Woods Megan: Greater Christchurch Regeneration Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoods Megan: Greater Christchurch Regeneration Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 29 March 2016. Volume:712;Page:9932. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): I would like to take a short call on Part 1 of this bill. The preliminary provisions of this bill are actually far more significant than they often are in a piece of legislation. They are covered in clauses 3 to 11 and they contain some very important provisions in this legislation before we get to the meat of the bill in Part 2. The first of these is the purposes clause clause 3 of this legislation which before we even got around to fixing this bill in the seminar style that the Minister has outlined was a very well discussed clause at the select committee. It was a clause that attracted a vast number of submissions—I think that 60 of the people who submitted actually submitted on the purpose of this bill and what it was going to achieve and I think this is where some improvements were able to be made during the select committee’s consideration.Clause 3 states first and foremost: “(1) This Act supports the regeneration of greater Christchurch through the following purposes:” and it then goes through a number of purposes including “(a) enabling a focused and expedited regeneration process:”. But one of the most significant gains that was able to be made at the select committee consideration of this piece of legislation was in clause 3(2)(b) if we are going to drill down into the detail which was “improving the environmental economic social and cultural well-being and the resilience of communities”.So although the Local Government Act may have done away with the four well-beings what we have here in this bespoke Greater Christchurch Regeneration Bill is the well-beings in writing—it is not about just the economic recovery of Christchurch. We all know that that is incredibly important but we also all know that there is a far greater project that has to happen in terms of the regeneration in Canterbury. That primarily is about putting people at the heart of the recovery and ensuring that this is a recovery that is there to take people forward to let people mend their lives and often mend their very broken selves.It is not only their homes and their businesses that have been broken in Canterbury—and I think we can see through the mental health statistics that we face in our region the scale of the human impact that the last 5 years have had. I would like in my first contribution—the first of many Minister Brownlee—on this bill to acknowledge the human impact that has taken place on the people of Canterbury in the last 5 years. My real hope is that this piece of legislation signals a new phase as we go forward in the regeneration and recovery of Christchurch. So that is clause 3.The next clause I would like to talk to in some detail is clause 8 “Geographical application of Act”. This is something that also changed during the select committee’s consideration. When the bill first landed on the floor of this House for its first reading it defined areas of Greater Christchurch that were going to be specially marked out for attention in regeneration. These were defined as Christchurch City and New Brighton which were singled out for special attention and these were covered off in schedule 4 of the bill. But I think a sensible amendment was made to this at the select committee. It was decided that we would not try to statutorily define suburbs of a city as that gets very complicated. What instead was put in place was the ability for regeneration plans to cover the whole of Greater Christchurch—Greater Christchurch of course being largely the urban development strategy area that Cantabrians are well aware of and were operating under pre-earthquakes.I think this is sensible but what I think also has to very much be part of it is something that comes under Part 2—and I would not like to wade into that during the debate on this part but I will talk when I talk about the letter of expectations in terms of Regenerate Christchurch about making sure that primacy is still given to those areas of Christchurch City and New Brighton as areas signalled out for regeneration as the original Act intended. I am sure that is something that the Minister and the mayor are working on together and are working very closely on.The other important part of this legislation is of course clause 4 the interpretation clause which is in Part 1 of this legislation. Some very important definitions are there including what exactly is meant by “Christchurch central city”. Although we have not tried to define it in terms of schedule 4 it does occur within clause 4. The clause also defines what a “Recovery Plan” is and what a “Regeneration Plan” is—and what regeneration will look like is actually what the future of our city and Greater Christchurch rests on. It is about what form these plans will take and how these will be implemented in the wider area. These are plans and we will talk more fully about these when we get into Part 2 of the legislation where we talk about what a regeneration plan means and who has power.This bill is a significant move forward for Canterbury. I think we see that in the purpose of the bill—that we now have a mandate to consider the environmental economic social and cultural well-being of our city as we move into phase 2. That is something that some of us have thought there has not been enough of. So we welcome the opportunity under this new phase of Regenerate Christchurch in this legislation to incorporate those well-beings into our future and to provide the framework as to how we can finally get some movement on some of the projects that certainly we on these benches have been saying have been taking a bit of time and we would like to see some more movement on.Labour is supporting this bill subject to the amendments that have been made and now append to this bill as the Supplementary Order Paper that the Minister alluded to which we worked on constructively in a cross-party way. I am very happy that Labour is able to come into the House despite the minority report that we wrote after the bill came out of the select committee phase and now support it. I would like to thank the Minister for listening at that phase and taking on board the changes that were incorporated. It is a pity that some of the Government members of the select committee could not have made more use of the select committee process. But none the less we do have a piece of legislation before us now that does allow for locals to lead the next phase of the regeneration of Christchurch to a far greater extent than they have been able to in the last 5 years. That is certainly something that we welcome.