Twyford Phil: Resource Legislation Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTwyford Phil: Resource Legislation Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 03 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8562. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): I am going to look back I think fondly on the career of the Hon Nick Smith in a couple of years’ time when he is languishing as an Opposition backbencher fondly remembering the halcyon days when he was the building and construction Minister. The image that I will have in my mind when I think back on Nick Smith’s career is him giving a press conference with a 10-metre high pile of council planning documents teetering and about to collapse on his head. That image that photo stunt which is so characteristic of the Hon Nick Smith and his political career is the high-water mark of the National Party’s grand ambitions to reform the Resource Management Act.This bill is a ministerial white flag. This bill is an abject surrender after a decade of blaming the Resource Management Act for every economic ill every setback and every disappointment. Nick Smith has been blaming the Resource Management Act for the Auckland housing crisis. That is what Nick Smith has been doing: for the last 10 years Nick Smith has been blaming expensive housing on the Resource Management Act.As David Parker said we are going to vote for this bill. We are going to vote for it because like so many of the bills that the National Government brings to this House particularly in the housing area it is a small incremental measure that may bring some positive change. It is basically a 180-page collection of fairly incremental process improvements and we will talk some more in this debate and in subsequent debates about the detail of those improvements. But it is important for people to understand the backstory to this bill.My colleague David Parker quoted the New Zealand Herald editorial that outlined the great political journey that the National Party has been on for the last decade around trying to weaken and gut the critical environmental principles in section 6 and 7 of the Resource Management Act and how it has been singularly unable to get the support of the country or this Parliament for ripping the guts out of the environmental protections of the Resource Management Act.What National has done with this bill is bring something that does not—and this is the good news—weaken the fundamental environmental protections in the Act but what it also does not do is it does not tackle the important Resource Management Act and planning rule blockages to urban development and affordable housing in this country that desperately need to be addressed. So it does not achieve the National Party’s cherished goal of weakening the environmental principles but it also does not do anything to tackle the root causes of the housing crisis and I want to talk more about that. It may be worthwhile and it may be a positive thing to improve the speed and efficiency of consenting but it is not a root cause of the Auckland housing crisis. If it was Nick Smith’s policy of the special housing areas might have been hoped to have had some effect because they are nothing but small little mini fast-track consenting zones. But as we have discussed many times in this House the special housing areas are not making a blind bit of difference to the housing crisis and have resulted in only 500 houses being built in 2 whole years. So it is clear to everybody that the speed of consenting has nothing to do with the housing crisis.We are voting for the bill because it might be a good thing. No one is going to complain if consenting is more efficient and if it is cheaper. That will be a good thing and we will test that out. We will test out in select committee whether the provisions in this bill will actually achieve that stated goal. But let us talk about what has actually been going on here. The National Party has been blaming the Resource Management Act for the housing crisis trying to use Resource Management Act reform as some kind of Trojan Horse: a cover for weakening the fundamental environmental protections in the bill. Meanwhile over 7 years in Government National has done nothing to address the aspects of planning rules and local government’s regulation of urban development that are among the root causes of the housing crisis.If the Government was serious about reform in this area it would instead of the kind of tinkering that David Seymour used to characterise this bill—and I would say it is tinkering on an industrial scale—Hon David Parker: Oh!PHIL TWYFORD: Ha! Yes. What the Government would be doing right now is actually tackling the planning rules that are a root cause of the housing crisis. I want to talk about those too because they are what is missing here. They are what should be in this bill.I think that most sensible people will acknowledge that one of the root causes of the housing crisis in Auckland has been the planning rules that both stop the city growing out and stop the city growing up. It is very clear that the urban growth boundary in Auckland has had the effect of creating an artificial scarcity of land that sees section prices being 10 times the value inside the urban boundary as land on the outside of the urban boundary. That has driven section prices up it has set off a chain reaction creating massive business opportunities for land bankers and speculators and it is the reason that the high cost of land in Auckland today is one of the main reasons that builders will not build affordable houses—not in Dr Smith’s special housing areas and in fact nowhere in Auckland because the land is too expensive.We cannot ignore also the plethora of planning restrictions that stop builders and developers building up. The restrictions on height and density—[Interruption] That is right. It stops people building affordable housing and the kinds of housing that people want in places where they want to live and that is in the city and in suburban and town centres. The combination of those two planning rules has created a pressure cooker in Auckland. The only outlet for that pressure cooker has been the exponential increases in house prices that saw the average house price in Auckland City reach $918000 only a couple of weeks ago.Hon David Parker: Further fuelled by speculators.PHIL TWYFORD: Absolutely. It is a magnet for property speculators and land bankers—something this Government refuses to do anything about. Those are the planning rules that are at the root of the housing crisis in Auckland. This bill does nothing about tackling them. It is an exercise in avoidance.I want to read a quote from Jason Krupp of the New Zealand Initiative who wrote a very good post the other day on the website interest.co.nz. Dr Smith this is really good. You should listen to this because I think you will find it very informative. Jason Krupp wrote: “The last 7 years have been characterised by weak piecemeal workarounds special housing areas for example while meaningful reform of urban development policy has been trapped in the Minister’s quixotic quest to reform sections 6 and 7 of the Resource Management Act. In the time it has taken to draft and shelve two versions of the RMA a workable urban national policy statement could have been drawn up and implemented immediately”—Hon Dr Nick Smith: You had 9 years—9 years.PHIL TWYFORD: There is more Dr Smith: “If Minister Smith is not willing to consider new ideas at least there are others in the political process”—I think he is talking about the Labour spokesperson—“who recognise that if the tools you have at hand have not solved your problem by now it is time to consider new tools.”A national policy statement under the Resource Management Act that the Labour Party has been advocating for for the last 3½ years would fix these problems.Hon Dr Nick Smith: You did none. You had 9 years.PHIL TWYFORD: That Minister has done nothing in 7 years to tackle the root causes of the housing crisis. Two years ago he came to this House and said: “You cannot do a national policy statement on urban development without changing sections 5 and 6.” How he has been proved to be wrong because now he has scuttled away to his officials to get them to start drafting an urban policy statement. He has wasted 7 years blaming the Resource Management Act for the housing crisis. He brings this bill of modest process improvements to the House and still he does nothing to address the root causes of the housing crisis.