Sage Eugenie: Resource Management Reform Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Resource Management Reform Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 27 August 2013. Volume:693;Page:12824. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green): When we were previously considering the Committee stage of the Resource Management Reform Bill I made a mistake and said that the bill would allow the Minister to call in medium-sized projects and appoint a board of inquiry to consider them. That was incorrect and I apologise to the Committee for the mistake. The bill provides for a 6-month deadline for decisions on medium-sized projects including ones that are notified for public submissions but it does not provide for a call in. But I would like to make some comments on these medium-sized applications and the provisions around direct referral to the Environment Court in clauses 13 14 and 15. The Green Party opposes these provisions as being anti-democratic and likely to reduce public participation. The bill enables applicants for medium-sized projects above a yet-to-be-defined investment threshold to avoid a council-level hearing and refer a matter directly to the Environment Court. It removes the relevant council’s power to decline that request except in “exceptional circumstances” which are not defined.An Environment Court hearing is by its very nature much more formal and prescribed than a council hearing. There are a lot more lawyers there are a lot more people in suits and it is more expensive and this constrains the public right to participate because of that expectation that people will have legal representation. This focus on the value of investment as being the threshold for direct referral to the Environment Court putting the application on a decision-making track that is quite different is putting the economic value of the application ahead of the public’s right to participate and be involved in the decision on whether that application should proceed. It is a very arbitrary threshold for an Act that is supposedly based on effects and it is not a good determinant of the complexity of an application nor of its potential effects. As Greenpeace noted in its submission a project that has higher economic value will often have many more effects and more serious effects than one with a lower value. So potentially you should be encouraging public participation on those more complex projects not restricting it by this direct referral provision. It is definitely eroding the power of councils and local authority decision-making to say that this is mandatory and that they cannot decline consent to a direct referral except in exceptional circumstances.There is also a risk that it will impose significant workload issues on the Environment Court by having more applications go directly to it but we are also concerned about a number of other provisions in this bill that affect and seek to restrict public participation. One of those is in clause 49 which introduces the concept of a person who is directly affected by an effect. It can restrict participation in the Environment Court to parties who are directly affected. Often that has been defined in relation to people who have got a private property interest such as a neighbouring landowner rather than a community organisation representing an aspect of the public interest. So this clause is quite a noxious clause and in our view a very unacceptable restriction on public participation and access to justice.I think what we are seeing here is the Government being quite contemptuous of our international treaty obligations. At the Rio+20 Earth Summit New Zealand and more than 190 other countries adoptedThe future we want outcomes document. That document says in paragraph 43: “We underscore that broad public participation and access to information and judicial and administrative proceedings are essential to the promotion of sustainable development.” That builds on very similar commitments in the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development of 1992. The bill is trampling on that because of clauses such as clause 49 but also because of the major push in the billto be quite restrictive around time frames. That is all about providing certainty for applicants but not for the community or the environment that is affected by those applications.The National Government and the big corporates have run a very deliberate campaign of misinformation about the Resource Management Act and about decision making under the Resource Management Act under recent years. We have heard time and time again from Government members talk about the costs uncertainties and delays but they do not talk about the cost to the community or the environment from speedy decision-making. That is because the National Government is focused very much on the short term. It does not understand that if you want a smart economy you need to underpin that with a healthy environment. You need to look out 50 years ahead. You need to recognise the importance of the ecosystem services that nature provides—clean air and clean water—and the need to safeguard those services not just rubber-stamp development like mining and drilling and big developments along the coast which cut across those.So there are major parts of this bill—and the whole thrust of the Government’s changes to the Resource Management Act in this bill and the proposed bill that is to be introduced later this year—where the National Government is sabotaging our economy. It is undercutting and trampling on environmental quality at a time when we should be giving integrity to our “100% Pure New Zealand” brand. Instead the Government is weakening our environmental law rather than strengthening it which would help give integrity to that brand.At the moment this is all about pushing through applications and changing the deadlines. In the Act at present we have time frames for specific parts of the decision-making processes at council level but there is not a set period of time in which a decision should be made when it is made at the council level. There is a very good reason for that. Often applicants will change some of the aspects of their applications in response to the concerns raised by submitters through the whole process but the bill is imposing a 6-month deadline for councils to consider and decide medium-sized applications. That compares with the 9-month deadline for applications going to the board of inquiry. Like Local Government New Zealand we oppose that because we are not convinced that there is a problem with timeliness in the Act. When you have got the Ministry for the Environment’s own survey of local authorities in 2010-11 showing that 95 percent of all applications are processed in accordance with the statutory time frames that 87 percent of the notified applications were processed on time and that more than 99 percent of applications are approved there is not a major problem with timeliness. Certainly the National members pull out anecdotal examples of small applications that may have taken a while but there is no solid policy analysis in the regulatory impact statement to support this restriction on making the decision within that 6-month period.It is not good enough in our view to beat up on councils. When the Waikato Regional Council analysed its data about when the time frames in the Act were exceeded it found that one of the most common reasons was that applicants could consult with interested or affected parties after they had lodged their applications. Again it is because of those submitters raising issues and the applicant responding. So as Local Government New Zealand said the bill is trying to legislate for good practice. This is inevitably difficult and arguably pointless when that practice cannot be validly prescribed in detail because a single practice will not be universally applicable. The deadlines that the bill is implementing are very complex. They will make the Act more difficult to administer rather than simpler which is supposedly what this Government’s agenda is about. By controlling the time frame in this way what the bill is doing ispushing councils to rubber-stamp applications to not consider their effects appropriately to not go and subject those to good scrutiny but instead to just push applications through as if the council were a sausage factory and to actually restrict the ability of communities to engage properly.Under the bill applicants will be able to ask for extensions and for the clock to stop in terms of the processing but a council will have only one opportunity to stop the clock and ask the applicant for further information. Often those requests for further information come in response to submissions from the community and the public where they say that these issues are important to them and that these environmental effects will occur and that the applicant has not considered those properly and has not done an adequate assessment of effects. But having the mandatory 6-month deadline for medium-sized applications and having these restrictions on the council asking for further information is going to lead to applications being rubber-stamped.