Shirley Ken: Resource Management Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second Reading 
Shirley Ken: Resource Management Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second Reading 
[Volume:608;Page:5322] 
Hon KEN SHIRLEY (Deputy Leader—ACT NZ) 
: 
 ACT opposes this bill. It is a failure of process and a failure of content. I think I am the only member in the Chamber who was here during the resource management law reform process in the late 1980s. I was quite closely involved with that. I chaired a committee and I became increasingly concerned at the way in which that process was becoming captured by interest groups. Let me shed a bit of light on what the Resource Management Act was meant to be. It was meant to be part of deregulation. It was meant to be effects-based a one-stop shop. It was mean to be a streamlining. Who today really believes that it has lived up to any of those intents? It clearly has not. By the time it was passed by the National Government in 1991 it had already been captured by interest groups and all sorts of extraneous matter had been appended to it; and we have now had 12 years of utter dysfunction in this country. 
Business groups up and down the country and indeed this Government’s own advisory group on compliance cost have identified the Resource Management Act as a major obstacle to investment growth and job creation in this country. All the evidence that the Opposition parties called together other than that of a couple of planners referred to by United Future—of course it is very much interested in self-perpetuation—highlighted the real major problems that we face. There has been any number of tinkerings with the bill. 
We had the Owen McShane review in the time of Simon Upton in the previous National Government and the Mike Holm review. Indeed in the bill as introduced by Hon Simon Upton in the National Government in 1999 all those proposed measures were important. I believe they were all necessary but they were insufficient because they were really still tinkerings of process. 
No one has grasped the basic failure of the premises of the Resource Management Act. Let me run through those that are in my mind the three key ones. Firstly it was always intended to provide for the sustainable management of natural and physical resources essentially taking the place of the old Water and Soil Conservation Act and the Town and Country Planning Act with the Clean Air Act appended. They were the three core statutes. But oh no the interest groups appended all manner of social engineering to it—economic well-being cultural significance and phrases like “kaitiakitanga” that have never been defined. There they are right up in the key principles that need to have notice taken of them but no one has ever defined them. What they have meant over the 12 years is whatever one wants them to mean—stewardship ownership the right to impose on private property rights. It is the biggest obstacle to investment. 
As the Hon Nick Smith pointed out this country is facing yet another energy crisis. The evidence is overwhelming that the Resource Management Act is one of the biggest obstacles to new generation being built in this country. People say that there will never be another hydro dam. Do we have no more significant water bodies? They are saying that the Resource Management Act process would kill it and they are giving up before they even start. Sure Project Aqua is under way but it still has to run the gauntlet and it is quite an exception. 
The process that this Government embarked on was appalling. First of all on becoming the Government in 1999 it referred Simon Upton’s bill to a new select committee chaired by Jeanette Fitzsimons which overturned every one of those important necessary but insufficient proposals for change and then added on another one for “heritage aspects”. We now have things like “cultural landscapes”. Who knows what a cultural landscape is or ancestral lands? Can anyone put hand on heart and say that he or she can define what an ancestral land or a cultural landscape is? They are meaningless nebulous terms that create nothing but uncertainty and confusion and become vehicles for extortion. Time is money in the business world so any investor looking to invest and process our raw materials looks at the Resource Management Act and says “Why would I go to New Zealand? They’re facing an energy crisis and their planning laws are chaotic.” We know that Australia can in 7 months process through its planning procedures what takes us 7 years to process. It can take 7 years to get through New Zealand’s planning proposals. 
The Government has totally failed to address any of the key principles that needed to be addressed. The first one is that the scope should be narrowed and the focus sharpened so that it is brought back to the sustainable management of natural and physical resources. It should not deal with taonga and all those other spooky things that are now frequently heard at resource management hearings—things that no one can understand like the taniwha holding up the works on State Highway 1 at Meremere. What sort of metaphysical society are we coming to? Taniwha are not natural and physical resources. They are metaphysical. People are entitled to their spiritual beliefs and I will defend their rights to hold those spiritual beliefs but they are not put into planning laws. What other country has put them into their planning laws? I suppose the Taliban of Afghanistan would have come the closest to that. That is the sort of path we are going down in this country. 
The second key thing we need to do is give compensation when the public as is its wont identifies a particular piece of private coastline or landscape and says it wants to socialise it either by putting the land into the Department of Conservation estate or by opening it for public use. The real test and discipline on that is when compensation must be paid in order to do that. Instead we have organisations like the Department of Conservation using the Resource Management Act as a back door method of socialising property rights. Members from Northland will remember the significant natural areas exercise where essentially the Department of Conservation grabbed a black crayon and circled every block of land on a big map that it could think of and then gave it to the local council which put it up as its draft plan so that clumps of gorse became significant natural areas. Then of course the property owners got to fight it. They had to spend their money which they could not then invest in their farms fighting the council which is also spending their money as ratepayers to take their cases right through to appeal. That is the sort of process in which we have become bogged down in this country. 
Those are just a few suggestions as to why this bill is an utter failure. It does not address that basic need for overhaul and reform of the basic premises of the Resource Management Act. Rather it is a mere tinkering of process. We have had 12 years of that and none of it has worked. I put it to the House that all the measures in the Resource Management Amendment Bill (No 2) are backward steps. They are not adding to the streamlining or greater coherence of the Act. They are actually making matters worse. ACT will be opposing this bill right through all its stages. 
In conclusion I reiterate the appalling aspect of the cultural heritage provisions and the way they were brought in. They were not in the original bill and no one has had an opportunity to submit an objection. The chair might get up and say that submitters made submissions in favour of them. Sure there are plenty of those who want to use the Resource Management Act as a vehicle but at no stage was it advertised that those provisions were in the bill so that people who were concerned by them could have gone to the select committee and opposed them. They have never been heard. That is why the Opposition parties held their own hearings. This Government in the most arrogant example I have ever seen brought in that substantial legislation and measures and refused to even put it to a select committee and that is after sitting on it for 100 weeks. The bill was left languishing on the Order Paper for 100 weeks. All of a sudden bang the Government whipped it in. There was no select committee. ACT will be opposing these appalling measures.