Court SimonSIMON COURT (ACT): I can promise you I won't read from the bill and you won't get a PowerPoint from the ACT Party. The ACT Party supports this bill. The bill was considered by the Environment Committee. I want to give assurances to the people of New Zealand that ACT's role my role as the ACT member of the Environment Committee was to make sure that the time taken to consider the bill was reduced as much as possible because—when you consider the amount of effort the cost the time it's taken for just a few hundred square metres of land to be removed from its title as a reserve and made available when this bill gets Royal assent made available for the local council that owns this piece of land to do something better with it for its community.Now it turns out—I've done a bit of research—that the Act that actually controls this reserve was passed in 1966 and you have to say that 56 years later there may be a need in some communities to do something different with parcels of land that were once set aside as a reserve for reserve purposes. Now the problem is that it's not just a Palmerston North council but it's councils all around New Zealand who struggle to get permission or to establish the legal authority to change the land use. If you look at the different types of reserves—and I'll give you an example in a moment of what this means—I found in a quick search scenic reserves historic reserves scientific reserves recreational reserves and I also found hospital reserves because it turns out that at some point back in the 1800s when a local town said We need a hospital." the Government passed a law to say "Here's some land which we reserve for the hospital." Now of course we've got much more efficient planning instruments than that like the Resource Management Act—I'm joking! But at least we don't need specific Acts of Parliament any more to designate land or give planning permission for land to be used. Local government actually has a really important role in delivering positive social outcomes to its communities. So when a piece of land is surplus they should have maximum flexibility in how that land is used and if it's disposed of that should be of no consequence. Despite what we've heard from the Green member today that it's a great worry that councils might want to sell a bit of land and use that revenue to put back into some other council asset—I mean heaven forbid that they might want to sell an asset get some money for it and invest in something the community actually wants rather than a weed-infested piece of land down the road.What Palmerston North council have pointed out rightly and what Tangi Utikere the member sponsoring this local bill has pointed out is that this land actually is in an ideal location to support urban densification and actually increase the housing stock that Palmerston North needs in order to grow and develop. The ACT Party supports that 100 percent. But what this process highlights is that it takes an awful long time for local and central government to do stuff and actually regulation laws Government are more often the handbrake holding back communities holding back business and holding back New Zealand from being our best selves.So for members who think they come to this House to pass laws to make people's lives better well there might have been a few of those that I've seen come through this House in the short time I've been here—at only 18 months—and this is one of them but we have this legacy of hundreds and hundreds of pieces of legislation which were passed with good intent and which now are nothing but a hindrance to communities around New Zealand who want to use their land for better purposes. I'll give you an example. When I worked in Auckland there was a piece of land that had once been a quarry and it was owned by local council. It was owned by local council. It had once been a quarry and they said "We're no longer going to dig rock out of it; we've got all the rock out. I know what we'll do we'll turn it into a reserve and we'll let the birds come back and we'll let the bush come back." Well that's fantastic except a short time later another part of council said "We've got hundreds of thousands of cubic metres of surplus fill we need to get rid of. We can either pay commercial rates or we can put it in the old quarry that we used to operate that you've now called a reserve." Well after some years of exploring the option it was deemed impossible because it would have required if not an Act of Parliament almost—just to get permission to backfill that quarry with surplus fill. Actually it would have delivered a better environmental outcome and a better asset for council because rather than a big dangerous hole in the ground with rocks falling into it that no one could use; it was actually fenced off it could have been made into a level site and repurposed for alternative community uses.So when we consider this bill this simple piece of legislation as the member Angie Warren-Clark rightly pointed out before she threated to give us a PowerPoint actually what we should be doing is looking at all the pieces of legislation that we currently have on the statute book and saying "Which one of these if we deleted it no one would notice?"—no one would notice. I can see the member Michael Woodhouse looking at me with a great deal of interest. I know the National Party sometimes loses their way when it comes to regulatory reform but I can assure this House that the ACT Party is laser-focused on eliminating waste on eliminating poor regulations that actually hold New Zealand communities back that stop our economy from thriving and our communities from becoming those places that we want to see grow and develop. So look it did take from around 2005 we heard today. That's about 16 or 17 years since the need to change the purpose or the use of this land was identified and now here we are today hopefully going to all vote yes and support this bill passing through the House. But I just want to point out what the cost was not just the cost in the member's time while we considered it not just the opportunity cost to Palmerston North City Council and its residents but also the costs of officials' time. While the committee sat we had officials from the Department of Conservation experts in their field. They came to the committee and they presented about biodiversity and land ownership and the Reserves Act. We got down into all kinds of detail that people who don't sit on select committees and aren't members of Parliament or don't work in the Parliamentary Counsel Office or in some Government department where the lanyard class goes to work every day—they wouldn't understand it. They would have no idea how complex and how difficult it is actually to pass a piece of legislation to prove why it should be allowed to pass to make the case and then to draft the legislation and have it passed just so that Palmerston North can sell or otherwise dispose of a piece of land or simply choose to own it but change its land use. I mean who knows? They might find oil in Palmerston North and they might come to the House and say "We want a bill to overturn the ban on oil and gas exploration because just like Jed from The Beverly Hillbillies "We've found oil!" But that's very unlikely. However they should be able to use their land for whatever purpose they see fit and it shouldn't be up to nimbys and others to say what council should do with their land and how they should use it it's best fit for the communities. So look the ACT Party supports this piece of legislation primarily because it makes it easier for local government or an agency to sell and dispose of land so that it can be better used by the community. And while it's important to recognise that the Environment Committee spent time on this bill there are also a whole lot of other people who submitted who raised concerns. And in fact the committee has found unanimously that this bill should proceed. So on that note I'd like to conclude by saying the ACT Party supports this bill. We want to see more bills that get rid of red tape. We want to see more bills that make it easier to do stuff in New Zealand and actually reduce the number of people who claim to have standing and want to make decisions about how other people use their land. So we look forward to seeing more great bills like this being brought to the House by Government members in particular maybe resource management reforms that limit the number of people who can say "No" to you on how you use your land. But of course there's a snowball out there somewhere in hell slowly melting. We look forward to the day."