Cunliffe David: Waitakere Ranges Heritage Area Bill — In Committee 
Cunliffe David: Waitakere Ranges Heritage Area Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:675;Page:14423] 
Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Minister of Health) 
: 
 It is a privilege to take a brief call in support of the Waitakere Ranges Heritage Area Bill. I acknowledge and thank my friend and colleague Lynne Pillay the member in whose name this bill has been brought forward. I acknowledge the very many people who have gone before to bring this bill to the House today. 
Work on this bill started some 30 years ago—30 years ago—when the Rt Hon Jonathan Hunt Tony Randerson now Justice Randerson and other members of the Waitakere Ranges Protection Society recognised that Auckland was growing fast and creeping stage by stage into the beautiful unique area that we know as the Waitakere Ranges and foothills. They had a vision then that if our law did not catch up with the pace of change and if it did not find some way of bringing together the long-term needs of future generations with the short-term pressures of subdivision and property development then we would all be the poorer—we would all be the poorer. 
This is absolutely the right thing for this Parliament to support for several reasons. Firstly it is an expression of the national significance and the nationwide uniqueness of this area not just because it has beautiful bush not just because it has significant biodiversity but because it is one of those very rare gems of a natural ecosystem that is directly proximate to a major and growing urban city and in that it is relatively unique. This bill is the right thing to support because it breaks new ground in dealing with the problem of incremental effects—the fact that each consent assessed on its own may be reasonable but the combined effect of consent after consent being granted is such as to lead to an irreversible degradation in our natural heritage and the amenity values of the area. 
I welcome my colleague Dail Jones and tell him it is good to see him back in the House. He raised the issue that this bill would somehow abridge private property rights and would be socialism by stealth. I would like to think so but I doubt that 81 percent of Aucklanders are in favour of socialism by stealth. In a scientific poll 81 percent of Aucklanders voted in favour of this bill as did 77 percent of Waitakere residents. It does not trammel any existing property rights nor does it change in significant measure the consenting process. What does it do? It ensures that the consenting process takes place with a set of objectives and a legal framework that provide for the long term as well as the short and that is absolutely the right thing to do. 
I said that this bill has been a long time coming and I have acknowledged some of the region’s tipuna who have supported it over many years. Let me mention some others. I acknowledge the good work of Ngati Whatua and Te Kawerau-a-Maki who have been wonderful kaitiaki of this area and have engaged with local councils and whose support for this bill is vested now in the Supplementary Order Paper that our colleagues in the Maori Party have put forward as well as in their earlier consultation with the proponents of the bill. 
I am happy to say that this issue was one of the first regional issues I embraced as a first-time candidate in 1998. In my first campaign in 1999 I travelled to the UK to look at the British national park system and at areas of unique national importance and I brought some of that learning back into the discussion with my local and regional authority colleagues working of course with my friend and colleague Lynne Pillay. 
This bill has been a long time coming because it has been the subject of extensive local consultation over many many years. It has broken ground in cooperation between territorial authorities and the regional authority which have all stood behind this bill. If anybody was in any doubt about whether supporting the bill was the right thing for this Parliament to do I simply ask them to reflect upon the fact that the processes of local democracy operating freely and through their democratic system have seen all of those local representatives join together to bring this bill to the House.