Kuriger Barbara; Court Simon; Brooking RachelBARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki-King Country): Thank you Mr Chair. Just along the lines of those recent regional spatial strategies and the 30-year time frame I guess it's reasonable to assume that within that 30-year time frame this is a live strategy; so it's not something that is set on the day that it's set and nothing could happen to it between that date and the 30-year time frame—it's a live moving document.SIMON COURT (ACT): Firstly I just want to acknowledge the contribution of Barbara Kuriger. Let's assume it is a live planning document and that we will need to respond to changes in demand at some point in the future. These things cannot possibly be fixed in stone. But I am speaking on behalf of the Minister so why don't I just ask the Minister some basic questions.Minister how is a regional spatial strategy to be developed with regard to a general policy statement (GPS) for land transport when there is no GPS for land transport? Because in November of 2022 the former transport Minister the Hon Michael Wood—Hon Scott Simpson: Who?SIMON COURT: The Hon Michael Wood—the Hon Scott Simpson MP for Coromandel—released a very important document a general policy statement for land transport that set out some objectives that turned out to be unfeasible. That was to apply the maintenance budget for the years 2024 to 2027 to funding removal of car parks taking road corridor space allocated to private vehicles heavy vehicles and buses and reallocating it to walking and cycling. Now when that was released as a draft for consultation local government transport entities like Auckland Transport all of those regional land transport bodies around the country councils around the country said You must be joking Minister we can't work with this. We can't have you transferring a proportion of the maintenance budget to walking cycling and public transport at a time when—Minister didn't you see even on the TV news that there are potholes and sinkholes developing all over the country we have cyclones and floods and storms we have rockfalls we have slips degrading the State highway network on a local road network. Minister if the GPS for land transport tells us to take a whole lot of funding that should go into roading resilience maintenance and operations and put it into walking cycling and bus lanes we're not going to be able to do that."Now that GPS has since been binned. Since then there's been a change of Prime Minister a whole bunch of Ministers have been memory holed by the Labour Party. But the GPS on land transport which should have landed for consultation with local government in the early part of this year—that's right crickets. We haven't seen it. Local government needs a GPS a general policy statement for land transport in order to know what funding what activity classes they're eligible for from Waka Kotahi—or New Zealand Transport Agency—what they should be budgeting for for the next three years 2024 to 2027.CHAIRPERSON (Greg O'Connor): Mr Court it's good to use this stuff for context but don't let it become the whole speech. Come back to what you're actually talking about.SIMON COURT: Thank you Mr Chair. I appreciate your direction. So Minister in the absence of a GPS for land transport in the absence of any national direction how is a region meant to develop a regional spatial strategy that takes account of the transport infrastructure needed to enable growth to enable communities to develop according to a regional spatial strategy where there is no transport component?Hon RACHEL BROOKING (Associate Minister for the Environment): Going back to Barbara Kuriger's point about I guess how have much of a living document these spatial plans are of course they can be reviewed and that's at clause 46A. And then also if we go to clause 23A which I referred to before in the answer to the Hon Scott Simpson's question this is the clause which really talks about the evidence that's needed and the scale and level of detail that should be appropriate to the issues at hand. So I think those are good useful sections.I'm going to the member Simon Court's points. In Schedule 3 there are of course the different general policy statements that are relevant but the whole point of this piece of legislation is to get that joined-up thinking between central and local government. The committee can get information from any Government department and that's a really important part of this—that information has to be free. And so there are many ways that the committee can get the relevant information and do that strategic thinking for the 30-year period."