Brooking RachelHon RACHEL BROOKING (Labour—Dunedin): Thank you Madam Speaker. I'm not sure why members are clapping when the Minister responsible for RMA Reform just said that we want to do better at protecting the environment and build more houses—this will do the opposite. The total opposite. That was the point of both the Spatial Planning Act and the Natural and Built Environment Act because the Resource Management Act is broken and has not been working. We tried to do some bipartisan fixing of it in the last term with enabling councils—well people to build houses in our big cities with the medium-density residential standards. But National seems to have pulled back on that which is deeply unfortunate regressive and goes against everything the Minister was just saying he was interested in achieving.Also I'm very angry that we are doing this Resource Management (Natural and Built Environment and Spatial Planning Repeal and Interim Fast-track Consenting) Bill in urgency in all three stages—all four stages—which is quite different from urgency of just one stage of a bill. We have only received this bill today and we are being told—Simon Court: You knew it was coming. You were put on notice.Hon RACHEL BROOKING: Oh everything was canvassed in the last Parliament." Mr Court words matter. The words in this bill matter. Some things are being continued and some things are not. And we are only going to be able to discuss this in urgency today in this House and that is not good enough.Hon Member: And the next day.Hon RACHEL BROOKING: Oh we're going to be—well we will see because of course it's only in two parts with most of it being in its schedule. And I can say that we are very interested—Simon Court: Which one?Hon RACHEL BROOKING: —in the intricacies of that. Schedule 1—yes there are two schedules thank you. And we will be talking about that in the committee stage. But it is difficult because there are a lot of pieces of the Natural and Built Environment Act that are being rolled over or bits of sections so it does take some time to refer to those bits of those sections to see what is being retained and what is not being retained. Of course they are all out of context as well. So that is why I'm deeply disappointed that this Government is taking such a cynical approach to introducing this on the Tuesday before Christmas and saying we have to do all stages in urgency.I also just heard from the Minister that well spatial plans—they might be a good thing but you know the last Government did the future of local government and three waters as well and how do they all merge together? Well the future of local government was not a legislative reform; it was a question put out to local government: how do you see yourselves; what do you want to be doing? The last Minister of Local Government the Hon Kieran McAnulty was very clear to those councils that the Labour Government would not do anything that those councils did not want to do. So now it's interesting to hear the Hon Chris Bishop say "Oh it's a reform that's going to happen." Maybe that's going to happen. And what's happening with three waters as well? How is that all going to link into the spatial plans? So I'm sure local government will be very interested that this new Government considers that the work on the future of local government should continue in some way and somehow be merged with the spatial plans and whatever is going to happen to that three waters work.All of this is very important work. And in terms of the three waters I was involved in that legislation and the select committee process. It was very cognisant—the Finance and Expenditure Committee—of the relationship with this resource management legislation as well so that they could dovetail together. And that work happened and I congratulate the officials involved in that.I note that the Minister said he acknowledged it was a little bit sad for officials that this was all going. I'd say it's more than that and it's totally unnecessary. We heard a couple of concerns about the legislation that Mr Bishop said had been so well canvassed in the last Parliament and that was around new terms new words and that the Act is very long. Length does not equate to complexity. Sometimes spelling out all the steps in a statute makes decision making much simpler. If you have simpler decision-making that means that you don't have as much litigation. So I disagree with that point as well.Of course we've heard that some of the fast-tracking provisions apply—not all of them and we will be asking the Minister about that in the committee stage. But again it's very difficult to know what I'm talking about in this first reading stage when we've only just got the bill. And I'm not sure what the Minister was referring to when he was saying that freshwater planning is going to be extended by three years. Why do we need that; what are the consequences?"