Oh, right. OK, well, we’ll see about that. Now, we’re still yet to hear from—the Minister talked about, yes, it’s still unknown as to how many consents we’d be talking about here. The fundamental concern, of course, is that every consent does provide an opportunity for consent holders to undertake an activity—an activity that has been assessed and an activity that has been considered with conditions to be above board. What this is seeking to do is to basically roll over a significant number of consents, regardless of any change in the operating environment, regardless of any consideration to what might be in the immediate vicinity. As we know, in any sort of environmental aspect, there will be changes, and for consents that have been in place for a number of years, on face value you might say, “Oh, well, an extra two years or three years or four years or whatever it might be is a small percentage of the lifetime of the actual consent.” But the receiving environment or the operating environment could be quite different. That very much is a concern.
It is a light bill, but it has significant implications. This is the fundamental issue that we have a concern around in terms of the House or the Government utilising the House’s time and urgency to, effectively, ram these changes through. Again, it is a transitional measure, but why was the Government not prepared to have things in place? They’ve got two other bills that have already been introduced. They knew this change was coming. Why is it that the changes that this bill is seeking to, effectively, fast track was not foreshadowed as part of the Government’s consideration in that space?
The only information that we have in front of us, apart from the bill, is the departmental disclosure statement (DDS). There is no regulatory impact statement, and I’ve covered that, so I don’t intend to go through it. But there are a number of noes that are contained within the DDS, but there is actually one yes, and the yes pertains to retrospectivity and whether this bill affects the rights, freedoms, or imposes obligations retrospectively. It says yes, it does. Any moment that there is an imposition, whether it be retrospective or not, on the ability for someone to exercise their rights or their freedoms, does raise some questions. That’s exactly why the Resource Management Act system, in terms of these consents that have been approved and will be rolled over, would have been, at the time, considered alongside the scope of different aspects, whether it’s in a regional or a district plan, around what could or couldn’t be done. That is a legitimate point that needs to be brought into this consideration as well.
The other thing of interest is that this—and the reason why I’m relying on the DDS is because, as my colleague the Hon Priyanka Radhakrishnan had said, at this point in the process, we would have actually been talking about what the community had to say about this, what the views were of consent holders about what this impact would mean for them, if anything. Now, they might have been quite happy with that. There might be others that think, actually, no, there was a chance to pursue this quite differently. Because we don’t have that in front of the Parliament or in front of the House, we can really only rely on what it is that Government members and the Minister himself have actually provided in terms of contributions, and they have been, to be fair, fairly sparse up to this point. There is an opportunity for them to change that and to change tack to provide a bit more information and context rather than saying, “Well, we’re here to roll this over and commend the bill.” Our job is to ensure that the legislation passing through this Parliament is consistent with some of the obligations and concerns that would be expressed by the communities that we all represent.
When I look at page 6 of the DDS, there is a very clear indication around the consistency with the Government’s Treaty of Waitangi obligations. Of interest, it says that extending consents without engaging Māori raises Treaty implications, as the Crown is generally obliged to consult on proposals affecting Māori interest. Automatically, this is a Government that is not prepared to lend any weight in that particular space. However, it says, to address this, the Minister intends to inform Māori groups about the proposal.
Well, how rude is that? Not going to engage—going to inform Māori groups about the proposal. Well, he’ll be doing it within the next 24 hours, perhaps, as this has been introduced, first reading, currently on second reading. Who knows when this will end? I just think this is just poor process. It is poor process when their own departmental disclosure statement indicates that, actually, don’t worry, we’ll get around that. The Minister will address it by informing Māori groups. I think that is a sham in terms of the way in which the partnership with Māori is being reflected in the context of this particular bill.
The other sort of aspect here is the fact that this is not being subject to the normal scrutiny, which means that it leaves the Parliament without a very clear or firm or deep understanding of the evidence that exists around the costs that this change would lead to. Now, it might be that the costs that would be borne—and the Minister believes that there are no costs associated with this, except the costs of the time of the Parliament. Maybe we should rack that up to see how much that actually costs—how much the Government is prepared to spend our taxpayers’ money on urgency, because it’s a bit of a common theme at the moment. But where those costs actually fall—and with that, I think there will be some unintended consequences.
There needs to be analysis as to what this would cost and who would actually carry those costs. If it’s actually going to be that these consents are going to be rolled over for a period of time, I’m sure that everyone expects that there would still be a monitoring opportunity for councils and territorial authorities to still undertake, or is it the Government’s expectation that they’re going to roll over these consents, and only for rolled-over consents, those consents and the operations would not be subject to any ongoing monitoring or evaluation? If there is monitoring and evaluation, there will be a cost associated with that. If it’s expected that local government as a sector—and therefore councils and therefore households, through rates—are going to bear those costs, then that is something that the Government is quite happy to do. Now, that might be the position, but simply saying that there are no costs associated with this change I think is a little bit far from the bullseye in terms of where things need to land.
The lack of consultation with iwi, with local government, with stakeholders in the environmental and in the development space—I mean, this would be an opportunity for them to feed into this process. Alongside the fact that these are significant changes in terms of time, we are talking about thousands upon thousands of consents that would be an authorisation to continue activities, with conditions or without, where there has been no analysis as to what the future implications might be. If a receiving environment has changed to the extent where, actually, the nature of that activity is significantly compromised or the impact or the effect on the environment of the receiving environment is going to be so different, surely that should be subject to some form of assessment. What this bill is doing is basically preventing that opportunity by doing a blanket rollover opportunity.
I support the comments that have been expressed by the Hon Priyanka Radhakrishnan in saying that there are other options here. The transition period could be for a shorter period of time. There could be some other ways in which transition could be given effect to. I think that these transitional provisions could be dealt with in a way where councils would be able to engage with consent holders or they’d be able to approach the renewal of consents, effectively, on a case-by-case basis. There might be, actually, a suite of consents that would fall within some form of identifying feature where that was not so much of an issue. Simply saying, “Well, we’re just going to roll all of them over”, without any consideration as to changes in the environment or operations over that period of time, I think is a very, very dangerous thing. It’s not to say that it shouldn’t happen in terms of the extension of a consent, because I think we accept that there needs to be some form of transitional phasing, but this sort of blanket approach that the Government seems to want to take under urgency is one that I think is dangerous and not the way to go.
Again, I think it’s difficult given that we haven’t had an opportunity to engage with the public over this. I don’t think many members in this House will think that this is a good use of urgency, given this has been well signalled by the Government. We will continue to oppose it.