Parker David: Resource Legislation Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeParker David: Resource Legislation Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 03 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8557. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour): There are lots of areas of policy that show that National is increasingly out of touch with the values of New Zealanders. I think that National’s now failed attempt to undermine the fundamental principles of Part 2 of the Resource Management Act is another of them. National has once again been on the side of a small minority that would have personally profited by doing what they wanted to do at the expense of decent environmental baselines with disregard to what are appropriate environmental safeguards at the cost of other New Zealanders who would bear those economic consequences.At a time when New Zealand has declining freshwater quality National’s answer was for years to lower the environmental tests in Part 2 of the Resource Management Act. It has been pushed off that. For 10 years National has said that New Zealand’s economic performance has been substantially—not just in a little way but substantially—undermined by the fundamental principles of the Resource Management Act that it has wanted to change.Yet National has failed to convince New Zealanders that that was right and after 7 years of its excuses it has been forced to concede—because the weight of public opinion and parliamentary opinion has been against it—that that was never true. The Resource Management Act has not been the substantial cause of New Zealand’s economic performance in the last 7 years. The fact that on a per person basis the size of the New Zealand economy is shrinking is not the fault of the Resource Management Act. Economic negative growth per capita has not been caused by the Resource Management Act; it has been caused by National’s lacklustre economic performance. The Resource Management Act has been used as a whipping boy by National and ACT for years.David Seymour: By the OECD and the Productivity Commission.Hon DAVID PARKER: At the time of the last election I said that if we were elected we would give Remuera and the Epsom electorate a Resource Management Act - free zone. We would give them a carve-out of the provisions of the Resource Management Act. Watch them come to us when we put all the prisons all the tanneries all the multi-storey buildings between the residents of the ACT electorate and their superyachts in the harbour and see them complain and call for the restoration of the Resource Management Act.Nowhere is National’s rhetoric made more clear than in respect of housing. The housing crisis in Auckland is severe; not enough homes are being built. The demand side factors and the supply side factors are complex and they do include land supply as the Labour Party has long said but land supply alone will not fix the housing problems in Auckland and blaming the Resource Management Act unduly for the problems there is wrong. It is not just Labour that is saying this; it is actually the fact that National has not been able to get a parliamentary majority. I want to thank every member of this Parliament who has stopped National gutting the Resource Management Act.I want to thank the Māori Party. The two recent things that the Māori Party has managed to knock out of this bill include the over-interpretation of property rights which was proposed and the Māori Party managed to knock it out. The other ridiculous thing that was until recently still being proposed was private consenting authorities notwithstanding the absolute debacle of National’s pushing upon the country private building consent authorities which was one of the causes of the leaky building crisis and the injustices of people who could not get a remedy after those building consent authorities that were private went bung and disappeared. National was going to do the same thing in respect of resource consenting. The Māori Party’s advocacy got rid of that—thank you to the Māori Party.Peter Dunne has been very principled in all of this. He knows the importance of Part 2 of the Act. He was one of those who was in Parliament when the Resource Management Act was introduced and I want to pay credit to him. The Greens and New Zealand First have also been opposing these changes. The truth of this is that on a voting basis National has got 61 votes against them in a House of 120: 32 votes of those are Labour 14 of them are the Greens 12 of them are New Zealand First two of them are the Māori Party and one is United Future. This Parliament is arrayed against National and despite its having the advantages of power and the pressure that it can bring upon parties it has not succeeded in bringing the fatally flawed bill that it wanted to bring to this House.The New Zealand Herald in the weekend said this: “Dashed RMA reforms show NZ’s priority”. I will read some quotes from this. “This Government’s longest and most ambitious legislative battle ended this week in defeat.” And yet we had Nick Smith just claiming victory. “The saga ended on Thursday when Environment Minister Nick Smith introduced a bill that will make very little difference to the operation of the act.”—victory Dr Smith. “But the bill’s real significance is that it represents a landmark victory for the environment over the economy.” There is an environmental baseline that ought not to be breached. I agree with that World Bank economist Herman Daly. At one level the economy is a subset of the environment. You have to protect the environment in order to protect the long-term viability of your economy and have a nice place to live.There are some aspects of this bill that we welcome. That is why we are voting for it. We have long called for standardisation of some provisions. I agree that a standard format for plans will make them all easier to follow because we will all know how they are all set out and there is no problem with that being standard. They can have different rules even if they are set out in a standard way and that is just sensible. I agree that some definitions ought to be standardised. We might have different rules as to what is the maximum height above ground level in different plans but we should all be able to agree that we measure ground level in the same way. Things like that should be standard. We do need more national policy statements.You know it has been clear for a long time that we have got a problem with affordable housing. How do you fix that? One of the ways is through a national policy statement on affordable housing. The Labour Party has been advocating that for 3 years. We have been offering to the Government that we will cooperate with it in that regard but it will not take up that offer. These do work. Look at what happened when we had a national policy statement on renewable energy which I had a hand in. Since then we have had more than enough renewables consented. We have actually met society’s need to bring forward more renewables. We have. Renewables had dropped to 57 percent; they are now up to 80 percent. One of the blocks to that being achieved was that it was too hard to consent renewable electricity projects so we made it easier through using a national policy statement under the Resource Management Act to bring forward renewables.There are some aspects that I will be wanting to debate very carefully at the select committee and I look forward to this—I hope—intelligent debate that we have across parties because the Government cannot do this on its own. It actually needs cross-party collaboration. I want to name some of them. Some of the changes that have been made so far in the name of speed have actually had the opposite effect. The Environmental Protection Authority has been a hopelessly expensive cause of more complexity and delay. We have even had complaints to the Regulations Review Committee because the authority’s hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of bills to applicants have been so high that people have ended up before it. It has not caused speed and it has actually just created multi-track alternatives that have added complexity to the Act. I think we should look at that. The Government might not be willing to change it.In terms of the exclusive economic zone part of this the Government’s major mistake here is that it should have just applied the Resource Management Act to the exclusive economic zone area. It needed a different consent authority but the same rules would have done. In terms of collaborative processes I want to give members one final anecdote. I ran collaborative processes leading to emissions trading scheme for emissions pricing. I excluded the worst critics. I left out Don Elder from Solid Energy and the then head of Genesis Energy an Australian who was rather unhelpful as well. I stacked that body. I actually got to an outcome through that stacked body that led to emissions pricing which was a good thing for New Zealand.Hon Dr Nick Smith: No you didn’t.Hon DAVID PARKER: I actually did.Hon Dr Nick Smith: No you didn’t.Hon DAVID PARKER: I am sorry Dr Smith; you do not realise but we actually legislated for an emissions trading scheme that—Hon Dr Nick Smith: You didn’t implement it.Hon DAVID PARKER: We did so—you negated some of it. Look I am not going to have that puerile debate. I stacked that board in a collaborative process just as any Minister can stack a board going the other way. Collaborative processes without appeal rights can be abused by Governments—