Simpson ScottHon SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): Well it was kind of sad really to listen to the member for Christchurch Central trying to fill up 10 minutes—and he ran out of material at about minute two—talking about this bill. There was if ever there was the real problem with this Labour-led Government in terms of its approach to issues of this sort relating to the Resource Management Act (RMA). It was the voice and the face of urban academic elites who actually are disconnected from the reality of what it is that is really at the heart of the issues relating to the Resource Management Act and its amendments.Now I listened carefully to the Minister for the Environment during his introductory speech and frankly it was incomprehensible. It was just a series of eco-babble statements that actually didn't say much and that really goes to the central foundations of what the problem is with this piece of legislation that's been introduced today.It's a piece of legislation that is just further more complicated tinkering with an RMA that has been tinkered with for nearly 30 years—in fact over 30 years now. We now have an Act that is about 800 pages long—incomprehensible to laypeople practically incomprehensible to those that practise in the area of the law relating to RMA matters and this bill does nothing but add further complication and confusion to an already complicated area.So on this side of the House we made some great changes in the last Parliament. Every single one of them—for the nine years that the Labour Party were in Opposition every single attempt to work on sensible reform to the RMA was opposed by that party and now what they want to do is actually just unravel some of the really good hard-fought-for changes that were made. What we know is that on this side of the House—in fact it's conceded by the Minister himself who in Opposition thought he had all the answers thought he had all the solutions and has been able to after two years in Government produce nothing other than a tinkering piece of legislation that all it does is unravel not all but just some of the matters that he didn't like when he was in Opposition. Then what of his major substantive reform? Well actually nothing—actually nothing because the coalition cannot get agreement cannot get a sense of cohesive direction about what should happen in terms of resource planning legislation and they can't get it. So what happened? They've kicked it to a committee. The Environment Committee is going to report back just before the election next year at a time when there won't need to be a consensus around the coalition because they know they can't get it. So after two years in Government nine years in Opposition—no real answers other than to have a go at some of the very sensible changes that we made. I want to just focus on a couple of pieces of change that will occur in this bill if it progresses through the House to eventually become law. One of them was that we changed the RMA—in our piece of legislation back in 2017—to provide for a situation where if a council had through its district plan through its own formal processes designated land to be zoned for residential development then there should be no further appeals on the principle of whether that land should be available for residential development or not. Now that seems to me to be a pretty simple obvious sort of thing but this piece of legislation undoes that and it takes it back to a situation where district plans where land has been zoned for residential development will now be able to be appealed and contested. That will only add cost and incredible time delays to prevent and slow down the further building of much-needed residential development around the countryside. I can't understand where the logic of that is but it seems to me that this is a bill that is designed not on principle or trying to improve quality of decision making but actually in terms of trying to score petty political points.Another area is in the area of water. This is a Government that has yet to learn that it needs to deal with farmers rather than deal to farmers. That's what they've been doing not just in this legislation but in lots of pieces of legislation. So let's just cite one example: they're going to double the infringement fines for stock wandering through waterways and they're going to double it from the current $1000 fine to $2000. But there is no comparative fine for people who dump rubbish for instance litter into urban waterways. Now it was only a few months ago that this same Government voted down my very good member's bill that would have sought to increase the infringement fines for littering to $1000. They said that was disproportionately high. They said that $1000 for littering was disproportionately high but oh no it's quite all right to fine farmers $2000 for allowing a cattle beast to wander through a piece of waterway. So we oppose this legislation and we'll be looking forward to picking it to pieces at select committee.