Brooking RachelRACHEL BROOKING (Labour): Thank you Madam Speaker. I'd like to briefly touch on the why where what how and a little bit of thanks as well in my contribution today.Why are we passing the third reading this afternoon? We've heard from both the previous two speakers Nicola Willis and the Hon David Parker about the huge problem we have in New Zealand that I think everybody in this House acknowledges about our lack of housing. We also have a climate emergency. The intensification of our cities goes some way to help with that issue and that is that when you incentivise transport mode shifts so that you have people taking public transport people walking people cycling that that can help with reducing our carbon emissions from transport which are 40 percent of our carbon emissions. It's also important that we don't sprawl and build on very productive land. Those issues are ones that the National Policy Statement on Urban Development 2020 (NPS-UD) was made to address as well as this housing issue. What we have with this bill is speeding up the process for the implementation of the NPS-UD and also this new tool which is the medium density residential standards (MDRS).Where does this apply? Well it applies to cities. It applies to the tier 1 councils. It doesn't apply to islands. It doesn't apply to Waiheke Island—that was a change that the Environment Committee made. It doesn't apply to towns near centres like Christchurch including Oxford and Akaroa.What is it? This bill it enables more development. It doesn't require people to develop sections that they don't want to. All it does is mean that they can build somewhere without requiring a resource consent if they are meeting the MDRS. Or maybe they have some sort of consent requirement as a restricted discretionary activity which is a simpler consenting process than some others. So it's good for developers.What is it? So by August of 2022 which is approaching at speed these tier 1 councils will notify an intensification planning instrument. That will do both the implementation of the MDRS but also the implementation of that NPS-UD.How will it do it? Well I think there's a couple of points I want to touch on in the how" and that is we've heard a lot about qualifying matters. The previous speaker Nicola Willis spoke about them in part. The MDRS doesn't have to apply to every single area of a relevant residential zone. There may be qualifying matters that mean that it's not appropriate to intensify a certain area. So one of the qualifying matters—and these are found in new section 77L—is any section 6 matter of the Resource Management Act (RMA). Section 6 matters are those of national importance and they include historic heritage.I just want to dwell very quickly on that term "historic heritage" because this is defined in the RMA. The definition includes a contribution to the understanding of New Zealand's history and culture. That's quite a high bar to reach—a nationally important historic heritage measure.So areas that a lot of submitters talked to us about in front of the Environment Committee related to special character areas. So these are areas where planners have said "Not quite historic heritage but still some very important amenity values." Some of those areas might have some historic heritage. So the section 6 qualifying matter won't necessarily apply to those areas. Instead they'll have to rely on a different qualifying matter and that is "Other matters". I mention this because if the council is going to use an "other matter" as a qualifier then it has to produce more analysis and justification for why it's relying on that as a qualifying matter—so reducing the enabling powers of the MDRS and the NPS-UD. It will have to do this at a site-by-site level. So that's an important part of this piece of legislation that planners in our biggest centres will be grappling with no doubt.Also important to note that where a development doesn't meet the standards in the MDRS that then it's a restricted discretionary activity. As I said before that means that you need to get a resource consent but the decision makers their discretion is restricted to the issue that's been breached. So if you want to intensify your land more than what the MDRS allows for then you can apply for one of these resource consents. Of course it's more time-consuming but it's very much still on the table as an option.Finally I'd really like to thank the Ministry for the Environment advisers the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development advisers that we had working on Saturdays in front of us in the select committee but I'm sure they worked all the weekends in the short time that we were looking at this bill. Also the Parliamentary Counsel Office—the same can be said for them. And of course our wonderful clerks. So thank you to all of them and I commend this bill to the House."