Court Simon; Parker DavidSIMON COURT (ACT): Thank you Madam Chair. Minister I just want to come back to the functions of regional planning committees—clause 30N—and the power for the regional planning committee to set any environmental limit and interim limit for a region that the national planning framework requires the plan to prescribe.Minister I just want to ask you: how is it fair and reasonable that an unelected only appointed planning committee which includes not just potentially appointees from local council—and not necessarily elected members; they could be officials they could be technocrats plus a minimum of two iwi Māori. How is it fair and reasonable that an unelected planning committee should be allowed to set environmental limits that affect productive use of land in regions particularly where primary production where farming is the main activity or even in urban environments where manufacturing for example and using water for example in an urban environment or even having stormwater discharging off large commercial industrial sites has an effect on receiving waters receiving environments? Those are currently consented. Those consents are issued by local councils and those local councils which set rules for their region are democratically elected—at least their governing body is.So how is it fair and reasonable that regional planning committees will be setting environmental limits and that the people who live in those regions which depend on being able to use their environment and who could potentially agree on what effect on a common resource they're prepared to accept won't be able to do that? That power will be taken out of their hands.Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): Thank you Madam Chair. The scheme of this system is that you go down from over 100 plans to 16 and they are put together regionally. Once you take that decision to put them together regionally—and we think there are good reasons to do that relating to the quality of the plans and the way in which you can approach planning regionally in respect of the issues that are identified through a spatial strategy flowing through to Natural and Built Environment Act plans; it makes good sense to do it regionally.Once you do it regionally you don't have any choice but to put it together through a body that is formed from the constituent organisations and we've been through the fact that the formation of those committees which we've spoken to in the discussion on the earlier part is left to the local councils working with local Māori interests. If they can't agree the decision is taken by the Local Government Commission. Every council has a right to appoint at least one person to that committee and beyond that it's up to the locals to sort out. There's a minimum of two Māori representatives and if they can't agree the Local Government Commission does it.Now there were some differing viewpoints around that at local government. The local government steering group that we put together who we've worked with extensively who provided very good input was concerned to make sure that that didn't mean there was a loss of democratic input which is why the statements of community expectation are provided for and strengthened in the bill.