Robertson GrantGRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central): This is the first of several calls that I intend to take. I want to start with two process points that I think are important and highly relevant to Part 1 of the bill. The first of those is the process of the bill itself and I will give the Minister one piece of credit: he has a unique ability to bring New Zealanders together. Because he has brought together Federated Farmers Fonterra infrastructure operators airports Fish & Game New Zealand the Environmental Defence Society Forest & Bird—unlikely allies it would be fair to say—in opposition to this piece of legislation. So I will give him that.But the process that this bill has gone through in order to come back to this House is less than optimal. And we have got to take ourselves back to 3 December 2015 because that is when the bill went off to the select committee to begin its consideration. The process concern that I have got is that hundreds if not thousands of New Zealanders have engaged with this piece of legislation. They have gone and given submissions in person—137 submissions in person. Those hearings were finished on 2 June 2016. There was a departmental report which I am going to return to in a moment which was produced towards the end of 2016. And then things ground to a halt. They ground to a halt because the National Government—the Cabinet Ministers—did not know what to do. It could not get the legislation through. The Local Government and Environment Committee was trying to do its job. It was unable to do that and we ended up with a bill coming back without amendment. That then went away again and now we have got a situation where the bill and the numerous Supplementary Order Papers (SOPs) that are in front of us today actually have not had proper public scrutiny. The opportunity to go through quite different proposals has been denied because the Government having mucked around and faffed about have now come back to us with this bill and it is substantially different and submitters have not had the opportunity to have proper input into this.The Minister may well say that these ideas have been out there for some time. This process has been so shambolic so confused and so contradictory that no member of the public—even those most engaged with it—would be able to put their hand on their heart and say they know what is happening with this piece of legislation. That is the major process flaw that we now encounter in trying to debate the bill. The Minister said when he stood up that the ideal behind this bill was to simplify the legislation and make it more efficient. There is absolutely no doubt that what this legislation does is make the Resource Management Act (RMA) less effective more complicated and potentially more expensive for those people who engage with it. It is a complete failure in the goal that it set itself let alone the Minister's somewhat odd claim when he stood up that this was the answer to the housing crisis. I am sure my colleague Phil Twyford will have something to say about that.The second process point I want to make is actually about Part 1. Part 1 of the bill contains 161 clauses. This document is the departmental report that covers Part 1 of the bill. I did not sit on the select committee. I am trying to do my job as a member of Parliament in scrutinising the bill that has been returned to us today and it is so poorly laid out now that within Part 1 rather than grouping together issues that have some connection to one another the Minister has come in as some kind of time lord and said: Right we're going to have the things that come into force right away—they're one subpart. Then we're going to have the things that come into force in 6 months. Then we're going to have the things that come into force in a year." It is utterly incoherent.I know that there are committees of Parliament considering the way that we debate bills and in that regard I will just refer members to the departmental report because the departmental report does what the Minister could not do. It actually structures how the bill works. So it covers off national direction plan making consenting courts process changes and minor and technical amendments. That would have been the way to do it. That is what would have given us the ability to coherently work our way through this bill. But instead we have the hotchpotch of amendments and changes that the Minister has decided that he could come up with.Just finishing in this call on those process-related elements—I do want to take another call on more substantive elements—we have an executive-dominated process that has led to the incoherent piece of legislation in front of us today. The Minister has only himself to blame for that.I do then want to come to some substantive matters in Part 1. As I say I wish we were debating this in a way where we were following on from each other but it is very hard to know what calls we will get so therefore we just have to put up with it. But I do think we could do significantly better. The biggest concern I have got as somebody who has interacted with the RMA in multiple different ways—as a person who helped draft some of the numerous amendments that occurred in the early 2000s and then has been on both sides of it working with constituents—is that a couple of the core elements of the RMA are being compromised here. One of those core elements was around the proximity of decision making. Who are the people best placed to make decisions? The RMA did something really important when it put together the bits of the Town and Country Planning Act and the bits of the National Development Act which is that it located that decision making as close as possible to the place that it was relevant. What we have got here in Part 1 is the unpicking of that. This is what has led Geoffrey Palmer one of the authors of the RMA to say that due process is replaced by executive fiat. That is essentially what is happening here. So the two elements that were core were: get decision making in the right place and have a process that is clear and understood by everybody. That is where this bill goes horribly horribly wrong.The example I am now going to give is around clause 105 and the changes there. I am sure many people are going to talk about this. This is among other things the proposing of what was initially called a national planning template. Here is how you know just how incoherent this piece of legislation has become because that has now been renamed as something called a national planning standard or I hate to say it an "NPS". We have already got them in the Act—we have got things called national policy statements as opposed to national planning standards and national environmental standards. So the Minister has created some kind of hybrid thing called a national planning template or national planning standard.It is interesting to note in the departmental report that on this clause there were a total of 230 submissions—three were neutral 18 were in support and 209 were against.Phil Twyford: So pretty balanced.GRANT ROBERTSON: Yeah. So clearly there were some concerns and the overwhelming number of submitters—the departmental report tells us—were concerned that the Minister was creating far-reaching powers to determine land use and that the Minister was doing things that were contrary to constitutional law and the rule of law principles; not providing for an adequate public participatory process; creating additional costs and complexity for local authorities; not providing for cohesion in the resource management system; and that it could be used to regulate GMOs which is obviously a matter dealt with by one of the SOPs.Submitters contended that the decision-making criteria here in terms of the role the Minister had used phrases like "not reasonably required" "undesirable" "in the Minister's opinion" "necessary" etc. All of that is the creation of uncertainty and complexity within this law. Rather than finding under this process the way in which we could use the tools that are already in the Act—national policy statements and national environmental standards—as a way of giving guidance to local authorities to make the decisions the very thing that the Act was set up on is totally compromised here by the Minister.The Minister has decided it is not easy to create national policy statements or national environmental standards so he is going to override them. That is essentially what he has done. After 8 or 9 years he has been so ineffective at creating national policy statements in this particular example which I am sure my colleague Phil Twyford will talk about—around urban form and urban design. He has been so hopeless at doing it that he decides the only way through is to override it. That is wrong. That is why we are opposing this legislation. It is not the way to do this. It undermines the fundamental principles of the Act which are about decision making occurring where the people who know it best are and that there is a clear and coherent process.The Minister had an opportunity here. He could have developed a piece of legislation that was widely supported. He has failed because he has created major powers for himself."