Fitzsimons Jeanette: Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill — Procedure Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill — Procedure Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:657;Page:6142] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Green) 
: 
 The Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill is vastly different from the bill that came before the House in February. For that difference I thank warmly the hundreds of submitters who took the trouble to come to the Local Government and Environment Committee. For most of them it was unpaid time; the bill would be much worse without their efforts. But that cannot disguise the fact that the bill’s true purpose is to remove the obstacles of public participation from the path of developers wanting to make their money at the expense of the environment and other people. 
The Resource Management Act has always been about how we resolve the conflicts in our increasingly overpopulated world between short-term economic gain and the long-term health of the environment that supports out lives. The Act as initially written by Labour and passed by National set out some bold principles. It was to enable people to provide for their economic and social needs while maintaining “the life-supporting capacity of air water soil and ecosystems;”—even trees. That is the ecological bottom line set out in Part 2 of the Act but these days it is hardly ever referred to. Meanwhile our biodiversity plummets and the kokako and the mohua head for extinction. Our waterways have become filthy and our urban air will not meet World Health Organization standards. 
There has been an incremental process since 1991 to weaken environmental protection under the Act and to weaken the powers of communities to have a say about the places where they live. And here we go again. Nothing could illustrate more clearly the attack on nature even the little of it that remains in cities than the proposal to end protection for urban trees. A city without trees is hot dusty shadeless and ugly. It is a city not worth living in. But so often developers want to cram the maximum possible number of sections into a subdivision and the trees are in the way. Most councils manage without blanket rules for tree protection but the areas where we find them are areas of rapid growth urban infill high land prices that attract greedy developers and where the community values its trees and wants to protect them such as Auckland and the Kapiti Coast. 
It is true that processing consents takes a lot of time and cost for the council. That is why the Greens proposed an amendment that allowed reasonable trimming but not felling without a consent. That would have more than halved the compliance costs. But was the Government interested? No. We will move that amendment later today but the Minister for the Environment Dr Nick Smith has already turned it down. Instead he proposes to saddle councils with the time and cost of describing every tree that is worth protecting and scheduling them and dealing with every submission that opposes scheduling a tree. That will be enormously more trouble than processing consents. Most councils will not do it or will leave out very significant trees that the community values. The Minister knows they will not do it. We will lose the green spaces in our cities the shade the habitat for birds the dappled light and the cooling in the summer heat. Where are the Bluegreens on this issue? Where are their proposed amendments to the bill? 
The attack on community participation begins with the reinstating of the power of the Environment Court to require an objector to put thousands of dollars up front as a bond before he or she can be heard. The Government and the developers know the court will only do this in extreme circumstances but community groups who are having their first tangle with the Resource Management Act do not know it. So it becomes a fearsome weapon that applicants use to deter local people from ever setting foot in court. Planning cases are not just arguments about competing property rights and whether someone’s building blocks someone else’s view; often they are David and Goliath struggles between well-resourced corporates with the best lawyers and community groups with little experience of the law who are running cake stalls to pay for some professional advice on how to protect the natural values of the places where they live. They do not need to be intimidated by the threat of ordering security for costs even if it is unlikely that the judge would ultimately issue such an order. Such groups are to be further disadvantaged by the removal of their right under section 274 to join an appeal brought by another participant. No big firm with full-time lawyers would ever need section 274 but volunteers with a day job and a family often find out too late what is going on and section 274 has enabled them to join the action and to put their case by piggybacking on the submissions of other parties. 
Local knowledge counts. When a goldmining company applied to build a mine in a tailings dam in the beautiful Waitekauri Valley near Waihi those who had lived there for generations told the hearing that the land was unstable. It had slipped before in extreme rainfall and could threaten the integrity of the dam and risk toxic sludge sliding into the Ohinemuri River. But they did not have the money to bring in expert geologists. The mining company did and it found overseas experts to testify that the land was stable. A few years later the land cracked and slipped so badly that it cost $20 million to stabilise it and we still do not know for sure that it really is safe now. But the Minister wants to shut out these people with his changes including the Supplementary Order Paper which further raises the hurdle for public notification. I will expand on that Supplementary Order Paper during the Committee stage. 
The Greens also object to the removal of the role of the Minister of Conservation in consents for restricted coastal activities. These are high-impact activities carried out on public land in the coastal marine area for private purposes. The Minister is there on behalf of all of us who are joint owners to consider the wider public good of the coastal ecosystem that is under threat. There are undoubtedly areas where the local iwi should be in this role and others where perhaps the power should be exercised jointly under a co-management regime. But we should not do away with the power of the joint owners of the commons to decide what can go on there. I am heartened that the select committee and the Minister think that the role of the Minister of Conservation and coastal planning should be examined again in phase two of the reforms. But when we look at the history of allowing the privatisation of public space against the wishes of most local residents I am not too hopeful. 
I want to record again my appreciation of the 850 people who took the trouble to bring to the committee their concerns their expertise their knowledge and their skills. I am pleased that with their help we managed to reverse the proposal to allow no appeals against plans and plan changes because getting the plan right is at the heart of the Resource Management Act process. A poor plan will lead to poor consent decisions for years. It is the most important time for the public to engage and the council cannot be left as the sole arbiter of what will meet the purposes of the Act. Likewise the committee has restored the opportunity to put in cross-submissions if another submitter proposes changes with unwanted effects. Green members sought input on the removal of the non-complying category for resource applications from all the councils that appeared. They told us of the huge cost in workload to rewrite their plans so this silly proposal has gone too. 
I want to record the enormous help given to the committee by a panel of experts—Professor Peter Skelton John Hassan Helen Atkins and Ciaran Keogh all of whom submitted on the bill—who were engaged to advise us on whether the drafting reflected the policy intentions of the committee. They raised many issues that led to substantial clarifications in the bill. The purpose of this bill is supposed to be simplifying and streamlining. No one could object to that purpose. Yet the bill itself adds many pages and layers of complexity. There are now multiple routes to a centralised planning process that can be initiated by the Minister the applicant or the council and that can pass through the Environmental Protection Authority or through the Minister’s office and that can result in either a call in to a board of inquiry or direct referral to the Environment Court—all to achieve basically the same thing. The expert panel noted in its interim report to the committee that the bill as it stood at that time did not simplify and streamline but rather complicated and confused those processes. We are indebted to the panel for its meticulous work with officials under great time pressure to remove many opportunities for misunderstanding and litigation. 
The environment needs more protection not less if the places we value are to endure and if biodiversity soil water and air quality are to be there for our children’s children. Communities need more say not less about the nature of the places where they live and of their landscapes built environments urban trees coastal marine areas and waterways. This bill will not help but at least it will not hinder to the same extent that it would have done in its original form. The Greens will still be voting against it.