Sage EugenieHon EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe e te Māngai o te Whare. Thank you. In beginning a call on the Spatial Planning Bill can I again acknowledge submitters and there were over 610 submissions on this bill compared to the nearly 3000 on the Natural and Built Environment Bill. I acknowledge the huge mahi of the Ministry for the Environment officials who as the Hon Scott Simpson noted were burning a lot of midnight oil and working a lot of weekends on the bill the departmental report and advice to the select committee. I also acknowledge parliamentary counsel and the members of the very hard-working Environment Committee. We had a very collaborative process in working on this bill despite the differences of view. I would also like to acknowledge the Minister for the Environment David Parker but I especially want to acknowledge the secretariat for the select committee and the staff: Dylan James Jacob Zoe Colvin Paquita and others. They did a huge amount of work liaising with submitters setting up meetings liaising with officials organising hearings and drafting the report on this bill and the other bill. A lot of that work goes unseen and I'd really like to have that read into the record. This bill is a bit more manageable than the Natural and Built Environment Bill but I don't think the criticism of the Natural and Built Environment Bill on the basis of its complexity is well-founded. As the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment has said Complexity in legislation of this nature is inevitable. The environment we live in is not simple. It intersects with everyone's property rights." and heaven forbid if ACT gets in and we have property rights dominating environmental legislation. This bill does aim to establish a long-term—30-plus years—strategic approach to how we as humans interact with the natural and built environment through the development of these regional spatial strategies which are developed with strong public community iwi and hapū input by regional planning committees. Those regional spatial strategies are intended to set out a vision and objectives for a region identify the actions that are needed to achieve those objectives and help achieve the purpose of the Natural and Built Environment Bill—te Oranga o te Taiao—and its 18-system outcome. They'll look at what change is needed over that 30-year period in terms of land and water use and where major development growth and infrastructure such as transport corridors new renewable energy generation and urban development should be provided for and how it should occur. As others have said the aim is to integrate infrastructure with land-use planning and to the Greens the most essential infrastructure is the natural environment which provides us with the essentials for life: water clean air and food. Now officials made it very clear that the regional spatial strategies would not map and determine land use on a property-by-property basis but they would look at it over that whole region and as the Hon Rachel Brooking—who contributed an awful lot of her professional expertise to the development of the bill through the select committee process—noted information presented visually in map form is much easier for the public to understand than in my view the planning jargon that we get in a lot of evaluation and other reports. So these regional spatial strategies are intended to be broad and indicative at that regional scale rather than the individual property scale and it's the natural and built environment (NBE) plans which will be much more specific. They will direct investment for things like land transport and for local services by central government and local government and others have queried this. But the inclusion of a central government representative on the regional planning committees is a key tool to ensure that much better integration between the funding that's available at the central government level for things like land transport through Waka Kotahi and the planning that is done at that regional level and it will help resolve the issues that we've had under the Resource Management Act (RMA) where you've had regional councils having regional policy statements which set an urban-rural boundary and which want to ensure compact cities and towns but we don't have the transport investment decisions at central government necessarily accommodating that with better public transport funding and more funding for cycleways and active transport. The regional spatial strategies will also provide for areas that require or may require protection restoration or enhancement. That's one of the key matters in the bill but one of the major shortcomings which submitters identified was that because infrastructure locations are identified in the strategy and a lot of that finer-grained work around where significant biodiversity areas are doesn't occur until the NBE plans there is likely to be a preference towards infrastructure or transport corridors over the protection of nature. But those key matters are quite important and I really take issue with comments by the ACT speaker about the climate adaptation bill. That bill as I understand it and as the Hon Rachel Brooking noted is to be largely about managed retreat. This bill has got a much greater focus than the RMA on planning for natural hazards and clause 17 sets out the key matters to be included in the regional spatial strategies. One of those is the matters relating to risks arising from natural hazards and the effects of climate change including areas that are or will be vulnerable to those risks and indicative locations for infrastructure that is required or may be required to reduce those risks or provide resilience to them—things like stopbanks. So this is a much stronger direction than under the RMA. It's a very good basis I think for ensuring that we avoid urban development in flood-prone areas and we ensure that through the spatial strategies if there needs to be an adaptation plan with specific measures around coastal hazard or flood hazard that is then provided for as one of the implementation actions that arises from the strategy and those key matters were something that the select committee did spend some time on and did improve. Similarly around the public engagement provisions in the bill the regional planning committees—which do these regional spatial strategies—have at least six members including two iwi and hapū representatives. Now there was a concern from the Hon Scott Simpson that the planning committees would be elite and geographically and physically distant from local communities but the select committee did make a number of changes to improve the process by which the planning committees engage with the public communities and councils. That public participation and engagement process is critical and there's a lot of flexibility now in the bill for the committees to use not just the normal submission process but other processes: public engagement through meetings through social media and the like. The bill requires the regional planning committee to actually set out in detail what process it's going to use particularly at the front end of the process and make that publicly available to make sure that it identifies what are some of the barriers to participation by certain sectors of the community and how will those be overcome. The principles for this public engagement are about encouraging collaboration and avoiding an adversarial process. So that is I think an improvement on the RMA and one of the things the committee did was ensure that there is also provision for a hearing. That was to ensure that decision makers on the regional planning committee are actually face to face with the public and with submitters so it's not just unaccountable faceless people making those decisions. One of the other issues where we strengthened it was the integration between this bill and the water services legislation because of course three-waters infrastructure is just the sort of infrastructure that needs to be identified in the regional spatial strategy. There is a requirement that the water services entities take account of these strategies and of implementation plans and that they ensure that their own asset-management plans and infrastructure strategies are consistent with the relevant regional spatial strategies. So it is quite ambitious in its objectives. There have been a number of changes which again I think have significantly improved the bill and one of them in particular is that issue around natural hazard planning and climate resilience. So I commend the bill to the House."