Court SimonSIMON COURT (ACT): Thank you Mr Chair. Minister I want to come now to Subpart 2 if we're on that—I assume we are—which is the Content of plans" and what plans must include. It's great to see that plans will have a strategic content and strategic outcomes and policies to identify the issues that are important to each region and that they will deal with matters necessary to ensure consistency with the relevant spatial strategy. Now I'm a big fan of spatial plans—which we'll get to in the following bill—because they identify where people should live where hazards might be and where it's not appropriate to build infrastructure or homes for example. One of the challenges of this planning process though—and it was actually raised by representatives from Taituarā or representatives of Local Government Professionals at the select committee hearing on this bill—is that in order for the planning function to be carried out according to the intent of this legislation it will require the planners in local councils and regional councils to be sent over to a new regional planning committee.Local councils will continue to have to pay the salaries of planners technical support staff people who specialise in geospatial information systems—people who have all the technical competencies required to carry out those planning investigations and planning coordination—who are actually putting together the documents and the maps that underpin regional or district plans which will now be natural and built environment plans. When you look at the responsibilities of regional councils and territorial authorities to contribute to these plans what they said was "Once you've co-opted all of our staff and required us to pay for them but we don't get anything for it—you're not compensating us for the loss of these staff—you don't recognise that we're still processing consents and planning applications under the existing RMA"—or whatever the transitional provisions are—"while you're taking our staff. Why don't you just set up a local office of the Ministry for the Environment in say Ngātea"—or I don't know—Hon Scott Simpson: A good town. SIMON COURT: —that's right Ngātea in the Hon Scott Simpson's electorate or maybe in Te Atatū or Henderson in West Auckland where I live or anywhere in the country that's going to have to put these plans together because it's going to require a significant amount of staffing and resources that the legislation proposes I assume to take from regional councils and territorial authorities or what we'd call district council. Then Minister not only is it this enormous resource drag on the sector which doesn't appear to be funded in any way—it's another one of these unfunded obligations that central government imposes on local government—but it also creates this problem. There are all of the conflicts between resource allocation whether it's fresh water soils for highly productive food production soils of land for housing or whether it's asking "Should we be allowed to develop a quarry on our land because that aggregate is needed for construction and infrastructure and homes?" or "Is the traffic going to cause a problem for our neighbours with truck movements hours of operation dust and noise?"—all of those other matters that need to be resolved between neighbours between private property owners and between private property owners and those who have responsibility for administering the commons on behalf of all people. Well currently regional councils administer the allocation of fresh water and issue consents for discharges into fresh water but all of these conflicts are apparently going to be resolved in these natural and built environment plans. So Minister two questions: how are local councils and regional councils meant to deal with this massive drag on their resource that establishing these plans will cause and how are planners remote from their supervisors their elected members in councils supposed to reconcile all of these conflicts between land use and resource allocation in a separate room from those entities those councils that are meant to administer all of these rules—Minister."