Simpson Scott; Parker DavidHon SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): Thanks Mr Chair. Part 12 of the Natural and Built Environment Bill deals with the amorphous General provisions". It's kind of almost a wrap-up kind of part where there are all sorts of interesting titbits of information that I'm sure my colleagues will want to tease out. But one in particular is an area that I've spoken of in this House on other pieces of legislation; it relates to the service of documents. So I'm referring to clause 806. In clause 806(1) in Supplementary Order Paper 389: "A notice or any other document required or authorised to be served on or given to a person for the purposes of this Act may be served [by] or given by (a) delivering it to the person; or (b) leaving it at the person's usual or last known place of residence or business [and so forth] … (c) sending it by post to the person's usual or last known place of residence … (d) emailing it to … an email address … (e) complying with a means of service prescribed in regulations made under section 858."I know that this is a provision that's probably literally been cut and pasted from other statutes or the existing Resource Management Act but at a time when good old-fashioned snail mail is becoming increasingly irrelevant to so many people and the inevitable march of digital communications I'm wondering whether the Minister for the Environment or his officials have given some thought to extending the definition of service. In the past I've been concerned about how easy it is to have multiple email addresses to have multiple digital identities and to have a document that could actually be very important literally just sent to what could effectively be a random email address is I think pretty—well it's designed probably not to have good effect. The Minister I'm sure attends religiously to his email inbox and will know that he gets lots of emails as do the rest of. Some of it looks like spam some of it looks like it should be taken seriously and some of it not.So my question really is: in relation to the service of documents is this going to be effectively futureproofed? Is it still reasonable to expect that sending something to the last known address of a person it could have been several years ago via snail mail where there may not even be a letterbox any more—is this a matter where maybe we've got to think more imaginatively?Finally on this matter could the Minister give us some insight into what's considered best practice in other jurisdictions in these matters? Surely it's not just New Zealand that's grappling with issues of this sort. I'd like to know that we're keeping abreast and up to date with the international best practice in terms of serving of documents.Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): Yes it is being modernised to include emails where that email is being used by the person. I suppose if the council is worried that they weren't using an email—if this was applying to a council taking enforcement action they'd be wanting to make sure they did it properly and I think more often than not they'd probably serve a copy on the person rather than just send them an email. But that will be for them. I can however confirm that after much debate we did delete facsimiles from the list."