Franks Stephen: Resource Management and Electricity Legislation Amendment Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Franks Stephen: Resource Management and Electricity Legislation Amendment Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:627;Page:22330] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT) 
: 
 As other speakers have said this bill and the time that Parliament is spending on it have given an opportunity to try to fix something that many many New Zealanders have been begging to have fixed for a long time. It has also been an opportunity to fix something that a huge number of New Zealanders—probably the vast majority of New Zealanders—do not even know is making their lives a misery. They are New Zealanders like the Grey Power members who are busy demanding that the Government renationalise power generation. They are people like those sitting in traffic jams right now as traffic starts to build up in Auckland and wondering why it is so hard to get what seem to them to be common-sense requirements to break the logjam in Auckland roading. 
This bill or what it should have been reforming is affecting the people who are trying to meet their water rates in places where there are water rates. It is affecting people who are struggling and wondering how they can ever buy a house on their income when land prices have gone to a multiple of three or four times the average wage. 
This bill does not touch on the basic problem that the Resource Management Act created. The Act’s intention may have been well meaning but for years people have clung to the idea that all that was wrong with it was its silly administrators—that all that was needed to do was to tell the bozos in local authorities that they should not misuse its provisions. I have heard it said so often that there is nothing wrong with the Resource Management Act except that it is badly run. 
But the Resource Management Act is fatally flawed and this bill simply eliminates a small part of the difficulty for Government in relation to infrastructure. It eliminates some of the worst irritants particularly for those major developers who will be able to afford to attract the attention needed to get their developments called in under this legislation but it leaves irritants in place where the Act most needs reform—that is for the everyday developers who are probably individuals maybe once or twice in their lifetimes needing to make some change in their land use. 
This bill should have been absolutely panned by every Maori member of this Parliament because it simply confirms that the Government regards article 2 of the treaty as an empty nonsense. The bill continues to entice Maori into using their iwi consultation rights when the very existence of those rights is a denial of the undisturbed use possession and power to control the use and disposition of land that article 2 promised them. Instead of Maori being here to ask for the legislation to be repealed and to ask for the property rights they were promised to be restored they have been suborned into being part of the process of attacking everyone else’s property rights. Maori have been gulled into being part of the process by which busybodies and newly-minted planners impose their ideas of how property should be used on the people who actually wear the costs. 
If this bill had been doing what it should have been doing we would have seen house prices falling as sections became available without the imposition of years and years of delay and years of complaint from people who want the status quo. The absolutely natural tendency of humans is to want the status quo all around them but also to have the freedom to do what they wish on their own property. The whole idea of property rights promised in the treaty was that within one’s boundaries one could do what one wished even if the authorities did not like one’s disturbance of the status quo. 
What New Zealand has done with the Resource Management Act is to re-communalise property decisions and we are paying an enormous price for it. We are paying for it with our risks of electricity shortage and we are paying for it in our roading paralysis. My executive secretary 35 years ago was buying the land to complete the Auckland roading network. He looks at it now and sees that the roads are still not built. That is not just because of political paralysis; it is because of the absolute despair that people feel when they know they will have to go through this palaver. 
I heard from someone working in the authority responsible for fixing up that death-dealing road between Hamilton and Auckland that the authority did not dare build a new bridge because officials could not stand the thought of the consultation processes they would have to go through in order to build it. It was considered to be far better to build wings on the existing bridge—but less safe less long-lasting with less capacity with millions more in costs and with more disruption while being built—than to go through the hassle of having to apply to build a new bridge which would have gone alongside the old bridge. The Government should be absolutely ashamed that it has not moved to make that sort of outcome impossible. 
Sure Supplementary Order Paper 389 is now doing the sensible thing of involving iwi consultation—at the risk of mysterious taniwha being discovered—and restricting it to the planning stage. But of course plans can be changed—and need to be changed frequently—so we will not see an end to that little irritant in the relationship between Maori and Pakeha. 
Unfortunately this bill is a huge missed opportunity. There are sensible things in it but what has been missed out is of much greater importance so ACT will be obliged to vote against this part of the bill in order to mark what has been lost.