Sage EugenieHon EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. Thank you. I'm pleased to speak on the Resource Management (Enabling Housing Supply and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. The provisions in this bill will influence what sorts of homes people live in and the shape texture and pattern of urban neighbourhoods for decades. It's a very important bill.The Green Party is supporting the bill because we strongly support intensification of housing development and urban renewal. It can help us tackle our housing crisis. It can avoid urban sprawl and the loss of productive growing land. It can help reduce transport emissions and protect the climate. So the question is not whether to intensify; it's how to do it well. There was wide support for the intent of the bill in submissions for that intention of improving housing choice and affordability and encouraging intensification in our cities to ensure that everyone has a warm dry place to call home. There's also widespread recognition in the submissions that we need to shift away from the single-housing typology to a much more diverse mix of housing types: apartments terrace houses flats and several-storey units. But there were significant concerns with the medium-density residential standards and the way the bill cuts across the efforts of councils to implement the National Policy Statement on Urban Development. So I'd like to talk about some of the improvements through what was a very constructive and collaborative select committee process—and I thank members for their kind comments—and also highlight some areas where the Green Party thinks further changes are needed and where we will be tabling our Supplementary Order Papers at the committee stage.So first of all some comments about the whole process. It's very challenging to compress a normal six-month process for a bill into six weeks especially with Tāmaki-makau-rau in the middle of an alert level 3 lockdown. Fast law is much less likely to be good law because of the reduced time for the public to consider it to consider any unanticipated consequences and any implementation issues. There's been no consideration here for example on who will benefit from the uplift in land values that goes with increased development rights and this was why we supported the ACT motion to remit the bill back to the select committee to allow further time to consider it. It was troubling that there was no prior engagement with local authorities iwi and hapū and stakeholders before the bill was introduced. The regulatory impact statement was finished in May 2021 but there was seemingly a cone of silence around the bill. I don't know whether that was driven by Ministers or by agencies but where you fail to have engagement with key stakeholders there's often poor problem definition and a limited range of potential responses. The Green Party's got a really strong commitment to local democracy and appropriate decision-making.We need a much more active and engaged partnership between central government and local government and iwi and hapū in terms of the way our cities and towns develop the way infrastructure develops the investment in that and public transport—all these things that shape our urban environments. That partnership between central government and local government was missing from the bill and it is the poorer for that.Councils presented their submissions very professionally but I did detect quite considerable frustration about the lack of consultation and about how their knowledge and expertise about their communities and their places had not been recognised in the drafting of the bill and their concerns too about the way in which allowing pepper-pot infill development right across virtually all residential zones in our largest cities cut across their work to actively implement the National Policy Statement on Urban Development. We had councils involved in Future Proof Waikato—Hamilton City Council Tainui Waipā and Waikato district councils—all saying that they've been really working with central government agencies like Waka Kotahi to plan future transport development and this bill just sliced across that.Despite having only three weeks to make submissions I like others acknowledge the huge expertise and effort that councils the urban design community iwi community organisations individual renters residents' associations and many others went to to make more than a thousand submissions and there were 183 that appeared before us in hearings. Public submissions and select committee consideration always improves legislation and it certainly did with this bill. But despite that the bill still has gaps. There are still potentially implementation issues and because it has these medium-density residential standards and these are the sort of detail that one would expect normally in the national planning standards or in regulations—the national environmental standards—the Green Party recommends that new Schedule 3A be taken out of the bill and gazetted as regulations so that if there are issues that arise they can be more easily amended than primary legislation can through this House.The bill should be welcomed by those who consider that existing plan policies and rules prevent innovation in housing form and the construction of more intensive flats units terraced houses and apartments. It will succeed if it leads to more of those sorts of housing options which provide a good daily living environment for their inhabitants are close to public transport routes are close to services such as shops and schools and make our suburbs more interesting places to live. It will fail if its permissive approach to infill development blights neighbourhoods with poorly designed apartments and units which provide their inhabitants with cramped living spaces and damp living conditions overwhelm their neighbours and replace trees with expanses of concrete. Housing developers can design and build houses faster; it'll be the question of whether with no need for a resource consent they do that and focus on maximising their commercial return or they respect residents and neighbourhoods and provide really good quality buildings.So the Green Party acknowledges the many changes that have been made through select committee and other speakers have noted those—the increase in outdoor space the increase in outlook the requirement that buildings interact more with the street through the requirement for 20 percent of the frontage to be windows—but we are doing urban density with urgency with the bill being passed potentially before Christmas. We are not doing anything to protect nature in our cities with any urgency. There has already been wholesale loss of urban trees in centres like Auckland continuing with the loss of a century-old pōhutukawa just last week in Khyber Pass. This bill does nothing to protect urban trees. We have a 20 percent site being required to be landscaped in grass or plants. The Green Party would like to see that increased to 35 percent to provide a stronger incentive to retain urban trees because all suburbs should be leafy suburbs and should have the benefits that trees provide in terms of shade reducing the urban heat island effect taking up stormwater and helping reduce peak stormwater flows and improving air quality and buffering from noise.We also need some other changes to the density standards. This bill is all about allowing infill development of three buildings of up to three stories as a permitted activity with no need for a resource consent right across residential zones. But as someone who emailed me yesterday said there are several thousand lots in Grey Lynn for example where some hope this bill will have some impact: Almost all those sections are long skinny rectangles exactly 40 feet or 12.2 metres wide. They are not suitable for three-storey development lot by lot." We need incentives in this bill to encourage developers to amalgamate single lots so that we can have larger-scale perimeter block development which allows areas to be set aside for green space which has the buildings interacting much more with the street and which provides the high quality of urban density that we see in many cities in Europe. But the bill doesn't provide the standards to encourage developers to amalgamate the lots to do that and the Green Party has a Supplementary Order Paper that will do that.One of the other major issues is in relation to private plan changes. Yes the medium-density residential standards will apply as an underlying zoning but we believe there needs to be a requirement for an upzoning to be of this medium density so that we don't get the cookie cutter single-storey suburban sprawl that we're seeing in Christchurch in areas like Prebbleton Lincoln and Rolleston with those private plan changes that don't promote more dense living. So that is a major failing in the bill and one again that we would like to see National and Labour consider in our SOP. Thank you."