Bayly AndrewANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua): Thank you Mr Speaker. Matt Doocey: A bit like his career—short and sharp. ANDREW BAYLY: Very. I wanted to return to that topic that my colleague the Hon Judith Collins was just mentioning. I just can't understand why it's taken all this time to be talking about this bill when you've got that dog-tucker that hoax that flop of KiwiBuild that just has not done anything yet here was a bill that we were promoting when we were in Government. In fact we even sent it to the Productivity Commission to have a bit of a look at and they came back and said Yes we should be doing this. We should be establishing an urban development authority." and we were all ready to do it. All this was laid out for this Government when it came into power and it's taken them until December 2019 to actually get to a point where we can stand up and start talking about it. I just find it remarkable for a Government that talked about a year of delivery and here we are in the last month of the year and yet it's still at a stage where we're just starting to talk about this first reading. Normally a bill like this takes about six months to go through so it'll be just before we go to the polls and they'll be able to say "Yes we put in the legislation but we haven't done anything else." Of course urban development authorities (UDAs) have a lot of success around the world and that's why we promoted them. You know we've seen the impact of them in places like Melbourne London Sydney and Tokyo—a whole stack of places—where they've been used to basically take areas of cities that have gone into degradation that are unusable and that are often at a stage where they are rundown. This is where a UDA can come in can start looking at the whole area—normally they're quite large areas—look at the master-planning of them and not just about how they're going to build houses but how they're going to do streets how they're going to do all the associated community infrastructure and how they're going to pull it together to make a community. That is where they worked really successfully overseas. It's another way to actually help how we're going to build more houses in New Zealand and of course that's the bit that we find so worrying. Just returning to that topic we left a pipeline of 27000 homes when we left office and—Dan Bidois: That's a good pipeline. ANDREW BAYLY: —it was a superb pipeline—yet here we are at this juncture at just over two years and as I've said before and as Judith Collins mentioned before we have hardly made any progress in creating new houses in New Zealand. This urban development authority does have wide-ranging powers. For instance it has the ability to override add to or suspend provisions of the Resource Management Act (RMA) plans or policy statements in the development plan that applies to the project area. So that's a pretty strong power to actually cut across RMA processes and also effectively unitary plan processes of cities. It also has the ability to act as a consent authority. That's interesting because already this group that we're talking about here that's going to be formed has been out nicking—and I use that word; it's paying a lot more than Auckland Council can afford—to acquire or to get the best of the consenting officers out of Auckland Council to come into this entity. I think that's wrong because that is just purely robbing the Auckland Council of its best staff and paying them more to come across to be able to do this work. Why shouldn't they be left at Auckland Council? This is a type of entity that should be training its own and adding to the sum total of building consent officers in New Zealand not taking them from another council and trying to fast track its own arrangements. It's also got the ability to use funding tools for infrastructure—and that's part of it; you know sewerage and we talked about roading and all that sort of stuff—levy targeted rates and development contributions build and change infrastructure and reconfigure reserves. Those are all wide-ranging powers and they are necessary but they've got to be implemented and used wisely if you're going to create this. Of course the success of these types of entities is in having people who are very experienced in doing these types of development and who have wonderful and well-honed commercial skills because essentially the value is created in the master plan and if you muck that up that's where these things can turn pear-shaped. I just think the thing about this is that this deals with one element of trying to help with new building but the issue is a much more central issue. The Hon Jenny Salesa who introduced this bill should be much more focused on fixing up the existing building construction rules around more people moving into the area fixing up the rules around allowing better products allowing better planning and all that sort of stuff because that's what needs to be fixed up and not just trying to create this new entity and resource it much more superiorly than other people and developers in the country are given access to. I think that is wrong. They should be dealing with the central issue of the broken system that has been around for a while and Minister Twyford hasn't done anything about it in two years' time."