Simpson Scott; Brooking RachelHon SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): Thank you Madam Chair. Well here we go. This is the sort of the grand wrap up actually and all through this legislative sweep that's been proposed by the current Government in its last few weeks in office. One of the criticisms of this whole change to the Resource Management Act regime is that the proposals given to the Minister for the Environment are incredibly wide-ranging enormously broad in their breadth and ability for the Minister of the day to intervene.So Part 3 as the Chair has rightly said indicates the general powers duties and other matters. Subpart 1 Powers and duties" clause 58 "Minister may require information" 58(1) "The Minister may give written and dated notice requiring information to be supplied by the following bodies: a regional planning committee a local authority a network utility operator (including an additional utility operator) approved as requiring authority." Now that's a very wide range of organisations. Regional planning committees local authorities—well those are arms of local government but network utility operators often have a stand-alone private investment capacity or indeed they are partially owned by the Crown or indeed have public shareholding in some cases.So the ability for a Minister to require information is quite a high threshold to insist that a Minister can delve into and require from these entities information pretty much of whatever sort that the Minister may deem as being required. Clause 58(2) sets out the kind of information that may be required and it does say in (c) that it may reasonably be required by the Minister. So there is a reasonableness test and I guess that at some point an entity a utility in particular is probably going to want to test that judicially.I want to come on to the time frames required. Clause 58(3) requires that "The body must supply the information to the Minister within 20 working days after the date of notice or a longer time set by the Minister." So the Minister can set a longer time because as we know 20 working days when it comes to official information requests can be considerably longer in most cases than 20 working days.But for me here's the kicker. Those entities the regional planning committees the local authorities the network utility operators under clause 58(4) "The body must not charge the Minister for supplying the information." So that information has to be provided for free to the Minister at the Minister's request as long as there is a an element of reasonableness and that test of reasonableness will have to be defined—Stuart Smith: Because of work of the OIA.Hon SCOTT SIMPSON: —my colleague Stuart Smith makes a very good point about the Official Information Act—but must not charge. So my question to the Minister in the chair is is that fair and reasonable particularly in the case of network utility operators who may be and often are commercial entities required to report to shareholders and stakeholders in some cases but that shareholder can be the Crown—Stuart Smith: Could be a trust.Hon SCOTT SIMPSON: Could be a trust—all sorts of things. So can the Minister give us some sense of assurance that requests for information are going to be reasonable the statute says may reasonably be required but whereabouts does that reasonableness fit? Given that the Minister is not going to be able to charge—sorry the entity or the body is not going to be able to charge the Minister for that information I'm kind of keen to have some certainty or assurance that that's not going to be an unnecessarily burdensome cost upon those organisations.Hon RACHEL BROOKING (Associate Minister for the Environment): Thank you. Well I would just point that member there—he did sort of point to it himself to clause 58(2)(a)(iii) regarding that network utility operator and this is to do with implementation plans. It is about the performance of the operator's responsibilities under an implementation plan. So that is narrow and it is in their interest to provide that information."