Jones Dail: Resource Management Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading 
Jones Dail: Resource Management Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading 
[Volume:607;Page:4304] 
DAIL JONES (NZ First) 
: 
 The Labour member who preceded me obviously has not been following this bill. She talks about this bill coming back to the House but this is the first reading. The bill is not coming back to the House; this is the first reading of the bill. She constantly talked about the bill coming back to the House yet this is the first reading—or that is what this House is being led to believe by the Government. Secondly that member seemed not to understand what was in the bill insofar as local involvement and participation in resource consent management is concerned. She seemed to be totally unaware of the way in which this bill works in that area much to the astonishment of Mrs Jeanette Fitzsimons one of the previous speakers. 
I am quite staggered at the way in which this bill is proceeding. I could have spoken earlier in the debate but I thought I would listen to some of the members who have worked on this bill in its previous incarnation as the Resource Management Amendment Bill in order to find out more about it before I said anything. I have had the opportunity to discuss it with Jim Peters the New Zealand First spokesperson on the matter and I am making my comments on that basis as well. The main point is that this bill is really just a mishmash of resource management law over many years. The Resource Management Amendment Bill sat here in the House as we have been told for 100 weeks after it was considered by the Local Government and Environment Committee and it is really out of date already. If we really look at resource management law we see that that bill passed its use-by date a long time ago. 
This bill will be referred to a select committee. If the House wants to do the job properly with resource management law we should be starting all over again. This legislation is historical now. We talk about Simon Upton’s involvement with it and what he did and then what the Labour Party did when it came in. It really is just a dog’s breakfast now. If we are to do anything in resource management we should get rid of this bill altogether and start all over again with a clean slate. 
Lindsay Tisch 
: And get it right. 
DAIL JONES 
: This bill certainly will not get it right. It will really make another mess of this whole difficult area. I have done some resource management work and I know how difficult it can be. 
I am really staggered that the United Future party should take credit for this bill and the way in which it has been drafted. The first principle of the democratic process must be to allow one’s representatives in Parliament to speak on an issue fully and fairly so that all aspects of a bill can be considered. I do not think I have ever seen an Act of Parliament—and I have seen just about every Act of Parliament that is on the book in my 41 years in legal practice—that has 110 clauses in only two parts. The first part has 95 clauses and the second part has another 15. 
I was speaking to a senior lawyer from one of the big law firms only last week and we were discussing a particular piece of legislation. I mentioned in passing that the particular part we were discussing has five subparts because of the way in which the Government uses that situation in the House to cut down on speaking time and he was quite staggered to learn that. Finally he understood why it is that in some commercial legislation a part of a bill can have many subparts some of which make no sense whatsoever: because that is only a debating tactic in Parliament to stop the Opposition speaking on a bill. 
That is what the Government is trying to do here: it is trying to stop the Opposition from speaking on the bill. If there were 16 17 or 18 parts we might have been able to spend half an hour on each part and to have a debate of about 8 hours or so. Now with just two parts the Chairperson would be entitled to take the view that the debate should be much less than 8 hours. We will be lucky to have 2 hours’ debate on the bill and that will be a matter for the Chairperson to decide at that point based on the way in which the bill is presented. So what United Future is doing is cutting down the Opposition’s right to debate the bill in the Committee stage by 75 percent in my generous estimation. That is an utter disgrace in a democracy. Yet United Future is taking delight in cutting down the Opposition’s debating time on the bill. Mr Baldock had the cheek to say that we were just trivialising the bill by making the debate on it last for so long. 
I will tell Mr Baldock what this bill does. I will explain the bill to him although I will not have enough time to do that. For example Part 1 has a subpart 1 which is the interpretation clause. Everyone knows that usually the interpretation clause in a bill can stand on its own but it is now part of Part 1. The purpose and principles are in subpart 2. Matters of national importance will now be built into a debate of possibly 1½ hours on 95 clauses. Matters of national importance are of so little importance to this minority Labour Government and its partner United Future that they want virtually no time to be spent on that debate at all. It will be difficult for members of the Opposition to spend enough time on it. 
Then subpart 3 “Duties and restrictions under this Act” relates for example to restrictions on the use of the coastal marine area. Members could spend quite some time just on that issue alone but debate on that will be cut down by the way in which United Future and this minority Labour Party have structured the bill. Subpart 4 is entitled “Functions powers and duties of central and local government” and clause 9 relates to the functions of regional councils. I would have thought that regional councils feel that they have some standing in the community and that their powers and functions should be the subject of some debate. But no they will be put into this short debate on 95 clauses. In relation to regulations prescribing national environmental standards surely everyone in this country and this House wants to have a good look at what the bill provides for those matters but no that is part of a subpart. Other areas such as the content of regional policy statements the content of regional plans and district plan rules will all be crammed into this very short debate. Resource consents would otherwise take an hour on their own but no subpart 6 relates to resource consents and that issue will be crammed into that debate as well. 
Coastal tendering is near and dear to the heart of many members of this House but this minority Labour Government has no regard for democracy. We have made a lot of noise about Saddam Hussein what a tyrant he is and what he does to his people. In a democracy one would expect that a Government that talks like that would allow its own Parliament to debate an issue but no it has purposely changed the debate on what should be 18 parts into a debate on just two parts. That is about as undemocratic as it can be. If we had an Attorney-General in this House who adopted the rules of an Attorney-General we would have expected her to threaten to resign over such undemocratic and unprincipled political behaviour. After all the Attorney-General as the principal law officer stands in a special relationship with Parliament the courts and the executive. One would expect that type of person to ensure when she was discussing matters in Cabinet that this Parliament had a proper right to debate those issues. But no this Government is prepared to ram through the Supreme Court Bill or to turn this country into a republic and this is the type of way that we would see legislation being passed in a republic without any regard for the duties of the Opposition. 
As an Opposition it is our duty to go through this legislation and to point out any defects in it. There would be many occasions where a bill was much the better because of the points raised by the Opposition. I am sure there are Government members in this House who have taken up points raised by members of the Opposition and have given them effect. 
We have looked at other areas of this bill such as declarations enforcements and ancillary powers. We looked at the right of appeal. Obviously that is one of the most important areas for anybody on either side of the resource consent application process but again that is all to be crammed into the debate on Part 1. 
I was very impressed with Ms Fitzsimons’ speech. It was interesting that she made the point that the United Future members have achieved nothing by their support for this bill—absolutely nothing. As a new member I was staggered to learn that. I would have thought that a party that claimed it was here in the House on the basis of some sort of desire to reduce compliance costs and to improve business in the community would at least try to achieve something. But I am told that all the things that the United Future member referred to in this debate were already the subject of public statements by the Labour Party prior to the election. Well really! United Future says it has certain standards but one can only assume that if it has those standards it does not have any idea of what is happening. If United Future had any idea of what was happening and it made the statements that it has made we would wonder what its standards were based on. Really there is a great contradiction between what United Future has said and what it has done. Common sense dictates that there should be a similarity between the two but clearly that is not the case here.