Genter Julie Anne; Tisch LindsayJULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. Tēnā koutou e Te Whare. Before I came into Parliament I worked as an urban and transportation planner. I am really passionate about the opportunity we have to create cities that are better for people that protect our environment that make good use of infrastructure that have affordable housing and that ensure not only that we are we going to reduce our climate pollution but also that we will be more resilient to extreme weather events in the future because the reality is that the flooding we saw in the past few days is something that will be happening more as a result of climate change and we need to have a plan for how we are going to have infrastructure to deal with that and how it is going to be funded. Our current Government is completely neglecting to address those problems and issues.This bill is passing by only a very narrow majority. I think that is a real shame because there have been calls across the board for a review of the Resource Management Act (RMA). The original architect Sir Geoffrey Palmer called for a royal commission of inquiry to ensure that we had a broad-based evidence-based review of the legislation so that we could improve it and solve some of the ongoing systemic issues with it. The Green Party would support a royal commission of inquiry. But the Minister and the National Government have been reluctant to engage in a broad-based debate about how we can make resource legislation work better for everyone. They want to do it their way and they are going to do it their way and it is not a good bill. In fact the vast majority of submitters—there were 647 unique submissions on this bill—made very similar points. Fish and Game New Zealand the Environmental Defence Society and Forest and Bird made similar points to people like Fonterra quarry operators and infrastructure operators. Many of them described the proposed ministerial regulation-making powers as excessive.The bill that is before us today is not one that we can vote for. It is not being supported by the Labour Party or New Zealand First either. I think that the public should be very concerned about the one-sided approach that the National Government is taking to reforming resource management law because it is something that affects everyone in this country. New Zealanders do want to protect the environment and they do want planning and resource legislation law to be smoother—to operate in a more coherent way—and this bill is not going to achieve that. We can see from the great number of submitters that noted huge problems with it that it is simply not going to solve the problems that the Government is claiming it will solve—most notably that is housing affordability. The Minister claims that housing is unaffordable uniquely because of the RMA and that is just rubbish. There is a whole number of factors that are influencing house prices. Some of them have to do with demand. If the Government had instituted a capital gains tax on investment properties and if it had restricted the sale of real estate to New Zealand citizens and residents that would have helped with housing affordability. Additionally if it actually passed some laws to protect tenants—to ensure there was a warrant of fitness on rental properties—that would help reduce house prices and address the issues which is that people do not have enough money to afford a place to live whether they are renting or buying in Auckland.Finally they could be improving planning rules. One of my greatest passions is improving planning rules. I wish that the Minister understood just how much the land supply problem is related to unhelpful planning rules that prohibit increased density from being provided because nothing in this bill is going to address that—nothing in this bill is going to address that. In fact the Minister constantly conflates issues with planning rules with the RMA. The planning rules are determined by councils. If the Minister used national policy statements and national environmental standards to a greater degree and undertook the sort of consultation that is needed then we might have better planning rules.Finally the Green Party would support a national policy statement on urban design to ensure that we have high-quality people-oriented urban development. It also needs to be championed by the public sector. We need a public sector - led development agency. Just look at Hobsonville. The highest-quality development that has happened in Auckland recently is in Hobsonville. It was led under the Labour Government with the local council—a public-private partnership but master planned and that is what we need more of in Auckland not this.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): The Hon Ruth Dyson—5 minutes.