Brownlee Gerry: Foreshore and Seabed Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
Brownlee Gerry: Foreshore and Seabed Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
[Volume:621;Page:17106] 
GERRY BROWNLEE (Deputy Leader—National) 
: 
 Part 5 is where Mr Dail Jones of New Zealand First has truly excelled himself in the subterfuge he has attempted to put around the real meanings of this part. Essentially this is the part that imposes various aspects of the bill on to the Resource Management Act. In every sense the veto powers that National members spoke of right from the time the bill was first read in the House are back and reinforced.  
What do we mean by that? We mean that where a group of natural New Zealanders—most likely Maori—have a customary use right then that group will be able to exercise that right in a way that will be very very restrictive on district plans and on the interpretations the Environment Court can put on consent applications should they get that far. In fact it seems to us that if one of those reservations that New Zealand First wants to set up for Maori is established then that reservation will have its governance board and the board will produce a plan for how the various rights they have in that area are to be dealt with. That plan will end up being lodged with the local environment council or the district authority—whichever the case may be—and those provisions will then by default be required to be considered when it comes to any consent applications on adjacent land. It will not be hard for people to have those various rights. We should remember that we are talking about 10 percent of the coastline of this country being covered by this. John Tamihere the previous Minister for Land Information has been able to confirm how much of the coastline is involved. Those areas will be subject effectively to Maori veto when it comes to resource consent applications.  
We would have thought that this Government might listen to the many thousands of New Zealanders who are saying already that the Resource Management Act is difficult to deal with and that it is a massive brake on the capacity for the New Zealand economy to move even faster than it is at the moment. One might have thought that the Government would learn from its own experience in trying to deal with the issue of roading in Auckland—something frankly that in our view it has paid a little bit of lip service to and has no intention of doing anything serious about. But one would have thought that Government members might have learnt that the Resource Management Act is a very difficult process as it exists. They might have been saying: “Well let’s see if we can get some streamlined approaches to the way in which resource consents are dealt with in this country.” But no a Resource Management (Foreshore and Seabed) Amendment Bill is being split out of this bill somewhere. At some point in the debate we might find out what the intentions are— 
Hon Dr Michael Cullen 
: In the dead of morning. 
GERRY BROWNLEE 
: No doubt it will be in the dead of morning in the middle of the night the day before yesterday.  
The point is that the provisions in these clauses will simply make it more difficult for anyone to undertake reasonable activity in the areas that are covered either by those reservations or perhaps separately by the customary rights orders issued by the High Court or the Maori Land Court. What is the necessity of that? Surely the Resource Management Act currently protects those areas from adverse effects. Is that not its purpose? Why do we have to have particular provisions for Maori in that Act? I think it goes right to the nub of the problem when it comes to dealing with this bill.  
On a number of occasions during the select committee process I asked submitters who were making pleadings on behalf of Maori groups whether they considered themselves to be part of the Crown in this country. Repeatedly the answer was: “No. The Crown is something else. Maori is us. We are separate from the Crown and the Crown is something that owes us an obligation.” As long as that is the thinking and as long as we have a Government that allows that thinking to be perpetuated through this sort of legislation we are in trouble.