Copeland Gordon: Resource Management (Security for Costs)  Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Copeland Gordon: Resource Management (Security for Costs)  Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:631;Page:3594] 
GORDON COPELAND (United Future) 
: 
 First I offer my congratulations to Kate Wilkinson on having a bill drawn from the ballot. I was fortunate enough in the last Parliament to have two of my bills drawn and I know what a thrill it is. 
In rising to speak on this bill I need to go back and look at a little bit of history in relation to the Resource Management Act. When United Future arrived in this Parliament in 2002 we gave a clear commitment to this House that we would support all initiatives to remove any obstacles to reasonable development in the important provision of vital infrastructure caused by the Resource Management Act. We said we would not hold the Government to ransom as the Greens ACT and the National Party had done by not being willing to support the Resource Management Amendment Bill (No 2) which had been sitting on the Order Paper for years simply because it did not contain everything we wanted or because it contained some things we did not like. We considered that the urgent need was to speed the provision of new roads power generation and other basic infrastructure projects. That was so important that even though we had some reservations about the Resource Management Amendment Bill (No 2) we would support it so we could move the process forward. 
History shows of course that we then went on to the Resource Management Amendment Bill (No 3). One of things we did criticise when dealing with the Resource Management Amendment Bill (No 2) was that it would remove the power of the court to require security for costs. However by the time we got to the No. 3 bill the situation had changed dramatically. There was a backlog of 2 to 3 years of appeals to the Environment Court. Therefore the security of costs thing was quite important because vexatious people could delay and hold up a project for literally 3 years. Through the Resource Management Amendment Bill (No 3) which was introduced in 2004 and passed in 2005 that situation was changed dramatically. We were delighted during the select committee stage of the Resource Management Amendment Bill (No 3) to hear submitters from both the business sector and environmental groups commenting on how much better the Resource Management Act process had become compared with the process that applied when we came into Parliament in 2002. In those 2 short years because of our initiative to support the Government in making a meaningful common-sense advance in the Resource Management Act we had improved the situation dramatically. 
Today there is not a 2 or 3 year delay in going to the Environment Court. The whole process has been sped up the backlog has been removed and therefore today there is no need to have such a draconian power as requiring the court to have security of costs before people could object on legitimate grounds to a project that they may as Doug Woolerton pointed out have very very deep convictions about—the sort of convictions that saw Sonja Davies for example chain herself to the railway lines. 
Therefore because of the positive achievements that were accomplished by United Future working with the previous Government we no longer consider it necessary to award the courts the power they had prior to 2003. This bill in reality is more of a political stunt than any real useful amendment. We are saddened to see the National Party continuing to live in the past as far as the Resource Management Act is concerned continually regurgitating its tired old stories about delays and road blocks caused by the Resource Management Act. The fact of the matter is that the resource management law was introduced by a National Government and if in the 1990s it had bothered to use its energy in a responsible way it could have fixed these things long since. I repeat that it actually took the arrival of United Future in this House in 2002 to break the logjam to break the deadlock and to enable this process to move forward. 
We are now in 2006. We have moved on from 2002 and from 2004. Our party has a policy of continuing to cooperate with the Government in making incremental improvements to the Resource Management Act process and that needs to go on. We are not saying that it is perfect and we are not saying that we have got to the end of the journey but we are well down the road from where we were in 2002 and this bill adds nothing to that process. 
I want to say in the House tonight that the progress we have made during the last 3 years is in no small measure thanks to the tireless work of my former colleague Larry Baldock who worked with both Marian Hobbs and then with David Benson-Pope to really crack the long delays the Resource Management Act process had been bedevilled with right through the 1990s all the way through until 2004 when we began to seriously address and fix the problems. This bill is a good bill but it is about 3 years out of date and we will not be supporting its going to a select committee.