Brooking RachelRACHEL BROOKING (Labour): Thank you Mr Speaker. Thank you for the opportunity to speak about one of my favourite topics on this positive moot of working together and partnership and that is relating to resource management. I want to discuss today in this debate both the working together that we need in terms of infrastructure and town planning and other planning and also with mana whenua. So there's been a problem in terms of different parties involved and how we develop our towns and our cities—haven't always talked together. This has been a long-term problem so we need to align all of these silos that have occurred. We've had infrastructure and town planning not really talking to each other for a long time and ending with a housing problem.How this works—and I think it's important to spend a little bit of time on this relationship between infrastructure and housing—is that it's no good to just say we need more houses; we just need to build more houses on a piece of land somewhere. The piece of land somewhere needs to have infrastructure around it and sometimes that infrastructure can take a long time and the funders of that infrastructure aren't necessarily talking to the town planners. That infrastructure is more than roads and pipes although of course those are very important. We need to think of things like schools and hospitals. We need to think about stormwater. There's an awful lot going in on the infrastructure piece. Also when we're thinking about infrastructure and houses it's important not to just think that when we talk about this we're meaning greenfield land. If you want to make an area that's already existing denser there are consequences for the infrastructure. If you put in a whole lot of extra high-rise apartments for instance then that is a lot more people flushing the toilets. So you might need bigger pipes. You might need another school. There's a lot going on there.There's also been difficulties in our resource management system with mana whenua not being particularly involved. I'll talk about that in a minute. And then of course we've had central and local government not always talking to each other and sometimes councils missing opportunities to work together as well.There have been some mechanisms—longstanding mechanisms—in the Resource Management Act to enable some of what hasn't happened enough and that is that working together. So in section 33 of the Resource Management Act there's an ability for a council to transfer its powers to say another council or an iwi authority. But unfortunately perhaps in this last year or two there may have been one or two examples of a section 33 transfer but certainly nothing in the almost 30 years prior to that.Then also just introduced I have to note by the last National-led Government sections in the Resource Management Act that allow for mana whakahono a rohe. These are important documents that enable councils and iwi authorities and tangata whenua to work out how they're going to work together. So there's a lot to do in this space and I'm really excited and privileged to be part of a Government that's going to make long-term big fundamental decisions but also some more short-term decisions to try and resolve some of the problems of siloed approaches and agencies not working together enough. So in the short term we've heard Minister Woods talk recently about the $3.8 billion Housing Acceleration Fund. This is a massive amount of money and it is to fund that infrastructure that I was talking about that will enable the houses that we need. Also in the last term of Government the National Policy Statement on Urban Development was updated to really try and get some more intense development in our existing urban centres. But in the long term there's a lot to do with resource management reform and one of the key pieces of that will be the strategic planning legislation. So this will take a 30-year view of both infrastructure and plans—so something that you can put on a map—and it's really important that the asset owners the infrastructure owners are involved in making those long-term plans. So that is central government and local government and mana whenua as decision makers. So working in partnership creates opportunities to do better.