Parker DavidHon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): Thank you Madam Chair. There are a lot of questions raised in that contribution and I'll try to address them. Can I thank the member Simon Court for the opening few sentences of that contribution where he said to the committee that councils in our largest-growing cities have often found it hard to zone for intensity. And that's a simple truth; it's a self-evident truth actually. And it's not the only reason why we've got such high land price inflation but it is a contributing factor to it.This bill applies to the tier 1 councils—there's five of them—and if there's the occasional tier 2 council that needs it we can bring them in and tier 3 councils can also try and volunteer in if they want to and some have said they want to.The tier 1 councils are Auckland Greater Hamilton Greater Tauranga Greater Wellington and Greater Christchurch. In total the territorial authorities that cover those areas there's 12 of them and when it came to bringing this to the attention of each of those territorial authorities the Hon Megan Woods as housing Minister and I as environment Minister split it in two and phoned six of the mayors each. We then touched based with each other after we'd done it. Both of us had four mayors who were very very positive about this because they recognise they need help to break through in what they need to do for their citizens and these mayors want to do the right things for their citizens. They want them to have housing choices; they don't want rents to go too high they don't want house prices to go to high and they know to use the language of the leader of the ACT Party that it is actually the marginal cost of new supply that drives price. It is the marginal cost of the new house including its land and its building that drives the cost obviously of the new house but it also drives the market for second-hand houses.Therefore the increment to supply that you can bring about by enabling the land that's already within a city to be used more intensively—really the efficiency that you have from land use and infrastructure use drives through to the marginal cost of the new supply which drives through to the price of all housing. These mayors get that; they got that. And so four out of the six that I phoned were very very positive one was neutral and one was a bit anti. And the experience of Minister Woods was the same. She had four that were effusive really one was sitting on the fence and there was one that wasn't so keen.In respect of some of the other issues that were raised this isn't the sole answer to the housing crisis and there are other things in responding to the housing crisis that are going well. Housebuilding in Auckland has doubled from 10000 in 2017 to 19000 this year. It's close to a doubling of housing and it's very interesting that more than two-thirds of those new houses are actually these new style of houses where they're effectively semi-detached or attached three-storey houses. So that gives us confidence that we're on the right track.In respect of the private plan changes point: planning rules by and large in respect of zoning rules are the primary preserve of councils. That's what they're elected to do which is a point that has been made by amongst others the ACT Party in this debate. So we think it is appropriate that they're the people to whom this is primarily delivered through. But of course the zoning rules that they allow in these cities apply for the benefit of all of the private developers and the vast majority of development enabled by those changes to the planning rules will be by those private developers.In respect of the process delays that Simon Court mentioned in terms of how long it can take a plan to proceed at the moment I agree that that is unacceptable. This will actually assist in that because we're actually going to permit three-storey types of dwellings as a building type through virtually all of these cities. There are some exceptions that we've previously talked about.In terms of the process actually you couldn't do it any faster than we're actually legislating it for this but it does show the tension between some of the traditional processes which take too long. In the face of a crisis you do have to act quickly and we think this is appropriate.