Court Simon; Brooking RachelSIMON COURT (ACT): Thank you Mr Chair. Minister I want to come back to your response to my question about ports and restoring and enhancing the environment. My question is: ports were issued 35-year consents in 1991. These consents will expire under the existing Resource Management Act (RMA) in 2026. Unless these ports are somehow going to be told to suck in their guts do less porting limit their decks take some cranes away turn some part of their port over into some kind of wetland maybe a mussel farm maybe some kind of I don't know cultural centre how is a port seeking consent under this legislation meant to demonstrate restoration and enhancement of the environment on a 30-year time frame when what they need to be doing is providing for efficiency potential expansion occupying more of the seabed building sea walls and other defences to harden them from climate change and storms? How are they supposed to do these things while demonstrating they're restoring and enhancing an environment from some unknown time in the past? What is this environment? Are we going back to say the 1950s or World War II when half the reclamation was built in Auckland? Are we going back to I don't know pre - World War II in Wellington when the Kaiwharawhara fill was under way and the motorway or the highway into Wellington was being built? What is this time frame that they are intending to go back in time and restore it to Minister? Because this legislation could potentially set us on a course for good. This legislation could say Spatial planning should tell us based on how many people we assume are coming"—and in Auckland it's between half a million and a million between now and 2050. We know we'll have to make so much land available for housing. We know we'll have to build stormwater treatment ponds. We'll have to build waste water infrastructure. Oh and by the way we'll have to upgrade our ports.Camilla Belich: Point of order. Mr Chair this contribution is repetitive and not related to the part at hand.CHAIRPERSON (Greg O'Connor): Ms Belich sit down. That's the job of the Chair and please don't interrupt members mid-speech with similar—it's the job of the Chair.SIMON COURT: Thank you Mr Chair and thank you to that member Camilla Belich for raising this issue that my contribution about ports and how you restore the natural environment of a port back to some unknown state in the past is repetitive because this matter came up time and time again at select committee—not just ports; organisations companies that deliver hydroelectricity that operate dams railway roading infrastructure. They said "How on earth are we supposed to restore the natural environment back to some unknown state at some unknown time through the Spatial Planning Bill?" That's completely the opposite of what the Minister told us his environmental reforms are going to deliver: cheaper better faster. It's the opposite of what the Infrastructure Commission said any reform of the RMA should do—which is reduce the cost of consenting. How on earth is this clause Minister meant to help us deliver cheaper better faster infrastructure for a port that needs to apply for a consent in 2026 to re-consent a port activity after the RMA has been apparently killed off by this bill? How are they supposed to do that and give confidence to their customers to the transport sector to KiwiRail who might want to build a new rail line or spend hundreds of millions of dollars investing in new hard infrastructure and networks into a port? How are they supposed to give confidence to the stevedores to the unions the people who work there Minister? This works against all of that. Explain it Minister.Hon RACHEL BROOKING (Associate Minister for the Environment): Thank you. It may come as a surprise to some people watching this debate that I actually agree with a lot of what the member Simon Court just said in terms of the importance of our existing infrastructure and that we don't want to accidentally ruin it and do the various different examples that the member gave. These regional spatial strategies can be useful to things like ports and allow them to have that long-term planning and to avoid the reverse sensitivity that's been a huge problem under the Resource Management Act. But I would then remind the member that of course you're not getting consents under this Act. This is not the regulatory plan. That is in the natural and built environment plan. And so this clause-by-clause "How do we get a consent under this particular clause?" is not useful."