Bishop ChrisRESOURCE MANAGEMENT (NATURAL AND BUILT ENVIRONMENT AND SPATIAL PLANNING REPEAL AND INTERIM FAST-TRACK CONSENTING) BILLFirst ReadingHon CHRIS BISHOP (Minister responsible for RMA Reform): I present a legislative statement on the Resource Management (Natural and Built Environment and Spatial Planning Repeal and Interim Fast-track Consenting) Bill.DEPUTY SPEAKER: The legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.CHRIS BISHOP: I move That the Resource Management (Natural and Built Environment and Spatial Planning Repeal and Interim Fast-track Consenting) Bill be now read a first time.This is a great day because what we are doing is getting off the statute book two pieces of legislation that would be a backward step for the environment and also the ability to get things done in New Zealand. The National Party campaigned at the 2023 general election on repealing the Natural and Built Environment Act—or the NBA as it is known—and the Spatial Planning Act (SPA) by Christmas. I'm pleased to say that our coalition colleagues from the ACT Party and New Zealand First made similar commitments and as part of the coalition agreements between the National and ACT parties we've agreed to do that. Hence the need for urgency before Christmas to get it off the statute book.The effect of this bill is to repeal those two pieces of legislation and to revert back to the Resource Management Act (RMA) 1991 as an interim measure. This is not ideal and no doubt members on the other side of the House will make that point because—as I think everyone acknowledges across the Parliament—the RMA is not fit for purpose in its current form. We do need a new system that will make it easier to get things done and look after the environment but doing that will take some time. Now the reason why we have to move at pace to get rid of these pieces of legislation is that there's a 10-year lead-in time that has started basically already through local government and all of the various players around that. And the sooner we stop it the sooner we can make clear our intentions and the sooner we can stop all of those costs that will be incurred by everybody for a system that is ultimately going to be repealed. So we've taken the pragmatic view that it's better just to get it all off the statute book as quickly as possible and we're doing that this week under urgency.My intention is to introduce a new package of resource management legislation by the end of the term. I'll be working alongside my colleague Simon Court Parliamentary Under-Secretary for RMA reform and Parliamentary Under-Secretary for infrastructure in that work and also alongside the Minister for Regional Development the Hon Shane Jones who has a lot of interest in this area as well.Mark Patterson: Details details.CHRIS BISHOP: What's that?Mark Patterson: Details.CHRIS BISHOP: Details indeed yes and well he provides many details and I'm looking forward to those discussions.We did not take the decision to do this lightly and it'd be fair to say one of the first things I said to the officials at the Ministry for the Environment when I became the Minister for RMA Reform was that I understood that many people spent a lot of time and energy on these reforms. I acknowledge the work of the Ministry for the Environment over the last five years—there's been an enormous amount of work done by officials and actually by external stakeholders as well in creating the SPA and the NBA. I said to them when I met them at my first meeting I acknowledge that there will be a lot of people who will feel you know perhaps a little bit upset about the intentions of the Government." But I sat on the Environment Committee alongside my colleagues as we went through that process and I engaged with a lot of stakeholders during the debate in the last Parliament and the bills—the Acts as they now are—just simply won't work. The overwhelming majority of the written and oral submissions on the legislation said words to that effect. And the conclusion that we came to as a new Government is that the legislation would be worse than what we have now and so therefore we're going back to what we had while we work to create a new system.The Natural and Built Environment Act promised more red tape not less. It promised shorter delay but it will not deliver that—in reality it will create longer delays and it will create greater uncertainty not less. You just have to look at the Natural and Built Environment Act—it's 900 pages long. It's the same size as the RMA except it introduces a wholly new legislative schema a wholly new legislative framework and it introduces whole new concepts that are unknown to New Zealand law. So it has all of the length and complexity and the breadth of the current RMA but makes it even worse by introducing new concepts that will be difficult for people who use the NBA to navigate and understand. So we're going back to what we had for the next couple of years while we build a new planning system and this will remove the implementation burden from local government.This is a relatively simple bill—it's mostly simple. This will largely be a technical process focusing on transitioning and saving parts of the NBA that are already in use. The bill addresses these matters to allow for an orderly repeal and to ensure that users of the RMA have a clear understanding of how their interests are affected. The fast-track consenting regime in the NBA is going to be saved in the interim. So one of the things that we considered as a Government was what we do about the fast-track regime that is in the NBA. There was a COVID fast-track regime which self-expired and the Natural and Built Environment Act has its own fast-track regime. So while we develop our own fast-track proposals as a coalition Government we're faced with the dilemma of what we do with the fast-track because no one wants to be in a situation where we couldn't have speedy access to resource consenting. What we decided to do after a bit of debate was essentially repeal the NBA but save the fast-track regime in the current NBA so it's there on the statute book while we develop our own regime.The other thing the bill does is extend the deadline for when new freshwater planning instruments must be notified by three years to 31 December 2027 out from 31 December 2024. A relatively simple change this will give councils additional time as we review the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management. If I could summarise our approach to that it is to review repeal replace and rebalance and that is what the Government will—Hon Rachel Brooking: You don't like swimmable water.CHRIS BISHOP: Oh no it's not about that. That's a cliché—I thought you were going to criticise my use of alliteration but instead you used a cliché. No we're not going to get back into the tired old debates around that; we are going to repeal replace and rebalance and review the national policy statement for freshwater. Repeal of the Spatial Planning Act is straightforward. There's been no spatial planning processes that have been triggered—no decisions have been made under the Act—so we are just getting rid of that Act while we as I say navigate ourselves through replacement legislation. I think one other point that members opposite will make is that spatial planning's a good thing. Yes that's true as a concept and in principle. But my criticism is that the spatial planning regime the last Government set up was something that was wholly disconnected from everything else that was going on inside local government—most obviously the three waters regime which is in a state of flux to some extent now as well because of the commitments made at the election for which the Government received a mandate. But also the Future for Local Government Review which the Government announced with great fanfare and then dropped a report on. And so you had both spatial planning going on at the same time as the future of local government at the same time as the Government was doing a variety of things with three waters. And local government quite rightly said you know this is a nightmare to deal with. You've got three disconnected pieces of—well three connected pieces of reform all going on at the same time in different ways. There's no coherence as to how all that comes together. So we want to take a bit of time to get it together as a Government.I regret the use of urgency but it is important we do this under urgency bypassing the committee and consultation. Many of the issues that will no doubt be canvassed in this debate and through the committee of the whole House were canvassed in the last Parliament so it's not like the Parliament hasn't had a good chance to consider these issues. We had a good go-round in the last Parliament a good go-round at select committee and a thorough debate in the last Parliament and we took to the election a policy to repeal it by Christmas and we received a mandate for that and therefore we consider ourselves to have a mandate to do it.Our goals for RMA are simple. We must protect the environment but we must make it easier to build houses and we must make it easier to do things in this country whilst also protecting the environment. Therefore it gives me great pleasure to move the first reading of this important bill."