Sage EugenieRESOURCE MANAGEMENT AMENDMENT BILLSecond ReadingDebate resumed from 2 June.Hon EUGENIE SAGE (Associate Minister for the Environment): Tēnā koe Madam Speaker. Thank you. Very pleased to take a call on the Resource Management Amendment Bill. When we were last in the Chamber discussing this Opposition members were railing against the bill. It is a very important bill and it is the first phase of this Government's changes to the Resource Management Act (RMA). There is a review panel chaired by Judge Randerson and that is looking at more comprehensive reform. But this bill is important because it removes some of the worst changes that the former National Government made to the RMA with their Resource Legislation Amendment Act. Some of those key changes are the very Draconian powers which the former environment Minister the Hon Dr Nick Smith provided for himself and they were widely criticised in submissions. Those were the powers in section 360D where it enabled the Minister to make regulations to either prohibit or remove rules that councils had developed and included in their district plans if they overlapped with any other subject matter. So these were really Draconian powers allowing the Minister just to come down on top of a district plan which had been through the whole public consultative process maybe even had been to the Environment Court and had appeals resolved there. These Draconian powers are going under this bill. Similarly for the powers that the former National Government put in in section 360G of the Act which allowed the Minister the ability to make regulations so that certain resource consent applications had to be considered and processed in 10 days. So a very narrow window of time to consider those applications and no ability to make public submissions.One of the other Draconian powers that this bill removes from the RMA is section 360H which was the Minister's ability to make regulations again overriding the primary legislation by requiring that there not be public notification on certain activities cutting right across the ability of councils to set out in their plans what should be notified and what shouldn't. So those changes in this bill are quite an important removal of the tinkering which the Resource Legislation Amendment Act did. But more important are the changes that this bill makes to the way in which freshwater planning is done at the regional level through New Zealand. With the new strengthened national policy statement (NPS) on fresh water and the new national environmental standards on fresh water which this Government has put in place to ensure that our rivers are swimmable both for people and fish and for gathering mahinga kai within a generation we need a much more nimble process for enacting the changes that the NPS requires in regional plans. So what the bill does is set up a new process by which councils have a panel of freshwater commissioners who consider the submissions on the plan changes which implement the NPS and those commissioners include people with expertise in tikanga Māori recognising that mātauranga Māori and te mana o te wai are at the heart of the freshwater NPS.So people will have the appropriate expertise. There will be a senior judge involved in that and these freshwater commissioners will come from a centralised pool highly specialised. There'll also be a representative from the regional council on that panel of commissioners. It is a process for considering and making changes to the regional freshwater or land and water plan which is very similar to that which was adopted in Auckland for the development of the unitary plan. So yes there will be some restrictions on appeal rights but that is only if the regional council rejects the recommendations which this panel of commissioners makes. It is a major improvement to regional land and water planning which has been often controversial around New Zealand because of the different interests of water users land users and those valuing instream values whether they be for recreation or supporting birds and wildlife. One of the other major changes that this bill makes is to ensure that it is compatible with the zero carbon Act which we enacted in the Parliament in December last year. That Act sets out a framework of enduring institutional arrangements with the establishment of the Climate Commission to ensure that New Zealand is on target to mitigate and adapt to climate change. But one of the problems with the RMA at present is it doesn't allow decision makers to take into account the greenhouse gas emissions of activities. So the bill enables that matching up with the zero carbon Act to occur and the implementation of these changes will only take place when emissions reduction plans have been done by the Climate Commission and when central government has had an opportunity to provide some national guidance on how that should be implemented under the RMA to ensure that there is national consistency. Ensuring that our climate change targets are reflected in the RMA will help ensure a cohesive approach to climate change so it's quite a major change that the bill is making. In terms of the other areas where the changes are important in subdivision the National Government with the Resource Legislation Amendment Act (RLA Act) reversed the presumption the quite restrictive presumption in the RMA around subdivision to potentially make it a permitted activity. This bill puts it back so that subdivision can't happen unless it's allowed by resource consent or a rule in a district plan. That is because in an age of rising sea levels more intense storm events and increased floods we want to make sure that subdivision and housing development occurs outside of areas of natural hazard. Having a very permissive approach to subdivision cuts right across that. So there are some quite substantial changes in the bill. The last of the areas I'd like to comment on was just the increase in public participation cutting out some of the changes that the RLA Act made that really restricted the rights of the public to get involved. This Government has a different approach and recognises the value that public participation—submissions appearing before hearing panels—has in providing more information to decision makers. The bill actually restores that because those changes that the former Government made were widely opposed by submitters. This is the first in other changes to the RMA to make it more effective more nimble to reintroduce public participation rights to override and remove those very Draconian powers that were given to the Minister by the former Government and to really make our freshwater planning system more nimble and to ensure that the RMA aligns with the zero carbon Act. I commend the bill.