Kuriger BarbaraBARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki-King Country): Thank you Madam Speaker. Well here we are on the Spatial Planning Bill after the Natural and Built Environment Bill this morning and this afternoon.It has been a big job actually listening to all the submissions—almost 3000 submissions on both these bills—but it was really interesting when the submissions come through between both of the bills the submissions were very intertwined all of them because actually that's what the two bills do. They're designed to work together and it's not surprising that most of the submitters chose to intertwine their submissions rather than do separate ones.I would like to note that as a committee we were able to make changes to the bill. The officials were very willing and as I said before we didn't get all the changes that we might have liked to have made particularly with the other bill. But I think when it comes to this one when I said before that the natural built environment and resource management planning is hard—and we know that there's a third stream to this which is going to have to link in in many ways. That's actually going to be much harder because it's going to be a huge disruption to the status quo for many people. I saw a presentation just recently around how difficult it would be and how many Acts it interacts with and so if we think this part is hard going forward into further parts is going to take a huge amount of thinking because it's going to cause a lot of disruption to many people's lives.I think probably where a lot of the objections have come in around both of these bills is around the legal aspects of it. I've not got a background in resource consenting but I know others have and there is quite a bit of concern from a number of people that there will be some legal challenges around this. Other people will have varying different views and they probably vary quite a bit as you work your way around the House. But I do think when it comes to long-term planning it is important to put a strategy before the structure and I think going from 100 plans to 16 plans has to be a good move. If we think about how our regional councils sit now if we think about regional boundaries if we have the opportunity as regions to look each other in the eye and do some face-to-face work we can often come out with some good things.Now there's a question around local voice and local council and local communities and how they might react to these regional planning committees but the idea of regional plans in itself makes a huge amount of sense. And I think not just from a regional planning perspective but also from a series of connected maps because no region is ever an island. If I look at an area like Taranaki it's quite a nice compact little region where it's very easy with the maunga in the middle to be able to interact. It's not too far to drive. It's much more simple than—and I know the Waikato region and all their good planning has been mentioned this afternoon. If I look at the Waikato region it goes from up in the Coromandel up where Scott Simpson lives—which has largely been affected by cyclones over recent months—right down to Mokau which is at the north end of Taranaki and it fits all into the same regional council and there's a huge amount of varying differences. So spatial planning for that one region in itself is going to take quite a lot of thought into how that works.But then of course each region then links with other regions. And I take note of what Minister Rachel Brooking said before about the map and we had lots of discussions at the Environment Committee about a map. I think that makes a huge amount of sense to start with a map look what the area entails and then have people identify opportunities within that map to show what they see is happening in their region. Because it doesn't make any sense to do it bit by bit by bit. Because whatever we do for nature nature always wins. Nature is hard. And in terms of planning we saw the Hawke's Bay floods we saw pictures of where the historic wetlands were and then we saw overlaid aerial photographs of where the water sat after the houses had been built. And then we wonder as human beings when we build in some places without giving it too much thought why things wash away when we have a cyclone. It's not to point the finger at any particular person and I'm sure there will be examples in the Auckland flooding there will be examples in Tairāwhiti. There are things where we say Why did we do it like this?" And I think spatial planning really is one of those things that will give us the opportunity to look at what we have and do it differently in the future.We also had as a committee the opportunity to work with the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment around planning where green spaces might have been and we looked at how the water didn't drain away in some of those places when we had copious amounts of rain. But also some of the other things when we look at the heating up and the climate change that we can cool streets down quite effectively by having more trees than what we might have had in the past. And there's some very good examples of streets where they're not very far apart particularly in warmer places and we saw some examples in Australia where trees make such a huge difference. So it is really important that we think about—we see lots of current housing plans and pictures of sub developments where we just have house by house by house. So it gives us a very good opportunity to stand back and look more closely at where we put things.It would have been easy as a country when we look at highly productive land to stand back and go "Well this would be the best place to put it; this place would be the best place to put it; and that place would be the best place to put it." But now that we're already moved as a population in time there's no way that you can actually then stand back and do that as simply as you could if you had a blank map. So we need to think quite carefully around that. But the climate adaptation bill is going to be a hard one to fit in and it will take some spatial planning it will take quite a bit of spatial planning to figure out if we've got to shift people from where they are now shift activities from where they are now to where they need to go. And we're going to have to have a jolly good look at each region and each spatial plan to figure out where and how and why we would be doing things. Because what we don't want to do is make the same mistakes in the future.There has been some concern around the people appointed to the regional planning committees and having one central government person. It has been explained to us that that would be a link back to the Government departments and to be able to make those connections with our Government departments in order to help the Spatial Planning Bill make the spatial planning committees do their work. I think it would be unfortunate if we did go to regional spatial planning and then had a central government overlay which then goes back to the way Governments actually—and Governments of both colours do this. I know that councils and regional councils in an endless process of planning and long-term planning—before you know it the central government changes the rules and you have another plan in place and another plan in place and I dread to think how much as a country we would have spent over a long period of time on long-term planning which actually doesn't turn out to be long-term planning because someone else puts a new idea in the middle and before you know it things are rolling over.And yes we have to evolve but we've spent a lot of money on planning over the years and so if this—well this bill will pass today if this does come into place you know National has signalled that we would be repealing and taking another look at this. But if this was to be in place I would hope that it would last a lot longer than what the current situation is because as a country we can't afford to keep undoing and redoing and undoing and redoing all our plans. We have to actually think years ahead put some longterm plans in place and get on with it. So hopefully that's what we can look forward to as we progress with more long-term planning.I think it's probably fair to say that it is the Natural and Built Environment Bill that is the harder one for National to accept. This one has some things in it that would need fixing but we do believe in spatial planning. Thank you Madam Chair."