Goff Phil: Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 19 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8325. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill): Labour has supported the Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill because it supports an effective and timely process to progress Auckland City’s unitary plan. What we do not support is the appalling process followed for this legislation. This bill was announced by the Minister for the Environment on 16 September. That is more than 2 months ago. That was plenty of time for this bill to be read a first time in mid-September and to go to a select committee for the public to have a chance to have their voices heard. That was plenty of time for the select committee to scrutinise the bill carefully for any errors or things that did not look likely to make the changes that people thought were necessary and that was plenty of time for the Parliamentary Counsel Office and for officials to be quizzed on whether the bill will achieve its objective.Did that happen? No. Why did it not happen? Throughout every stage of this bill no adequate explanation has been given to the House as to why instead of proper process and normal process this bill was introduced at 25 to 11 last night and pushed through its stages. What the Government could have done during the Committee of the whole House was to have the Minister in charge of the bill in the chair and ready to answer questions legitimately put to him by members of that Committee. Did that happen? No it did not happen. We had Minister after Minister sitting dumbly in the Minister’s chair in the Chamber ignoring the questions. One Minister finally got up and gave a 40-second answer which was wrong.Hon Louise Upston: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. It is a well-traversed convention in this House not to refer to the absence of any member at any time.Hon PHIL GOFF: Speaking to the point of order it is not against the Standing Orders to say that the Minister in charge of the bill was not in the chair.Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Well the matter has been traversed. Of course the Hon Phil Goff referred to the Minister not being in the chair and not to the Minister not being in the Chamber.Hon PHIL GOFF: The huge irony over the debate over this bill during the stages it has gone through is that as well as seeking to facilitate an effective process of hearing submissions by the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel the bill had a second purpose. The second purpose was to validate legislation that had been rushed through the House previously on this very same issue and to correct the errors and to retrospectively make legal what had been done illegally. I say “irony” because the lesson of that to the Government—there were three instances where we had to validate legislation that was inadequate and where activity was not lawful—was surely that you do not rush legislation through you give it proper consideration and then you have a better chance of getting it right. But we again at the Government’s insistence have seen legislation rushed through and it is bound to come back to the House because it is not adequate. Despite the appalling process which not one single National member sought to justify the Labour Party supports the intent of this bill.The goal of the legislation to bring in the super-city in Auckland was to bring together eight separate councils into one to cover an area that is in effect one city. The next step that is necessary to realise the benefits of that is to replace 13 district and regional plans with a single unitary plan for resource management. That means that we can put behind Auckland a history of complex and fragmented resource management planning and we can hopefully facilitate quicker and more environmentally sustainable development both rural and urban and in the marine environment.In order to make this process happen more quickly there was a decision made which I support that instead of a 10-year process under the Resource Management Act previous legislation set up a system where the council would notify the Auckland Unitary Plan and then the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel would hear submissions on that plan and would recommend back to the council. Well that independent hearings panel chaired by Judge David Kirkpatrick has done a very good job. It has heard about 9000 submissions. But in the last part of this process we are looking at site-specific issues and there are 5000 submitters who want to be heard.The statutory deadline for the independent hearings panel to report back to the council is 22 July 2016. It did not look like it was going to make that deadline and it benefits nobody for the bringing into effect of the unitary plan to be further held up. That is why this bill makes three changes that the Labour Opposition supports. It will reduce the quorum; it will increase the pool of panel members that can be drawn upon; it will allow the panel to report back after each issue that it deals with with its recommendations; and it will allow more than one panel to sit simultaneously.Those things are good and we support that and that is why we are supporting the bill. What we were not able to do in the Committee of the whole House however was get answers to certain questions that were validly raised. One question was that if you reduce the quorum to two and you have got two members on a hearings panel what if they disagree? What sort of recommendations are they going to give back to the council? Well the Minister did take a call on that one to say it would not be making a recommendation. I am sorry but the point of the independent hearings panel is to make recommendations to the council and who would make that recommendation but the people who heard the submissions on it? So the answer was a nonsense and time and again we could not get answers on whether this bill will do exactly what everybody in this House might want it to do.The failure of the Government to allow this to go to a select committee also meant that we were not able to challenge the Minister in charge of the bill in terms of the claims that he makes for it. I want to quote him on two claims. First of all he said that the bill was needed before the expiry of the special housing area legislation. Well I would have liked to ask the Minister what bad effect that would have. The Minister has set a target of 39000 new houses over 3 years. When the council was asked last week how many of those houses 2 years into the 3-year period had been built in special housing areas the answer was 102—102 out of the 39000 target. So first of all it is very hard to accept from the Minister that special housing areas have been effective. They have not. They have been a dramatic failure.The second thing the Minister has said is: “This bill is needed to maintain the momentum of lifting Auckland’s housing supply.” I hope that the new unitary plan will facilitate addressing the crisis in the availability and the affordability of houses in Auckland. The Productivity Commission has said very clearly that the problem with Auckland is that there is going to be a million more people in the next 30 years and we have got restrictive laws that will not let the city move out and will not let the city move up. If that happens it said what is affected by those pressures is price and affordability and that has impacted on price and affordability. Land is more than half of the cost of a new home.So we hope that the new unitary plan will allow properly the city to expand balancing out the needs to protect the most valuable rural land and we hope that it will allow the city to go up balancing that need with good urban design and plenty of public open space. So to the extent that the unitary plan can help we support that but I absolutely challenge the Minister in his claim that this bill is going to resolve Auckland’s housing crisis. I challenge that on the basis of the fact—Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: I am sorry to interrupt the member but his time has expired.