Turei MetiriaMETIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green): I think we have had the clarification now from the Minister for Building and Housing Nick Smith where he has just now—Hon Dr Nick Smith: I apologise to the member. I seek leave to table the email dated 3 August from the Treasury regulatory impact statement that makes that very clear statement that it is minor—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): No no that is all you need. Is there any objection to that? There is objection.METIRIA TUREI: So I just want to—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! Sorry we will start the whole speech again in a second. I am going to ask the member to reconsider. Members of the House have asked for that evidence to be tabled on repeated occasions. I think it ill behoves the Committee to refuse to have something tabled that is not anywhere otherwise available and has been asked for by a number of members from at least two parties. I am going to ask the member to reconsider his objection.Denis O'Rourke: Speaking to that Mr Chair the reason that I have objected is that on numerous occasions exactly the same situation has occurred when New Zealand First has sought to table material that would be just as valuable to the House as a whole and has been requested by members of New Zealand First and sometimes by others and for no reason at all a member on the other side of the House—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): OK. It is all right. The member has a right to object. There is no reasonableness test.METIRIA TUREI: The Minister has as I understand it just confirmed to the Committee and the public that in his initial negotiations over Crown land that he in his wisdom decided ought to be used by developers for the purposes of building housing he failed at that point to ensure the legal certainty of the use of that land. That was his failure. I do not know what he said to those developers about the legal certainty of the use of that land or the status of that land in terms of the offer back. But what is clear from what he just said is that when he provided access to that land for building signed the deals for the use of that land watched as developers spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing that land he could not give them any legal certainty about whether they could continue to use and on-sell it. So what he is asking from us now is to clean up that mess he created in his failed negotiations. I wonder then whether the supposed legal risk is actually coming not from original owners of the offer-back provisions that he is taking away but from the developers themselves because the developers themselves as he has just confirmed do not have legal certainty over the land on which they have now invested possibly hundreds of millions of dollars in building infrastructure resource consents and all of those things. So is that Minister the reason why Part 2 is included in this bill—not because of a risk from the original owners who would otherwise be entitled to an offer-back provision under that land but from the developers themselves whom he has done deals with knowing he could not give them legal certainty? That is what it sounds like to me especially given this Minister will not go into any further detail about the nature of that legal risk. In the Cabinet papers it is the detailed description of that legal risk that is redacted and it is the only part of the Cabinet paper that is redacted—where it looks like it goes into describing the legal risk in some detail. I think that if he has a particular legal problem to deal with as a result of his failure to provide legal certainty to developers from the first instance then that may be a legitimate concern to bring to this House under urgency. It may well be. There may be a circumstance where he would talk to us about this in some detail so we understood the full story. Things do go wrong. Ministers make mistakes. This is the sort of thing that happens. The provision that we would expect him to build in the law would be specific to that particular legal problem not as broad-brushed as this current provision is which will remove for every possible original owner and their descendants their right to an offer back for any land that was given for State housing across the country—it does not matter whether it is in Auckland or for special housing areas. This provision is so broad that there could be hundreds if not thousands of original owners whose rights are being taken away. That is what he has created here when he could have more clearly identified the legal risk come and spoken to the Opposition MPs about the nature of it and we could have found a more effective and targeted way of dealing with that risk. I have been here a long time—and others have been here a long time too. We know there are times when you engage in very specific detailed conversations—highly confidential conversations—with Ministers about some of these kinds of legal and financial issues. All of us who have been here for a while have been involved in something like that to some extent at some point. There is an ability for Ministers to work with Opposition MPs to find credible and sensible ways through tricky legal problems and—often—tricky financial problems that are created through a genuine mistake. In those circumstances I as co-leader of the Green Party am more than happy to work with Ministers to find effective logical rational careful means through those problems. But that is not what happened here. What happened here was that a bill was put forward under urgency. A very short briefing was provided.