Court SimonSIMON COURT (ACT): To the Minister in the chair David Parker you are absolutely correct: it is enabling legislation—and it's entirely possible in this world that two things may be correct at the same time. It is enabling but it also creates through the enabling process an imposition on master plan developers. We're talking about groups that would spend according to the Adare group Beachlands South which again as I said includes the major funder New Zealand Super Fund—New Zealand Super Fund right? They have sunk by their estimates—by their estimates the Adare group Hamilton—$3 million to $4 million and three to four years in undertaking all of what they called the pre-lodgement work. Before you can even put your application in for a master plan development you firstly have to have a planner look at the zoning you have to have a geotechnical engineer an ecologist probably someone who knows something about bats look at the land that you propose to develop on. Each one of those technical reports costs between $25000 and $100000.Once you've done your initial assessment then you start your planning and your preliminary design. You go to council you ask them This is our proposal. Can you see any major hooks and crooks in the planning and consenting approach that we're taking?" And you know councils actually even despite the fact it costs them money and they have to suffer a financial disadvantage for saying yes to people—and that's a separate matter infrastructure funding and financing—what they tell developers and applicants is "Actually there may be a few ways you can steer your development around some of the rules that will make it easy to get over the line. We would love to assist you in that way because we also don't want to spend a whole lot of our time going through your application having to litigate the whole thing. So get it right and then it'll be easier for us to say yes to." That process takes years and costs millions.What these master plan developers have said to us what they've said to the committee is "Actually we're just about at the point of lodgement. We've got all of our stakeholders on board we've got the local 'Save the Bats' group on board we've got iwi on board we've got our local council planning team on board. All we need to do is tick the boxes and make sure when this set of documents"—which I can guarantee you is far bigger than the set of documents sitting on the Table right now in front of you; if you stacked it all up it'd be metres high—"when we lodge we want to make sure that we haven't wasted millions and millions of dollars in investment in planning and technical reporting." But what this bill will do is tell them that all of that can go in the bin because when you come to council and you apply for your master plan development all of the reports about "Will the bats be affected?" and "Will the stormwater system be able to cope and will the waste-water pipes be big enough?"—that all goes in the bin because they now have to allow for three houses three stories on every single lot in their subdivision. Yes it's enabling this legislation but it's also disabling because it's actually torching years and years of work.Now one of the members on our select committee Rachel Brooking is a Resource Management Act (RMA) lawyer and I know that in a past life we—me as an engineer and Rachel Brooking as an RMA lawyer—may well have collaborated on projects just like this. So I'm confident that at least that member is well aware of the risks that I'm talking about that they are real. So we propose a solution. When we get to the schedules I'll be proposing an amendment which actually if the Minister wants local councils to suffer under the medium density residential standards enabling—or disabling—provision—CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order! The member's getting a little far away from Part 1. Thank you.SIMON COURT: Thank you—thank you Madam Chair. Coming back to Part 1: so there are some fundamental issues with the bill which submitters pointed out to us. They have not been addressed by the amendments and I just want to come to that very briefly. The committee only had a very early draft of the bill to consider. We spent many many hours poring through it line by line and each day we were offered amendments and right up until 24 hours ago the final bill was not tabled. So it's been very very difficult not just for parties like the ACT Party that wants to contribute to making better laws and improving public policy but submitters those affected have had zero time to understand the effects of this bill. Minister I'd like you to explain to them why you think that's fair."