Patterson MarkHon MARK PATTERSON (NZ First): Thank you Mr Speaker. The end of [the] war on farming" is how Federated Farmers have responded to this piece of legislation getting introduced to the House. This is a critical piece of legislation for our agricultural sector and I congratulate Minister Bishop on bringing it forward and actually expediting it through as the first tranche of Resource Management Act reform in what is a much bigger body of work to try to undo the mess that we have inherited in this space.Rachel Boyack I can say to you the Primary Production Committee is absolutely the right committee to be seeing this legislation go through there. It is the fact that the Environment Committee stuffed it up so badly the first time around because there weren't enough farmers or people that understood the implications of the things they were signing off that we're in this place now.So farmers: we are freeing them from the tyranny of one-size-fits-all regulation being imposed on them by Wellington and we are fulfilling those promises of getting Wellington out of farmers. Farmers do care about the environment and to say anything else—I absolutely dispel that sentiment for anyone that may be raising it in this debate. Grant McCallum the Northland MP and I spoke the other day at the Aotearoa New Zealand catchment collective. There are 290 catchment groups now in this country. They have proliferated throughout from Southland to Northland. This is actually people on the ground doing things—fencing riparian planting restoring wetlands and dealing with it at a catchment-level solution. The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Simon Upton has just come out with a report on this and he has said that the catchment-level solution is the only way forward here that regulations that work within farm boundaries catchments and ecological systems do not.There has been a quantum shift—a quantum shift—on management practices on farm around things like intensive winter grazing. We have recognised that some of the practices of the past have fallen short and that has been acknowledged by regional councils which has given us the trust to take the measures that we have. And there is real oversight of this. We have fly-overs in Otago and in many parts of the country. You're actually monitored from the air to make sure that you are complying with good management practices and you're exposed if anyone's trying to cut corners; they're picked up. They're intensively managed by the regional council and often Dairy New Zealand Beef + Lamb New Zealand and Federated Farmers and they're working with those farmers—actually doing stuff—but we're leaving the farmers that are following good practice alone. We're letting them get on with the job. We're not imposing heavy compliance and cost on them to do what they do when they're doing it well. It will be a risk-based approach and it will be locally driven with local solutions. We will be getting to the same place in environmental outcomes. We will be just doing it in a different and more practical way.The te Mana o te Wai provisions that also have been referenced they are incredibly problematic. That was an incredibly powerful piece of planning legislation. It was a vague catch-all term that could have meant anything. It could have shut down any farming operation for any reason. It had no place in a resource management setting where real lives real livelihoods real communities were on the line.The significant natural areas—and I commend Minister Hoggard on his work there. That wasn't an attack on property rights. We are a property-rights Government across this side of the House. There are hundreds of thousands of hectares of native vegetation particularly on our sheep and beef land much of it in QEII Trust much of it preserved for perpetuity. Farmers care about this stuff. Genuinely significant natural areas may need to be captured. That is a piece of work that was going on. The low-slope maps the stock exclusion that was incredibly onerous on high-country farmers—little or no environmental outcomes. We trust our farmers. We'll back them. Thank you Mr Speaker."