Goff Phil: Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading[Sitting date: 17 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8267. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill): Just to begin with the Minister glossed over a number of areas talking about clarifying and validating. The Government is clarifying that you can hold the sessions concurrently but he glossed over the fact that it has in fact been doing that without that explicit authority for months and months. This is a cock-up that is being fixed up. So let us call a spade a spade and a cock-up a cock-up in this and not gloss over it.The Minister also glossed over the fact that the Government validated February of last year as the closing date for submissions. Well that is a long time ago. That was another cock-up. Then he did acknowledge that it fixed an error in the main Act about procedural requirements for the filing of appeals on questions of law with the High Court. That is a third cock-up.The reason I raise these things is that these mistakes have been made in the legislation we are fixing tonight but we are fixing this legislation at 20 minutes to midnight after sitting since 9 o’clock this morning and without the benefit of a select committee process. Is there any better way to continue stuffing up legislation than doing it in the way that the Government is doing it tonight? A wise Government would learn from its mistakes. This Government is simply repeating its mistakes.This is the second reading. During the second reading normally we would rise to our feet to discuss the submissions that we have heard from members of the public and experts in the area. We would discuss the consideration that the Parliamentary Counsel Office had given to the drafting and the errors that the Parliamentary Counsel Office would have found in the legislation and would have corrected before reporting back to the House. We would talk about the hours of analysis that the select committee had put into the legislation. None of us can do any of that tonight because that process was not followed.The question I have to ask the Government is: when Nick Smith could announce the details of this legislation on 16 September more than 2 months ago why did this Government not get its act together and have the first reading of the bill at that time so we could have honoured the democratic principles of this House in giving the public the right to be heard on it?I have heard members of the Government and the ACT Party tonight singing the praises of a democratic process where there is the opportunity to be heard. They were talking about the hearings that this bill is legislating for but they did not acknowledge that they were totally contradicting themselves in supporting legislation that forbade the public—blocked the public—from being able to make submissions on it.It is bad process to have urgent legislation. I accept this legislation needs to go through before Christmas. I agree with the Attorney-General that it will be a good thing if we could get these hearings processes operating effectively so that the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel can meet its statutory deadline and report back and we can get a unitary plan in place that will allow for better planning process and better resource management process. I agree with that. But it was not necessary to ram this thing through in the middle of the night and not allow the public to have its say.I listened with interest to the ACT member because he was damning the process that his predecessor from the ACT Party in the same electorate of Epsom had put in place and he did not see the contradiction. And then the ACT member said: “We’ve got to have a change in the unitary plan process so we can remove the rural-urban boundary so the city can move out.” But the city cannot move up. The city cannot intensify. It cannot become more compact.I listened to the Productivity Commission and Murray Sherwin and his team yesterday and they said: “Why have we got a problem with the availability and affordability of housing?”. He said: “If you create a situation where the city can neither move out nor move up there is only one thing that gives and that is prices.” We have a crisis in availability and affordability because we have blocked the city from moving either out or up. It should not be an either/or; it should be a both/and.The unitary plan will be about having a more compact city and I agree with my colleagues from the Green Party on that. And inevitably because the population of Auckland is going to increase by a million in the next 30 years it is going to have to move out as well. I of course would argue that it is good to allow that city to move out but only however if you have got the infrastructure in place to make that happen.I was down at the Karaka Lakes subdivision the other day and I drove by Pōkeno—I drove by Pōkeno. There are huge huge developments there—I am sure that you would recognise them Mr Assistant Speaker Tisch—but what is not there is any infrastructure to support those people. A huge percentage of the people in Pōkeno are going to be working in town but we have got a motorway that is already clogged we have not got a railway line that is sufficient to meet the needs and we do not have a busway. So if the Government is going to allow this growth to happen—and the growth will happen—then for heaven’s sake let us get a unitary plan. Let us not only get a unitary plan that puts infrastructure in place but let us get a Government that is committed to ensuring that we have the infrastructure so that Auckland can grow without losing the quality of life that that city offers to its people.I agree with what Scott Simpson said. I thought it was very big of the member for Coromandel to acknowledge that New Zealand cannot succeed if Auckland fails.Scott Simpson: That’s right.Hon PHIL GOFF: That is absolutely right and I agree with the member. We are on the same path on that.I have to say that I disagree with the point made by my friends in the Green Party that this is about taking power away from local government. Auckland Council is in favour of this—absolutely in favour of this—including people like Penny Hulse who has done so much work in actually getting this unitary plan going forward. David Kirkpatrick chair of the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel is also in favour of it. If I believed that the changes being made would diminish the quality of the hearings process I would not be recommending to my colleagues that we support them tonight but I have seen no evidence that the changes that are being made do diminish the quality of the scrutiny of the submissions. In fact I believe that they allow that panel to get through its work more effectively.Auckland desperately needs to have a proper planning process. It desperately needs a planning process that can ensure the sustainable development of housing and business not only in the urban environment but also for the rural area and the marine environment. The unitary plan covers all of those things. It will be good to have a unitary plan—one plan for what is effectively one city—instead of the complexity and the fragmentation that existed and still exists right now actually because of the old structure.I want to come lastly to a comment that Nick Smith the Minister in charge of this bill made about it. He said “This bill is needed to maintain the momentum of lifting Auckland’s housing supply …” and he also said that this bill is needed because the legislation allowing for special housing areas is going to run out. Well I commented on that in the first reading—the latter point. Nick Smith has set a target of 39000 houses. The special housing area was his big initiative to achieve that target.Sue Moroney: How’s that going?Hon PHIL GOFF: The goal is 39000 houses and Sue Moroney says: “How’s it going?”. Well we have reached just over 100—102 actually. I have not got my calculator here to see what 102 is as a percentage of 39000 but it ain’t much—it ain’t much and we are not going to get there.So I want to challenge the Minister in charge of this bill about this bill actually doing what he says it will do because it is not going to hugely affect the supply of housing and the problems of availability and affordability. For 7 long years the housing crisis has been ignored. The Government has ignored the impact of speculation. Only in the last few months have we had the brightline test. The Government has ignored the problem of the affordability of infrastructure for housing. It has ignored the market failure of the slow-down in building houses after the global financial crisis. It could have built houses then. It could have avoided this problem but it did not.So my message finally is that the unitary plan—if it is done well—will help but it will not do it on its own. The Government needs to do much more.