Court SimonSIMON COURT (ACT): Thank you Mr Chair. I want to come to another matter. We're actually circling back to the provisions relating to partly completed proposed plans. So while we understand that the Minister is not prepared to move on the medium-density residential standards even though it appears that there is no updated cost-benefit analysis for the claims that he has made today that was asked for at the Environment Committee this week—and we still haven't seen the analysis although the results of the analysis have been reported in the media as being only a reduction of 3 to 4 percent from the Government's initial proposal of a 6-metre high wall. Now it's a 4-metre high wall 1 metre from the boundary.But there is another matter which we've covered to some extent but which is still important and needs to be exposed and that is that for private plan changes. We're talking about developers like the Templeton Group which have through one of the companies they acquired—Todd Property—developed Stonefields in Auckland a former quarry site into one of the most exquisite master-planned developments a combination of apartment living terraced housing and single homes. It's a balance of intensification of lifestyles and opportunities for people to—at the time that the development was first offered off the plans—buy affordable homes close to transportation networks close to amenities. That's a site that was at one point tasked with being Auckland's future regional landfill in the 1990s that instead was repurposed to an extremely high-quality master-planned development.So it shows you that if we trust the private sector to actually deliver homes and communities they will deliver much better outcomes than a regional landfill in an old quarry pit. They will deliver some of the best master-planned developments anywhere in the world. The evidence from that group the Templeton Group from the Adare Co. in Hamilton from Beachlands South consortium—which also includes the New Zealand Superannuation Fund as a large part of the consortium an organisation which while it can't speak for itself because it is essentially not able to because it's a Government entity. But what they have asked for is for their private plan change proposals which set out the most exquisite community developments: intensity apartments terraced housing around retail and community centres and of course single homes around the margins. As they pointed out those single homes actually—the single-home zones which essentially comply with the standards of the mixed housing suburban they're quite large homes and additional dwellings on these properties they fit in with the natural environment in those parts of these master-planned sites which are more sensitive which are closer to streams and waterways closer to existing remnant bush areas for example where the developers and iwi and their ecology advisers all agree it would be highly inappropriate to locate buildings at the scale and size that the medium-density residential standard proposes.That is why I have today tabled a further Supplementary Order Paper proposing to replace Part 4 in Schedule 3 with a new Part 4. If the Minister intends that local councils should be forced to include the medium-density residential standard in their plan changes well what private developers are asking for particularly those ones who have delivered the most exquisite high-quality and desirable developments New Zealand's ever seen in the past 30 years who have a pipeline of $8 billion worth of work some of them and billions of dollars' worth of others—what they are asking for is just a blanket exemption. They've said the years and years of investment in technical investigations in ecology reports finding out when the bats come and go from the remnant bush on their development sites—they don't want all of that to be wasted when they have to redesign and remodel their developments to accept these three-storey three-unit boxes on what are currently designed for single-home sites.The planning consultants who spoke to the committee also pointed out that when they're designing these developments what they're designed for the infrastructure accommodates much higher intensity and density at the centre around the town centres along transport corridors—kind of sounds like urban planning to me. That's what they do and they do it really well. They've said that the pipes are much larger. The waste-water pump stations are more frequent and have to be larger. The stormwater detention ponds and all those other environmental mitigations are designed for density at the centre and low density at the margins of these developments because that's what good urban design practice has evolved into over the past 50 or so years since World War II since New Zealanders returning from World War II had the opportunity to buy a piece of quarter-acre paradise. Then those New Zealanders and the new Zealanders moved to cities like Auckland in the 1990s who wanted to live in more dense communities subdivided existing eighth of acres or quarter acres and put an extra house or a couple of houses on the back.Actually all of that can be delivered in a far more planned and high-quality way through accepting that there is a good urban design set of principles and that the master planners delivering projects like at Peacocke in Hamilton East the Adare Co. and the Beachland South developers in Beachlands Maraetai where they propose that their high intensity their higher densities are much closer to the ferry terminal to public transport and to nearby schools. They don't consider it's appropriate to have much higher densities much further from the town centres. They understood having studied urban design and planning for decades that actually you want to build up closer to where you've got social services community services transportation and where your bulk infrastructure is located. The reason they're asking for an exemption is not just because they're confident that they can do it better than the Government which by any analysis whether it's a cost-benefit analysis that we haven't seen yet or that they could—what they're asking for is an exemption to be allowed to continue to proceed with the high-quality developments that are in train.As I pointed out earlier this morning it takes a long time and a significant cost and investment of resources and technical expertise even to get to the pre-lodgment stage with private plan changes. What people outside this House might know as a change of zoning right from say rural land or a bit of rural and a bit of residential: combine all of those titles and land types into one larger block of land design a new community around the existing environment the remnant bush the streams and waterways that are there and actually deliver some of the best quality of life that New Zealanders everywhere would aspire to. This bill would extinguish those developments—actually extinguish them. This is from a Government which keeps talking about wellbeing and which has all kinds of wellbeing measures although we never actually see the measurement. They don't actually want to report any of that wellbeing. But we know they believe in wellbeing or they certainly did once.That is why the ACT Party proposes in this Supplementary Order Paper labelled A—and it's on the Table. It's very simple. It says that if the Minister wants to impose this flawed medium-density residential standard on local councils well that's up to him to negotiate. But what the ACT Party is seeking is actually just completely exempt private plan changes master-planned developments—the private sector—from this flawed approach to urban planning and design. New Zealanders do aspire to live in high-quality homes in wonderful communities where their wellbeing is put first. So does the ACT Party.