Sage Eugenie: Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 22 August 2013. Volume:692;Page:12796. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Deputy Speaker. Well the Green Party continues to oppose the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill because as Holly Walker explained we do not believe it will increase the supply of affordable houses and also because it represents another erosion of local government and local democracy by this National Government—[Interruption ]—and I say to Mr Ngaro that democracy is a fairly important detail. The bill does this because it is overriding the decision-making powers of city and district councils in terms of urban planning and it is curtailing public participation rights under the Resource Management Act. It is certainly not about a partnership between central and local government. It is much more about a centralisation of power—more power to the Minister.This bill is going to have quite bad implications for urban planning because it cuts across the work that councils have done to identify areas for growth; to set urban limits in place; to prohibit residential development from going beyond those limits to make sure that our cities and towns promote compact well-planned residential development; and to make sure that residential development is integrated with existing infrastructure like public transport services major roads water supply and sewerage.But this Government hates planning. It hates to look beyond the short term to consider the needs of future generations for well-planned cities and towns. It is all about letting the market prevail with as light a regulatory hand as possible. This bill is a charter for property developers and for urban sprawl because it is giving the Minister and property developers a free hand to challenge and cut across urban limits and well-planned development. It does this through the strong-arm provisions which allow the Minister to designate these special housing areas where we will get much more permissive resource consent processes and a much greater fast tracking of those processes whether the council agrees or not.There is no requirement for the Minister to consult the affected local authorities and if you do not have an accord negotiated with the relevant council you get the Chief Executive of the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment becoming the decision maker on resource consents for residential development. The council is effectively strong-armed into agreeing to a so-called accord. As Local Government NewZealand noted in its submission where you get the Minister swooping in and where you get these ad hoc decisions about where residential development is to occur and is not in line with existing council plans or existing council priorities for infrastructure development you are going to get very fragmented decisions.It is really ironic that the Minister in charge of this bill Nick Smith was repeatedly beating up on local councils for their rates increases when he was the Minister of Local Government yet is now promoting legislation that encourages poorly planned residential development that does not integrate with infrastructure and will potentially increase the costs on councils if they have to provide for example new waste-water infrastructure or new water-supply infrastructure which they were not planning to provide in response to the new development in the special housing areas. That potentially increases rating costs and potentially as Local Government New Zealand noted affects the creditworthiness of councils.Also the bill is anti-democratic because it completely overrides through these special housing areas the investment that councils and their communities have put into developing their plans. It is those plans that reflect community aspirations yet the plans are given very little weight in the decision-making process—the fast-track decision-making process—for the new residential development that the bill allows. Again one hand of government does not seem to know what the other is doing because councils will limit areas where residential development can occur not just to set urban limits and encourage compact cities but also to ensure that development does not happen in areas at risk of natural hazards like areas that are flood prone.So we have got the Minister encouraging development that does not take account of plan provisions yet his colleague the Minister for the Environment is proposing to strengthen the natural hazard provisions in the Resource Management Act. As submitters on the bill noted the rush to reform means that we potentially get—Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member’s time has expired.