Upston Louise: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeUpston Louise: General Debate[Sitting date: 02 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8475. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon LOUISE UPSTON (Minister for Land Information): I am enormously proud to be part of a Government that is both encouraging and enabling the building of more houses more businesses and greater infrastructure. I want to take a moment to just acknowledge the extraordinary work of the Hon Dr Nick Smith in bringing the next phase of the Resource Management Act reforms to the House. It is about supporting business owners. It is about supporting homeowners. It is about supporting our councils to actually ensure that we are able to get the level of development in cities and towns from one end of New Zealand to the other. This Government is very much clearly focused on reducing silly rules reducing bureaucracy and actually making it easier for councils to put together consistent plans that support their work in their communities.We have heard endless examples as we have spoken with constituents and councils alike about the obstacles that have been in their way and reforming the Resource Management Act will make a significant difference to enable them to really get things moving. It is about greater consistency. It is about more responsive planning simplified consenting and—equally important—better alignment across other pieces of legislation.This Government has focused on delivering Better Public Services. It is also around enabling better local services in local government and as we know the performance of local government is absolutely critical in regional economic development and the quality of everyday life. One of the things that I spoke about last night at the launch of the civil trades is that in the next 10 years we are expecting that central government and local government will spend approximately $11 billion each year in infrastructure. We have a responsibility to enable that to occur quickly and efficiently so this Government has really been very deliberate about finding more ways to support local government in responding to the significant challenges of infrastructure and also those of building more resilient communities and growing their local economies.Some of the work that we are doing is looking at what other opportunities there are to improve local government. There are some fantastic examples up and down the country of how regions are working together across councils. We have got great examples in Northland Waikato and Canterbury but it is actually about how we go further to enable shared services to have a look at the functions and structures to enable greater collaborations to actually enable the constituencies—our taxpayers and ratepayers are the same people—to get some of those savings and better local services delivered in our communities.We have had the Rules Reduction Taskforce—goodness me some of the absolutely loopy rules that both homeowners and business owners talked to us about were absolutely horrendous. So that is another piece of work lining up the Resource Management Act reforms with the rules reductions which actually makes a significant difference for local government and local government’s customers. It is significantly about reducing costs and it is about reducing delays because we know on this side of the House that when businesses are trying to grow we have actually got to get some of these things out of the way for them.We had great results from the first round of Resource Management Act reforms. I think this piece of legislation might be even thicker than the first one but at the end of the day it is about making New Zealand go faster it is about growing our economies in small towns as well as our large cities and it is about building more houses and building them faster. So I am enormously proud of what we are doing in local government and hats off to my colleague for the Resource Management Act reforms.