Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of the ACT Party in opposition to this bill. I should first just assist the member Angie Warren-Clark who's just resumed her seat and say climate change considerations have been in the Resource Management Act (RMA) for a long time. It's actually a mistake because if the emissions trading scheme (ETS) legislation we debated last night is truly putting a proper price on carbon then people will be able to make decisions about emitting carbon based on that price and we actually don't need a second layer of legislation in the Resource Management Act because people would already be considering it because the ETS is working. So either last night's legislation is working and this is not necessary or this is necessary and last night's legislation doesn't work. That's the simple logic of it but we don't get that sort of critical thinking and analysis from the Government benches. So much for rebuttal. The reason for opposing this bill is that frankly it's pathetic. I mean that in the proper sense of the word. In comparison to the problems that this country faces under the Resource Management Act and the level and scale of reform that is necessary and possible this bill is pathetic. It is like setting a capuchin monkey of a solution on a gorilla of a problem. Let me tell you what those problems are—something that one might think the Labour Party would care about deeply.Under the Resource Management Act over the past 30 years we have had inflation in New Zealand—consumers price index inflation of 61 percent. The cost per metre of building a home has gone up a lot more than that—260 percent. But the price of the median section in Auckland has gone up 900 percent over those 30 years. That is what this piece of law the Resource Management Act has delivered.I've just seen Clayton Mitchell hold up a sign with a 7½ on it. I can only guess that he was scoring my speech so far out of five because by the standards of his party speaking in Parliament that's about what it deserves—150 percent. There we go it is out of five. Thank you Clayton Mitchell for that adulation. I hope he learns something because the New Zealand First Party in the previous Parliament postured politically that it was prepared to cross the floor and work with ACT and National to pass real Resource Management Act reform. Now the possibility exists to do just that—to cross the floor and work with National and ACT to pass real Resource Management Act reform—and where is New Zealand First? Nowhere. As per usual throughout their history they're more than happy to take the baubles of office and leave no lasting policy improvements for New Zealand. What a shame. All he can do is sit in the corner of the House and hold up silly signs. What a shame. No wonder New Zealand First is on the way out and the great tragedy is they'll leave nothing behind. But we should come back to this piece of legislation. This piece of legislation is introduced into a context where the inflation in the price of a section in our largest city has gone up 900 percent—10 times inflation over the period that we have been trying to build more homes. In that same period the amount of income that the lower quintile—that's the bottom 20 percent—of households spend on housing has doubled. Thirty years ago the poorest people in New Zealand spent a quarter of their income on housing. Now they spend half their income on housing. Now that's something that a good social justice warrior like Iain Lees-Galloway should care about. You'd think he'd care about it. But instead the Labour Party comes down to Parliament and introduces Resource Management Act reform that does nothing to fix the problem of land supply and housing and that is one of the greatest shames of this current Labour Government. That's our history. We'll see it: nothing to improve the Resource Management Act under which the price of housing for the poorest New Zealanders has doubled as a share of their income.The fundamental problem with the Resource Management Act that should be getting fixed but isn't is that it has no regard for property rights. You look for property rights—the right of people to use their property in the way that they see fit—and you try and find it in the 900 pages that make up the contemporary Resource Management Act and those words cannot be found. One of the results of that is that people that want to develop their property people who want to subdivide—do you know the words inappropriate subdivision" appear in the RMA dozens and dozens of times. That's why it's so hard to subdivide—because the councils won't allow it because the RMA won't allow them. What people find when they try to use their property to build new homes and expand the supply of housing for the poorest New Zealanders is the RMA stops them doing it time and time again. What does this piece of legislation do about that? Absolutely nothing. It introduces a new freshwater commissioner—yet another bureaucrat empowered by legislation passed by this Government and this House. That doesn't help the poorest New Zealanders. It introduces climate change legislation which should be dealt with by the emissions trading scheme but instead will become another way that disinterested persons can stop the owners of property from developing their property.What else does this bill do? It strengthens public consultation. Do you know what that means? That means that people who have no interest in your property are able to tell you what to do with it and come along and submit and obstruct and that means fewer houses get built. That's going to be historically the great failing of this Government: that it promised so much on—I would say it won an election on—housing and then it gave us KiwiBuild.If this Government was serious it would be reforming the Resource Management Act and making it about property rights. Do you know why it would do that? Well another good reason is that one of the reasons there's so much opposition to development is that people whose property is actually affected often have no say. So I see people in Central Auckland who find that they're able to have property seven stories high up against their single-story home in their back yard right up against their back fence. That's OK under a Resource Management Act that says nothing about people's rights of peaceful enjoyment of their property. But at the same time someone that lives in another suburb can come along and tell you that you can't develop your property even if your neighbours are quite happy with it. That's what this bill should be alleviating. In the Part 2 principles sections sections 5 6 and 7 it should be saying this bill exists so that people have the peaceful enjoyment of their property. You can't damage the environment in that regime because to damage other people's property environmentally would be forbidden. You can't impinge on your neighbour's enjoyment of their property under that regime but you can develop your property so long as you're not harming anyone else. That's the regime that should be debated tonight but tragically it is not. The result of that is when the historians come around and say "What sort of Government was this?" they'll say it was a Government that came into office promising to deliver on housing and failed epically because it wasn't prepared to do the real work and reform the Resource Management Act properly even when it had the mandate. Instead it gave us KiwiBuild; instead it let down the poorest New Zealanders whose biggest cost is housing; and instead it lost the moral authority to govern and be respected for its success because it couldn't deal with the most important issue on its books. I have to oppose this bill because frankly it's pathetic."