Simpson Scott; Parker DavidHon SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): How much of that special funding will be spent on converting existing national environmental standards and national policy statements into his new proposed national planning framework?Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): I would say a small but important fraction. The new system moves from managing effects to trying to manage for outcomes. One of the problems environmentally under the RMA that there's a general consensus on is that the avoid" "remedy" and/or "mitigate" language of the RMA in the end in respect of impacts from land use on things like water ended up being mainly "mitigate" and the effect of mitigated increases in intensity and land use cumulatively amounted to very significant degradations in water. In order to overcome that we think that there's a need to manage to bottom lines. In truth those bottom lines in respect of water are now largely coming through the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management that was promulgated last year. That will be transitioned into the new system and will be an example of the bottom lines that the system will be managed for. It is complex because in some instances you've got this tension between strictness of bottom lines and the need to sometimes have exceptions. This has been made clear in a mistake that I was partly responsible for in respect of wetland rules in the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management where we probably went a bit hard and chose a prohibited status for nixing of any wetlands.Now we do need to be very careful that we don't lose a lot more wetlands in New Zealand because you know we've lost more than 90 percent of the wetlands that used to exist including national parks. Outside of national parks it's even worse. But that wetland exception shows that we didn't get it quite right and we're in the process of fixing—it shows that there is the need occasionally for an exception from the bottom line. We don't want to lose more wetlands but occasionally you have to; for example for infrastructure or for a quarry expansion. Now how we're going to manage that in the new system through the national planning framework is that we think that there will be national direction and a positive direction in respect of infrastructure developments so that we make explicit that on occasions the national planning framework which will include the transitioning in of existing national environmental standards and national planning statements—there will be exceptions that are necessary for infrastructure on occasions and that'll also be articulated in the national planning framework.Hon SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): Total staff numbers at the Ministry for the Environment have increased from 349 when he first became a Minister to 492 in the 2020 year. That's a 41 percent increase in just three years. Why?Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): Because sadly New Zealand's view of ourselves as being good custodians of environmental outcomes has been found to be wanting and there is a desire amongst New Zealanders to do better in a number of areas. Fresh water is one of those areas. There are more people that are employed in assisting regional councils to halt the decline in the quality of fresh water. When we came to office sadly more than half of the monitored sites that people swim in in summer are not safe to swim in and put your head under according to World Health Organization guidelines. So there was obviously a need to do better in respect of oversight by the ministry of freshwater outcomes. The Hon Eugenie Sage mentioned in her contribution the work that is being done in respect of waste. New Zealand has I think—we are one of if not the highest per capita contributors to landfills on a kilograms or tonnes of waste per person per annum in the world in the OECD and so we also need to make progress on waste. So we are doing a lot of work in that space including updating the relevant legislative code as well as bringing forward recycling initiatives so that we have more recycling and move closer to a circular economy and less going to landfill. Then of course within the numbers that the member quotes although they're not within my vote Vote Climate Change has also had an increase in personnel to deal with the zero carbon bill and the very difficult transition that we have as a country—achievable but quite technically difficult in order to advance towards a low carbon economy."