Simpson ScottHon SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): Well thank you Madam Speaker. I think Hope springs eternal" is probably the best way to summarise the Minister's introductory speech in the first reading of this quite momentous piece of legislation. But we've been a long time coming to this point.So the Minister in his address to the House this afternoon has presented a long list of reasons why the existing resource management framework in New Zealand needs to change. And he correctly summarised that there was unanimity across the Parliament at the last election that the existing legislation that was first passed in 1991 had long since ceased to be effective for our beautiful natural environment in terms of protecting maintaining and enhancing that natural environment. And it was woefully inadequate in terms of providing for our built environment and the development of infrastructure lifestyle and the sorts of developments that we want as a First World nation.But is what the Minister is proposing the correct answer? I think that on this side of the House there's probably one simple test that we will want to apply to this legislation as we give it vigorous attention and scrutiny through the select committee process. The test that we will want to apply to this suite of legislative changes that the Minister has brought to the House—remember this is just the first part; the second part the spatial planning part will be receiving a first reading later this afternoon. But there is a third leg to the treble and that's the adaptation piece which won't be seen until next year and may not be concluded in the life of this Parliament. But the question and the test that we will apply to this reform package is: will it make it easier to get things done? Will it make it easier to get things done? I am sceptical upon first glance at this fairly significant piece of legislation that the answer to that question will be in the affirmative. I'm not sure that it will be. And for anyone that is doubtful about the complexity of the issues that are confronting this Parliament when we attempt to reform the existing status quo just have a look at this first piece of legislation and look at the size of it. The existing Resource Management Act (RMA) runs to some 900 pages. It started out in 1991 at about 300. And then as the Minister has said it's gone through a lot of amendment and change since then and has ended up at about 900 pages. This first leg of the trifecta that the Minister is introducing to the House runs to nearly the same length some 807 pages and then we'll add in the Spatial Planning Bill and then we'll add in the adaptation piece—and I would put money on it that the total will be longer and more complicated than the existing status quo.So what does this piece of legislation seek to do? Well it seeks—I think and I'm going to give the Minister some credit in a well-intentioned way to try and improve things. And so from that point of view that's a good thing: to try and improve things. But if the remedy is worse than the ailment then that isn't moving our nation forward. We are a country of 5 million people spread across a not insignificant landmass—about the size of the United Kingdom or Japan—and we have some of the most complicated most expensive most complex planning and resource legislation on the planet. Some of it stems back to the actual formation and creation of the existing RMA. A quite radical piece of policy at the time which set about trying to resolve the eternal conflicts of how to protect maintain and enhance the natural environment while at the same time allowing development. It set those two conflicting positions if you like into one piece of legislation. At the time people thought "Well this is world leading. This is going to be the way the world will go." And we all sort of patted ourselves on the back in New Zealand we thought this was world-leading stuff. It turned out that in fact the world didn't follow us and they didn't go down the path we went down—and they did not do it for some very good reasons.So there are some issues that we want to present to the select committee and to this House as this piece of legislation works its way through the system. In essence we've got a number of main concerns. The first one I've outlined is the answer to the question: will it make it easier to get things done? We're not sure that it will. But we are concerned that this piece of legislation and the other two pieces that go with it will actually just add more bureaucracy to an already heavily burdened bureaucratic system. The plan is to establish 15 regional planning committees with some very dubious democratic accountability levels applied to them. We don't know quite how they are going to be appointed what the decision process will involve. But we do know that those regional planning committees will be effectively another layer of local government and that's a cause for immediate concern. But it'll be another level of local government that has enormous power enormous power to influence the outcomes of people's lives and how they live their lives. And so we are concerned about the whole concept of the regional planning committees how they're going to work how they're going to operate how they're going to be appointed who makes the decisions where is the democratic accountability and where they will actually assert and exert their power and influence.Another area of concern for us in the National Party is the high degree of legal uncertainty that the new reform package will bring to anyone who wants to get anything done. And so there is a lot of new language a lot of new vocabulary a lot of new terms in the proposed legislation. There's a new concept in terms of replacing what the RMA used to refer to as "sustainable management" with the new concept of "Te Oranga o te Taiao". Now that's an untested term and phrase and pity the poor developer or person who wants to get something done that is going to have to end up taking a case all the way probably to the Supreme Court to get some kind of judicial interpretation in understanding of exactly what the term means. That's going to be expensive and time consuming. And it will need to be tested because iwi will want to test it in exactly the same way as any other sector of our society want to test it to find out exactly what it means and how it will be applied.Then I think the next area of concern that we have on this side is as to whether the balance of these reforms are pro - development and progress or whether they will hinder development and progress. On our reading of it it looks very much so that things will be harder to get done that the development of much needed infrastructure is going to be very very difficult. And so there's nothing in this bill that gives us confidence that it's going to be easier to get things done.Now there have been a number of responses to the legislation—[Interruption.]ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order! Hon Scott Simpson.Hon SCOTT SIMPSON: Thank you Madam Speaker. There have been a number of responses to the proposed legislation and I just want to just go through a few of them because I'm sure that many of these folk will want to be presenting submissions to the select committee. But there's one that stuck out for me that I thought was very appropriate. It comes from a former Labour Cabinet Minister one David Benson-Pope and he is now and has been for some time a long-serving councillor on the Dunedin City Council and he says that the suggested savings were "a bit overblown" to be his analysis of that. And then he said further he's wary of a one-size-fits-all mentality. And then he goes on and says "A lot of wheels are being reinvented now many of them unnecessarily." And so good old David Benson-Pope a man who spent quite a bit of time in this Parliament and has had a very long career in local government so he's dubious and concerned about it. And then you've got Alan McDonald from the Employers and Manufacturers Association he says "Success or failure will depend on how these reforms are made a reality." And isn't that going to be the test: how are these reforms going to be made a reality? Leonie Freeman from the Property Council she's got concerns. Federated Farmers have concerns. There are a whole range of legal practitioners and citizens and developers who have concerns and even the environmental organisations have concerns—as do we. We will not support this bill at first reading."