Brooking RachelHon RACHEL BROOKING (Labour—Dunedin): Thank you Mr Speaker. I can assure the Minister responsible for RMA Reform that I'm not interested in having trite discussions but what I have heard a lot of here has been trite. Now first of all this bill is being sent to totally the wrong select committee. It is going to primary production and I have nominated the Environment Committee. I think that is where this bill should go to because of course it is about amending the Resource Management Act (RMA) and what committee has always considered things to do with the Resource Management Act? Oh that would be of course the Environment Committee that should be considering this because the regulations that are being amended by this bill are to do with protecting the environment and improving the environment by stopping pollution. It's all very well to say that you need investment to clean up the environment once it's polluted but of course the best and most efficient thing to always do is to stop that pollution from occurring in the first place.What is the pollution we're talking about? Well a lot of it is sediment run-off into our rivers. Do our trading partners care about clean rivers? Yes they do. Do our citizens care about clean rivers? Yes they do. Do we want swimmable rivers? Yes we do. This is the point of a lot of the regulations—Grant McCallum: Farmers care too by the way.Hon RACHEL BROOKING: —that are up for amendment today. I'm hearing farmers want clean rivers too—excellent news. I'm very pleased to hear that and they should be talking to the Environment Committee about that.Now of course the other irony is that most of the changes—the Minister just said that there are six main changes. Of those six five of them are amendments to regulations. There is no need for primary legislation to make these changes. The sixth one of course is about how those regulations are made in the first place and a lot of that is taken from the now-repealed Natural and Built Environment Act. The Minister often says that his legislation can be done swiftly because it is modelled on that of Labour's. In terms of fast-track that is totally wrong because of course the fast-track bill that we have before us at the Environment Committee has nothing about the environment in its purpose. It is all about the facilitation of development and that overrides all of our environmental regulations that are there to protect our environment from pollution. However in this case the only amendment to the RMA that is actually needed by primary legislation is similar to what was in that Natural and Built Environment Act—not exactly the same—and it should be considered by the specialist committee the Environment Committee but no it appears to be going to the Primary Production Committee.I also note that the Minister talking to us is the Minister of resource management reform. Making changes to regulations is not the reform of the resource management system. I note that the Minister for the Environment was not even involved in the press release about these changes which is mind blowing.Now we know that this Government has some real problem with Te Mana o te Wai. One of the changes to the regulations here is that that Mana o te Wai hierarchy doesn't apply to consents. We see in the documents supplied with the bill that the officials have said we don't even know if this is a problem. We don't even know if consents are being stopped because the Te Mana o te Wai hierarchy is being considered in those consents. There have been a couple of cases where it was mentioned but likely those consents would've been not granted—refused—based on environmental outcomes. So there's very little analysis about that point but then we see in the bill in the explanatory note that there are going to be many further changes to this national policy statement on fresh water around Te Mana o te Wai.I want to pause here and remind members about this hierarchy. It is first the quality of the water body that comes first. Secondly comes the ability for humans to use that water—so things like drinking water; that's important. Thirdly is the consumptive use—that's the ability to make money from the water. How can there be any discussion of rebalancing that hierarchy unless you intend for profit to come over the environment and to come over people? It is outrageous that there'd be any talk of going further with that but that is what this Government is happy to do and it just terrifies me the state that our environment will be in when we come back to Government.