Brooking RachelHon RACHEL BROOKING (Labour—Dunedin): Thank you. So following on from that answer by the Minister—and I thank him for getting to his feet so quickly—can he explain what he means by Regional councils would have nothing to do under the Spatial Planning Act and the Natural and Built Environment Act"? It's important to understand that those are two different pieces of legislation. The Spatial Planning Act is one that involves central government and the councils—the regional council the district councils the unitary authorities whatever you want to call them; all the councils. Regional councils under the Resource Management Act (RMA) under the Natural and Built Environment Act under the Spatial Planning Act continue to do what regional councils have done since they were created and that is their focus on the environment—their focus on water quality and air quality in particular. That is why it's so important that we have good water plans which should be delivered well before 2027 in my opinion. So I honestly do not know what the Minister means when he says "Well what would regional councils be doing?" Regional councils would remain having those functions around air and water quality biodiversity—there's hazards there's other elements as well—but the fundamental is that they are environmental regulators. Why is that a reason to repeal the Spatial Planning Act which largely doesn't have very much to do with the ins and outs of environmental bottom lines? That's in the Natural and Built Environment Act; that makes little sense. Also though again—the Minister said I answered my own question about why spatial planning needs to be done in a coherent way but this was done in a coherent way; this does enable spatial plans to look at water infrastructure.So I'm interested in those questions and then some different questions—and I thank the Minister for his comment on the grey areas as well. Why is it that so many parts of the RMA that have been widely regarded as wildly inefficient are being gone back to rather than using the provisions that could have been rolled over from the Natural and Built Environment Act or the Spatial—well the Natural and Built Environment Act in particular because obviously that is the one that directly refers to the RMA? You can think of the Natural and Built Environment Act as a replacement RMA. The Spatial Planning Act—that is new. The idea of a climate adaptation Act—that is new as well. These are both different functions. The Natural and Built Environment Act is the one that has the regulatory plans under it where you have to go to get consents. In my mind you could have the Spatial Planning Act with the RMA—they could still work quite easily. There's no reason to be repealing the Spatial Planning Act. You could easily—I mean of course you'd need to do some amendments to it so it referred to different legislation but obviously the Parliamentary Counsel Office is well versed in this and I have faith that they could do that very easily.So I say to the Minister: (1) there is no need to repeal the Spatial Planning Act at all; (2) has there been any consideration of for instance not reverting to section 32 of the RMA? Section 32 is a very long analysis process that takes a lot of time. It is normally done after decisions have been made which is unfortunate and just adds a whole lot of inefficiency into the process. Then there's other changes that were made in the Natural and Built Environment Act including reducing the number of consent categories and this was to make the system simpler. At the moment under the RMA you have non-complying resource consent categories and non-complying resource consents have a convoluted test at section 104D of the RMA that requires a lot of decision making from the councils that just seems unnecessary if you can already have a plan that specifies what the considerations can be. So I'm seeking an answer on those questions."