Parker DavidNATURAL AND BUILT ENVIRONMENT BILL First ReadingHon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): I present a legislative statement for the Natural and Built Environment Bill.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.Hon DAVID PARKER: Thank you Madam Speaker. I move That the Natural and Built Environment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Environment Committee to consider the bill.Today we are considering very important and substantial reform that affects all aspects of the environment we treasure and live in—legislation which affects everybody's lives. The essences of life—clean air and water; housing; infrastructure such as roads hospitals and schools; renewable energy; farming; and commerce—are all impacted by these laws. Change is long overdue but it has proved difficult to achieve. Successive Governments have not delivered; we are.Since the Resource Management Act (RMA) was passed in 1991 there have been more than 20 major amendments and countless thousands of minor ones. They've made it ever more complex and difficult to navigate and overall have failed to fix the underlying problems. Everyone is frustrated: environmentalists developers councillors farmers and home builders. We need a faster cheaper and better resource management system. It is undisputed that the Resource Management Act is not working as was intended. It takes far too long costs far too much and it's no exaggeration to say it's broken.Plans under the RMA have been too restrictive to enable sufficient house-building opportunities. The planning restrictions have strangled land markets pushing up prices and restricting home-building opportunities. There is agreement across this House and across Government agencies that this has been a major contributor to land costs being amongst the least affordable in the OECD. In major cities this has flowed through to inflated house costs for all housing old and new; on the housing front the RMA has had severe problems.Sadly environmental outcomes have also been poor. In practice cumulative environmental effects have not been well managed. This is most obvious in the degrading of water quality and the loss of biodiversity and of valuable soils. Resource consenting has become ever more costly. Between 2014-15 and 2018-19 council consenting fees have increased by 66 percent for non-notified consents and 124 percent for notified consents. Infrastructure New Zealand Te Waihanga has estimated that infrastructure developers are collectively spending $1.29 billion annually on resource consent processes—5.5 percent of total project costs. This is outside the extreme end of approval costs internationally with benchmarking showing that equivalent costs in the UK and the EU vary from 0.1 percent to 5 percent of project cost. Consenting is also taking longer with a 50 percent increase in decision-making times between 2014-15 and 2018-19.The RMA has not responded well to environmental challenges. Our environment is under significant pressure with many of our native plants animals and ecosystems under threat. Many of our lakes rivers wetlands and estuaries are degraded. The majority of monitored swimming sites do not meet World Health Organization safe swimming guidelines in summer. It's all interconnected. The degradation of our natural environment reduces the ability of our ecosystems to recover from shocks like the increasing storm events that come from climate change. Sediment run-off is degrading our inshore fisheries. We're losing that valuable topsoil. Sediment and nutrient loads extend beyond estuaries adversely affecting kelp beds and scallops.So it's been a fail on the enabling of houses a fail on the cost of consents for infrastructure a fail on environmental protection and civil society has concluded that RMA reform is overdue.Over the past 18 months Government has been advancing changes as recommended by the expert panel chaired by the Hon Tony Randerson KC. They considered and we've considered reports from the Productivity Commission the Waitangi Tribunal Local Government New Zealand the Employers and Manufacturers Association the Environmental Defence Society the Property Council and Infrastructure New Zealand. The Government has engaged with local government the private sector—including developers and infrastructure providers—environmental NGOs and Māori groups and now we're legislating for changes that are grounded in the Randerson panel's recommendation.The Natural and Built Environment Act (NBA) sets out how the environment will be protected and used. It covers land use along with environmental protection order takes and discharges and use of the coastal marine areas. NBA plans will describe the way in which a region's resources will be managed how environmental limits and targets will be set locally how infrastructure development will be enabled and how conflicts between outcomes will be resolved. More than 100 RMA plans reduce to 15 regional level plans across the country prepared by regional planning committees who also approve them. Submissions are heard by an independent hearings panel. Time to take to prepare the equivalent of an RMA plan will reduce from 10 years to four. With fewer plans and faster processes local communities will continue to have a strong voice including through statements of community outcomes. There is flexibility for regions to determine the make-up of regional planning committees which comprise representatives from local government and Māori groups. We're not putting in place 50:50 co-governance. Broader on Treaty issues we've aligned the new law with the wording in the Conservation Act to give effect to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi. Treaty settlements will be fully upheld and carried over.The most significant change to enhance environmental protection is the shift from an effects-based approach to one that's based on outcomes. The RMA approach of avoid remedy and mitigate has in the end allowed the accumulation of small negative effects to the degradation of the likes of water and the likes of topsoil as well as loss of biodiversity. The NBA changes this approach setting limits to maintain current environmental levels and targets where degradation needs to be addressed. This shared environmental generation ethic is described as te Oranga o te Taiao which is defined in the NBA and will support a responsible and positive relationship with the natural environment.The National Planning Framework (NPF) will be central government's primary lever to influence the new system. The first NPF is in development. It carries over existing national direction. It has new content on infrastructure and also dealing with natural hazards including those caused by climate change.Infrastructure is a major focus of the first NPF. Te Waihanga is leading the preparation of this direction which will include policy outcomes targets standards and rules to support a nationally consistent approach to infrastructure. Under NBA consenting will be simplified and made more efficient. Greater use of standards a reduced number of activities and the expanded scope of permitted activities will reduce the number of unnecessary consents. This will reduce costs. Fast track which was put in place in response to COVID and has been successful at reducing average consenting periods by 15 months will be made permanent. We will not adopt fast track for all projects as the National Party has suggested. They're on the wrong track on that because that would gum up the system and would turn fast track into slow track.Designations are carried on as the main tool for infrastructure provision—I'm not going to have time to go into that detail. I'll consider that in the Spatial Planning Bill.Section 32 reports have become hopelessly long-winded post-fact justifications and are hardly used. We're putting an end to this waste. They're going to have to be expressed succinctly and plainly be proportionate to the scale of the proposal and be prepared in a way that's useful to a decision maker. We're also legislating for an evaluation report to be limited if it's giving effect to a provision in the National Planning Framework.The cost-benefit analysis in the supplementary analysis report says that every dollar spent will deliver benefits of between $2.50 and $4.90. This comes from a reduction in consent volumes and a reduction in costs when consents are necessary. It will result in efficiency benefits from between $210 million and $430 million per year. Central and Government costs for infrastructure and development projects are likely to decrease. Consenting and designation costs go down corridor protection protects investment certainty and the opportunity to purchase land earlier in the development cycle also helps. Housing affordability benefits are predicted to be between $146 million and $834 million per annum. Public good benefits include a well-functioning resource management system for future generations and of course include the environmental outcomes that cannot be measured in dollar terms but they'll be improved. And those benefits are always very expensive.The combination of the NPF the regional spatial strategies and the NPA plans will embed expanded supply of land and enable renewable electricity generation so we can affordably decarbonise the economy and address cumulative effects. The new system will be faster cheaper and better and I commend the bill to the House.