Brooking RachelRACHEL BROOKING (Labour): Thank you Madam Speaker for the opportunity to speak on the Crown Pastoral Land Reform Bill. It's a great pleasure to rise to speak on this bill that both updates the legislation to allow for a new and improved consenting regime and gets rid of tenure review. I am lucky enough to live in the beautiful Dunedin and spend a lot of my time in Otago and Central Otago as do my children so this environment is a place where I've grown up and studied in and where my children spend a lot of time as well. So it's a very important place and it's good to be standing here in this House and talking about the South Island. Five percent of the country is high country land so that means it's about 10 percent of the South Island. In any comments of the iconic nature of this I'm going to be thinking of Otago but I acknowledge other members here will be thinking about their parts of Te Wai Pounamu.Now we had a lot of submissions from people about that iconic environment. So we heard from the Merino Company about the importance of being able to market to the world our sustainable farming practices in this area and how important that is to a lot of our iconic merino products. We heard from Ngāi Tahu about how important those land forms are to them. I note that the current legislation that we have that we are going to be replacing—or amending rather—doesn't deal with any Treaty issues any mana whenua issues so the bill updates that and the changes that we made in select committee improved upon what was introduced.Of course the farmers who submitted obviously they also care a great deal about this magnificent environment as do other people who submitted: different environmental groups different recreational groups—widespread acknowledgment of the beauty and importance of these places. As the Minister mentioned we were lucky as a select committee to go and visit two of those farms. So we went to Branch Creek Station just next to Cardrona ski field and Minaret Station on Lake Wānaka—both very beautiful places and thank you to the leaseholders of those stations for enabling the select committee to come and ask some very detailed questions and to see how those places operated. I think that really helped inform our decision making particularly in regard to new Schedule 1AB. We also travelled around the South Island as the Hon Scott Simpson just mentioned. We went to both Queenstown and Christchurch to hear submissions. And as he also mentioned Eugenie Sage was not in the chair for hearing the submissions and I was privileged to be in that position where my recollection is that I heard from all members of the committee and everyone from both sides was very engaged. So what does this Act do? It starts now with outcomes in its purpose and a key mechanism of the Act is the idea of inherent values. So in the purpose section new section 1A set out in clause 5 now we are to maintain or enhance inherent values and they are defined—and we spent a lot of time in select committee working on that provision. There were many submissions on it and there's been some amendments from the select committee. We were also working on the consenting regime. We've heard from the Minister that there are now permitted discretionary and prohibited activities and where you find the detail of what these activities are is in new Schedule 1AB. It might not be the first place you would look if you're looking at this bill but that's where they are and you'll see if you look at that that there were a lot of changes made by the select committee. And a lot of that I would attribute to the time spent on those farms and engaging with all the different farmers that we spoke to in the submission process. Another change that the select committee made was around the provision for farm plans and regulations for those. Farm plans are a hot topic at the moment. They are a reasonably new thing and people have different ideas of what farm plans might be at the moment. We heard that Beef + Lamb have some farm plans but those aren't always going to be appropriate for the high country. We know of course with changes in the Resource Management Act that there's a need for farm plans to do with water. Because this is something that's not quite settled at the moment the changes to the bill are that there's some time for regulations to be made about what will be in those farm plans and that they're optional. There was very good support for this by the farming submitters in terms of that it should enable farmers when they have got a range of activities that they need to consent for that they can bundle them together and work through the issues with Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) all at once and in an efficient and useful way. We also heard about the importance of LINZ and leaseholders working together and we've just heard the Minister say how important that is. And I note just last week at the Environmental Defence Society conference that two high country farmers both called Kate were there and with LINZ as well speaking about the importance of this legislation.The other thing that bill does is to get rid of tenure review. And again for people who are new to the bill it's good to then just look at clause 9 which says Part 2 repealed—Repeal Part 2." It's quite simple. That part commences the day after the bill gets Royal assent whereas the provisions relating to things like the regulations they commence in six months' time. I'm interested as the Hon Scott Simpson said in the Supplementary Order Paper that the Minister has said he'll bring to the next stage in the House. So as we've heard already we had a lot of really impassioned submissions from people who very much care about the environment. And I'd like to pause for a second to recall Jess who as I remember was aged nine and gave a very powerful submission to us about the importance of her home farm environment where she is home schooled and how much she cares about the environment generally. Unlike the previous speaker I think that the select committee members all were very interested in this and made very good contributions and I'd like to think the clerks for their really constructive process in particularly organising those field trips. It's an unusual thing for a select committee to do. So on that note and accepting that there are different views I thank the House for its time and commend the bill to the House."