Twyford Phil: Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTwyford Phil: Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 19 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8325. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): As my colleague Phil Goff has said Labour is voting for this bill. Why? Well there are two reasons. The first is that the Auckland Council asked for it and we think it is appropriate in the appropriate spirit of partnership between central government and the elected representatives of our largest city that there should be a relationship of cooperation. If it seems like a good idea and the Auckland Council is asking for it then it is appropriate that we should be supporting this initiative. The second reason is that the draft Auckland Unitary Plan is vital and here is one thing on which we do agree with Nick Smith. This unitary plan is vital for reforming the planning rules that are critically important to fixing Auckland’s housing crisis getting the flow of new housing construction under way and building a better more prosperous and more liveable city. Those are the two reasons.What is really significant about this bill is that it comes after 7 years of a difficult problematic relationship that the National Government has had with Auckland. There have been 2 years of imposing the super-city on Auckland riding roughshod over the desires of Aucklanders and then having set up the super-city 5 years of fighting white-anting the Auckland Council and scapegoating the Auckland Council for the many policy failures of this Government not least in housing. I say again to members opposite: “What took you so long?”. There have been 5 utterly unproductive years of fighting and blaming the Auckland Council for things like the housing crisis but at last we see in this bill a practical cooperative measure that will do good and will benefit Auckland and benefit the country.I think the other really notable thing about this bill is that one of the things that the draft unitary plan will do is it will give us a measure of progress in reforming the planning rules particularly all of the restrictions and the limits on height and density that are such a barrier to the supply of affordable housing and a better choice of housing types in places where people actually want to live.This bill really comes after years of the National Government being dragged kicking and screaming towards a more rounded view of the need to reform the planning rules. For so long this problem for Bill English for Nick Smith and for others in the National Government was all about sprawl. They were scathing of Auckland’s vision and plan for a compact city.In a remarkable turn-round we have now got the Prime Minister issuing an edict to Aucklanders telling the good folk of the leafy suburbs in East Auckland that they have to get used to living in apartments. That is what he said. The memo has gone out. I know Paul Goldsmith is horrified by that—at having to explain this to the people whom he would like to have as his constituents if he did not have to put up with this terrible awful shoddy sort of deal with the ACT Party in Epsom. He would have to explain to them that the National Party says that there is going to be high-rise apartments all the way across Epsom. But that is the reality.Now the Government is rushing this bill through the Parliament under urgency. If the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel is successful in doing its business it will free up the constraints to some degree on density and height and that will be getting rid of an important impediment to the kind of development that Auckland needs. We have in the course of this debate set out a number of our concerns about this bill. I was sorry to see my tabled amendment not get enough support to be adopted; that amendment would have changed the rules for the appointment of members of the hearings panel. Instead of this Government through the Minister for the Environment and the Minister of Conservation just imposing its choice of panel members on Auckland it would have allowed the Minister for the Environment and the Mayor of Auckland together to decide who should be on the panel. Surely that would be appropriate—surely that would be appropriate. Normally in Resource Management Act rules it is the councillors the elected representatives who ultimately make that choice about who is appointed onto these decision-making panels so it is an extraordinary thing that the National Government assumed its right to tell Aucklanders who should be making these critical decisions about the plan.Also Government members did not support my other amendment which would have limited the scope of the panel to make recommendations in the draft unitary plan only within the scope of the submissions. Again I think this Government has overreached when it designed the independent hearings panel process by giving it the extraordinary power really to make recommendations on whatever it likes regardless of whether it has received submissions on those issues.We had no real response through the Committee stage to the questions that we put to the various Ministers in the chair about whether or not it made sense to allow the panel to make recommendations on certain topics through the course of the hearings schedule and not to wait until they had got all the evidence before they then deliberated on the whole weighing up all the evidence. We think that raises the possibility of some incoherence—a piecemeal approach to dealing with what are complex and interlinked issues.The other concern that we have in conclusion as we draw to the end of this process and as so many members on this side of the House have said is the irony of this bill which is basically about public participation in the planning process and trying to ensure good decisions and that communities are able to have a say in these important decisions. The very bill that is trying to deliver this is subject to a truncated process being rammed through the House under urgency with no select committee scrutiny no ability to really tease out the issues get expert advice or for the public to have their say. There was no good reason to be in urgency at all except for the incompetence of the National Government’s management of House business so it is a very very poor show in that regard.We support this bill because we believe that the new rules that the independent hearings panel will we hope usher in will deal with things like all of the decisions around zoning the urban growth boundary and height and density limits. Improving these rules is vital to Auckland’s future prosperity. It will be very difficult to fix the Auckland housing crisis without improving and reforming these rules. But we have to say that it is not a panacea. For 10 years now senior National Party politicians like Nick Smith and Bill English have routinely blamed Auckland Council for the high cost of housing and blamed the Resource Management Act as if it was some kind of panacea. Bizarrely they have been saying that for 10 years but have done nothing about it.The draft unitary plan that I think we all hope will improve those planning rules for supporting more and better urban development will be the first significant change to town planning rules in Auckland in that entire period that we have had to put up with and to listen to Bill English and Nick Smith scapegoating the Auckland Council and the Resource Management Act for these problems even though they have done nothing about it. So putting aside the things that the Government chooses not to do and will not do—cracking down on speculators actively building large numbers of houses—the Government refuses to do the very things that it could do use the levers that it could pull to fix the problem. At least now Auckland Council is one step closer to doing what it can do to improve the rules that govern Auckland’s development.