Scott Lynda: Resource Management Amendment Bill (No 2) — Instruction to CommitteeCWH In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
Scott Lynda: Resource Management Amendment Bill (No 2) — Instruction to CommitteeCWH In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
[Volume:608;Page:5502] 
Dr LYNDA SCOTT (NZ National—Kaikoura) 
: 
 I follow on from the Hon Nick Smith also to talk about the abuse of process here. Have members ever seen anything like this? Part 1 has been condensed down to 14 subparts. We know that the Minister has had difficulty in getting the No. 1 Resource Management Act Amendment Bill organised into this House. It has been delayed and delayed. The commencement date of the legislation was October 2001 then October 2002 and now it is supposed to be 1 August 2003. 
The bill had the opportunity to improve the Resource Management Act. When major legislation is brought in there will always be problems. We will get some things right and other things wrong. Simon Upton identified a lot of the things that had gone wrong but there are good parts. Some people say that the whole bill should be thrown out but Simon Upton decided that the best way to deal with things was to make serious and significant amendments to the Resource Management Act. But what a huge waste of opportunity this Resource Management Amendment Bill (No 2) is. Fourteen amendments have been thrown out and this Government will not make the significant changes to the Resource Management Act that will be needed to stop the delays in development and the delays that will cause our roading to be congested or to address the lack of development in energy generation that is causing problems in infrastructure in this country. 
The fact that the commencement date was originally October 2001 then October 2002 and now August 2003 shows us how long it takes to get a bill through this Parliament. This Government has taken credit for the fact that it has all those fiscal surpluses. This bill shows the lag between the time someone brings a bill to the House develops it and gets it through the select committee and the time the effects are felt. That time delay has been really significant in terms of the Resource Management Act. 
I am the member of Parliament for Kaikoura and many people have come to see me with their concerns about the Resource Management Act. Absolutely they have been waiting for changes to be made. They will be extremely disappointed with this bill. Marlborough is at one end of the Kaikoura electorate and the Hurunui is at the other end. Marlborough is very good. The council there has done a great job in terms of managing the Resource Management Act. But in the Hurunui farmers have had massive problems in applying its council’s interpretation of the Resource Management Act. One could not get two councils with two such different approaches to the Resource Management Act. The people in the Hurunui have been hanging out for changes to improve the Act and they thought that those changes would happen much earlier on. 
National had significant amendments it wanted to make to the bill. But no the commencement of this No. 2 bill has been delayed until August 2003. I can use a few examples of how this has affected people I know. One of the things that National wanted to do was to allow applicants to choose to go direct to the Environment Court if that is what they wanted to do. That would have been an extremely good thing because councils really like that. They did not really want to be clogged up with things that could go directly through. I shall give the Committee an example of someone I know who was doing a small development and how it cost them $20000 extra— 
Jill Pettis 
: Relevance? 
Dr LYNDA SCOTT 
: I am talking about the commencement date. They wanted to see this bill get through so much earlier. They wanted to see the bill commence. The problem the people I know had was that their development cost them an extra $20000 and an extra 3 years. They were very keen to see National’s bill go through—not the bill before us now but National’s bill with its 16 significant amendments to the Resource Management Act. That is the bill they wanted to go through and commence.