Warren-Clark AngieANGIE WARREN-CLARK (Labour): Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare. I'm really pleased to stand today and take a call on the Resource Management Amendment Bill. It is really a great pleasure. The Resource Management Act (RMA) has been around since 1991 and I remember at law school in 1993 when we first started learning about it. At that point it was about 400 pages of text. We've now got about 800 pages and the bill is essentially a mismatch of many many years—many many years—of working very piecemeal across the system to create bits and pieces and changes for the Act. We know across the community that everyone in the community finds that this Act is very difficult to use. It is complex. It is a weighty piece of legislation. And that's why I'm really delighted to be standing alongside the Government when we bring the first tranche—the first changes—of the Resource Management Amendment Bill to this House. Of course we will be working in the future in the next short while to bring the second more substantive changes to this House.So I'd like to thank the Minister the Hon David Parker for bringing this legislation. I know that due to the sheer complexity of the RMA that we have now the officials have worked extremely hard and this has been a huge task even just to get to this point. So I'd like to congratulate the Minister and his officials for that. I too am a select committee member and I'm looking forward to hearing from the individuals from the community from our local government and from our businesses and I welcome those submissions so that we can get the best legislation possible.I just want to address the Hon Nathan Guy's comment about the Chief Freshwater Commissioner's powers and who that person might be. Having read the bill as it sits I would just like to direct the Hon Nathan Guy to Subpart 3 in Part 4 of Schedule 1 Freshwater hearing panels". Section 57 clearly explains the powers and what that freshwater commissioner will do. I recommend that the member read the bill.We have this complex piece of legislation and it has been groundbreaking and lots of Ministers have had the opportunity to comment on this bill and to make changes to it but what we can say is that New Zealanders care deeply about our environment and we care deeply—it underpins our lifestyles our livelihoods and our very wellbeing. So this bill as it stands with its four changes is a great start on fixing the intractable issues that sit within the bill.We've got some areas that are absolutely underperforming and so yes we are looking at rolling back some of those conditions that were put in place in 2017. We're taking the 22 pages of that process out of the Act so that there will be a faster process—one that by the way people have naturally used. We do not need 22 pages of regulations to tell us as a community how we should communicate. So we're looking at four major parts to this bill.Freshwater quality—we all know 92 percent of Kiwis tell us they want us to move quickly on fresh water. They want to be able to swim in their local rivers or seas. They want to have certainty of where it's safe to swim. And they do not want wadeable rivers and streams. They want us to act and we are clearly doing so. This bill creates a new National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management and it establishes a freshwater planning process and it creates a Chief Freshwater Commissioner. I wanted to pick up on the member Dr Liz Craig's comments in regards to the five-commissioners process just by acknowledging and recognising in this House the tangata whenua representation as a commissioner. So I just wanted to read—it is clause 58 of new Part 4 of Schedule 1 "Composition of freshwater hearings panel" and I'm moving down through subclause (1) down to paragraph (c): "1 freshwater hearings commissioner with an understanding of tikanga Māori and mātauranga Māori who—(i) is nominated by local tangata whenua; or (ii) if no nomination is made is appointed by the Chief Freshwater Commissioner." I think it's very important that I mention that because as we know the relationship of land—whenua—and Māori is so important and fresh water is part of that. We know from many years of participation under the Resource Management Act process that this is an often long process for Māori to constantly have to participate and so by tying this in and building in a particular role with a particular skill base it will hopefully in fact make it a much clearer process for community participants. Just to continue back to the bill—I've got off-track. I see I've only got three minutes to go. The other aspect that I particularly like—the other part that I particularly like—is the climate change adaptation. We're going to hear from the member Todd Muller I hear so he will know that our community of Tauranga has a huge complexity of issues around climate change. We're a coastal city. How do we manage those changes coming at us? Are they going to impact on our very way of life? For us we're not just looking at election cycles; we're looking at a 30-plus - year plan—an ongoing process—so this is the first tranche to start this process. We're looking of course at addressing affordable housing and thriving urban communities—things that had been done particularly poorly by the National Government I must say for a long long time the nine years of homelessness that we had in this country. Hon Amy Adams: And it's got worse under Labour. ANGIE WARREN-CLARK: It has not got worse under Labour. People are now not so afraid to come out. We need to create a system that better enables growth within economic limits—sorry environmental limits. It is so important—[Interruption] The boys are laughing at me. We need a system that aligns the economy with the environment not the other way around—not the other way around. We need to ensure as a country that this bill is very clear that there will be consistent changes put in place to better support the other legislative programmes that we are doing across the Government—for example the alignment of Kāinga Ora with the RMA and the interface between. We don't just look at the silos and we don't just look at one part of the building programme; we look across the entire environment. I am delighted to commend this bill to the House."