Fitzsimons Jeanette: Infrastructure Bill — First Reading 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Infrastructure Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:656;Page:5846] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Green) 
: 
 There is a lot of obvious good sense in providing a code of practice for infrastructure providers. There is a huge amount of waste when there is no coordination and no planning in terms of combining the wires pipes and fibres in the same corridor. It is high time to attempt to bring about that kind of rationalisation. I understand the work on that began under the previous Government and it is good to see it being brought to completion. The Green Party certainly supports that. 
We do think there is quite a mystery as to how we can combine in one bill this Infrastructure Bill such a load of disparate amendments to nine different Acts. We could make a case for Parts 1 to 3 hanging together and being something to do with infrastructure but how Part 4 on housing has anything to do with wires pipes trenches railway lines or any other kind of infrastructure totally beats me. However we will come to Part 4 in time. 
The provision in Part 2 that gives us some concern relates to the old tension between territorial local authorities saying to someone who is going to dig up a street that it would be very sensible to do some amenity improvements at the same time and infrastructure companies saying that is nothing to do with them and they do not feel like cooperating. This bill resolves that conflict totally in favour of the infrastructure companies and totally at the expense of territorial local authorities. The status quo is that infrastructure companies and territorial local authorities tend to share those costs unless other arrangements are made and we are concerned that this bill errs too far on the side of making things difficult for councils. We want to look at that matter in the select committee in order to see whether the right balance has been struck because we suspect that it has not. 
Likewise we have no objection to cleaning up the New Zealand Railways Corporation Act and effectively bringing the corporation under the same rules that apply to other State-owned enterprises. It is time that was done too. The corporation is a Crown entity and there is no particular reason why it should have its own set of provisions that are different from those of all the other kinds of State-owned enterprises. 
Part 4 repeals the Affordable Housing: Enabling Territorial Authorities Act and initially that concerned us considerably. But we believe that the most important part of that Act is being saved by keeping the provision that kills exclusionary covenants. Those covenants insist that development has to be consistent with somebody’s idea of a good standard which can be very discriminatory to anybody else who wants to build in the same area. We very strongly supported that provision in the Act and we note that it is protected in this bill but we wonder whether there was a drafting mistake that means that the replacement clause is not retrospective in terms of all of the exclusionary covenants already entered into. The Act is repealed but the replacement clause applies only to covenants entered into on or after the date that this Infrastructure Bill comes into force. So there will be a gap period. We wonder why if Government members believe that exclusionary covenants are a bad idea and should not be allowed—and they believe that sufficiently to have rescued that provision from the legislation that they are repealing and put it back into law—they think that it should not apply to the ones entered into up until the date that this bill is enacted. I very much hope that this is some kind of drafting oversight or mistake. If it is then we can rectify it at the select committee and the Green Party will certainly be arguing to do that. 
We will support the referral of this bill to the select committee and we will see what happens to it there.