Fitzsimons Jeanette: Resource Management and Electricity Legislation Amendment Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Resource Management and Electricity Legislation Amendment Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:627;Page:22281] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 I thank my colleague Jim Peters for allowing me to speak earlier as I have to be somewhere else at 12. When the Forest and Bird Protection Society of New Zealand Inc. business associations local authorities and the Environment and Conservation Organisations of New Zealand all turn up at a select committee and say the same thing—that the Government has got major parts of this bill seriously wrong—and give the same reasons then we know there must be something in it. That in fact did happen in this case at the Local Government and Environment Committee. There was widespread agreement among the submitters that the draconian ministerial powers allowing the Minister to instruct councils to put certain things in their plans and the interference with the powers of the Environment Court to conduct a complete hearing were wrong unnecessary and damaging. 
David Parker 
: And were changed. 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS 
: And they were changed. A lot of the changes in the bill as introduced were mindless tinkering with the Resource Management Act. It was as though the Minister had said to officials: “We’re getting a lot of flak about the Resource Management Act. Go and fix it will you?” the officials had asked: “Minister what exactly do you want us to fix?” and the Minister had replied: “Basically don’t totally damage the environment and do away with public rights but just fix it so that we don’t get all these complaints about it.” 
So the officials came up with things as mindless as mandatory mediation. Mediation is a process that works if one has goodwill and cooperation on both sides and achieves absolutely nothing if one does not. How on earth does one make mediation work if somebody is there under duress? So we got rid of that one. The officials came up with mindless tinkering like taking away the requirement for plans to include objectives because it would make plans shorter by about a paragraph—or maybe up to a page. Yet if plans do not include objectives how does one measure whether the rules and policies in the plans achieve what they are there for? That had huge consequences right through the bill and the committee has put mandatory objectives back into plans. There was tinkering with the role of the Environment Court trying to shorten court processes but thereby making council processes much longer more laborious and more difficult for the public to participate in. That was clearly not going to work and that has been fixed as well. 
I am proud to have chaired the select committee that has substantially rewritten considerable parts of this bill—with I have to say a lot of cooperation and good sense around the table. Even though many of us had different views about where the Resource Management Act should be heading we nevertheless had a high degree of cooperation about using this amendment to make things work as well as we could. We have restored the powers of the Environment Court to hear all the evidence before it and consider that evidence properly. As I said we have left objectives in plans. We have got rid of the bizarre requirement for regional councils to promote infrastructure. Regional councils are there to manage effects on water air and soil—to manage effects on the environment of the region and planning across the region. Giving them the job of promoting power lines and motorways was clearly in conflict with their purpose. 
We have got rid of the requirement for regional councils to remediate contaminated sites which they could have done only by putting the full cost on the landowner because at present there is still no legal defence for innocent landowners who have taken over a piece of land with no way at all of knowing that it has been contaminated by a previous owner and the State still takes no responsibility for contamination that it has caused on land that it has managed or contamination that it has required through the requirement to use certain chemicals with long-lived effects. That matter still needs to be addressed. We still need law on the innocent landowner defence. We still need the State to step up to its responsibilities in terms of contaminated sites. But at least we have prevented this bill from obliging regional councils to clobber landowners at present. We have at least provided for an appeal against the draconian strike-out procedures whereby a council may decide that evidence is not relevant and refuse to hear it. We know that in many cases councils will use that power with extreme care but that in some cases the Environment Court has found that councils were far too close to developers and could well have used such a power wrongly against members of the community who wanted to be heard. 
 After hearing many many submissions from Maori that kaitiakitanga lies often not with iwi authorities but with hapu in particular cases we have provided a role for hapu. We have recognised hapu in some circumstances as the people who should be consulted on plans and who should be on the register that councils will hold of the Maori organisations they should deal with on resource issues in their community. 
We have constrained the ministerial powers quite considerably. There are now criteria against which ministerial decisions are reviewable and Ministers will not be able to give just any old instruction to councils and plans. But this bill is still an attempt to centralise decision making; to put the national interest as perceived by the Government of the day ahead of the local interest as perceived by the people; to skew the Resource Management Act towards development rather than towards environmental protection; to provide an easy track for big infrastructure projects like pylons prisons motorways and power stations which will have preference over the ordinary person’s resource consent; and to make life harder for community groups that are trying with very little in the way of resources or help to protect their local environment against big damaging projects. 
Much of that agenda remains in the bill despite the improvements that the select committee has made and the Greens therefore do not support the bill. In particular we are concerned about the new process for setting national policy statements. Rather than a board of inquiry and a broad public debate leading to a robust national policy statement with cross-party and cross-society support that will be enduring to guide plans and policy statements we will have a quick and dirty national policy statement written by a Government official with no public inquiry no hearings a submission process—which the official may or may not read—and then it will be law. It will be binding on all plans and councils will gradually have to change their plans to comply. By the time they have done that there will be another Government in power which will use the same quick and dirty process to overturn the national policy statement. We will get this policy see-saw every 3 years which is not good for planning or for resource management. 
We know that national environmental standards are now being drafted in conjunction with the officials by the industries that are being regulated by those standards. This bill makes the default position that those standards will be absolute and that councils will have to allow the degradation of their environment down to that minimum standard. So if people have really high-quality water in the rivers in their area because they have been fortunate in the past and have not had a lot of polluting industry they will not be able to set a standard to keep those waters to that high quality. They will have to allow them to be degraded down to the national standard which of course will be set down to standards that rivers like the Ngakawau which is full of coal tailings and the Otara Creek in Auckland can potentially meet. 
The call-in provisions have been changed so that the biggest and most controversial projects called in by the Minister will unlike all others not have to go through two hearings. They will have to go through only one. So there will be two hearings for someone’s veranda application but one hearing for the giant motorway or pylon process. At least the select committee insisted that that one hearing must be chaired by an Environment Court judge. That is an improvement. 
The benefits which were unanimously agreed cannot compensate for these serious damages to the Act.