Barry Maggie: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBarry Maggie: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 31 July 2013. Volume:692;Page:12162. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MAGGIE BARRY (National—North Shore):We are looking at the proud record in terms of the environment some of which my colleague Nicky Wagner alluded to earlier and I will pick up on that in a moment. But first I will look at the environment appropriation itself. It is interesting when you look at the breakdown because when we look at the environmental side we spend about $130 million or 40 percent of Vote Environment on the environment and climate change takes up about 60 percent which is $195 million. So when you look at the way it is spread across and you look at the reforms that we are bringing in the Resource Management Act is certainly very much central to our initiatives and our policies around protecting the environment and growing the economy at the same time.The Resource Management Act is certainly very important. Once this debate on the Appropriation (2013/14 Estimates) Bill is finished of course the Resource Management Reform Bill will be going into the Committee stage; it is progressing at a great rate. We have already introduced a couple of pieces of legislation around it and there is going to be another bigger tranche coming through later this year.But let us look at the key components of the bill that we are dealing with at the moment because I think that when you look at what this Government is trying to dowith protecting and enhancing our environment the key does remain within the Resource Management Act reforms. We are looking to further improve the resource consent regime. For those of us who have electorates and have people coming to see us it has been a source of great complaint—the delays the costs the unnecessary nonsense and you know just the impossibility of getting a job done. So we are continuing on with those reforms.We are also streamlining the delivery of Auckland’s first combined plan. Within the Auckland Unitary Plan there are a number of complexities and they are being carefully and slowly worked through with the cooperation of Auckland City and the various agencies there. We are improving the quality of local decision-making and also improving the workability of the Resource Management Act through some minor and technical amendments.So those are the four main components of the bill that we are looking at. As I said there are going to be even larger-scale Resource Management Act reforms which will include substantive improvements for freshwater management and planning systems more generally and they will be coming in a little bit later in the year. Water management and the protection of our waterways are what my colleague the chair of the Local Government and Environment Committee alluded to earlier and went into some detail on so I will not traverse that again.When we look at what we are doing with direct referral we see that these are the kinds of changes where the rubber really does hit the road and where people will notice a difference in their day-to-day lives—the DIY people and the people who actually want to get a fairly small project done. Decisions being made through the Environment Court rather than through relevant councils are going to improve and streamline that.Six-month consenting is an excellent thing. We are going to allow medium-sized projects to get going without the red tape. Around about 1600 medium-sized projects are processed each year and that includes new subdivisions supermarkets industrial developments and infrastructure projects. Those are the kinds of things where putting a time limit of around 6 months focuses people’s attention and gets the job done. The sorts of delays that we saw in my area the North Shore and Albany where a supermarket was held up for an inordinate length of time by an appeal process that was driven by a commercial competitor are the kind of stuff we want to do away with.The select committee process as you will gather from the discussions that have gone on around the Resource Management Act has been robust. People have come to us with submissions—genuinely felt genuinely held submissions—and they have been debated at length and with some passion rigour and conviction within the committee itself and we have made some changes. We have introduced a new approach as a result of the select committee recommendations to express time frames. The time frames were considered overly complex. We listened to that and made adjustments accordingly.The Minister for the Environment Amy Adams has done what very few Ministers have done—that is she has called all parties of the select committee together in her office and gone through in some detail their concerns in an effort to address them and in an effort to come up with a level of sensible consensus that we can all work with. I think that is the measure of the Minister and the reason why these Resource Management Act reforms are going through in the way that they are. They are big reforms. They need that level of consultation they need the submissions that we have had and then it is discussed and moved on. But it must be moved on. We are not going to follow the old Labour way of paralysis by analysis where nothing much ever happens because there is no political willingness to make it happen. We make it happen and we make it happen in ways that really do work for the public as well.The subject of trees has been very contentious. There is not really enough time in the call I have now to go into the detail of that and to do it justice but we have made significant amendments to the blanket protection of trees in urban areas which was a pretty lazy way of doing it. Individual homeowners and landowners have the right to know and to plan with what they have.