Brooking Rachel; Bishop ChrisHon RACHEL BROOKING (Labour—Dunedin): Thank you Mr Chair. Following on from that little point of order discussion I do want to note of course that we don't have a regulatory impact statement and we haven't had the select committee process. I heard the Minister say earlier that everything has been traversed already when we went through the process with the bills that then became Acts that are now being repealed. So I am hopeful that the Minister will take an approach that I think has been different from some of his colleagues and answers a lot of our questions Mr Bishop because that will add to the flow and I am encouraging of that so that of course we are earnest with our relevancy and seek to go through the bill quite carefully. I say that for a number of reasons: one is I have written to the Minister today stating our position which is of course it would be best not to be here at all today discussing the repeal of the bills and that if there are particular concerns that the Government has that it would be better to do some legislation to pause the commencement of the new legislation whilst it was reviewed. So that remains our position but in that spirit I will ask some questions and I would like a response from the Minister about his plan for how he wants to deal with this committee stage given that the bill has only got two parts and it has got two schedules. There are some very small things that we could raise—so for instance there seems to be a drafting stylistic—[Interruption] Look sorry—there is a lot of interjections in this House and I've experienced this last week as well. We are here in good faith trying to work out what these issues are and we have a point of order that speeches are not to Mr Seymour's liking—we are entitled to make these speeches. But my point is this has not gone through a select committee process. It is always a complicated—David Seymour: It's gone through an election.Hon RACHEL BROOKING: Oh it's gone through an election. It has not—that is a terrible frustrating thing. Electors do not vote on the word-for-word of laws and that is why we have the very good public process which I thought Mr Seymour was a fan of that we could go through and have a proper process through select committees and even if points are in—Hon David Seymour: Point of order. Mr Chair the current member's contribution is exactly what I was concerned about. She's spent a huge amount of time talking about me and the process and procedure. She still hasn't asked a single question about whether the bill as returned from the second reading is fit to serve the principles and objects of the bill.Hon Grant Robertson: Speaking to the point of order. Mr Seymour may well be aware that the reason the speaker—the Hon Rachel Brooking—began mentioning Mr Seymour was because he interjected and his interjection was responded to by the member; that is commonplace in the House. In fact I've seen it in the House extend out debates for a considerable period. Mr Seymour might want to reflect on that.CHAIRPERSON (Teanau Tuiono): Just speaking to this point of order—we have to keep these interjections down so that we can actually hear the contributions from members. I note there's a lot of amendments here that will form parts of our discussion.Hon RACHEL BROOKING: Thank you Mr Chair. So my point that I was trying to make is that there are some small issues—there are drafting issues for instance whereby a clause is referred to as a clause rather than a section in the bill where normally past Parliamentary Counsel Office drafting is to refer to a section rather than a clause I can give some examples of that. Then there are some substantial matters so that includes the fast tracking is to continue." and so I think it is important that we drill down into what is being extended what is being continued in that fast tracking. I've heard comments in various different speeches in the second reading that there will be some extension to fast tracking to include mining—so that goes to the definition of what is an eligible activity. Then of course a lot of the schedules to the bill are very boring and they are simple straightforward replacements of names of Acts. I have no intention of focusing on those but then there's also some things where it's unclear what the change is. We have only just seen this bill today so I think it would be useful—and I'm interested in the Minister's response. This is the question: how the Minister intends to respond to this proceeding this committee stage—it would be good to be able to go through those changes where we don't have all the bits of legislation in front of us to see what has changed or not.Then there are some important changes that would be easy to miss—so we have at page 105 of my version of bill that section 80A—the date changes from 2024 to 2027 and that's in relation to the National Policy Statement on Freshwater Management. So there's a range of things that we can consider some I think we should spend some detail in and I'm interested in how the Minister intended to proceed in the committee stage.Hon CHRIS BISHOP (Minister responsible for RMA Reform): Thank you very much Mr Chair. To take the member's somewhat convoluted questions in turn: how do I propose to deal with the committee stage? Well I propose to deal with the committee stage in the same way that other Ministers deal with committee stages. The House is in committee; members will ask questions; I will attempt to answer them; and we will work our way through the bill.In relation to what the member says around the simplicity of the bill she is right. It is actually a relatively simple and straightforward bill. Despite what members may have said in the earlier parts of the debate what we are doing is basically going back to what the status quo was prior to the passage of the Natural and Built Environment Act and the Spatial Planning Act which only happened three or four months ago. In fact there are members in the committee right now who were integral to the passage of that. So we all know about what happened three or four months ago. What we are doing is unpicking that because at the election the Government sought a mandate to repeal both Acts and we are now proceeding to implement that mandate. So the bill is quite a simple bill basically. It repeals both Acts. It puts in place a range of saving mechanisms where that is necessary and appropriate—most notably in relation to the fast track which the member mentioned as well. We are saving for people to use the fast-track mechanism that the previous Government put in place.In relation to the member's final question about the extension of time for fresh water that's a very simple change. It's as advertised: 31 December 2024 was the status quo; if this bill proceeds through the committee of the whole House and third reading the new deadline for regional councils will be 31 December 2027. So it's just a three-year extension and the Government's made its policy intention in relation to that clear and there will be more to say about that in due course. But this is just part one of our changes to freshwater management."