Nash Stuart: Reserves and Other Lands Disposal Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeNash Stuart: Reserves and Other Lands Disposal Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 19 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3382. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]STUART NASH (Labour—Napier): I stand in support of this piece of legislation. However it has taken a while to get here. As the Minister for Land Information outlined there was a bill that went through in 2003 and this bill was put up in 2008. As the Minister said about every 5 years these sorts of bills come before the House because there are antiquated pieces of legislation or local government rulings etc. etc. that need to be changed. They are supposed to be non-controversial. There were some controversial measures in this and I will allude to those a little bit later on.In 2008 this bill was brought before the House. In fact David Parker was the Minister who brought it before the House. Here we find ourselves 7 years later in 2015 and it is almost time for another one of these bills to be introduced—or what we do is we put forward a whole lot of Supplementary Order Papers so they negate the need for another bill. But the bottom line is that it should not have taken this long for this bill to get to its second reading. I think that even the Minister would acknowledge this. Richard Worth would acknowledge this if he was still in the House but he is not. Maurice Williamson would probably acknowledge it if he was still the Minister of Land Information but he is no longer. In fact I think we were on about our fourth Minister for Land Information before we actually got to the second reading.The Minister alluded to a number of Supplementary Order Papers that are changing original parts of the bill. We support these. We are talking about the Ōpua esplanade reserve land except the Albert Park piece of land. But the fact that there are about four Supplementary Order Papers accompanying this bill and that they talk about changes that need to be made to the original bill just shows I think that this is a little bit sloppy. The reason I say that is I think that as a Parliament we need to send a message to local government authorities or to district health boards or to the Department of Conservation or to whoever are approaching their MPs on behalf of constituents to get these sorts of changes made that they need to go through a robust set of consultation meetings.What we find here is that these changes end up in a bill and then suddenly people go “Goodness me I didn’t know about this. There was no consultation whatsoever.” The Ōpua esplanade was a classic one. There was no consultation whatsoever and then they approached their local MP and they approached their local council saying “We need to change this. This is not right.” and a movement starts and it ends up in a Supplementary Order Paper as mentioned. It is reasonably non-controversial but a good robust process must be gone through before legislative changes are made or else it ends up just in a whole lot of mess.There are couple of things that I think the Minister glossed over. She talked about the volcanic cones. She said that some thought that this was controversial. The vast majority of submissions were against this. Again this is a classic case where I do not think that Parliament listened to the wishes of the local people. Albert Park is another classic one to the point where the select committee actually made a recommendation in the paper saying that this is not good law. And it is typical of John Banks—he was mayor at the time. What the council did was run roughshod over the process and then come to Parliament and say they wanted to change the law for something they had already done. Typical Mr Banks—we know where that ended up do we not?I was not on the Primary Production Committee. I was not in Parliament when this came forward. But I look at the Nelson Marlborough District Health Board land. There is a proposal by the Nelson Marlborough District Health Board—the member Nick Smith may have comments on this—to remove specific hospital-related purposes and other constraints on five titles to land held by the board.When I read something like this without knowing the full details alarm bells go off because what that says to me is that this is the district health board wanting to sell down land. It cannot sell the land because it was either gifted or something else to the district health board or the health board way back when and it was designated “hospital land” and as a consequence it could not be used for anything but health purposes. It wants that designation removed I suspect to sell it.Hon Dr Nick Smith: Is the member opposed?STUART NASH: I am just saying that red flags go up whenever I see this sort of stuff. That is all I am saying—that is all I am saying. The other thing that I must admit did make me smile was when Minister Upston stood up and said she had great pleasure in bringing this bill to the House. I do not know whether she had great pleasure because it has taken 7 years to get the bill here or whether she had great pleasure in the fact that this is the first bill she has actually brought to the House. At this point in time the Minister for Land Information should be one of the busiest members in that Government and the reason for this is that there is a whole lot of concern right across the country that overseas investors are having a free ride into this country.Every single overseas investor who wants to buy a piece of sensitive investment land which is usually defined as over 5 hectares must get consent through the Overseas Investment Office. It is a reasonably rigorous piece of legislation and the consent process takes a little bit of time. But again what concerns me about this is that in the last 3 years not one consent has been turned down and part of this might have been the case law actually that came out of the sale of the Crafar farms. Under the Overseas Investment Act in terms of buying land—talking about the Minister for Land Information and her portfolios which she discussed in her opening speech—there are three tests and one of them was relevant experience and core competencies.The case law in respect of the Crafar farmlands gave that such a wide definition that I think it opened the way for any single overseas investor who wanted to buy sensitive land in this country to just go ahead. There are very very few restrictions on that at all—and Mr Assistant Speaker Mallard if I had known you were going to be in the Chair I would have talked about that first as opposed to last. But anyway Labour does support this bill. But as the Minister mentioned and I think it is worth coming back to this there is sort of an unwritten rule with these sorts of omnibus bills. They are supposed to be non-controversial. This is information brought to Parliament everyone agrees on it it goes through the House it goes through a process and there are usually very few submissions because there is no contention here whatsoever. The Minister herself has outlined two areas that were contentious and I think that is against the spirit of this bill.Let me if I may just quote what the select committee mentioned with regard to the Albert Park change: “A majority of the submissions we received concerned the Auckland Art Gallery development in Albert Park. Almost without exception submitters were opposed to the development and the way the Auckland City Council has proceeded with the development under the assumption that a non-controversial bill would be ‘rubber stamped’ by Parliament. Many submitters would have liked the clauses relating to the gallery’s development to be deleted from the bill.”I must admit that if I had been on that select committee in 2008 I would have shared their concerns because the Albert Park case contravenes the spirit of this bill I believe in the sense that it was hugely controversial. In fact I can remember when I moved from Auckland back to Hawke’s Bay—and what a fantastic move that was believe me. I love being in the regions. It was wonderful to get out of a city where it takes me an hour to get to work and go back to Hawke’s Bay where it takes me 8 minutes to get to the airport and I do not even live on the flight path.But anyway I remember when this was going ahead and I was approached by some of the submitters because I had worked with them on a couple of other issues and they asked me to advocate on their behalf. At the time I was involved in Labour Party politics. I was not a member of Parliament. I looked at this and I thought this was very very poor legislation. It is not the way that legislation is supposed to be done. By that I mean that you go and do something and then you beg for forgiveness through a piece of legislation—it is not the way that councils should operate.I would just like to sum up by saying that I think what we need to do as a whole Parliament is send a message to these district councils to the health broads and to the Department of Conservation. We need to tell them that whenever they put up a bill of this nature they need to ensure that they have undertaken a reasonable amount of consultation and that their residents and their ratepayers or their constituents have had a say. When I read through the notes and the select committee deliberations it became very apparent to me that this was not the case in a number of instances. Thank you very much.