Genter Julie AnneHon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Minister for Women): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker tēnā koutou e Te Whare. The Green Party is supporting this bill because we know how important good urban development is to our communities and to the future of our climate. Here in New Zealand we've had quite fragmented provision of housing. It's been expensive it's led to incredibly expensive transport costs and sometimes in the big rush and focus to create affordable housing it's possible to lose sight of the fact that if you create a lot of cheap housing on the fringe with higher infrastructure costs and higher transport costs a need for households to own more vehicles you end up losing all of the benefits of the more affordable housing with more expensive transport. What good urban design delivers is complete neighbourhoods with affordable energy-efficient housing; amenities like shops schools parks places where people can work; excellent public transport; safe walking and cycling links so that you can stay within the community but you can also get to other parts of the city. That was simply not going to happen without significant change and the ability for the Government to step in and provide greater leadership. Because what we have been seeing is a lot of subdivision out on the fringes full of houses nowhere near shops nowhere near schools no parks absolutely car dependent and that was going to continue to happen. Of course the cost of that to the economy to people to the planet is enormous.Here with good urban design and good urban development we have a fantastic opportunity to create the kind of communities that New Zealanders actually long for and they just haven't been provided those opportunities. I know so many young people who want the opportunity to live in a walkable neighbourhood. They don't need a big stand-alone house with a yard if there are nearby parks and green spaces. In fact what's far more important to many young people is that proximity to their friends proximity to where they work so they can spend less time commuting and more time doing the things that they really care about.So we in the Greens of course did have some concerns because any time you centralise power like this there is the potential for the needs and desires and aspirations of the community to be lost. So some of the improvements that the Green Party made and that we're very very proud of are ensuring that there will still be an absolute focus on Te Tiriti and the rights of tangata whenua as partners and kaitiaki.We also ensured that in the purpose and principles of the bill good urban design was a major part of it. I mean there is simply no point in us amalgamating and giving these powers to a Government agency if it's not going to be tasked with delivering the public good. I think one of the reasons we haven't had the benefits of integrated development is because when you have private developers the incentives are to maximise their profit and that's fine but not if it's at the expense of the things that we actually care about. So we want to get the incentives right so that private developers are delivering what the community wants and needs; that we're doing it in a way that protects our water our soil our climate our air for future generations; and just to enhance the very wellbeing of how we live our lives right now. It's an absolute no-brainer. It's something that I think most New Zealanders could absolutely agree with.So having good urban design and bottom lines for protecting our environment—because once we start to chip away chip away with more development that slowly takes away the green belts around our urban areas slowly might chip away at our incredibly valuable agricultural soils we could have found ourselves in the situation of not having access to the very things that we love about New Zealand and that we want in our communities.I see this legislation as a positive move forward that will enable us to deliver quality affordable housing with the types of smart transport connections that are affordable frequent good for the climate. I really really do hope that when we start to see the types of projects that are enabled by this there will be an excellent opportunity for community to really be involved and to be there at the beginning of the structure planning so that we can start to see the types of neighbourhoods that all New Zealanders would love to live in. Tēnā koutou.