill is a good one.One of the things I wanted to comment on—and the last speaker Rachel Brooking actually alluded to it—was hydro facilities of any size which the Minister spoke about in the legislative statement and in his speech this morning. It has been amended by the select committee because it certainly was a real concern for a country who wants to build much more renewable electricity that for small hydro schemes it was looking like 10-year consenting was going to rule them out of the ballpark. It would mean that they would never start because the banks wouldn't lend them the money. So it is good to see that this change has been made. Good projects like that will be looked on favourably in terms of where we take our renewable electricity work in the future. What I would like to say in this third reading is that I think I spent something like 30 days in that select committee and I know others spent a lot more time in that select committee than I did; I want to say that the process of that select committee was absolutely outstanding in terms of people being able to sit around the room express their views. I have to give credit not just to the members of the select committee but also to the officials that came in from the Ministry for the Environment. Not every question or every change was able to be accommodated but they certainly accommodated many things when they could and where they could. I have to say that the chairmanship of the Hon Eugenie Sage and the members of that committee—it was very open. It was very transparent. We worked well together. We started off by splitting people across into subcommittees because we did have lots and lots and lots of submissions coming through. I think one of the key things was the hydroelectricity renewable electricity. People were concerned about the purpose of the bill: te Oranga o te Taiao. We spent a lot of time working on defining that. Basically if the environment is healthy the people are healthy. The wellbeing of the environment actually leads to the wellbeing of the people. It's not a complicated thing to understand but it does create lots of discussion. We want to make sure that that is absolutely in a good legal standing when it is introduced. I think the one big thing that locals still need to be convinced of—we heard a lot about local voice and local input and there's still a bit of concern that maybe as we lock this system together that won't be happening to the extent that they would like it. But I can certainly say that the process of the committee was a very intense and good one. Thank you."