Smith Nick: Resource Management Amendment Bill (No 2) — Instruction to CommitteeCWH In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
Smith Nick: Resource Management Amendment Bill (No 2) — Instruction to CommitteeCWH In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
[Volume:608;Page:5514] 
Hon Dr NICK SMITH (NZ National—Nelson) 
: 
 What is going on in this Parliament this evening is a damn outrage. That David Benson-Pope and Jill Pettis have denied leave on such a critical bill to this Parliament just shows the lack of respect they have for good quality law and no amount of excuses that Mr Benson-Pope makes can hide that fact. He has a moustache like Hitler and we may as well call him that. This bill and the way it is being progressed is quite wrong. 
I firstly want to object to the heritage provisions of this bill which will create a huge amount of uncertainty for New Zealand. There are four particular points on which I wish to focus. This bill and this part provides for and requires as a matter of national importance the protection of this notion of ancestral landscapes. The Local Government and Environment Committee asked officials to define what ancestral landscapes were. They said they did not know. We have asked resource management experts what protection of an ancestral landscape requires. I will give the Committee the advice of one expert: “Put your finger on a map of any block of land anywhere in New Zealand and it could be deemed to be an ancestral landscape.” My first question to the Minister is this: when has the public had an opportunity to debate putting that into law? How is it acceptable for this Parliament to make such a significant decision without any input from the public for the select committee to go through a rushed process and for there to be no public debate at all? What sort of draconian Government do we have that we are prepared to pass laws of that sort? 
Back in 1998 I chaired the Historic Heritage Management Review. It is a matter of some disgrace that the key recommendations in that review have not been followed through because there was a very strong consensus amongst the members of that review that the Historic Places Trust at the moment plays the role of both judge and jury. It is able to be an advocate for heritage and at the same time have regulatory powers. So the original Resource Management Amendment Bill stated that we should integrate heritage decisions into this legislation but also that we should repeal the regulatory powers of the Historic Places Trust. The Prime Minister wrote to the select committee and said that those powers were to be removed supposedly with the approval of the Minister for the Environment. This Government said: “We want to do half what the heritage review said but not the other half.” 
Therefore we have a double-banger. We have a situation where the Historic Places Trust gets to participate in decisions under the Resource Management Act and also at the end gets to put in place a regulatory control such as a heritage protection order. I want the Minister in the chair the Hon Marian Hobbs to give some justification for that. We have not heard from a single person within Government how that double regulatory model in some way will serve the purposes of New Zealand. 
We then have the new spiritual provisions. We are to put into law a legal requirement for all decisions under the Resource Management Act as a matter of national importance to protect spirits. I want the Minister in the chair to explain how that is to be done. How do we protect a taniwha? Is this Minister effectively condoning the fiasco that occurred over the Ngawha Prison site when over $1 million in consent process was wasted on trying to find out where the taniwha lived? Can the Minister in the chair explain to me why the Prime Minister says that we shall not have prayers at State luncheons because we are a secular State yet in the next moment she proposes a bill that will require every decision maker under the Resource Management Act to take into account the protection of spirits? The Prime Minister and the Government cannot have it both ways. Either we are a secular State and are consistent in that or we include the recognition of all sorts of persons’ spiritual beliefs. 
We on this side of the House are very clear. We respect people’s spiritual beliefs but we think it is a gross error of judgment to have courts of the land and Parliament putting them into law. We make a mockery of the whole resource management process. New Zealanders are angry about this stuff. Why has the Minister not given an opportunity for members of the public to make comments on these provisions and to participate in the decision making? It is a tragedy that the public has not been given that opportunity and it is a disgrace for this Parliament.