Court SimonSIMON COURT (ACT): Good morning Mr Chair and good morning Minister—and thank you officials for joining us in the Chamber again. I want to come now to Subpart 7 Resource consents because I feel we're not going to get much further in questions to the Minister on the preceding clauses. Resource consents; Clause 75AAA "How activities are categorised". Now this cuts to the chase of what the purpose of the resource management reforms are: how we define the way people use their land and the activities they propose that people do on that land. Are they to be "Permitted" activities which is provided for in the Resource Management Act—very few of those. Are they to be "Anticipated" activities which the bill describes as "Activities that require a resource consent which the authority may grant (with or without conditions) or decline in accordance with the relevant provisions of the national planning framework or plan (whichever applies) and the limited discretion conferred by those provisions." May these activities be "Discretionary"—"Activities that require a resource consent which the consent authority may grant (with or without conditions) or decline in accordance with the relevant provisions of the national planning framework or plan (whichever applies)." And of course there are "Prohibited" activities: "No person is entitled to apply for a resource consent for the activity and no consent authority has power to grant a consent for the activity." So I would like to explore Minister with you—and potentially seeking advice from officials—as to how this might work in practice. Because what we understand with the problem statement identified by ACT and National and Labour over many years is that the Resource Management Act made it too hard to get consents for things that we do every day that we know how to do well: whether they're land developments that involve excavation earthworks land clearing building things near watercourses that require diverting watercourses—potentially disturbing places like wetlands and having to reconstruct wetlands in order to manage our stormwater in an environmentally friendly way. So Minister when we think about permitted activities we come to clause 75AAB "How to decide which activity category applies". Now this is absolutely vital if we're actually going to get "New Zealand Inc." to go faster if we're going to make it easier for people to develop their land and to be able to propose an investment to a commercial board for example. Imagine you want to build a distribution centre; a warehouse; if you want to stand up a manufacturing operation—you want to know that when you make that commercial proposal to your board you can give some certainty about the time it will take to go through the regulatory planning process. ACT has identified that process as a barrier to building new road infrastructure for example which is why on Sunday we released a policy which actually sets out how we could build more roads using tolling. But one of the barriers to that is the lack of regulatory certainty for investors who wish to pay for New Zealanders to have better roads and are happy to do so and recover the cost over time—the regulatory uncertainty of seeking consents for that is a barrier that needs to be overcome. So Minister clause 75AAB: How do we decide whether an activity is permitted anticipated discretionary or prohibited? Because I note when it comes to prohibited activities it wasn't that long ago that the Minister and the Ministry for the Environment released a national policy statement for freshwater management—or was it a national environmental standard for freshwater? Forgive me: there's so many policies rules regulations and red tape when it comes to doing things in New Zealand with your land particularly if you happen to be near a watercourse which it turns out most of New Zealand is—which prohibited either accidentally or on purpose we weren't quite sure—activities in a wetland. And the definition of that wetland that calls activities like quarries and land development to be prohibited on that land included somehow—what was interpreted to be—three bulrushes in the middle of a paddock because bulrushes are a species of reeds which indicate that the ground is damp most of the year round and so that somehow got captured in the definition of wetlands. So Minister what I'm interested in is and with your permission Mr Chair I'll just continue to expand on the question—[Time expired]"