Court SimonSIMON COURT (ACT): This is a very important piece of legislation because it clarifies how natural hazards are identified to property owners current and prospective. This disclosure has been missing from information that property owners should have had access to and should have been available to them for many many decades.Now when we think about the purpose of the bill to introduce changes to improve natural hazard information provided on the land information memorandum the LIM and to align withholding information with the Official Information Act processes—ACT agrees with both of these provisions but I want to explain a little more what the implications of this bill are what the bill does but also what it means because that has not been articulated by the Minister of Local Government or by anyone else here. So when we read the rather garbled executive summary—I'm not quite sure who edited this—it says that purchasers do not make decisions that reduce natural hazards that may have significant consequences for community wellbeing including the impact of natural hazard emergency response and recovery programmes."Well that's a little bit garbled but what I think they mean is that if people buy land and think they're going to develop it in a certain way but it turns out that it's subject to flooding or slips erosion or coastal processes then they might waste their money or they might build in a place that in the future someone has to rescue them from. That's how I would interpret that for people watching or listening at home or for members in this House. So it does make sense that natural hazard information is included on a LIM.Now what else does it do? It says the key benefits to purchasers are information from a single source—well apparently that's council—and to better inform property decisions that reduce or avoid natural risks greater certainty for councils about what natural hazard information should be included on a LIM and a potential reduction in costs as a result of limited liability. All of these matters are important to local government and to people who own property. The impact assessment says that stakeholders generally agree with the problem definition and support statutory amendment. The ACT Party does too. There are some fundamental issues that this raises. I visited the Karekare community a few weeks ago and I was horrified to see the damage to homes caused by in some cases what are enormous landslides that have come from bush-covered slopes that if you stood back and looked at it on a sunny day you'd think "That doesn't look prone to slipping." It's a beautiful bush-covered slope in the Waitakere Ranges in West Auckland above the Karekare coastal settlement and enormous volumes of soil and trees and rock have literally fallen off the side of the hill and engulfed or completely demolished homes or pushed them off their foundations and people are lucky to have got out with their lives.But that land is council land that is or was a regional council park. You can go online and you can find reports from academics from geotech specialists about the landslide risks in the Waitakere Ranges on those very cliffs that failed but nobody at Karekare was told about that by a local council even though they knew. There's nothing in this bill that says what local government needs to tell people. It says what must go on a LIM. So when we get to the committee of the whole House stage I'd like the Minister to answer some questions about that because simply putting information on a land information memorandum that's held in local councils' files doesn't necessarily give people who live in a place now the information they need about whether it's a safe place to live what they must do. So that may well be an omission or it may be intentional or it may be consequential.But I also want to come to—forgive me; just got to grab some notes. What are the implications? So when information about natural hazards—and in fact it also includes land contamination special features or characteristics of land including information about the likely presence of hazardous contaminants. What does it mean when a council applies information to your property file that says "Here's some information that we think your property is contaminated or is subject to a natural hazard."? Well firstly the property owner has a right to know. So I hope that local government would send them a letter telling them about the information. The first thing that will happen is when people get that letter some of them will be shocked. Some of them will be upset. Some of them will fear that if they've been living on a property if they have small children for example playing in the backyard that those children have been potentially exposed to contaminants and we know this has happened in places like Paritutu in New Plymouth where agent orange was manufactured at a chemical factory there and the airborne pollutants have ended up on people's properties. We know that asbestos is present on some residential properties and we also know that lead from lead paint is a common pollutant in soils in urban areas built before the 1990s.So people will get a fright and then they'll ask "What should we do and why didn't council tell us before? And if they knew but they've only just put it on the property file but they let us build here who is liable for that?" Is it local council which knew? There must be many many local councils which have this information in their files because there will have been contamination assessments done. There will have been risk assessments for geotechnical risk landslide risk flooding risk erosion risk. They'll be on file. What this bill allows councils to do is to put that information on an individual property file and then be able to hold their hands up and say "This is not our problem. We don't owe you an explanation or apology. This bill absolves us of legal responsibility for that for having allowed you to build—and by the way now we're divulging the information." This matter was canvassed extensively in Auckland around soil contamination in residential properties in parts of the city back over a decade ago. This is not a new problem.So implications: people are going to get a fright. They're going to say "How come you knew but you let us build here? How come you're only telling us now?" And then they're going to say "What do we need to do about it?" Because when someone gives you information that's actionable you do something with it. Well imagine if we knew what to do. There's something missing here. And maybe when it comes to climate adaptation that could be the Climate Adaptation Act which was supposed to be one of three bills introduced to this House this parliamentary term to round out the resource management reforms. Now last night we debated the Natural and Built Environment Bill and the Spatial Planning Bill and the bill that was missing that's part of the Government's reform programme that Minister Parker announced is the Climate Adaptation Act and that would give local government and property owners a steer on how to deal with the implications of knowing about natural hazards that affect where it's safe to live and who's responsible who can help what decisions we should make that guide us living safer lives where we're not wasting money on property developments that end up being stranded assets. That's missing and so I'll have questions for the Minister at the committee stage about that as well.Then of course funding because local government is going to have to respond to some of this stuff. They're not squeaky clean. They're not excused of all legal liability. They're going to have to respond. So what ACT would say is that the Government should be sharing at least half of the GST on all new building activity—$1.2 billion a year from central government revenue—back with local government that is signing off consents for new builds because they're going to have to pay for all of this."