Parliamentary debates: Wednesday, 10 December 2025

Good morning. When the House rose last night, we were on the third reading of the Resource Management (Duration of Consents) Amendment Bill.

Mōrena, and a holly, jolly merry Christmas morning we have this morning, although we are in yesterday in this urgency, and so it makes it a little bit weird. I wish I could say I was feeling the Christmas spirit today—I really wish I could—but the unfortunate thing is that we’re starting this long day of urgency with nothing but a lump of democratic override, delayed environmental protections, and more pollution for Kiwis for Christmas.

I think the really disappointing thing that we heard throughout the committee stage was this constant denial and downplaying of the actual impacts of this bill. We heard from Minister Bishop that “It’s just a bill. It’s only five clauses. It’s not that complicated.”, and yet it was so clear throughout that the understanding of the very real implications is just completely absent. We don’t know the actual implications when it comes to exactly how many consents, exactly what the environmental impacts will be of this delay. There was a real incoherence and total lack of understanding within that about our existing resource management system and the people and the resources that go into actually making it work. We haven’t seen that or heard that at all or an acknowledgement of that. I really want to take the time in the wrap-up of this third reading to acknowledge those people, particularly those council staff but also those fantastic landowners and farmers who know and understand the importance of environmental protections and are actually getting on with the job despite anything that this Government is doing.

We also heard from Minister Bishop that we’re, effectively, doing to consents what we’ve already done with plans through the plan stop, relieving everyone of the burden of going through the motions with a major overhaul looming. But what that Government is actually doing is leaving everyone else to continue to live with the burden of the impacts from the activities that happen in their communities, and a lot of these perhaps never should have been consented in the first place, or were finally getting to the position where they would be renewed, where actual rules and regulations that exist within our district and our regional and our unitary plans would actually have some effect. That’s not just for a bureaucratic exercise; that’s actually because we know we’re losing biodiversity and we continue to lose it.

We know we’re losing these last remaining dry land pockets of minute indigenous vegetation and kōwhai. These are the unseen impacts of this bill, and communities will now have to live with those impacts for another five or maybe six years, or longer.

What we find extremely disappointing with this Government’s pushing through this bill under urgency is the power that is taken away from communities that, in many instances—and particularly with iwi and hapū—were finally about to be able to have a say, be able to contribute, whether that be through their own voice or through the voice of the democratically landed plans that actually wrote those rules and regulations that would have had impact.

Instead, we have this complete and utter overreach from this Government, and it actually says everything it needs to say about the Government. They seemingly have zero understanding of a duty of care that New Zealanders actually expect from Government—no matter their stripes—of actually protecting te taiao, our environment, and the value of local voice. The Government waxes lyrical about localism and then takes all the power away from those local communities.

Come on, say something positive.

What’s really damaging—and I’m hearing from the Government that they want to hear something positive. Well, I think the positive thing that’s going to come of this is that the communities across Aotearoa are seeing exactly what this Government is about in terms of destruction of te taiao, continued exploitation, and they’re going to take the opportunity that the next year brings to vote this Government out.

That’s the positive that I’m taking from this, because no matter what this Government does, for people, for farmers and for landowners who actually understand the world, the environment, and their markets—they know that where we’re going and where we’re ultimately evolving as humanity on this planet is towards increased environmental protection and connection and understanding, not less. This is a rallying call for everyone out there who rejects what this Government are doing to get involved. That’s the positive that I want to take from today.

They also say that this will give certainty to consent holders, councils, and communities while the Resource Management Act (RMA) is being replaced, and that is bang on because it will certainly be the status quo continuing. It means certainty for those many communities across our country—places like Waimate, like Selwyn, like Kāeo up in the North—that their water supply will continue to be undrinkable because of pollution, primarily from intensive agriculture, waste-water systems, stormwater systems. It’s all one bundle. It will mean certainty this summer for New Zealanders who go out and think they can safely swim in their rivers and lakes and they either get sick or—if they’re on to it enough to actually check—find that their local river, lake, or beach is actually unswimmable, and it will certainly mean certainty for the declining trends that we know exist, with more species at risk of extinction, more communities struggling to pay for clean drinking water, and more valuable soil being washed off our hillsides.

Ultimately, this bill and the next steps that it provides for in this replacement of the RMA based on private property rights will give New Zealanders certainty that soon enough, what someone wants to do with the land that they have the influence to make decisions on, whether they’re the overpaid CEO of large milk-processing companies, a mining executive or industrial farmer, or simply a neighbour—those private property rights will be more important than the activity that might have and the degradation and the exploitation that it will have on the communities and people downstream or in proximity to them. That is absolutely not acceptable.

If farming operators want to intensively farm, the nutrient pollution that leaches into the groundwater doesn’t just remain there; it impacts everyone around them and it pollutes the groundwater. We know this. We know that if someone strips the native forest on the hills of their property, the soil that washes down in the storms doesn’t stop at the property boundary. It carries on downstream. It carries on to communities, with sometimes devastating impacts. We know that if landowners plant pine trees on steep land and clear-fell them in one harvest, the logs and the soil don’t respect property rights; they impact all of us.

This bill is just one of the many Government’s short-sighted, ill-thought-out, destructive attacks on even the most basic protections that we have remaining. It can be really hard within this to remember that a better future is possible, but we’re staying focused, and New Zealand should know that it is.

Well, some good news: the previous speaker, Lan Pham, mentioned about whether people can swim. I just did a quick check—it was 28 degrees on the farm yesterday, I was told, and I had a quick check of the Land, Air, Water Aotearoa site, and, yep, the daughters are free to go swimming in the river, it’s all good, and it looked like the rest of the Manawatū was as well. So it’s not all doom and gloom.

In terms of this bill, it’s a very simple bill. We’ve got a fundamental change coming up with the resource management system. We are completely changing it on its head. We are moving to a new system. It makes absolute sense that we take the current consent holders and transition them through into this new system. I don’t know whether the members have seen the various accounts of how much it is costing people to get a simple consent renewal, but it’s tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars, to go through this process—all for what? It’s not making the environment any better; it’s making lawyers richer, but it ain’t doing much for the environment.

So this just makes complete and utter sense. The member also mentioned about the fantastic farmers that are out there. Well, these are the people I’ve been meeting. These are the people that are facing these huge costs. If you don’t believe me, feel free to send me an email and I’ll give you the names and addresses—you can go and visit them yourselves and see the absolute wrenching process they’ve had to go through, with the absolute farms they’re running, just to try and get a consent renewal to keep on doing exactly what they’ve been doing, and, in many cases, getting awards for it, getting A grade reports. This bill just makes absolute sense, and I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to support the Resource Management (Duration of Consents) Amendment Bill. In the first reading, the Hon Mark Patterson mentioned what a big week this is for New Zealand’s future, and it is a big week, and this is a part of that legislation that will make such a difference going into 2026. It is a turning point in this environmental legislation in renewing the law as we go forward. It’s also taking a blowtorch to the red and green tape that we see that is holding up business and development within the country.

As we heard from the last speaker, it is a simple bill in the fact that it’s a two-year extension; it gives to 31 December 2027 till the Resource Management Act (RMA) replacement legislation comes in. What that does is give some certainty. It also helps around costs, so people aren’t spending unforeseeable amounts of costs on the old, broken RMA. Both sides of this House get up constantly and say how the RMA 1991 is broken, so why would we want to force people to go through that system if it’s a broken system when we’ve got something better just on the horizon? That is the reason we give this extension here today.

The other thing we hear too often from the Opposition, from the other side of the House, is that everyone in New Zealand that’s got a resource consent for some reason is a villain. They’re not; they are genuine people trying to get this economy moving and trying to grow the economy. This side of the House is getting behind those businesses and supporting them. That side of the House is being unhelpful. They’re adding cost and uncertainty by making them go through a broken system. They actually sound like the bureaucracy we’re trying to get rid of. That’s the reason they’ll still be in Opposition in 2026, going into 2027. This Opposition doesn’t care. We do care on this side of the House. We will grow the economy. This is a good piece of legislation, and I commend it to the House.

Tēnā koe, e te Pika. You know, the hardest thing is not just having this whole debate under urgency but is also reconciling the myth plus the legend and the whole lot of Disney kōrero that’s been going on in the last 12 hours.

What it is is that the biggest discussion here—the fundamental principle of what’s going on—is that there is an assumption that everyone that has a consent is best practising; that they have best-practising environmental aspects to their business, to their thinking, to their culture, to their way of being. But that is not the case for many. For many, this bill has interrupted those who have survived muru raupatu and were expecting to have consents concluding and justice served. That is not what is happening here.

In many situations, we have people who have been absolute great citizens of Aotearoa, who have honoured Te Tiriti, who have honoured settlements, and awa, the Waikato awa, who are concerned with the extraction that consents are doing. In many situations, these are great partnerships and great examples for Aotearoa, to show those iwi, those hapū, those leaders of community, community Māori, that have gone and worked with their councils, that have gone and agreed on what can be the next movement within these consents, but they’re no longer going to end.

That is the fundamental here: not that there are some good farmers, not that there are some good-practising companies; but the fact that the law was meant to protect us all. By extending this, that has been taken off every other citizen who has absolute right to be able to conclude some poor-practising companies with really bad consents. That is what’s at stake here.

I think we need to go back and remind our whānau out there what consents look like. What this Government has said is that those who are not best-practising in polluting discharges, those who are not best-practising in industrial emissions, those who are not best-practising in stormwater runoffs, in land use, in coastal permits, in marine and coastal structures, those who are not best-practising in how they have applied their way into infrastructure projects are now given an extension. That’s the debate, and we should all be applauding those who are best-practising; I certainly do, and there are some great farming practices. We’re all shareholders in Parininihi ki Waitōtara—great farming practices, great land use—but not everyone is in that situation.

That’s where this bill has desperately let down those communities. They have spent years, generations, protecting and expecting justice, and this Government—in the interests, which we continuously hear, of economic development—has told those iwi, those hapū, those communities to go and forget what we had said we would do, which is treat all of Aotearoa equally, all of Aotearoa well, and with justice. And that is not what this bill’s doing. You can sit there and say it’s complex—well, the Government can sit there and say it’s complex—but it actually isn’t.

Why is everything that has to be about justice and economic development involve removing Treaty relationships, involve removing the goodness and goodwill of iwi, involve taking out hapū? Why? Why can’t we sit here and be a Government and be a country and be a Parliament that actually sits here and says, “You’re right, we honour Te Tiriti, we honour the great partnerships and the leadership that’s happening out in the regions, that’s happening out locally.”? No, why is it that everything that involves economic development, everything that involves cleaning things out in this Government, also means moving and sidelining Māori? Why?

That is the problem here: this Government has told all those waiting for generations, across consecutive Governments, that “You do not matter, your consent issues do not matter, your pollution issues do not matter; the fact that your wahi tapu and your ability to want to develop does not matter. But, by goodness, Māori, you matter when we want economic solutions, you matter when we want to make sure we have great partnerships with your dollars. But your principles and your values are thrown and sidelined by this Government.”

That’s what this bill is doing and only this Government will be able to confront the wrath of iwi and many who are unnecessarily having to spend their time in courts, undoing the damage that this has done. This was about honouring, and this Government has honoured and sat there and agreed to every Treaty settlement that has come through this House—every Treaty settlement—but in one swipe, under urgency, without even allowing them the dignity of a kōrero or a conversation, you have decided to sideline their interests, sideline their intergenerational fights, sideline the fact that they have rights to be able to respect this taiao, and you have sidelined every other New Zealander that cares about the future of their mokopuna. Shame on this Government. Kia ora rā.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I wish to remind the House and the member Jamie Arbuckle that it was his Government that reinstated the Resource Management Act (RMA) at the beginning of this term after the previous Government had created a whole new piece of environmental legislation, the Natural and Built Environment Act. What was announced yesterday, which is the reason for this piece of legislation before us today, was a radical inversion of the principle and the purpose of our primary legislative structure around the environment, which is the protection of the environment. This Government has now created a situation where public officials will be spending the best part of six years rewriting environmental law because of the time spent by the previous Government and the time spent by this Government. How does that give certainty to the public or to industry? Minister Hoggard said, just now in his speech, that the new RMA completely turns it on its head. It does—it does—because it says that private capital should be the primary focus of our environmental regulatory system, not the environment.

This bill before us, which extends the consents, has had, like so many things that come to this House under this Government, exceedingly little evaluation and scrutiny. There is no accompanying regulatory impact statement. The Ministry for Regulation has not exempted the proposal. The urgency with which this legislation was prepared did not allow time for a regulatory impact statement to be developed. Several thousand consents have recently expired or are likely to expire next year, based on the limited data available—well, we don’t have exact data. The urgent time frames for preparing this legislation have constrained the ability to undertake a broader analysis of the magnitude of the costs and the benefits—this is all in the departmental disclosure statement—and the cost to the environment has certainly not been evaluated. This Government fundamentally does not care about that cost. It is imposing on us new, radically right-wing property rights above the commons, above the public good, above the founding principle on which our nation is based, Te Tiriti o Waitangi. It is imposing a new form of—actually, Mr Bishop, in his responses to questions last night used a term, “anarcho-libertarianism”. In fact, the correct term for it is anarcho-capitalism, whereby you place private property at the centre of all considerations, and you enforce the rights of private property.

What’s the problem with that? I’ll tell you what the big problem with it is: the commons don’t belong to anybody. The atmosphere doesn’t belong to anybody. From the mountains to the sea, the rivers, the lakes, the aquifers, the oceans—they’re not the possession of anybody. How can you protect them through upholding private capital and property rights? You simply can’t. The only thing you can do through that is allow the greater destruction and exploitation of them. If you’ve got the loot, you’ve got the right to pollute. If you say that private property, which is capital, is a basis for a right, then the simple fact is that, if you’ve got more money, you’ve got more rights. When Mr Bishop gives the example of somebody putting a garage on the front of their house, that makes it sound like it’s not actually about giving extraordinary extra rights to major corporations in this country—to say that if I’m going to tell Fonterra they can’t put so many nitrates into our rivers, I had better compensate them for it. I had better compensate them for the regulator and the legislator doing their duty—which is protecting the commons from those who would destroy it—for the good of this generation and future generations. That is what environmental law should be based on. This extension is just a pathway to Ozymandian hubris.

Look, the third reading of this bill—it’s been great to traverse everything over the last wee while. I think what is very important to say here is that there is nothing more local than individuals in a community getting jobs done, doing things that are very important for them. I think that what has been said opposite is an insult to the council planners, consent planners, that have put a huge deal of work into what’s been done in the first place. This is making sure that every single one—and I said this last night—has certainty to keep going over the next two years, while we go through the upcoming process. It is important, and I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Quite a few things to traverse in the third reading of the Resource Management (Duration of Consents) Amendment Bill today, and I want to make mention of some of the comments that members opposite have made, particularly Jamie Arbuckle, who said—proclaimed—that those of us on this side who are speaking in opposition to this bill hold a view that those who hold resource consents are villains, and that is absolute nonsense. There is nothing that is further from the truth, and I will lay out, in my contribution to the third reading of this bill, why that is so.

Firstly, I will make the point, though, about the process that we’ve debated this bill under. It’s been under urgency—all stages urgency. While this may be a transitional bill, it provides, according to Government members, some certainty for those who hold resource consent. But there was actually no need, firstly, for this bill at all, if the Government had got their act together and done a better job with the resource management reform that they campaigned on. Secondly, I still don’t understand—although we’ve gone through pretty much all stages of this bill, including a committee of the whole House stage of this bill—why the secrecy for this bill. Is it just that the Government couldn’t get their act in order? Did they not foresee that this was going to happen? I mean, the bill was introduced to the House very—well, a very short time frame before we actually debated this bill for the first time, to the point that when we read the bill and we clicked on the link to the departmental disclosure statement (DDS), the link was broken, and we couldn’t actually get the DDS till we were in this House and we picked it up off the table.

I mean, why this level of secrecy? We didn’t know what the first bill was that they were going to introduce under urgency, and it was this one—a transitional bill that, apparently, just provides some certainty for resource consent holders. Did they not see that this was coming? To my other point that I sort of laid out at the start, that there is actually no need for this bill at all: we spent a fair bit of time and we understand the need for faster consenting processes. We understood the fact that the Resource Management Act (RMA) wasn’t working in terms of consenting or protections for the environment; in fact, we repealed it, and we replaced the RMA with two bills, which were the Natural and Built Environment Act and the Spatial Planning Act.

Now, this Government took office in 2023, and one of the first things they did was to repeal, in December 2023, those two bills. They have now taken two years to come up with two bills of their own, which, to an extent, mirror the legislation that Labour in Government brought into play, that we had worked on over a considerable number of years. The main difference between their two bills and the ones that we introduced to replace the Resource Management Act is the emphasis on property rights, and that is the bit that is going to be problematic. But, you know, members can judge—members of the public can judge—whether it warranted taking two years to repeal something and to replace it with legislation that is purely ideologically driven by that side of the House.

Now, if they hadn’t taken all that time to replace those two bills, they wouldn’t have needed a transition bill, which is what we are debating under all-stages urgency in this House today. What is the problem with all-stages urgency? Firstly, the lack of analysis. It is just bad lawmaking, and it is becoming a trend of this Government to push through legislation—

Did you never do that? Did Labour never do that?

Members opposite heckle, “Oh, Labour did it, too.”—but not as much as this Government is doing. Secondly, you do it when there’s an absolute need to do it. That is why urgency is allowed in this House—not to push through things because a Government is shambolic and couldn’t get their act in order, which is what we are seeing now. So it’s bad lawmaking to keep pushing through bills that circumvent proper scrutiny and don’t allow public consultation or public input here. It’s clearly stated quite clearly in the departmental disclosure statement—once we got our hands on that—that there is no regulatory impact statement (RIS) because “The urgency with which this legislation was prepared did not allow time for a RIS to be developed.”

Also, under the section around the extent of impact analysis that is available, it clearly states here that “Several thousand consents have recently expired or are likely to expire next year, based on the limited data available.” That, the Minister did lay out during the committee of the whole House stage: that that information is just not available, apparently. But it goes on to say that the analysis around the size of the potential costs and benefits of this legislation: no analysis around that. Again, it says here, quite clearly, that it’s because of “the urgent timeframes for preparing this legislation [that] have constrained the ability to undertake a broader analysis of the magnitude of costs and benefits.”, with regard to this piece of legislation.

I want to also lay out comments that have been made by environmental NGOs, most notably Forest & Bird. Given that all of their voices were shut out of this process because there was no select committee stage to this—not even a short one, which the Government could have could have done—their concerns are around the blanket consent extensions that this bill provides for. It’s predicated on a few different things: one, of course, the environmental risk that it could pose. When consents are extended without proper environmental assessments, it could pose a serious risk to biodiversity, to marine biodiversity, to water quality, and taonga species.

The other thing that it does is that it circumvents community and iwi or hapū input as well. Blanket extensions without thorough re-consenting or local review will bypass meaningful public input into this, and that undermines our democratic rights as a whole.

Finally, what it also does when you don’t have a review process is you lock in outdated conditions as well. Things move on, you know, things change—

That’s right—stuck in time.

This Government is, indeed, stuck in time because science advances and progresses; environmental conditions change. Climate impacts also mean that there will be, potentially, an impact on the environment, and if you have a review process for these resource consents baked in, it allows you to take those changes into account and then decide whether a consent should be reviewed or not.

Forest & Bird also laid out some options for this Government, which I was hoping to traverse in the committee of the whole House stage but, unfortunately, I didn’t get a call, and so I’ll lay them out here—

It’s because you weren’t here.

What this Government could have chosen to do is to apply a risk-based review when it comes to consents. They could have chosen to enable low-risk consents to be progressed very quickly. They could have even allowed for higher-risk consent to be accelerated, but to bake in a review process with an allowance for community input there as well. They could have chosen to provide shorter extensions—a six-year extension seems incredibly long. Given new consents can be issued from mid-2026, they could have, actually, picked a shorter time frame, and, basically, what the Minister said during committee of the whole House stage was, “Oh, well, you know, we kind of had to pick a time frame, and that’s it.” They could have also ensured that Treaty obligations were met. Instead of just informing Treaty partners, they could have consulted with Treaty partners and not, therefore, potentially breached their Treaty obligations.

There are a number of things that this Government could have done better, but, unfortunately, they don’t seem to be able to get their matters in hand. They could have foreseen that this was coming. They could have just stuck with the two bills that Labour worked on—that was, actually, essentially, where they’re getting to as well, because we did recognise the need for faster consents. However, we on the side of the House also prioritise protecting the environment. This Government doesn’t seem to feel the need to do that. We’ve seen numerous examples of how they continue to wage a war on the environment. This seems to be the next step.

They’ve framed it as something that is transitional, something that is really “nothing to see here”, but they could have used this opportunity to do things better, and they chose not to. For all of those reasons that I’ve laid out, we do not support this bill.

Point of order, Mr Speaker.

Catherine—point of order—

Arena Williams. Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. I just want to draw your attention to the comment of Ryan Hamilton. He said during the speech of the conservation spokesperson of the Labour Party that she was not here. His exact quote was “Because you weren’t here.” That is untrue and misleading. The reason why she didn’t get a call was because the person in the chair at the time took a closure motion, and I’d like him to apologise.

Sorry, could you run that by me again.

No problem. It’s prohibited under the Standing Orders to comment on whether someone is in the Chamber or not and to say something which is untrue, whether that’s in a speech or in a heckle. During the speech of my colleague, the Hon Priyanca Radhakrishnan, Ryan Hamilton called out “Because you weren’t here.”, in response to her comment which was along the lines of “I didn’t get a call in the committee stage and so I will lay my argument out here.” That is untrue and it is unbecoming of a parliamentarian to comment in that way, and I’m asking you to ask him to withdraw and apologise.

All right. Mr Hamilton, that is actually correct. So I won’t ask you to withdraw and apologise. I’ll put that as a warning broadly that we don’t comment on people not being in the House, but I don’t think it reached the threshold of withdraw and apologise.

Look, I’d like to give the Opposition a little wake-up call. When you run a business, you need certainty. When you export apples to the world, when you export red meat to the world, you need certainty. This bill is about giving certainty to those consent holders, to those business owners so they can create jobs and so they can grow our economy. I commend this bill to the House.

Five-minute split call.

I’d suggest to that previous speaker, Catherine Wedd, that she wakes up and comes into the real world. There is not much certainty, and those people who survive will be the ones who adapt to the changing circumstances internationally. This is a desperate bill, rushed through the House under urgency, and I’d suggest that it will be shown in history to be faulty. That’s what usually happens.

What we have here is rhetoric overtaking reality. We have a piece of legislation being passed through the House to deal with about possibly 2,500 to 7,000—no one knows, because there was no regulatory impact statement done; no idea of what is the issue here that is at stake—of 200,000 consents being managed by councils across the nation. This Parliament often passes legislation to deal with a very small minority of consent holders or people who break the law. This is the case now. But be careful what you ask for: the Resource Management Act was an Act passed by the National Government. It’s been amended, it’s been chopped and changed, mainly added to, and all would agree that it’s not perfect. But the rhetoric that we have from the people in the House here: blowtorch to red and green tape; turning it on its head. This is what we hear from the coalition partners.

Well, go to the World Bank and ask: what is the reality for New Zealand businesses in this country? What are the hurdles to operating—the so-called certainty that the previous speaker referred to? Well, actually, we’ve been judged number one year after year to operate business internationally. It’s easier in this country than just about every other country in the world. Now, can I say that of course some of the regulations are not perfect, and we should continue to improve them. But if you get into the rhetoric that we hear from the other side of the House, they’re going to throw it all out. We are already a laughing stock internationally for turning our back on our international obligations around climate change and around biodiversity. This will further add to the declining reputation that our ancestors have built up.

The vast majority, as I said before, of regulation and legislation that we pass here is for the minority of people. Deregulation is rhetoric that we’ve heard from that side of the House time and time again. They, in Government, deregulated the building industry. We ended up with leaky homes. They, in Government, deregulated health and safety. We ended up with Pike River and too many people killed at work.

They think they’re going to deregulate the resource management process.

Back to the bill.

I’ll tell you what’s going to happen: we will have a trail of lawyers up and down this country working out whose property rights are paramount—whose property rights are more important—when one versus the other, when the council versus the private property owner—[Interruption] Oh, they’re asking how this is relevant to the bill. What this bill is doing is rolling over consents on the basis that it will offer certainty—you’re kidding yourselves; you’re absolutely kidding yourselves. This will not offer certainty, at all. What is certain is that we all collectively have some challenges moving forward. Indeed, unless we address those, the rhetoric coming from that side of the House will give people false hope that they can get on and do what they like without any regard for environmental impact or the neighbour’s property rights. Your individual rights as a property owner will be paramount. That’s what we have heard from speakers on that side of the House, time and time again.

Let’s be honest as a Parliament: let’s say that the original Resource Management Act, passed by the National Government, amended many times and now under new proposals, is designed to balance property rights versus environmental responsibility. We in Labour support that approach, but the idea that property rights will roll right through environmental responsibility is ridiculous. It will undermine our international reputation, and it should not be supported.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. The previous speaker, Damien O’Connor, talked about reality. Well, I’d like to give the Opposition a lesson in reality. The reality is simply this: I want to commend the Clark family, David and Jayne, for having been brave enough to stand up and highlight the challenges that the previous regime was delivering for them—costing thousands of dollars and creating huge uncertainty for their family. For that reason, I commend this bill to the House.

Mr Speaker, thank you for the opportunity to talk in this final reading of the Resource Management (Duration of Consents) Amendment Bill, a bill that was introduced yesterday to the House. Here we are, it will soon be law in mere minutes—that is the way our legislature has been designed. Many people, much smarter than me, have commented on it, but it does seem relevant to reflect on it at this point in the year, when we’re at the end of the year, where the Government has used urgency over and over again. It is less common for all-stages urgency to progress like this, and in a bill which itself removes public participation rights. There is both the removal of public participation rights at the primary legislative stage and then the ability of anyone who wants to comment on the resource consent extensions is also curtailed—there’s some poetry in that.

Let me turn to this bill and what it does. It was actually really helpful to have, and I want to thank the Minister responsible for RMA Reform, engagement in a committee stage that did bring much of that to light. When the Opposition finds on the Table the only information that is provided to us is in a regulatory impact statement that is two pages long and generally answers all questions with a simple “No”, we are reliant on the Minister to talk through some of the policy choices that he has made, and his intentions behind those choices. None of those has been echoed in the speeches by Government members in the first, second, or third readings, and so it’s useful for us to continue to record them here.

If the policy intention of the Minister is to be taken at face value, it’s about getting the balance right; it’s not about continuing consents that have existed for two years, because that is the fix in and of itself. The idea that two-year extensions on consents have no impact isn’t, in fact, what the Minister was contending at all—that a two-year extension is a valuable property right bestowed on these people simply because they have stacked up first is something that he was trying to achieve—but it’s important that we know what we’re doing here, because that has an impact financially on the neighbours, on the people down the street, on the people downriver, on the people in a community, if it is an air discharge.

I want to say to the electorate MPs on the other side who are frustrated with Opposition MPs raising these questions and pointing these things out: if any of you are electorate MPs who have been involved with communities who have brought to you petitions about the local dump discharging its odours next to the school, if any of you have been an electorate MP who has talked to a business owner who is worried about the business that is opening up down the street with a water take or a discharge, this is that. This is about those business owners, those neighbours, those people who come to you and they say genuinely, “I’m trying to do absolutely everything right under the law, and I’m really worried about the person down the road who I think is taking too much—in the 1980s was granted these rights, and it doesn’t fit with the character of the neighbourhood any more. I want to live here undisturbed. I want my kids to be able to go to school down the road without air pollution in the community because now this community has grown and there are more people here.” This is that, right? We know that—that this is an extension of those rights for two years, without any visibility.

That mum who sat in your office and raised with you this issue of the kids going to school next to the air discharge at the plant which was built in the 1970s—this is about her, and this is the legislative answer to her which says, “You have no say.” You know that, right? And when she comes to you, and you say, as her electorate MP, “I would love to help you, this is a legitimate concern. Good on you for going around your neighbours and getting a petition of 20 people. This is engaging with democracy. Good on you. As your electorate MP, that is my role, I will take this to Parliament. I don’t necessarily agree with you, but I will raise it with Ministers.”, this is that. This is “No” to that mum. This is “No” to those community groups that want to go to council and have a say on the water takes. This is “No” to the business owner downstream from those people who have water takes that were granted in the 1980s and that are no longer appropriate, because the environmental science has moved on and we know more about their uses. This bill does that, and there are trade-offs to be made here, but shouting down concerns that are being raised here about public participation is saying “No” to those people.

The choice that has been made here, from a policy perspective, is about whether the balance is right, and that comes down to what resource consents are for. The resource consents that have a time on them are not land consents. We’re not talking about the owners of most blocks of land, because those consents don’t end. The consents that do end, Andy Foster, are water takes, they’re irrigation takes, they’re air discharges—they’re the ones which do have a community impact, and the reason they have a timing on them is because people want to have a say on those. These are the ones we are talking about. When we’re talking about the extensions for farmers, we are talking about the ones where there are legitimate community concerns, where we want to engage in a community dialogue about those, so there is a trade-off to be made here.

It was useful, in the committee stage, to tease out some of these issues—issues like, when you make planning rules changes in Auckland, you have a complicated web of different planning changes; they’re called PC “number number”. In the case that occurred in November last year, council adopted some new rules that were essentially given effect by planning changes that we made in this House. All of a sudden, developers who were wanting to build three-storey houses, because they were relying on the MDRS—the medium density residential standards rules—couldn’t build those any more. We haven’t solved that problem for them, and this bill could have done that—I put that to the Minister. He is working through that, but this is another missed opportunity, and a reason why a rushed legislative process where people can’t come along and have their say, they can’t come to their local MP and say, “Hey, I’m a mum and dad developer. Because I’ve had this land for 10 years, it’s now the right time in the market for me. I can get a builder cheaply, you know, and the husband can do some of it himself. We’re really excited to build this three-bedroom townhouse.”—

It’s the next bill, Arena.

No, it’s this bill, Ryan Hamilton. Perhaps you could have been listening in the committee stage, which you were clearly in the entire time. The issue here is that when those developers weren’t able to develop their land, they—this is not solving it for them, and this is not solving it for everyone who has issues with the timing involved in introducing this kind of reform. It’s only dealing with those sorts of consents like water discharges, like air issues, that have public participation in them, and it’s just a blanket extension which creates an extended property right with no protections for community.

It is the least to say that this bill also absolutely limits the right of Māori participation in the extension of these, that we have moved on so far from the 1980s, and that should be progress we can all be proud of as New Zealanders, where the ability of iwi and hapū to make their views heard about the use of water, about the use of air, has changed, and that is generally—I think everyone in this House would agree that that is a good thing. They are not able to do that. In some cases, they have been waiting 25 years, 30 years, 35 years to be able to have their say about these water takes which were granted many years ago, before they were settled, before they had an office, before they were able to collectivise and have a say in the environmental planning regime. They will not be able to do that now, not just for two years but, effectively, until 2031.

That was an issue that we played out at the committee stage, we got to the bottom of. It was useful to really understand what this Government is doing here, that those rights will be curtailed, that there has not been consultation with iwi, with hapū, with affected Māori landowners at all, before the introduction of this bill. One can only assume that the quick introduction, the lack of consultation with the Opposition, and the way that now iwi, it is said, will be informed of this rather than consulted is because the Government feared the litigation risk because of this. Why is there litigation risk? It’s because iwi want to have a say, they want to be at the table when it comes to matters of water and air, because they want to be alongside Government and local government and make those decisions as kaitiaki of their whenua. That’s something we should all be able to agree with, but that is not what’s happening here.

Finally, I want to reflect on the difference between making a decision like this under all-stages urgency and having it go to select committee. We won’t know how this affects people or who it affects or how many it affects until this law takes effect, but we all should. All of us who are electorate MPs who have water takes in our area, who have pollution discharges into our air—when you look up and you’re an Auckland MP and you see the smoke in the columns going up, you should know that that has been extended, and you should find out what your community thinks, because that’s your job and that’s the decision we have made today.

Can I just say touché, Ms Williams.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Look, I won’t take too long. We were criticised for being rushed with this process and taking two years to build the RMA. In that process, we’ve created this hybrid bill to, I guess, grandfather or piggyback or support those that are caught in between the legislation process; to carry them over and give them some security. We’ve heard all the scaremongering from the other side about Treaty and rushed and all this stuff. But this is pragmatic. New Zealand is watching, and I’m proud to be part of this once-in-a-generation change. I commend this bill to the House.

I move that the Emergency Management Bill (No 2) be now read a first time. I nominate the Governance and Administration Committee to consider the bill.

Was there a legislative statement there, Mr Mitchell?

The bill will replace the Civil Defence—

Mr Mitchell, was there a legislative statement?

I present the legislative statement, Mr Speaker.

That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

This bill will replace the Civil Defence Emergency Management Act 2002 (CDEM) and make a number of changes which respond to the Government inquiry into the response—

Sorry, Mr Mitchell, you’re now required to move the bill, sorry—just to—

I move, That the Emergency Management Bill (No 2) be now read a first time. I nominate the Governance and Administration Committee to consider the bill.

The bill will replace the Civil Defence Emergency Management Act 2002 with a number of changes which respond to the Government inquiry into the response to the North Island severe weather events of early 2023. I want to acknowledge the work done by colleagues across Parliament who also recognise the need to strengthen our emergency management system.

There are two areas that I feel are really important for us as a Parliament to work together on: one is national security and the other is emergency management. Firstly, I want to acknowledge the outstanding National Emergency Management (NEMA) team, right from the leadership through to our policy team, who have worked very long hours burning the midnight oil to work on this bill and bring an outstanding bill to the House; right through to our people that deploy, that provide advice, that work on education, and man our information centre 24 hours a day, keeping us updated with information as it unfolds around our country. We are a country that will continue to be hit with weather events.

I want to acknowledge the mayors, the chief executives, and our civil defence controllers, and all the stakeholders who have been engaged with us on the development of this bill. I want to acknowledge them and their hard work and their engagement. I want to acknowledge Camilla Belich and Francisco Hernandez for the work that they have done with us on this bill, in a very bipartisan way. Camilla, I want to make a special mention to you: not only has she worked very closely with me on this bill; she is on the ground at several of the events that I’ve been to that have been local states of emergency. I appreciate your engagement because I think that in terms of emergency management, we all need to be working together on that, and I know that’s appreciated when you’re on the ground, also.

I want to acknowledge the previous Ministers: the Hon Kieran McAnulty provided me with a seamless handover/takeover when I took over from him; Kiri Allan, who continues to work in emergency management through the Iwi Chairs Forum, and has worked very well with us; and Marama Royal. I want to acknowledge them. The Hon Peeni Henare, as the previous Minister; Kris Faafoi, who I’ve done a lot of work with, who now has a leadership role with our insurance companies and has done a lot of work with me; Nathan Guy; the Rt Hon Gerry Brownlee. Can I acknowledge the Rt Hon Gerry Brownlee, who has given me a lot of extremely useful advice, especially around recovery. I don’t know if there’s another Minister that has been in this House, in our recent history, that has had to deal with and do the heavy lifting around recovery. I want to thank him and acknowledge his outstanding guidance advice for me in this role.

Finally, I want to acknowledge Nikki Kaye—and I’ll finish there—but I wanted to mention Nikki Kaye because I think the whole House would agree that you would not have found a more passionate Minister of Civil Defence than Nikki Kaye, and the astounding amount of work that she got through in the three years that she was Minister.

The previous emergency management Bill proposed a range of sensible changes that we’ve taken forward but it pre-dated the inquiry’s final report, so it didn’t go far enough to address lessons from Cyclone Gabrielle and the Auckland Anniversary floods. The frequency, complexity, and consequences of recent emergencies have highlighted the importance of updating the legislation to improve how we manage risks; prepare for, respond to, and recover from emergencies; and empower and support communities.

New Zealand’s approach to emergency management is based on three key principles: first, we need to pay attention to all hazards, natural, and man-made; second, we need an end-to-end approach to managing the risks from those hazards—that means taking action across the 4Rs of risk reduction, readiness, response, and recovery—and third, all parts of society have a role to play in emergency management. Risks should be managed by those who are best placed to manage them.

This was an intent of the CDEM Act, and this bill follows the same philosophy but the inquiry and other reviews have made it clear that New Zealand has not achieved what Parliament envisaged when the Act was passed in 2002. The inquiry, as well as submissions on the previous bill, informed our reform objectives and proposals which were publicly consulted on earlier this year. That consultation has led to over 20 substantive changes being made through this bill, in addition to a general overhaul to modernise the Act.

The majority of submitters agree to our reform objectives, which are to strengthen the role of the communities in iwi Māori emergency management; provide for clear responsibilities and accountabilities at the national, regional, and local levels; enable a higher minimum standard of emergency management; minimise disruption to essential services; and ensure agencies have the tools to do their jobs effectively when an emergency happens.

I’d like to touch on some of the most significant changes the bill will make to deliver on those objectives and make a real difference on the ground. To strengthen the role of communications and iwi Māori in emergency management, the bill provides membership roles for iwi Māori, rural communities, and the wider community on coordinating executive groups. These groups are currently made up of local authority chief executives and senior representatives from emergency services in each area. They are responsible for advising the local political level of emergency management. Having a seat at the table will give iwi Māori, rural communities, and the wider community a direct role in informing what their emergency management committee does to reduce risk, get ready for emergencies, and respond and recover when they happen.

The bill also requires an engagement with iwi Māori and the wider community, particularly those who may be disproportionately affected by emergencies, whether they have existing vulnerabilities or different needs that don’t suit a one-size-fits-all approach. Emergency management committees and the Director-General of Emergency Management will be required to identify these groups—such as disabled people, seniors, and our culturally and linguistically diverse communities—and engage with their representatives when developing regional and national emergency management plans.

The bill also provides for more clarity about roles and responsibilities at the national, regional, and local levels of emergency management, to ensure faster decisions are made by the right people. The need for role clarity has come up in the inquiry and other reviews, and I’ve seen it first hand at emergency events over the past two years. It is absolutely critical that responsibilities and accountabilities are clear. Any confusion about who is making decisions causes unacceptable delays during a response.

Local government has key roles in emergency management. The vast majority of emergencies play out at a local level, and other legislation gives local authorities many of the levers to manage hazard risks. Councils know their own communities best when an emergency cuts communication and knocks roads out of action. Local resources may be all that’s available to respond, for the first few hours. The bill retains committees of the councils in each region. Each exists to provide economies of scale and enable regional coordination of emergency management. However, it puts more emphasis on councils’ individual responsibilities by creating specific roles for regional emergency committees and their local authority members; making mayors primarily responsible for declaring states of local emergency and recovery transition periods within their own districts; and requiring every territorial authority to have a district controller and district recovery manager with a clear line of accountability to the council’s chief executive. Giving territorial authority chief executives an explicit mandate to coordinate resources provided by other agencies in the lead up to an emergency and over the long-term recovery is essential.

The bill also addresses current ambiguity around who is in charge during an emergency by formalising and clarifying the concept of lead agencies as the central government agencies responsible for responding to emergencies caused by specific hazards. Lead agencies will be required to keep the Director-General of Emergency Management informed of situations where there is or may be an imminent threat of an emergency. In turn, the bill places a duty on the director-general to inform the Minister about such situations. Timely and reliable information is a key part to determining whether a situation may meet the threshold for a response under the bill and provides a better chance of addressing the situation before it escalates.

Regional emergency management plans are key instruments for driving action across the 4Rs at the local government level that identify the hazards and risks to be managed by each emergency management committee, and set out the policies, projects, and other necessary measures to manage them. These measures could include things like identifying bylaw changes, setting requirements on each of the committees’ councils to build their response capability, or agreeing to progress joint risk reduction initiatives.

I wanted to finish my speech today in an acknowledgment to an outstanding NEMA manager in the Christchurch area, Rochelle Faimalo. Rochelle passed away peacefully on 13 August this year. Wife to Joe, mother to Azure, Zyon, Quest, and stepmom to Jeorgia. She typified the quality of the people, the qualities that our emergency management people right across the country bring to that role. I met her during the Port Hills fires where she played a critical leadership role. This will be the first Christmas that their kids don’t have their mum. She was 40 years old; she was a much-loved member of the NEMA team, and she was very passionate about this bill coming to the House, which she was briefing mayors on right up until June. So I wanted to acknowledge her, and I wanted to let the family know that we’re thinking of them during the Christmas break. Thank you.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I just want to acknowledge the contribution of the Minister for Emergency Management and Recovery and also echo our condolences to Rochelle’s family. I know that the work on the Port Hills fire was really exceptional, and, as the Minister and anyone who has worked in this area will know, the people who are involved in emergency management around New Zealand are really exceptional people. Often, it’s a career that they end up being in for most of their lives, and it’s not because of anything that they personally gain from it; it’s from, really, a feeling of service and contribution to New Zealand, and we’re very grateful to them, and it’s always sad to hear of one of our colleagues who has departed. So I want to acknowledge that family. I also want to acknowledge and reiterate the acknowledgment that the Minister made of people who have been involved in this bill.

This bill is something that has gone over a series of Governments, and that is the nature of emergency management. Emergency management is something that is exceptionally important to New Zealand and exceptionally important to our communities. We never know who’s going to be in Government when an emergency strikes and all that we can hope on either side of the House is that we can do everything that we can and that we have the best processes in place.

This is something that is a genuine era, I think, of bipartisanship. It is something that we on this side of the House, in the Labour Party, take very seriously and have done when we’ve been lucky enough to hold those ministerial portfolios as well, and I know that many of those former Ministers hold a lot of interest still in this portfolio because of the importance that it has to New Zealand and to their communities.

I want to acknowledge you, Minister, for your work here, as well, and also your team, especially Bailey in your office, who works very hard to make sure that we’re all aware across the House of emergencies when they happen. I think that that kind of approach is really what this bill is meant to legislate for. It’s much more of an all-of Government approach, rather than having little sectors working on their own. So this is an important bill, and it’s kind of the antithesis, really, of the previous bill we were discussing.

This bill has really had its genesis in changes that were seen to be needed in the 2002 Act. There’s a consensus, I think, from everyone that that piece of legislation is no longer fit for purpose any more in New Zealand and there have been so many reviews, and various Governments have looked into trying to amend this. I suppose the issue that we have is that we keep having emergencies and we keep realising that there are issues in our system. I think it’s important to acknowledge that we will never have a perfect emergency management system and we will never be able to do everything, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do everything that we can and that we shouldn’t learn every lesson that we can in order to be better prepared.

When Labour was in Government, we did introduce a bill, and we’re happy to see that a lot of the sensible, pragmatic suggestions that were in that bill have been carried through into this new piece of legislation, as well. The big thing that happened in between the introduction of that bill and now was the North Island weather events, which were significant events for New Zealand. I want to acknowledge the 15 people who lost their lives in those very sad events, including children. I think it couldn’t be more serious that we get this system right. Certainly, we will not stand in the way of making sure that these changes are implemented as soon as they can be, and so it’s timely to see this bill introduced.

We had a slightly different approach, it’s fair to say, at the select committee when we saw the report into the Government inquiry into the North Island weather events. We thought that maybe we could amend the existing bill and that that would be faster, but the Government took a different view. That’s their call. It’s not something we agreed with at the time, but I think, as you’ve heard through the Minister’s reflections, we tried to work very constructively with that decision, and as chair of the select committee where this bill will go, we will definitely be taking the scrutiny of this bill very seriously and making sure that we put forward the best possible bill to the House in order for this to be enacted, hopefully, as soon as possible.

I don’t think we will ever have a perfect piece of legislation, but we certainly must implement the lessons that we learnt from that Government inquiry. That Government inquiry included at least six separate reviews, and also several other studies into what was happening in our emergency management system. So it’s really imperative now that we do implement this.

This has been well-thought-through. We were talking about regulatory impact statements. This is the regulatory impact statement on this bill: it is extremely long, extremely thorough, and extremely well-thought-through. This has had a previous select committee process, on the last bill. It’s had an initial consultation process from when the roadmap was set up by this Government. It’s had significant amounts of submissions from the public already, and I understand it will go through a full select committee process, as well. So it will have the full democratic parliamentary process and all the tools we have in relation to looking at the quality of our legislation have been utilised. I want to commend the Government for that. It really should mean that, hopefully, there won’t be any barriers to this bill being passed and being legislated for.

I wanted to mention an important area which I think is reflected still in this bill, but is a bit of a difference from the previous bill brought in under the Labour Government, and that’s the role of iwi Māori in emergency management. We have seen it again and again, and one of the key findings from the Government inquiry into the North Island weather events was that every time there is an emergency situation in New Zealand, iwi Māori and marae—whether they are asked to or not; whether they are at the table or not—step up in emergency situations. They take care of the people. They house people. They feed people. They have been taking on this role for generations, and whatever the legislation says, that’s not going to change. The manaakitanga in emergencies that iwi Māori have is not going to change, and my colleague Cushla Tangaere-Manuel took me out to Tairāwhiti and I met some of those very people who took on that role during Cyclone Gabrielle.

So it’s really important that that is acknowledged. The current legislation does not acknowledge that at all. This legislation does have a seat for iwi Māori at the committee on emergency management group—the CDEM group. That is something that we very much support, and I should note that it’s not just one seat. It’s one or more seats, and so it depends on the differing area as to whether more people should be involved. There are also another couple of areas where iwi Māori can participate through being consulted, as well.

We had suggested a national Māori emergency management advisory group. That hasn’t been taken forward in this piece of legislation. From our perspective, that’s regrettable, but at the same time we see that there has been a concerted effort to improve the status quo, which is nothing at all at the moment, by the Government and the Minister. I want to acknowledge that and also the significant Treaty analysis that’s been involved in the regulatory impact statement, and the intention of recognising what was in the Government’s report into the North Island weather events and making sure that there is recognition for that key role that iwi Māori play in our emergencies in New Zealand and the fact that they have a right to have a seat at the table when decisions are made. So this bill is an improvement, and we do support that, so thank you to the Minister for taking that forward.

There are other things in this bill that are significant changes. There are changes to ministerial powers. There are changes in relation to information sharing. I should acknowledge as well that one of the benefits, although we didn’t support the bill being discharged at the time, has been that issues that we’ve seen in very recent events have been incorporated into this bill, and I think that is a benefit. One of those things is information sharing. There have been issues in recent events where information hasn’t been shared in a way that it could most usefully be shared in order to assist the emergency management response. So I think that is a very good change as well.

There are also, as the Minister said, changes around decision making. We know that there should be a really clear decision-making process in emergencies. That hasn’t been as clear as it should be under the current legislation. I think this legislation will improve that as well. So that is something that we definitely support.

The situation in emergency management in New Zealand is that we need to take seriously the fact that, as the Minister often says—and it’s recorded in the Government’s report, which this bill is really based on—we are the second most at-risk country in the world, and we are one of the developed countries with the most at-risk profile in the world. That means that we should be, in theory, the best in the world at emergency management, and I’m sure that it is a shared desire across the House that we need to do whatever it takes to ensure that emergencies, when they do occur, are run with the best available information and the best systems. We know we have the best people, so it’s just about utilising that collective information to do the things we know will assist in the response.

I thank the House, this Government, and previous Governments for the work on this bill. I commend it to the House.

Just before I take the next call, I acknowledge that we did have an error with the clocks. First reading speeches after the Minister speaks are five-minute calls, so from now on there will be five-minute calls.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise to speak in support of this bill, and I wanted to thank the Minister for his leadership and engagement on this. We know that, in this portfolio, he’s been willing to make some hard but not so popular calls, so we do think that is a mark of leadership. We also wanted to echo the condolences you’ve expressed to the family of Rochelle and the thanks that you’ve expressed to the emergency management workers all around the country.

The Greens are always uncomfortable supporting any legislation under urgency, but I’ve been assured by the Minister that it will go through the full select committee process, so that’s assured us. I also appreciate my colleagues across the House, and the cross-party nature of the way that we engage in emergency management. I always appreciate everyone’s passion and engagement at the Governance and Administration Committee, ably chaired by Camilla Belich, when the topic of emergency management comes through. Everyone’s passion for emergency management, and a genuine desire to serve the country, really comes through in those discussions. I think, sometimes, when we scream at each other across the Chamber like animals, we lose sight of the fact that everyone here is an intelligent adult that is doing their best to serve the country, and that does come through in those select committee discussions. It does show what we can do when we work in a cross-party way; we can make good law, and we can go through the full select committee process.

While legislation like this is really welcome, we do need to actually address some of the drivers of the emergency management events that are increasingly occurring. Since 2023, New Zealand has been, either nationally or locally, in some state of emergency for 224 days. Every single one of these days has been due to a fire, coastal hazard, or severe weather or flooding. Most of these events are exacerbated by the impacts of climate change. Every single greenhouse gas we emit contributes to heating up our atmosphere, and every single fraction of a degree exacerbates and amplifies the impacts. In the same urgency block that we are passing this needed and necessary legislation with cross-party support, this Government has also introduced a bill that would gut the Climate Change Response Act by weakening our emissions reduction targets, watering down the independent Climate Change Commission, and gutting our emissions trading scheme. It’s a little bit like increasing the funding to the fire service—something that’s urgent and necessary, by the way—at the same time you’re handing out fire starters.

We do support this bill; it is a good and necessary bill. We support, in particular, the increased coordination between local and central government that this bill enables; the requirements for lifeline services to contribute to emergency management plans; the increased protection for animals in emergency management situations; the increased oversight for emergency management powers; and increasing the role at the table for iwi Māori. But there are things that we think this bill could go further on, and these are the things that we will push during the select committee stage, and we do know, as my colleague Camilla Belich has said, that the original emergency management bill that was introduced by the then Labour Government had stronger provisions for working with iwi Māori. We also want to ensure that disabled people are included in the emergency management planning, and we will continue to push for greater integration with climate change adaptation frameworks, because the risk-reduction aspect is really complemented by efforts to ensure that they’re being aligned with climate adaptation efforts.

Outside of the legislative process, we will continue to fight for what we have always fought for: fair funding for workers at the climate emergency management front line, like firefighters, so they can have fair pay and conditions and safe equipment. I wanted to close by thanking the emergency management workers, not only at the National Emergency Management Agency, and not only the people working across the different councils, but also the people at the front line of emergency management response, whether they be police, ambulance workers, nurses—people who are really dealing with the actual front-line impacts of emergency management events. I really wanted to thank, in particular, the firefighters who came to talk to us on the Parliament forecourt last night: we do stand with you and all the other emergency management workers around this country, and I hope that you can see, with the cross-party support that this bill is getting, that we do support emergency management in this country across the House. Kia ora.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise in support of this piece of legislation. I also want to acknowledge the Minister and his work and the Opposition members for their work in this reform that we greatly need. I also want to acknowledge Rochelle and her family. Being from Christchurch I did not know her personally, but I do have quite a few friends and family that had worked with her.

Some of you may know, or may not know, that before I became an MP, I actually worked in this space for the last 15 to 20 years I’d been doing emergency response planning, mostly in the evacuation side of things. But I’d been working quite a lot out there with our communities, with our councils, with our iwi around improving the systems that we have. Time and time after we would often hear that when disaster strikes there was a lot of confusion, a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of red tape around what could and could not be done.

What I’m really happy to see is that this is enabling more of a community-led approach. I think that’s a really important thing, because we all know that communities know the person to get on the phone and call up when they need a generator. We know that central government rolling in to do that job is not going to have the same effect. I think that this bill’s a really great start and it’s heading in the right direction to empower those communities.

We also know that failure to prepare for a disaster means that we prepare to fail ourselves. That is something that I’ve always said to people and it’s highly important that we actually go into the preparation a lot more. I hope to see that these established groups really do get into the preparation and actually go through some of the scenarios. I know that the member across the other side of the House talked about how we could have any system and it would never be perfect, and that is actually true, because you can never prepare for some things. But what you can do is you can make sure that people know their roles and they know who to call and they know where to go. That has to be led from the community.

I do have concerns with the bill that the community part of it doesn’t include our NGOs, our other community organisations, and our other groups that are actually on the ground as well. I think that we need to consider that and I really look to those, particularly to the councils that are going to be setting up these groups, to think about the other people that are often involved in a disaster and also that recovery phase as well, because we want to decentralise this process as much as possible to empower those communities to do the right things.

We also have a bit of a concern about the mātauranga Māori and the tikanga into the committees. I think, while we definitely need local voices and local iwi—we have to have that; it’s really important—but we don’t want, you know, someone coming in from central government just saying, “Oh, I know the tikanga. This is how it’s going to be.” So I really want to make sure that when the select committee goes through this, they actually consider that; that these are locals, these are people from the marae that are involved, because that’s how we’re going to derive the best outcomes.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I commend this bill to the House, and I’d like to see where it goes in the future.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of New Zealand First, and also as a member of the Government’s Governance and Administration Committee. I’m looking forward to considering this bill later on.

I just want to start by saying thank you to Minister Mark Mitchell, both for the work that’s gone into this but also for the way in which you’ve engaged with the select committee every time you’ve come along. It’s been a very open conversation, and I think that’s great, and so I really, really appreciate that.

It was Sir Humphrey Appleby who said that “Civil defence is a joke; everyone knows that civil defence is a joke.” I don’t think he’d have given that advice if he’d been living in New Zealand. I look at the information—which many of you will have seen—that National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) has given us. In New Zealand since 2016, there have been 87 local and two national states of emergencies declared for a total of 559 days, at least at the time that this was published. That’s equivalent to one day every week for 10 years that somewhere in the country or the whole country was under a state of emergency.

So it is a big deal in New Zealand, and, looking forward, NEMA talk about the likelihood of serious and significant events. You can look at this and say that there are some certainties in life: there’s death, there’s taxes, and, I’ll tell you what, in New Zealand there is emergency, because there will be some. I mean, even if you look at one particular one, which is the Alpine Fault magnitude 8 (AF8) situation, in the next 50 years, there’s a 75 percent chance of that happening. That’s not quite certain, but it’s getting right up there. So being prepared and being able to respond to an emergency is absolutely essential.

The Emergency Management Bill (No 2) has been long awaited. It’s been great to see a lot of engagement. If we did lots of engagement before all pieces of legislation, that’d be a really good thing because there’d be much better legislation for it, and I’m sure that this will improve the legislation that we’ve got in front of us at the moment with the level of public input. It’s important, I think, that this bill delivers all that we need in terms of emergency management. I don’t know how hard it is to get a legislative slot, but I don’t imagine it’s easy, so this is the shot that we have to get emergency management right in this country.

The bill talks about three things: taking an end-to-end approach—I’ll come back to that in just a second—considering all hazards, and having all parts of society playing a role, and we’ve had a lot of discussion already about the importance of community and the importance of iwi being involved in emergency management and emergency response. We also talk about the four Rs: reduction, readiness—we can’t avoid risk, but we can consistently work to reduce that risk—and there’s also response and recovery. The danger, I think, in these things is that we focus too much on the response and recovery and not necessarily enough on making sure that we don’t have a problem in the first place.

There are three quick lessons that we’ve had with the engagement, particularly, with you, Minister, and our engagement with NEMA. The first one of them is that we need to stop reinventing the wheel with every single different event. With every event we have, it’s “Who do we need to get involved in this event to try and respond to it?” We’ve got to do better than that and be switched on right from the start. That’s the kind of bureaucracy, I think, that we’ve just heard about from the previous speaker.

Secondly, we’ve got to stop building dumb things in dumb places. I just want to think about the Auckland situation. We’ve had to change the planning laws so that we didn’t put 3,000-plus homes in a place which was subject to flooding. So we stopped building dumb things in dumb places, and you get a lot of support from that from the insurance industry and our Natural Hazards Commission. But also the question is: what is the role of NEMA in saying to stop building dumb things in dumb places, because I think that they should have a role in doing that.

The third one is adaptation. We’ve already heard a little bit about adaptation, but I just want to call out one particular thing. We were at a meeting in Hamilton not that long ago, in the middle of the year, I think it was, and Shane Jones was talking to that meeting. He was talking about investment in the regions, and somebody stood up unprompted and said, “Thank you very much for the work that was done under the Provincial Growth Fund in protecting Taradale.” What that man said was that the floodwaters under Cyclone Gabrielle got within a few feet of the top of that flood bank. If they’d got over that flood bank or had that flood bank not been there, just think of the loss of property and, worse, the loss of life that would have happened. So preparedness is really, really important.

Just to finish off, there are a lot of aspects to emergency management. At a recent visit to the West Coast, they said that they’re very anxious about emergency management. I mentioned the AF8 situation, the availability of Bailey bridges, fuel, and equipment, and how we manage events in tunnels. We visited the Mines Rescue Service and they raised issues not only of those tunnels that they have there but also of road and rail tunnels, and so there’s a lot that goes into preparing for emergencies and then to responding to them.

I’m looking forward to the Governance and Administration Committee hearing submissions and considering the bill, and I commend the bill to the House. Thank you.

Tēnā rā koe e te Pīka, otirā tēnā rā tātou e te Whare. E tū ana a Te Pāti Māori ki te tautoko i tēnei pire. Waihoki ki te mihi atu ki te Minita, ki a koe Mark me ō mahi, me ō kaimahi i roto i tēnei o ngā pire. Waihoki ki ngā kaimahi puta noa i te motu kua rau i ō rātou ringa raupā ki tēnei momo mahi i roto i ngā take, āhuatanga o te motu me ngā huarere o te wā.

[Thank you, Mr Speaker; indeed, greetings to all of us in the House. The Māori Party stands in support of this bill. Furthermore, to acknowledge the Minister: to you, Mark, and your work and your staff’s work on this particular bill; furthermore, the staff all across the nation who have worked industriously on this particular work amidst the issues and conditions across the country and the recent weather events.]

Te Pāti Māori supports this bill, and I just want to extend our mihi to the Minister, Mark, and also the condolences to the whānau who have lost a great wahine and also acknowledging all the kaimahi within the emergency response team throughout the country.

This bill implements parts of the Government’s response to the 2023 inquiry into North Island severe weather events, finding that the current emergency management system was not fit for purpose and lacks the capacity or capability to deal with the significant emergencies affecting many regions at once. The inquiry also underscored the fact that Aotearoa has not achieved the whole of society approach to emergency management that Parliament envisioned when the Civil Defence Emergency Management Act was passed in 2002—I was born that year—a point strongly understood by marae throughout the country.

Iwi and Māori communities may be offered seats on committees and involvement in emergency responses that they would have led out anyway, because iwi and Māori don’t sit around waiting for somebody else during and after a disaster. Rather, iwi and Māori choose to lead together where no one else will and can. Iwi, hapū, and marae often place themselves forward as bastions of protection and manaakitanga to all communities affected. Tikanga steps forward where Government legislation is inadequate. Iwi and hapū step forward where Government agencies and authorities do not know where to look, who to speak to, or how to help. These acts of manaakitanga and rangatiratanga rang true during the Christchurch earthquakes and, later, the Kaikōura earthquake. More recently, the profound role of iwi Māori was demonstrated further during the Edgecombe floods and the Whakaari / White Island disaster and Cyclone Gabrielle.

It was the late Dr Ranginui Walker who said this: “The marae is the focal point of Māori culture and communal activities, but the contemporary history lesson here is that the marae are often the focal point of emergency management and communal uplift.” The marae is not only, as Dr Ranginui puts it, a place to stand for Māori people; it is often a place of refuge and aroha, for all people who enter its gates, and deeply held notions of mana and good faith towards all people who make up the diverse communities. Maraes are not businesses and most don’t have regular income and resources to support their functioning, so at times I must acknowledge the Provincial Growth Fund that many marae have had across the country, and yet they are relied upon heavily by both Government and the public to provide support and relief, despite the taxpayer-funded role and obligations of authorities.

While I’ve got the last minute, I also just want to shed light on some of the young rangatahi Māori who have used their studies to contribute to te taiao, climate resilience, and also their maraes. I want to acknowledge one person, Haukapuanui Vercoe, who has used his PhD for future planning for all maraes across the country in how we can better use our infrastructure of maraes, because the majority of our maraes are actually close to wetlands and are predominantly exposed to flooding. That would be a great person to have on the future Māori advisory committee. Nō reira, tēnā rā tātou e te Pīka.

Merry Christmas, Mr Speaker. Our philosophy for civil defence emergency management in New Zealand has always been one of everyone in the community having a role to play. As a small nation, we rely on each other, and this bill formalises that. Whether it’s in bringing in iwi, our rural communities—these groups that have people. They have manpower, they have infrastructure—not just marae—and they have machinery, and I think that’s a great thing. I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise to take a call on the Emergency Management Bill (No 2), and in particular, I would like to acknowledge the Minister but also my colleague Camilla Belich, who is the chair of the Governance and Administration Committee. I’m really pleased that I’m a member of the Governance and Administration Committee because we will be scrutinising and looking at the bill when it gets to select committee.

I do want to just mention that Labour did have an emergency management bill. The bill had been—our version—through extensive policy development and a select committee process. Progress could have been faster; however, we are now at this point. I want to acknowledge, as the Minister highlighted, a family who have lost their loved one. We want to pass on our condolences, but also too, in terms of the weather events that have happened for quite a while, it is important to remember it wasn’t just the people that we lost through those tragedies but also all the communities that have been affected by these weather events. This bill represents a very important step for New Zealanders throughout Aotearoa in terms of strengthening and understanding the pivotal points where, when you’re designing a framework, it’s important to understand the differences of a community but also the strengths that can be represented through an updated emergency management system.

I have a personal story because, in the Auckland anniversary events, we were in a car and the whole motorway got flooded. There was chaos. It was a Friday evening, and people just did not know what to do. In my local community, in Māngere, it was absolute chaos because the floodwaters were rising on the roads and many families were affected. It was before 6 p.m. that evening. People were coming home and picking up children; it was just absolutely chaos. In that specific Friday event, we had just left a tangi at Hoani Waititi Marae. It was a scary time for many citizens who were going about a Friday evening and then bang—there were torrential rains. It was a very scary time. If I reflect back at that time, my immediate thoughts were: what is our emergency management system? Cellphones were not going; the flood waters were rising. It was a very scary time, and I was thinking about our elderly, our non - able-bodied community members. It was a very, very scary time. I do want to acknowledge all the first responders. People were checking their phones. We were trying to reach family members. It is really important that citizens in our community understand the readiness and the response. I want to acknowledge everyone that has been through it. We actually lost 15 New Zealanders through those events. And so, through those difficult times, what are the lessons and who is responsible in providing specific leadership either in a central government capacity or a local government capacity?

When we’re thinking about emergency management, one of the things and, tulou, respectfully, we immediately think that everyone speaks English. We don’t think about our mātua, we don’t think about our citizens, where English is the second or third or fourth language. When we are interpreting and when we are designing frameworks, it is important that those who are contributing keep different nationalities and ethnicities in mind but also the ages. Not everyone and not all of our citizens are going to understand the instructions that come out either on your device or on paper, which is important.

I’ll just move to the last point that I wanted to make: it’s important that we reflect back on personal stories but that we get this right. I really appreciate the bipartisan approach in terms of acknowledging those. Lastly, I want to focus on the role of iwi Māori. In every tragedy or circumstance that has happened, specifically in Māngere, specifically in South Auckland, iwi Māori have always been there. They don’t come to, or reflect on, “We want this.” They just say, “Here we are. This is what we need to do.” I want to emphasise and focus the importance of their role in every, or any, planning committee in a community. I also want to make sure that the leadership and clarity for iwi Māori is understood in the framework. I commend the bill to the House.

Thanks very much, Mr Speaker. Many people today have traversed the content of the legislation, so I actually want to spend just a brief moment acknowledging the leadership of the Minister himself—the Hon Mark Mitchell—a really humble, diligent, hard-working Minister who won’t want people to point out what he does in his role. But the first thing he does in states of emergency is get there on the ground, be with the people, hear them, listen to them, spend time with them. I think it’s 19 states of emergency this term, and he has been there for all of them. He has provided exceptional leadership on the ground—relatability, understanding them, understanding the situation—and he has used that to be reflective in this legislation. I think he has done a superb job, so I’m going to put on record our thanks to him for his incredible work. I commend it to the House.

Tēnā koe e te Māngai o te Whare, otirā tēnā tātou katoa e mahi tahi ana mō tēnei pire.

Ka tautoko awau i ngā mihi ki a rātou kua wehe atu, arā ki a Rochelle, me ngā mea i hinga i roto i a Gabrielle.

Nā reira hoki mai ki a tātou te hunga ora, tihei mauri ora.

[Thank you, Mr Speaker; indeed, greetings to all of us that are collaborating on this bill. I support the acknowledgments to those who have passed on, that is, to Rochelle and those that fell during Gabrielle. Therefore, returning now to us, to the living, it is the breath of life.]

I want to support the mihi to you, e te Minita, for your proactivity during these times, and I have had the pleasure of being on the ground with you. “Pleasure” might be the wrong word, but I appreciate you and your staff, as our wonderful spokesperson for this kaupapa, Camilla, has acknowledged, for including us and keeping us informed. I don’t know if you’re trying to make sure our emergency responders are so well prepared by creating all these disasters, but tēnei te mihi atu ka ki a koe.

There’s so much I could say on this, so I will try to encapsulate it in one focus, and that is the value of local. When Gabrielle hit us in Te Tairāwhiti, we were ready to go because through not only our nature but through COVID, hapū had gathered, hapū had organised, so we had teams on the ground in every community, ready to go—ready to work with whichever organisation we had to and, indeed, lead them, because of the local knowledge.

I want to acknowledge everyone here who appreciates the value of iwi and marae, but I want to talk about what that really, actually means on the ground. Recently, Camilla and I went to Ūawa, and, like all our communities, they had opened their doors. I must acknowledge Pene Brown, who described to the then Minister Grant Robertson their response in Te Karaka. He said, “Our response was threefold: our people, other Māori, and everyone else.” When people open their marae, their impact is not just, “Hey, we’re providing four walls and a roof.” The impact is that these people—also volunteers—have to go to work in the morning. They’re still worried about whether the waters are going to breach. Where do we go to? There’s no roads. The impact is we’re taking a resource out of the community. That marae is no longer available for 21sts, for weddings—for tangihanga, even. I think we need to take a deeper look when we talk about iwi and marae responsibility.

On that note, there’s so many acknowledgments I could make, and one, of course, is Māhaki Tiaki Tangata. Te Karaka was so badly impacted by Cyclone Gabrielle, and one of the things we’ve learnt from that is that while councils, etc., who do a great job, have monitoring devices, have technology, the reality is sometimes those cameras are about half an hour behind the local monitoring. We’ve got people who actually stand by and go and man their rivers, monitor the levels, and then inform the councils and Civil Defence Emergency Management (CEDM). This is the true depth of iwi and marae input, so while I acknowledge, I think we have to go beyond advising and embrace more leading. It was my work on this that really made me determined that Māori have to go from being the response to being the decision makers. Thank you, Minister, for the advance we’re making, and we can certainly go further.

I want to thank Mr Foster for acknowledging the investment that Labour made in the response through the Provincial Growth Fund—tēnā koe e hoa—and acknowledge that that’s another positive thing that’s come out of this: the level of resource in our communities. I’ve talked about Te Karaka; I want to talk about Tokomaru Bay and all our communities—Hauiti—who now have fantastic resources beyond the people. At the end of the day, the best resources we have in our communities are our people, but now they have physical tools in our communities. I want to thank Ben Green and all the other amazing CEDM workers across New Zealand who are going into our communities and upskilling our people even further.

We support this bill because, at its heart, it’s about manaaki—it’s about looking after people. The investment that’s being made, and that will continue to be made, will make sure we have resources and even more skills and resilience to continue to care for our communities. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’d like to, first of all, start off with my acknowledgment to my learned colleague the Hon Mark Mitchell, who has done an amazing job in this portfolio. I thank him for this bill that’s come to the House. Apart from everything else that other members have actually said, this bill formalises and clarifies the concept of lead agency. I think that’s a wonderful thing. It reduces the ambiguity and clarifies who is actually making the decisions, so everybody knows who to follow.

This actually takes me back about 11 years ago. It didn’t happen in New Zealand; it happened in South Korea, where a ship called Sewol sank. I think it was 304 people that died as a result, and 250 of the dead were students who were actually on a school excursion. That’s 82 percent of the total who actually died. Out of the 172 who actually survived, more than half were rescued only by fishing boats that were nearby. The coast guards were 40 minutes behind them. The reason why that happened was that no one actually knew who was in charge. There was no leadership. They did not know if the national guards were in charge or the coast guards were in charge or if the military could actually go and help. Even a foreign vessel, an American naval ship, was nearby and wanting to provide help, but they weren’t allowed, because they were a foreign ship, and they could not actually help those children. That is an utter disaster that I hope never ever happens in any other country. I commend this bill, which will make sure that it doesn’t happen.

The question is, That the Emergency Management Bill (No 2) be referred to the Governance and Administration Committee.

I present a legislative statement on the Arms Bill.

That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

I move, That the Arms Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Justice Committee to consider the bill.

Over 40 years ago, Parliament enacted the Arms Act 1983. Since then, politicians have spent 40 years amending and rejigging the Arms Act 1983. Each change made was stacked on top of the next, rushed through in moments of political panic or patch-ups, until what’s left is a law that is confusing for licensed firearm owners, inefficient for police, and ineffective at stopping criminals. New Zealand deserves better.

Public safety and respect for licensed firearm owners are not in conflict; they actually depend on each other. This bill starts with that simple premise. It rewrites the Arms Act in plain English, with logical structure and practical improvements. The result is stronger firearm laws that better protect the public and a simpler regulatory system that supports compliance.

The tragedy of 15 March 2019 was a day of unimaginable horror for this entire country, and none of us wants to see that again. But the arms laws that followed were rushed, confused, and unfair, and they punished the wrong people. They targeted the responsible, law-abiding New Zealanders, instead of checking the systems and processes that led to this country’s worst atrocity. They even negated really targeting criminals and gangs when they made their changes. Good law is not made in a panic. It’s made with clear heads, sound evidence, and respect for those who already do the right thing. That is what this bill does.

A core lesson from the past decade is that trust matters. For law to work, the public must have confidence in the system administering it. This bill creates a new, independent firearms regulator to replace the Police Firearms Safety Authority. Its job will be to regulate clearly, consistently, and transparently so that licensed firearm owners can comply without unnecessary burdens. It will operate independently of New Zealand Police, with an independent chief executive, and no sworn police officers will work within it. Police will retain all the information that they need for enforcement, but their focus can shift to where it should be: pursuing the gangs and criminals who put the public at risk. The regulator will be empowered to provide clear guidance in consultation with the firearms community, so that licensed firearm owners understand their requirements and can comply with their obligations. This bill also sets clear limits on what information can and cannot be recorded in the firearms registry, promoting transparency and building public confidence.

I’ve heard the concerns about licensing delays, and this bill helps them. When New Zealand moved from lifetime firearm licences to 10-year licences, tens of thousands of people moved into the 10-year system all at once, and so every decade since, the same surge and bottleneck has repeated for the same people. To put this into context, in a normal year there are around 9,000 firearms licence renewals. This year, we are expecting around 55,000, and next year there will be around 50,000 renewals. To smooth this out, the regulator will have the discretion to be able to extend firearm licences for up to three years for some licensed owners whose renewals fall during the peak periods. Over time, this will end the bottleneck cycles each decade and create a steadier, more manageable flow of renewals.

The regulator will also be able to issue infringement notices and educate licence holders for lower-level offences, rather than revoking a licence as the only option. This keeps people in the system and learning, instead of pushing them out for behaviour that does not pose significant risk. Health-related suspensions are being introduced and could last up to 12 months.

Under the current law, many people lose their licence permanently simply because they need more time to get help. That is neither fair, nor proportionate. If a licence applicant disagrees with the regulator’s licensing decision, the new, independent Firearms Licensing Review Committee will hear their appeal. It replaces the current internal police-run process with a truly independent panel consisting of a lawyer, a representative from the firearms community, and an appointee of the regulator. Between October 2021 and March 2025, a third of appeals in the District Court resulted in a different outcome, which shows exactly why this change is needed.

The current Act is not fit for purpose for people whose work or expertise requires specialised use of firearms. Pest controllers and biosecurity organisations perform essential work, protecting our environment, and agricultural community and economy. Their endorsements will be extended from 2½ years to five years, with a mid-term check-in. Multi-user agreements will allow restricted firearms to be temporarily transferred among approved pest control employees for up to seven days without triggering unnecessary paperwork.

Dealer licences will be renamed business licences to reflect the variety of modern firearms-related businesses we have. Compliant holders will have their licence duration extended from one year to five years, which is directly addressing one of the most frequent complaints that I have heard. Business employees will no longer require endorsements on their personal licences, subject to controls being in place, and gunsmiths will be able to conduct short-term repairs on restricted firearms without a permit to possess.

Import permits will be extended from 30 days to 12 months, reducing administrative burden for both businesses and the regulator. New licence classes have been introduced for museum curators and their employees to reflect their unique circumstances, ensuring their rules are not disproportionate or so costly that they have to shut down. Collectors will also have greater flexibility around where the vital parts of a prohibited firearm must be stored.

If we want to improve public safety, we must ask who is driving the offending in New Zealand, and the answer, overwhelmingly, is criminal gangs. Gang members represent less than 1 percent of New Zealand’s population, but are linked to around a quarter of all firearms offending, and this bill deals with that directly. It introduces automatic disqualification for gang members from holding a firearms licence, new offences for straw purchasing and diversion, and offences to tackle 3D-printed firearms made by unlicensed individuals in possession of digital files used for illegal manufacture, and it significantly increases penalties for over 60 offences, many of which have been untouched since 1983. This bill also clarifies product definitions and rules around manufacturing, and closes loopholes relating to large-capacity pistol magazines and blank firing guns.

For individuals who inadvertently find themselves in the unlawful possession of a firearm, there are clear pathways now back into lawful ownership. One of the simplest and most important improvements is allowing secure storage at any regulator-approved location; not just a primary residence. Students that live in halls, renters, and many other people who were simply unable to meet the secure storage requirements will now have a safer choice for security.

This bill balances safety, fairness, and practicality. It strengthens the law where criminals exploit it, and it simplifies it where licensed firearm owners have been burdened by it. It’s not a bill that scapegoats legitimate firearm owners; it’s a bill that fixes what matters.

I encourage all New Zealanders to participate in the select committee process, especially those who will be impacted by this law. Consultation informed this law, showing that more voices make better law. This Government values the vital role that farmers, hunters, sport shooters, pest controllers, dealers, museums, collectors, gunsmiths, and all licensed firearm owners play in our economy, in our environment, and in our heritage. This bill is for them.

I’d just like to acknowledge that one of my staffers that has been working on this bill with me for the last two years is having his birthday today. Happy birthday, Matthew O’Connor. I now commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Kia ora, Mr Speaker. Thank you for the opportunity to speak on this bill, the Arms Bill. This bill is a major retreat by Nicole McKee from what was originally threatened, or promised, but this is a major win for public safety in New Zealand. What was initially meant to be in this bill would have enabled military-style semi-automatic weapons to be used on a gun range, the Firearm Safety Authority (FSA) would have been taken out of New Zealand Police, and the firearms registry would have been changed to exclude weapons such as A category firearms. None of those things are in this bill, and that makes New Zealand a safer place.

The fact is that we held—I held—public meetings in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch on the risks of deregulating military-style semi-automatic weapons, we ran a petition that got numerous signatures and the media engaged, and New Zealanders made it very clear that we did not want prohibited weapons, military-style semi-automatic weapons that were used in the Christchurch massacre made more readily available in New Zealand. It is heartening that that protest and those voices were heard loud and clear and that this bill does not make that dangerous change. I know there are many members of the Muslim community in New Zealand who will be grateful to see that that change has not been made.

The Firearms Safety Authority also will remain within the police, and that was promised to be taken out of the police. When we looked at the costs associated with that early on, we asked those questions and did not get answers, but it is now clear that the cost would be over $500 million to take the Firearms Safety Authority out of the police. Also, what it does is it stops, potentially, that real-time access of intelligence; when someone has had their weapons removed, that is upfront when police officers are attending a call out. That information is vital for the safety of our front line and for the safety of our communities, and so we are heartened to see that the Firearms Safety Authority is staying where it is.

The firearms registry also remains intact. The firearms registry commemorated a big goal just recently in November, with over 50 percent of those people who are licensed now using the registry for their weapons to be licensed through that. That is a huge testimony to the fact that people do not have a concern with trust and confidence and that they are making sure that they use Te Tari Pūreke—the Firearms Safety Authority—and making sure that licences are now included in that registry. That is an intelligence map for our police to be able to use to know where the legal firearms are, and when we know where the legal firearms are, that makes it a lot easier to trace where those ones that have been diverted are going.

We still have some concerns with this bill, and I think it’s important that we point those out. The provision in this bill that no police will have involvement in the Firearms Safety Authority, or “blue shirts”, as referred to be Nicole McKee in her press release—we’ve had no real reason as to why we would not draw upon the institutional knowledge of New Zealand Police in firearms when making these changes to our Act. They are the ones that have the most experience and the most insights, and it does seem somewhat of an ideological move to remove the police from having involvement. I’d be really interested to know what the Minister of Police has to say about the police not having involvement in the FSA under its new, restructured form.

The second one that we would like to know about is the funding. There’s no clear indication of who is paying for this restructure. It is, potentially, up to $50 million or $60 million for a full restructure of the firearms registry, but it is unclear whether that’s coming out of the Police budget and impacting on front-line services, or whether it’s from the Ministry of Justice budget. It seems like it will be a separate Budget bid, and so we would be very interested to know who’s paying.

Finally, we want to know the implementation dates. These changes will take time; we want to make sure they’re imbedded properly. For this reason, we want to make sure these changes are made appropriately. We’ll be supporting this bill to select committee for the clear reason that we want to make New Zealand safer, and we are heartened by the fact that those initial threats made by Nicole McKee on military-style semi-automatic weapons, taking the Firearms Safety Authority out of the police, and changing the firearms registry—all of those do not change. We think that this is a win for public safety in New Zealand and that it shows that even though we have a firearms lobbyist as the Associate Minister of Justice, she has been unsuccessful in achieving her goals.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. This bill, the Arms Bill, which repeals and replaces the Arms Act 1983, has the laudable goals of aiming to provide for greater protection of the public, simplifying regulatory requirements, and improving compliance. Those are all really laudable goals, and the bill as it stands could well achieve some of these things.

On public safety, as we’ve heard, there are good changes such as recognising that multiple people within the system share responsibility for safety; regulating blank-firing guns, which we know have the potential to be transformed into live conventional firearms; restricting high-capacity pistol magazines to endorsed licence holders; requiring firearm businesses to notify the police of all surrendered firearms, which will enable checks on those firearms to see if they have been involved in criminal activity or have been stolen; and requiring the regulatory approval for commercial and munitions sales. Now, these are all really good things, and there’s a range of new offences, as well, which will address real risk and help futureproof things.

They are new offences like failing to notify the loss or theft of a firearms licence; the unsafe storage of firearms; possession of firearms without a serial number; possession of files that would enable 3D printing, as we’ve heard; and intentional diversion. As a parent, I really do support the change allowing licence holders to have secure storage facilities at any location approved by the regulator, such as in my gun safe rather than in a flat somewhere in Wellington that may not be as secure and may not be desired by the landlord. This certainly will reduce risk, and it is part of the really positive changes that we see in this bill.

I am particularly pleased that the Associate Minister of Justice did not succeed in allowing greater access to military-style semi-automatic firearms. That’s a rare moment of spine shown by National to stand up for something, but we know that the Minister wanted to and still wants to give public access to military-style semi-automatic firearms and we’re concerned that some changes have been made more from spite than from any rational concern for public safety. While this bill as it stands today does offer a number of improvements, it makes one big change that we believe will create more risk and reduce oversight and transparency, and for this reason we will not be supporting this bill in its current form.

Removing the regulator from the police seems more like a petty, vindictive act based on some vibes from some small group of firearms owners than any responsible act. The police have a unique and valuable perspective. Because they’re on the front line of gun violence, they’re often exposed to gun violence and they’re at the greatest risk of gun violence. That free-flowing information flow is valuable in reducing risk, but their expertise is not included in the regulator, and that is extremely problematic. Instead of repairing the relationship and rebuilding trust between firearms owners, businesses, and the Government, the Minister has stripped the police of responsibility as some kind of weird punishment. The police should be involved in the regulator and in addressing violent crime, rather than being tasked with responding to mental health issues.

We understand that this bill will proceed without our support and will move on to select committee. However, I would encourage the public listening and my Labour colleagues here to seek the retention of the regulator within the police, reporting to the Police Commissioner, because we can’t allow some petty punishment for some imagined slight to reduce public safety by removing police oversight. It is the police who deal with violent crime and gun violence. Removing the police just increases the risks to the public, and for this reason we oppose the bill in its current form.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. This bill is designed to ensure that we promote the safe possession and use of arms, and there’s a couple of things within the bill that I thought I would highlight as part of that objective. The first is the clarification of the 60 offences down into eight offences. I think that that really ensures that we’re clear that there are offences for doing things wrong, but we make them easy to understand. Secondly, there is the independence of the Firearms Licencing Review Committee. Therefore, I commend the bill to the House.

I call the Hon Dr David Wilson.

I rise on behalf of—

Oh, sorry, not “the Hon”; just Dr David Wilson. Thank you.

I’ll respond to both! I rise on behalf of New Zealand First in the first reading of the Arms Bill. We’d like to commend the Hon Nicole McKee for her work on this bill: relevant, practical, and balanced.

This bill is about ensuring New Zealand’s firearms laws are fit for purpose in the 21st century. The Arms Act 1983 has served us for decades, but recent events and reviews have shown gaps in licensing, compliance, and enforcement—for example, in responding to the emerging technology in firearms, such as 3D printing. The Arms Bill strengthens the oversight of firearms ownership, dealers, and clubs while ensuring legitimate users can continue their activities under clear and fair rules.

New Zealand First has always stood for balance: protecting public safety while respecting the rights of responsible firearms owners. Our party policies have consistently emphasised the need for strong licensing, secure storage, and tough penalties for criminals, while ensuring that hunters, farmers, and sporting shooters are not unfairly penalised. We believe in having practical, enforceable laws that target misuse, not tradition. We support this bill because it delivers exactly that balance. It strengthens police powers to deal with unlawful possession and trafficking, it ensures dealers and clubs meet modern standards, and it introduces tougher penalties for those who misuse firearms. At the same time, it provides certainty for responsible owners, recognising their role in rural life, food production, and sport.

For New Zealand First, this bill is about fairness and ensuring criminals face consequences while law-abiding citizens retain their rights. We commend this bill to the House.

Tēnā koe, and thank you, Madam Speaker. Before setting out Te Pāti Māori’s position on this bill, I want to acknowledge the wider context in which we’re debating it. Across Aotearoa, many communities are confronting rising violence, deepening inequality, and ongoing pressures that disproportionately affect those with the fewest resources. Those communities, as we very well know, are tangata whenua.

Firearms legislation sits at the crossroads of public safety, political influence, and community wellbeing. How this House chooses to regulate firearms is not just a technical exercise; it reveals whose safety is valued, whose voices are centred, and whose interests are given priority. It is in that context that I rise on behalf of Te Pāti Māori to oppose the Arms Bill 2025. Our position is clear: this bill shifts power away from community safety and toward political interests, including powerful firearm lobby interests, while failing to address the real drivers of harm in our communities.

This bill includes over 50 separate policy changes, it rewrites more than 60 existing offences, and creates eight new offences. It loosens rules for firearms users, pest controllers, collectors, and dealers, and it establishes an entirely new firearms regulator deliberately distanced from sworn police oversight. We must be honest about where this direction is coming from: this Government’s decisions appear aligned with the interests of lobby groups, rather than with the people most affected by gun violence.

The move to hand all regulatory powers to a new, independent regulator is not necessarily about improving safety. It risks politicising gun control and weakening safeguards that were strengthened after the 2019 Christchurch terrorist attacks.

Recent data suggests that gun crime in Tāmaki-makau-rau is rising and that the majority of these offences involve illegally owned firearms, and not licensed holders. This trend shows that loosening regulation doesn’t necessarily help people—like our hunters—who use firearms responsibly, but, rather, it may benefit those who obtain guns illegally or misuse them. From a Māori world view, whānau who use firearms responsibly for hunting, pest control, or mahi on their whenua contribute to the oranga, or the wellbeing, of their whānau and whenua. Our concern is not with them; our concern is with protecting life, whakapapa, and mana, which demands strong and culturally informed regulation.

If this Government was truly serious about reducing gun harm, it would invest in whānau support, violence prevention, housing security, mental health services, kaupapa Māori responses, and action against illegal firearms, and not deliver a bill shaped by lobbyists and with weakened oversight that sidelines the voices of people living with the consequences of gun violence. Therefore, Te Pāti Māori cannot support a bill that, under the guide of reform, shifts power away from community safety, risks public safety, and ignores the real issues facing our people—not just Māori but all New Zealanders. The responsibility of this House and this Government is to protect our communities, our whakapapa, and our mokopuna, and not to appease political pressure groups.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. Let’s clarify two things for the previous speaker: the purpose of the bill is to promote the safe possession and use of arms, and, secondly, to impose controls to prevent the possession and use of arms for criminal activity. It’s a good thing. It’s a really good thing for New Zealand and, therefore, I commend the bill to the House.

For many people in Aotearoa today, this is actually a moment of relief, and the strange thing is that it’s a moment of relief not because of what’s in the bill but because of what’s not in the bill. So many people have been concerned that the shift we’d be discussing today would be a shift to change our position on semi-automatic weapons, and that is not the case. That has been a failed attempt today because of the work on this side of the House but also because of the work of many people in the Muslim community and many people in the community who have been lobbying against that.

I did want to just acknowledge Philippa Yasbek from Gun Control, and the important work that she’s done, but also the Federation of Islamic Associations chairperson, Abdur Razzaq, who said, “One of the key legacies of the 51 shahada was to make New Zealand safe, particularly from the menace of the semi-automatic killing machines.” This is an important moment to mark what grassroots campaigners and what our ethnic communities can do when they have their voices heard by this House, and I think it’s extremely powerful.

We will be supporting the bill through to select committee, but, as the Hon Ginny Andersen has said, there are concerns that we have and things that we will be raising. The bill is a significant one—232 pages to go through—and I’m looking forward to really robust submissions from those in the community about the detail of the bill. I do want to acknowledge the officials, who have produced this great document called Arms Bill: Explanation of proposals. It has an excellent spreadsheet that goes, change by change, through what the law is now and what the changes will be. It will be a huge aid in terms of making those submissions.

I just wanted to speak to some other choices that have been made in the body of the bill, which I’ll certainly be questioning at the select committee stage. The first one is in relation to the health-related licence suspension. Right now, if people are deemed not to be in a sufficient state to hold a licence, those licences can be suspended for three months, and if the licence is not reinstated in that three-month period, then it expires. The person cannot apply for another licence for a 10-year period. Now, there’s a change in this bill that extends that to a 12-month suspension. On the one hand, it feels like that would mean having a potentially safer community because those licences can be suspended for longer. However, it also gives the person the opportunity to remediate whatever the issue is, which then avoids the 10-year problem. It’s a choice that’s been made that strikes a particular balance, and the question is: is that balance the correct one?

Another interesting one is around the definition of penalties and what constitutes premises or not. The current law assumes that you must keep the licensed firearm in a secure place within your premises where you normally reside. Now, for many people, that’s not going to be the place where they normally reside, and the example used in the document provided by officials was students, for example, who may be flatting elsewhere, but who may need to keep their firearm in a location that’s separate from where they live. There are some extremely sensible changes made, including changes around the printing of parts of what could be used as a firearm, and so it’s acknowledging that technologies have developed in a way that means we now need to accommodate for that.

There is section 7 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act advice to the committee on this, as well, that says that the bill is compliant with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. However, there are a few matters to interrogate for the committee as we go through the select committee stage. One is around the freedom to relay or not to relay information and the requirement that people have to disclose their personal details to the police when asked. The current assessment is that that is a fair limitation on rights, but I do think that that is something that the committee will need to interrogate, and I certainly hope we receive submissions on that.

For the time being, I do commend this bill to the House, but, again, I urge submitters to come, having read the spreadsheet, and just give us their assessment on whether they believe that the ground struck between some of these difficult choices is the correct one. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. My favourite proposed change in the Arms Bill is that if someone chooses to be a member of a gang, then they will be automatically disqualified from holding a firearms licence. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. First of all, I want to reiterate what Vanushi Walters has just said about the great deal of relief that people will feel now that we are no longer looking at semi-automatic firearms coming back into our communities. That’s an incredibly important thing. I was very aware of the stress that that was causing and the way that people felt about it on the ground. They felt that there was not sensitivity around what happened in this country, and, like many other people, I remember exactly where I was on that day as that terrible, terrible event unfolded in our country.

I wanted also to talk about my portfolio—because I have the sexual and family violence portfolio—and the implications for people of this law. I am very pleased to see this bill going forward in the form it is to the select committee, but I too am concerned about the police not being as involved as they were. I don’t really understand why that is, and I would urge people who are submitting who have had, particularly, experiences of domestic violence or fear of domestic violence or family harm to come forward and to tell those stories.

I also ask the select committee to be sensitive about how they get to tell those stories, because they’re often very fearful of doing that, and I wanted to talk about an incident that happened the other day when we were in scrutiny week. The Justice Committee had moved to the part of scrutiny which was about the sexual and family violence centre, and as we spoke about a particularly serious and very worrying new development, which is a lot of promotion of rough sex on the internet and people being involved in situations where they were simply confused about whether they had a right to be upset about what had happened to them or to claim that it was abusive behaviour—because things have just moved so far. As we talked about that subject, a police officer—who I’d actually given a pretty hard time to about the call-out changes from the police, and I thought that she probably didn’t necessarily like my questioning—came to the front of the room and she said that it made her hackles rise because she was seeing on the front line the very behaviour that I was discussing, over and over again. She said that we needed to do something about it, and I thought about the value of her role as a police officer in that situation.

Our police are absolutely in the front line, and people like the woman who came into that situation have a very grounded, realistic view of complicated issues. They get to see things that I wish I never saw, and they do carry that experience and that responsibility. If you look at this bill and you think about that experience and responsibility in the context of people who may harm their family members with guns who may be subject to mental distress or who may be angry, it’s really important that our police who see that participate in this process.

I have a strong belief that the police should be involved in this process. I would really like it looked at as an issue at the select committee, and I take my friend Vanushi Walters’ point that the 12-month suspension probably has arguments for and against it. I’d really like that looked at at that time with an open mind because these bills make a difference to whether people live or die, and a really responsible thing to do is to listen to our submitters and think through these things with an open mind. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. This is a good bill because it clarifies the law and closes some loopholes. As my good friend Rima Nakhle has said, it also makes gang membership an automatically disqualifying factor for holding a firearms licence, and that’s a good thing. I commend the bill to the House.

The question is, That the Arms Bill be considered by the Justice Committee.

I present a legislative statement on the Fast-track Approvals Amendment Bill.

That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

I move, That the Fast-track Approvals Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

It’s a privilege to be back before the House to present the bill for the second reading. When the bill was introduced on 3 November, I said, and repeat again, that the bill has two complementary priorities. The first is promoting competition in the grocery retail sector, advancing a core part of the Government’s Going for Growth agenda, which will have flow-on effects for productivity and living standards. The second is to make changes to improve the fast-track regime’s workability and efficiency. Fast track is working pretty well, actually, and we’ve had a number of projects that have already been consented and received approval. In fact, some of those projects are under way, like the Port of Auckland expansion or extension and the new cruise ship terminal, and Maitahi, which I’m visiting tomorrow, which is a housing development down in Nelson. Fast track is working pretty well, but all regimes—particularly ones as complicated as fast track—benefit from fine-tuning. Over the course of this year, there has been feedback sought from targeted engagement—with applicants, with agencies, and the panel convenors themselves, actually, who are doing a good job of processing all these applications—to try to find operational and procedural efficiencies.

The bill includes a range of amendments to speed up the application process, reduce time frames in key areas, improve flexibility, and to clarify a range of operational matters. I do want to acknowledge the Environment Committee, who have a had a short but thorough look at the Fast-track Approvals Amendment Bill, hearing submissions and considering the bill. There were many submissions during that process. There were quite a few themes that came through from submissions, including if proposed changes would allow for consideration of environmental issues; how they would accommodate Treaty and other arrangements with Māori; concerns about Government input in the decision-making process; representation for local communities; the Government policy statement (GPS) process; and time frames, including for panel decisions.

Some submissions concerned changes to the current clause 42 of the bill, under which parts of an application can be withdrawn after an application has been lodged. Some submitters expressed concern that this change could lead to project scope being expanded mid-process. The legislative process has led to a clarification: modifications cannot be made that result in the application expanding the scope of the project beyond its original description in the referral application or as it was listed in Schedule 2 of the Fast-Track Approvals Act 2024. Ministerial direction in this area is intended as a backstop in the event that expert panels are uncertain if a project, if modified, will continue to have significant regional or national benefits. This makes it clear that expert panels can continue processing applications as modified without seeking a direction from a Minister.

Several submissions referenced previous mining cases or applications under the Resource Management Act, or concerns regarding long-term environmental risks or considerations. The bill does not seek to change the expert panel’s role in determining whether identified adverse impacts are out of proportion to the project’s benefits and to impose appropriate conditions on approvals. The bill introduces a new requirement for applicants to provide information on effects in their referral application, which will help inform ministerial referral decisions. The Minister for Infrastructure has the discretion to decline a referral application if it would have significant adverse environmental effects—and I note that I have declined some referral applications already through the fast-track process.

Changes will be made to several key time frames for decisions in the fast-track process. Decision time frames to date have varied due to the complexity of individual applications. However, in line with the Act’s requirement for efficient processes, clear statutory time frames give applicants and investors greater certainty about process and cost. Having heard submissions, it is sensible to increase the maximum time limit for an expert panel’s decision from 60 working days to 90 working days, which can still be extended with agreement from the applicant. The time frame for parties to provide comments on referral applications is reduced from 20 to 15 working days. Regional councils must respond to requests for information about existing resource consents within 10 working days; previously, there was no statutory time frame. The intention is to achieve a balance between the requirement for timely information and the need to maintain accuracy and avoid placing unreasonable burdens on councils.

The panel convenors and others provided informative submissions on how reducing the time taken to establish panels may not be workable in practice, and the Government has established that it is preferable to maintain the status quo and have no statutory time frame for panel appointments. Efficiencies will be realised when certain steps in the substantive process, such as completeness checks and competing application checks, happen concurrently. Applicants invest significant time and resources, and it doesn’t make sense that they should be penalised if application circumstances change and they want to pause their application. The maximum time that an applicant can request a suspension of their application is proposed to be increased from 50 to 100 working days. This is to allow applicants more time to provide information to address concerns raised by parties invited to comment on applications.

In relation to Government policy statements (GPSs), these were proposed so that projects’ regional or national benefits were more easily related to Government policies and priorities for development or growth across a range of sectors. They will be issued by the Minster for Infrastructure. GPSs set out the Government’s policies on the regional or national benefits of certain types of infrastructure or development projects. The Minister for Infrastructure will consider any relevant GPSs during the referral process. The expert panels will do the same when deciding whether to approve a project and set conditions or decline them. Some submitters were supportive of the GPS mechanism as drafted and thought it would provide greater clarity and certainty for nationally significant issues. Others considered the grocery retail GPS a good template for future development in other areas, such as urban development and to enable infrastructure. Developing GPSs will not happen in a vacuum; Section 10A of the amendments outlines how they will be issued and who may be consulted.

The bill amends a number of project descriptions and updates the respective project descriptions, locations, and authorised persons, including for the Stella Passage project. There are also transitional provisions to ensure fairness and clarity for applications in progress. Any changes that do not require system or IT updates will take effect immediately, but some changes that require system updates will take effect on 31 March 2026. The bill’s legislative process has delivered a range of sensible outcomes that, if adopted by the House, will balance the need to improve fast track’s efficiency and workability while still preserving the ability to facilitate regionally and nationally significant infrastructure and development projects and deliver robust decisions.

As I say, fast track is working well. We have listened to some of the feedback that’s come through the select committee, who, I think, did a good job of hearing the submissions. Members will note that the Government has lodged an Amendment Paper—yesterday, actually—which is available for everybody to see. As we get into the committee of the whole House, we can work our way through that, which picks up on some of the submissions. My understanding is that the select committee did not do a revision-tracked version, so, essentially, the committee of the whole House stage is the ability for the House to make amendments to the Fast-track Approvals Amendment Bill, and I’m looking forward to considering that in the committee of the whole House.

As I say, there are twin objectives to the bill: one is around grocery sector competition, which I think is broadly supported across the Parliament—I think I’m right in saying that—and the second is some efficiency and workability improvements to the original fast-track regime. Having decided to do the grocery sector competition, the Government thought it was worthwhile making these sensible finesses and tweaks to the approvals Act. As I say, it’s working well, but everything can be better, and that’s the aim of this bill. Thank you.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m interested in one of those last remarks from the Minister: that he acknowledges that there is general support from around the House for increased grocery competition, and if he will remove his Facebook post that he made immediately after the first reading of this bill saying that Labour didn’t support supermarket competition—that Labour had voted against it. Then noting his further comments that he made, whereby he said, “Oh yes, yes”—and I’m paraphrasing somewhat—“Labour has some fair points about the fact of the supermarket competition being entwined with a whole lot of other issues, but they can vote on that clause by clause when we go through the committee stage of the bill.” I hope the Minister holds to that.

My main point, of course, is this bill is not about supermarket competition. If it was about supermarket competition, we would not have been rushing this through the select committee in the way that we did. There may be general agreement about all of the changes, but there is not, because what this bill is about is enabling Ministers to delve down into the substantive decision making on these decisions. These are decisions that already have normal environmental protections degraded. That is the problem with the Fast-track Approvals Act—the principal Act—and what this bill does is make it even worse. It’s not about speed; it’s not about a one-stop shop. It’s about Ministers making decisions.

We saw, when the fast-track bill, which is now the principal Act, first came out some time ago—there was talk of Muldoonism. The Minister says he doesn’t like Muldoonism and that, in fact, he has Fitzgerald and Muldoon on his wall. We had protests down Queen Street, and Glen Bennett was at that protest, and it was all the way down Queen Street, because people were particularly worried about Ministers making decisions on important issues that need to be considered with evidence in front of a robust decision-making process. That seems like something that the Attorney-General would want, and the change was made.

Sorry, the Ministers in the Fast-track Approvals Act do not have that ability to make the decisions, but what this bill does is introduce a new mechanism, a Government policy statement—a Government policy statement that is made on the whim of the Minister. There are no criteria. There’s a little amendment that’s just been made that, “Oh, they can consult other people if they want to.” Whoop-de-do! That is not a robust process, that is not criteria, and it is different from other pieces of legislation—apart from, of course, the recent amendments to the Crown Minerals Act—whereby there are criteria for anything that is called a Government policy statement, or words to that effect.

I have suggested an amendment, which I hope the Minister will consider, that provides some criteria for that Government policy statement. Now, if the Minister was committed to this bill being about supermarket competition, then the provisions in the bill could specifically refer to supermarket competition—that the Government policy statement is to be about grocery competition—but it does not do that. No, no: it is much wider, and that is the concern that we have and that many submitters—many very thoughtful submitters, including the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, amongst others; even the New Zealand Institute—have about how this is ministerial overreach, and it is very serious. That is one issue.

Another issue is the process this bill has gone through to this point. Normally, if we’re reporting back from the select committee that has a report-back period of under four months, there would have been a debate in this Chamber from members across the Chamber about that shortened time frame. This did not happen for this bill. Instead, the chairperson decided to have a very short submission period and then the majority of that select committee agreed to report back early. That is not a good process. The Environment Committee did work very hard and the officials all worked very hard, as well, and I, of course, commend their dedication to doing their job and being good public servants, but it did mean that we did not have a long time for submissions and, of course, we haven’t got a revision-tracked version with the select committee report back.

The Minister just referred to the amendments coming in yesterday. When I was looking for his amendments yesterday, I could not find them. I note that they have been tabled now, for at least an hour or so, and I have been going through those diligently and will refer to them at some length in the committee stage. That is not a good way of making laws, and it also has meant that a whole lot of submitters brought to us good points.

Now, the Minister has described this bill as “supermarkets” and “rats and mice.” There are some rats and mice in this bill, and, being from Dunedin, I’m careful when I talk about supermarkets and rats!

Don’t go there!

I note that the Minister for Food Safety is in the House. That’s just outside my electorate, on the other side of the road.

I’ve got a spare cat for you.

Thank you for the offer of cats. Whilst there are some small issues, there are also these bigger issues that I’ve been talking about. If you’re doing a tidy-up of a bill that you’ve only passed a year or so ago—and I’m all for reviewing bills and all for having good regulatory systems—then we could have had a good robust process.

For instance, Queenstown has an awful lot of listed projects that relate to Queenstown. Queenstown’s population is not giant, and the council has limited ratepayers and limited resource. Queenstown is a beautiful place and it is growing, and the council has been trying to plan for its infrastructure and where that additional housing growth should go for a long time. It’s very important that there are more houses in Queenstown; nobody is debating that point, but the councils from both Queenstown and Central Otago District Council—so that includes Cromwell, where there’s a lot of commuters living who go and work in Queenstown—came to the select committee and said, “Look, Queenstown has the most unaffordable housing in the country.”

Queenstown has had special legislation about housing before. Nick Smith did a special housing accords piece of legislation and, as a result, there was a requirement for affordable housing. Now, they made a submission to the select committee: “Look, we’re the ones with the most unaffordable housing in the country. We are the ones with the most per capita fast-track applications happening here. Surely there is an argument for a specific requirement for those developers who will be getting huge uplift from rurally zoned land that will now be developed with housing. Surely there is an argument for a special requirement for, say, 5 percent affordable housing in those projects.”—and that seems, to me, like a very legitimate argument.

I, of course, don’t want to make a decision on it, because we haven’t heard any analysis from officials about that, because, of course, there was no time to do so. That is a missed opportunity, and that is because this Government continues to want to just rush things through and not have some good thought to what is actually happening. We’re going to have many questions about the Amendment Paper that the Minister has put up about what the consequences of the changes are, because, again, we have not had that analysis.

There are many other changes in this bill that are not to do with supermarkets or rats and mice, and some of them are to do with limiting participation of other groups. There are some changes in the amendments that we’ll talk to in the committee stage. Particularly, we heard from iwi groups that the time frames in the fast track at the moment are already near impossible, so any further reductions of those time frames will mean that their participation is mere rubber-stamping. They cannot do substantive, thoughtful contributions, and that is what we want, because we are concerned here about our environment and protecting it. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker—

General Treaty protection, Steve—tell us.

Are you doing it? General Treaty protection—I’m happy to talk about that because 100 years hence, anthropologists will take a bird’s-eye view of this particular moment in history and this particular Government and this suite of bills that have been rushed through the House without democratic process or proper consultation or consideration, or any respect whatsoever of the constitutional foundation of this country in Te Tiriti o Waitangi and He Whakaputanga. They will go, “That was the point when Aotearoa set itself on ecological ruin under the manic ideology of corporate power, anarcho-capitalism, whereby our view of the world is shaped entirely by the idea that private property rights and the accumulation of money is the most important human value there is.”

You only have to look at some of those ancient books of old that tell you that the accumulation of wealth is not good for anybody—it is not good for the planet, it is not good for people, it is not good for communities, and it’s not even good for the people who accumulate the wealth, at the end of the day. There is no version of a life on this planet that is not centred around protection of the basis of that life, which is the health of our ecology.

The bill before us today is a worsening of what was one of the worst pieces of legislation this Government passed—the fast-track legislation—and what is more, as my colleague just pointed out, they’ve just dropped a stack of amendments on this bill. So we haven’t even had half a minute to read through what those amendments are, but we will certainly be debating them over the course of the next few hours.

One of the most egregious parts of the fast-track legislation—and this bill makes it worse—is that it takes community out of decision making; it takes local iwi out of decision making; it takes the environment out of consideration, in so far as it dismisses the upholding of our existing environment laws; and it certainly has no regard for climate change, the existential challenge that threatens us all.

We made a commitment, as the Green Party, that we would correct this extreme legislation and the things that it has committed to make happen. The basis of that commitment is a recognition that there is an appropriate place for development. There is an appropriate pathway for people to get a consent and a permission to undertake certain activities—business activities or whatever they are or farming or whatever you like—but it must be with the consent of the people, it must be consistent with Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and it must be consistent with protecting the common good, which is the health of our rivers, the health of our atmosphere, the health of our oceans, and our biodiversity, because those are the things that are the first duty and responsibility of the regulator and the legislator to protect. It is our responsibility, as parliamentarians, to protect the public good and the commons from those who would exploit it and harm it and destroy it. That’s our job. This fast-track bill seeks to bypass that responsibility.

One of the more egregious things that it does is it allows projects that have been through a substantive and an extensive process, such as the Taranaki seabed mining project, which has been rejected and resisted by community and iwi in Taranaki for more than a decade. It was opposed by even the commercial fishing industry. It was opposed by the offshore wind industry, who have been put off the prospects of building offshore wind in Taranaki because of the prospects of seabed mining by Trans-Tasman Resources—[Member sneezes] Bless you.

It is a zombie project. It has been rejected by all of the courts and tribunals in this land, including the very Supreme Court—the Supreme Court sent it back. It is dead, buried in the ground, and this Luxon Government resurrects it through the fast-track process. It is shameful. It is so disdainful of the inordinate hours and time that communities have spent to say, “This is not what we want for our country.” Oh, but no, this Government’s first duty is to some Australian speculator, Trans-Tasman Resources, who want to destroy the seabed off Taranaki for 35 years straight.

So we, as Te Pāti Kākāriki, wanted to make it clear to industry that this sort of a process by which consents are achieved will not stand under a Green Government. We set a line in the sand that stretches from Bream Bay to the sandstone cap of the Denniston Plateau, and that line in the sand is a commitment that any consents issued by this Government through the fast-track process for coalmining, hard-rock goldmining, or seabed mining will be revoked. That is because of how inappropriate this process is. It is a significant act to take and to commit, but that is because this is such an egregious piece of legislation that does not respect biodiversity, does not respect democracy.

The message to the mining industry, today, is that you should not take any heart from this Fast-track Approvals Amendment Bill. It does not give you security of tenure. It does not give you a certainty in the future, because there is not political support for it across the House, and when there is a change of Government, you can be certain this bill will be either entirely thrown out or substantially amended.

What is more, it is a high priority for the Green Party, if we are in coalition negotiations with any other party, that we will stand on what our commitment is: that we will revoke the consents for the destruction of the spectacular 40-million-year-old ecology of the Denniston Plateau for Aussie goldminers—that ain’t happening. We will stop Trans-Tasman Resources’ seabed mining. We will stop the mining of Bream Bay for sand—

Where are we going to get our sand from, Steve?

You should have a look at the fast-track applications, Simon. There are about seven other sand-mining applications; there are plenty of places to get sand without dredging the seafloor.

Back to speaking to the bill, not across the House in a conversation, please.

Sure. We will revoke the hard-rock goldmining in Otago, Bendigo, in Macraes, and Waihi. Why? Because those forms of mining use cyanide to extract the gold. They leave a toxic legacy of arsenide, arsenic, and cyanide tailings dams that are there intergenerationally. Long after any jobs have dried up and the profits have been repatriated to Australia, that legacy is there. The acid mine drainage that we saw in the Hinewai River down in Coromandel was from a mine that was a hundred years old. Anyone who had worked in that mine was long dead and probably their grandchildren were dead. This is why this form of extractive, destructive industry is not the future for our country.

We need a future based on renewable industries, and we have made a commitment, as the Greens, as an alternative to this—just to be clear—that we can create 40,000-plus jobs through renewable industries and backing central North Island timber processing, among other things, but also by keeping the mills open that this Government is letting close—

They can’t afford the bloody energy, Steve.

They can’t afford the energy because they won’t reform the electricity market and break up the generator retailers. Get on with it—fix the problem.

We will certainly be opposing this bill. This sort of reckless disrespect for people and planet and Te Tiriti has no future. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Well, wasn’t it an eye-opening speech from the Green Party member Steve Abel, who I do have a lot of respect for for his commitment to the environment. I mean, he spent over 240 days in a tree in West Auckland to stop a property development. I’m not sure if those houses have ever been built, so there are probably 240 people who don’t have a warm, dry home. But I do respect his commitment to the environment, even when he starts to mix up Kiwis’ care and appreciation for our natural environment with “Oh, and therefore everything must be collectivised. We must nationalise the energy system.” What did he say? That development requires the consent of the community. Well, of course communities must have an input into development. The fast-track process allows for views to be gathered, but we can’t allow a right of veto to every Tom, Dick, and Harry who turns up at a hearing and gives their reckons and vibes as to why something like a housing development or a mine shouldn’t go ahead.

Now, what does this bill do? It’s quite simple: it provides for grocery businesses—supermarkets—to demonstrate that there’s a national and regional significance test that they pass so they can use the fast-track system. What else does it do? It establishes a more efficient process for fast-track approvals, which means that instead of applicants having to spend tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars stacking up technical reports to demonstrate why every risk is managed down to the nth degree, why things you can’t even see, touch, or feel are managed in a way that the collectivists over there on that side of the House approve of—

That’s the story of your life.

—we are providing a much more efficient pathway. I want to tell that member Rawiri Waititi that the story of New Zealand has been people on the other side of the House objecting to development, threatening to nationalise successful businesses that deliver electricity and food to consumers, and that’s not going to work for New Zealand. Everywhere that collectivisation and collectivism has been tried, it’s led to famine, poverty, destruction of institutions, the collapse of civil society. You think of Cambodia under Pol Pot. You think of Russia under Stalin. That is what you’re advocating, Steve Abel, and that is what you are riding shotgun on, Rawiri Waititi.

Now, why is fast track an important part of the development approvals process? Well, firstly, it recognises that under the Resource Management Act (RMA), the Wildlife Act, the Conservation Act, and the Public Works Act, their approval is needed for many different aspects of a development. What fast track does is simply bring them all into one place so that all the evidence can be considered at one place at one time by one group of planning commissioners. Now, if you think about viewing the world in a holistic way and balancing human needs with nature, you’d say that actually the fast-track approvals process pulls all these things together in a really coherent way, which is why it’s such a struggle to understand, as a civil engineer, the incoherence and, frankly, the lack of rationale behind the arguments that we’ve heard from the left and hard-left Green wing of politics in New Zealand.

I can’t understand why someone would bother, like Glen Bennett marching down Queen Street, to protest against a bit of legislation that makes housing development and getting vital minerals out of the ground easier. I mean, if you honestly think, Steve Abel—you mentioned that there are a whole bunch of other places we could mine sand, on land instead of the ocean. Would you turn up and write a positive letter saying the Green Party would love you to do more sand mining on land? Like, would you turn up at the hearing and say, “The Green Party loves land sand-mining”? I don’t think you would. I don’t think that that’s a fair reflection of the Green Party’s views. In fact, I think they’re 100 percent anti-mining anywhere, ever. If you really, really believed in that, you’d hand over your cell phones, you’d hand over your laptops, you’d refuse to fly anywhere, you’d be as sound as Greta Thunberg and you’d only come and go from Parliament by boat.

Can I just ask the member not to bring the Speaker into your debate.

Madam Speaker, I do apologise for bringing you into the debate, but I will reflect that Greta Thunberg, even though she’s completely wrong about everything, at least has the courage of her convictions to travel to and from the places she wishes to protest and speak at by sailing boat. She’s only ever flown on a plane when other people have said, “Greta Thunberg, you must sit next to the toilets at the back of the plane.” I don’t know; maybe that’s the kind of sacrifice even the Greens would be prepared to make, but I doubt it, because they don’t have the courage of their convictions to say, “Actually, there should be some mining somewhere, and we will say where it is because we know it’s important to New Zealand.”

Now, this bill is important. We must have a one-stop shop to consider complex development applications. For far too long, the Resource Management Act has made it almost impossible to consent the things we need in a reasonable time frame and at a reasonable cost. It doesn’t mean that these projects won’t proceed; of course they will. But why would we hold applicants, developers, and even the Crown to an impossibly high standard where every single risk must be managed down to the nth degree until you can’t see it, or even if you can see it, you know it’s there? It’s still a risk. That’s what the RMA does. Fast track cuts through this.

But what’s coming next? What’s coming next is going to be even better. We’re going to replace the Resource Management Act that has caused all these problems with two new bits of legislation—a Planning Act and a Natural Environment Act—based on property rights in the Planning Act; being able to use your land without having every Tom, Dick, and Harry turn up to object to the colour of your front door, and a piece of legislation to establish environmental limits.

Now, the Opposition doesn’t disagree with that. They love environmental limits and they also love living in houses. Some of these problems we’re trying to deal with with the fast track are actually to deal with this legacy—this kind of 1980s, cool kids vibes, sustainable management crap—that we’ve had to accept holding us back for over 30 years. Fast track is going to help, but replacing the resource management system with a new system based on property rights is the new game in town. New Zealand’s going to have the best planning system in the world. Green parties, I predict, from other countries, will come to New Zealand to ask, “How did you do it? How did you protect the environment and build homes that people want to live in and have mines?” Well, New Zealand’s going to show them how. This Government’s going to show them how. ACT is proud to support this amendment to the Fast-track Approvals Act.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to support the Fast-track Approvals Amendment Bill in its second reading. As I did mention in the first reading of this bill, this is a core part of the National - New Zealand First coalition agreement. Yes, I remember back to that time around those coalition discussions, and this piece of legislation was something New Zealand First had developed and popped on to the table at those coalition agreement talks. It’s a proud moment to actually see this piece of legislation in the House being refined and actually working the way we want it to work.

It’s about letting the investment flow. We need to let the investment flow, and we need to let the activity flow. There is too much stopping activity in New Zealand. This bill will actually get the wheels moving and get the economy moving. As I mentioned, it’s about fine-tuning. It’s about getting the legislation working in the way that we want it to work. Obviously, when the first part of the legislation came through, there has been the need to bring it back to fine-tune it. One of the great things with the fine-tuning here is we’re going to see in the supermarket industry what we’re all shouting out for, which is we want to see more competition. In the supermarket industry, if we don’t get competition and if we don’t get new players into the market, we aren’t going to see prices come down. We want to see the competition. We want to see new players coming into the country.

You can do that without this legislation.

It’s fantastic that the Māori Party’s actually agreeing with me. We want to see some competition. We want to see more dollars in everyone’s pockets so we can see competition in the supermarket industry. We’re talking of a six-week reduction—six weeks of red tape cut out. If we can cut out six weeks of red tape of having to go through processes that aren’t required, it will save costs, it will get shovels into the ground—

And pollution into the waterways!

—and we can get projects under way. I can’t believe that the Labour Party spokesperson is disagreeing with me, but we’ll carry on and have a little bit of a discussion about that a little bit later.

The other thing about this piece of legislation is it will create jobs now. In regional New Zealand and across New Zealand, we want to see jobs being created. We want people to be in jobs, and by getting activity in a pipeline of work—

Resources are limited.

Again, the Labour people just can’t agree that we actually want to see people in real work and we actually want to see people out actually developing these supermarkets and getting shovels in the ground, and that is it going to create jobs and activity across New Zealand.

A big thing with this piece of legislation is the pipeline. The Government has said that we want to create a pipeline of infrastructure work where when one job finishes, you go to another job. If we can get a pipeline of infrastructure work in the country, across the country, contractors can have confidence to go from one job to another job.

Shame about the 10 percent unemployment for Māori.

Again, we’re hearing from the Opposition about employment. If we can get that pipeline, we can actually get people into work and working across the country. We want to promote a strong infrastructure development pipeline that promotes productivity so that if we, actually, can get these projects up and under way, we will see more work come from it, we can see contractors having the confidence to invest, and then we can have more confidence and businesses to invest more and to actually want to develop more work throughout New Zealand.

What I can’t understand—and we’re hearing it through the Opposition as I’m speaking today—is the “no” to everything. I got up earlier on today and was talking about consenting, and it is anti - people that actually want to do things in this country. On this side of the House, we actually want to see people invest, we want to see people have confidence, and we are actually backing the people that will get New Zealand moving. We don’t want to hear a “no” attitude to everything. I’ve just heard from Mr Abel. He’s saying no to housing developments; saying no to mining; they’re saying no to supermarkets; they’re saying no to energy projects; they said no to fast-track. They can’t say no to everything. We actually need to have productivity, we actually need to have businesses working, and we need to actually have the ability to actually employ people. If we’re going to keep having a “no” attitude and be so negative, the economy is not going to turn around. This side of the House, this Government, will turn the economy around. We’ll have a pipeline of work that will lead into the future, and people will have the ability to invest, and they will have confidence. On that, it is with great pleasure that I commend this bill to the House.

Five-minute split call—Rawiri Waititi.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I find it difficult to listen to some of the speakers in this House today. We saw with the last speaker, he banged his mic, he thought this was going to be his mic drop moment of a speech in this House. The only anti in this House is a Government that is anti - Te Tiriti o Waitangi, that is anti-environment, that is anti - workers’ rights. All I have to say to Jamie Arbuckle, through this speech, is “Ah, buckle up.”

What we have in this Fast-track Approvals Amendment Bill is—the public have spoken: 95 percent of submissions opposed this amendment bill. Every opposing submitter raised the same alarm, that the bill sidelines Te Tiriti o Waitangi and hands unprecedented power to Ministers Tom, Dick, and Harry. The Government are not fast tracking progress; they are fast tracking cronyism. The core issue—and what this Government is obsessed with removing, Te Tiriti o Waitangi—is the red flag. The bill replaces Te Tiriti partnerships with ministerial discretion. It is vehemently opposed to Te Tiriti, and we have seen that across many bills that have passed through this House. Now, under urgency, you are urgently moving bills in this House that remove the fundamental constitutional agreement that protects Aotearoa—that protects Aotearoa—from corporate exploitation.

This is what this bill does: it reduces Māori to optional consultees, deepening Crown dominance, meaning Ministers can approve or decline projects without recognising iwi, hapū, or honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi. This reverses decades of legal precedents, including the Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Act, the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Act, the Resource Management Act, and the 2021 Supreme Court decision on seabed mining in Trans-Tasman Resources Ltd.

Iwi feedback and all iwi submitters oppose the fast-track amendment bill: Ngāti Ruanui, Ngāruahine, Ngāti Toa, Waikato-Tainui, Muaūpoko, Ngāti Kuku, Ngāti Whakaue ki Maketu, Te Rūnanga o Ōtākou, Ngāi Te Rangi, Ngāti Hauā hapū, Patuharakeke Te Iwi Trust, Ngaa Rauru, Ngāti Maru, Ngāti Tahu, Taranaki iwi, Te Atiawa, Te Nehenehenui, Ngāti Manawa, Ngāti Rārua, Ngāti Kuia, Te Tōpuni Ngārahu Trust. The Government cannot erase Māori from the law just because we are inconvenient to your investors.

This is what this bill does: it sidelines Māori from decisions about whenua and moana; reopens extractive industries already rejected by courts and by iwi; it ignores tikanga, customary rights, and Treaty settlements; loss of Māori voice and participation. The bill restricts who can submit, it limits hearings rights, it compresses time frames, it reduces opportunities for appeal. Hapū and whānau are directly affected are locked out of decisions; where Māori once exercised kaitiakitanga, this bill silences them. The process now privileges corporate applicants over communities defending taiao and heritage. Māori ward council wards are warned: Manawatū has 10 hapū still unsettled and lacking Treaty settlement protections. Te Whānau a Apanui are the same. Te Tai Tokerau are the same. The bill leaves them exposed to decisions made without consent or involvement.

What we have is a constitutional overreach that concentrates power in Ministers, removes Māori from decision making, dismantles Te Tiriti protections, sacrifices whenua and moana for short-term corporate gain. We stand firmly with iwi, hapū, whānau, communities across Aotearoa opposing this bill, and we’ll repeal this bill and entrench Te Tiriti. This is not fast track; it is a fast trick—a trick that hands power to Ministers and corporations while stripping power from Māori communities. The Government can silence us in this legislation, but they cannot silence us in this House or across Aotearoa. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I wonder what kind of new misery this is, because we have been in this situation in Aotearoa New Zealand for decades of governance where some duty of care was owed to the environment. Again and again, we are reaching new levels of dismissal.

I want to make it really clear that the original Fast-track Approvals Bill was already completely unacceptable in its overreach. It was already completely undermining communities’ democratic participation. It was overriding the Crown’s very clear obligations to iwi and hapū under Te Tiriti. It’s weakening environmental laws and protections. That’s already unacceptable. But now, if that wasn’t enough for this Government that wants to push things out so far, these processes that we’ve been accustomed to in this country—that have some form of legitimacy and legal standing—no longer apply with this. This has pushed it out so far. It gives more weight and more strength to our very clear position as Te Pāti Kākāriki that we will revoke consents when it comes to coalmining, seabed mining, and goldmining in particular, because of how egregious it is that they sidestep these environmental protections.

I want to also touch on some comments that we heard earlier from the ACT member about a lack of an argument from the hard-left for being against this bill. I want to start with a submitter that we heard—

Hard-left.

—in the select committee process that is not from the hard-left. They’re an independent fast-track panel convener, who is independent of the Environmental Protection Authority, who actually appoints experts to these panels. What they said was they warned the Environment Committee to “be alert for unintended policy outcomes and to proceed with caution here.” “Impractical, unworkable changes will simply concentrate pressure on panels. Were this to happen, the quality of some decisions will be very vulnerable to appeal and judicial review.”

Now, why that is so critical that this Government actually listened to those conveners is because they hold up the integrity of the very process that these decisions are made under. What they said this bill does is it threatens the reputation of these independent panel members that sit on these panels to make these decisions. This is how extreme this bill is. Unfortunately, from the little we’ve been able to make of the short time we’ve had to look at this Amendment Paper, it doesn’t look like the Government’s listened. What that means is this process is going to be somewhat, if not completely, illegitimate when it comes to these decisions having to stand up to appeals, having to stand up in the courts. I think that should be of serious concern to this Government, and yet they’re not listening. So be it; let’s push this through today, like they’re going to.

Any Government that pushes through a bill that departs so significantly and irresponsibly from these long-held democratic legal safeguards, and threatens political influence in independent decision-making under urgency needs to be challenged; it needs to be called out. Ninety-five percent of New Zealanders who submitted on this bill called it out. They said we do not want this bill, and surprise, surprise, it’s going through, because the applicants, past and present, have gotten in the Minister’s ear. It’s completely unacceptable, and we oppose it.

Look, it is really sad to hear, on that side of the House, the culture of no, no, no, slow, slow, slow, when on this side of the House we are wanting development, we’re wanting the housing developments, the renewable energy that we so desperately need, powering up our growers and our farmers so that we can strengthen this economy and create jobs and opportunities. When it comes to supermarkets, we need to create more supermarket competition so that we can reduce the cost of living for hard-working New Zealanders out there. This is what this bill is all about.

I would just like to take this opportunity as chair of the Environment Committee to thank our members for the fast process that we took with this bill to obviously get it through to its second reading here today, because it is about getting more competition into our supermarket sector. We know that we need to get things built faster in this country; we need to get the consenting regime and our planning regime a lot more streamlined and effective. This is what this bill is about, as well as, obviously, making some technical changes to the fast-track process, just to make it more effective and more streamlined.

It was actually very good to hear from the fast-track panel during the select committee process, whereby they said it was running very smoothly, it was going well, and they did actually mention some of those great projects that have already been passed, which of course is the Port of Auckland, Bledisloe North Wharf, and the Fergusson berth extension, as well as the Maitahi Village developments in Nelson, and of course the Milldale development. These are all positive, and we want to see more of these fast-track projects being approved.

Of course, during the process we heard from the Port of Tauranga, and this bill, of course, will ensure that we can get that stellar passage and that wharf at Tauranga built and constructed. Why is this important? Well, this is important because, at the moment, the Port of Tauranga is turning away ships, turning away our New Zealand exports, our kiwifruit, our apples, and our red meat, when actually we can be welcoming those ships and getting that produce off to market, getting the value for the New Zealand economy and strengthening our economy. It was good to hear the reality of the situation that we’re in with the Port of Tauranga. I visited them recently, actually, and I could see the potential from our largest port, which obviously needs to get a wharf built, expand that wharf, and welcome the ships in so that we can get more exports and grow our economy.

We also heard from the Tukituki water storage scheme, which, of course, is very, very important for my own region of Hawke’s Bay, where we’re actually seeing 37 degree days at the moment in Hawke’s Bay; it is so hot. We’ve got drought on the back door, we’ve got drier summers, and we don’t have water storage yet. We are one of the most productive regions in the country. The Tukituki water storage scheme is very, very important to growing our economy in Hawke’s Bay, but actually growing what we already have there and, of course, supporting many jobs and opportunities in the region. Of course, that project is on the fast track at the moment, so this will be very important for Hawke’s Bay, because it’s going to unleash economic potential in our region. It’s going to diversify the land use that we have at the moment across the Heretaunga Plains, across the Ruataniwha Plains; this is a very, very important project. With climate change on our door, with droughts on our door and drier summers, we need water storage, so that is very important.

Of course, during the process we also heard from the energy companies, and it was very interesting to hear from the energy companies, because they said one of the most restrictive barriers to bringing renewable energy online at the moment is the consenting process, because they cannot get it online fast enough. I’ll give an example. Recently, I was up at Tepahui with my wonderful colleague, Napier MP Katie Nimon—welcome back to the House, Katie; it’s great to have you back—and we were up there opening this wind farm. It took 20 years to get this wind farm constructed; it was two years to build it. This balance is absolutely out of whack. We need to bring renewable energy on a lot faster and more efficiently, and this is what fast track is all about. It’s about getting renewable energy projects built faster and more efficiently.

The last element that I just want to talk about was the retirement villages, who we heard about through the select committee process, because we’ve got an ageing population and we are wanting to encourage more development in our retirement village sector. They said that one of the biggest barriers to getting retirement villages built in New Zealand was the consenting process. When you see large investment like this, you need certainty when we’re going to get that capital investment into the country, and we’re going to get these retirement villages built, which, of course, is very important to addressing our ageing population. Having fast track provides the fast lane to getting these projects built, and they are so important for strengthening our economy, creating jobs and opportunities across New Zealand. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It is so incredibly frustrating to sit here and listen to speeches from members on the Government benches who wax lyrical about how their Government wants to strengthen the economy, create more jobs, and build a whole bunch of things. The reality is that they’ve built absolutely nothing, and, because of their decisions, 20,000 jobs in the construction sector alone have been lost in New Zealand.

It is incredibly frustrating to listen to members who talk about wanting to build things and wanting to support the construction industry, when everything that they’ve done goes against even that. They also talk about the need for a faster consenting process; no one’s denying that. No one’s denying that we need to build things better and faster, and that we need a strong economy. What is frustrating is the idea presented by members on the Government benches that the economy and the environment are in opposition, because that is a false dichotomy. We absolutely need a healthy environment if we’re going to build a sustainable and strong economy, and that is the point that members opposite fail to understand. The chair of the Environment Committee stands up and talks about development, not once mentioning how this bill will absolutely ruin and put in decline the environmental protections that we need in this country.

The original Fast-track Approvals Bill was described as an assault on the environment and on environmental protections: that was absolutely correct, and 20,000 people marched down Queen Street in opposition to that bill because they felt it was ministerial overreach; it was a Government that would dictate what happens when it comes to development, to the detriment of the environment. Then this Government made a couple of changes—OK, so three Ministers would no longer be able to veto the decisions of the panel that they themselves put in place, but, instead, the panel would have the ultimate decision. Now what happens? They have a piece of legislation that they claim is all about increasing supermarket competition—but it’s not. There are about 100 other changes in this piece of legislation that they describe as technical, small changes—“rats and mice”, nothing to see here, because it’s all about supermarket competition. If that were the case, we would be supporting this bill, but it’s not the case, is it? This bill is a Trojan horse. It pretends to be about supermarket competition. The word “supermarket” is mentioned once, maybe twice. “Groceries” is mentioned once, maybe twice, in this bill.

What does this bill actually do? I’m going to quote the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Simon Upton, because I think he puts it very clearly when he says that “the effect [of the bill] will almost certainly undermine the legitimacy of the Fast-track process and the robustness of its decisions because it seeks to make the approval of applications almost inevitable, by providing the Minister with a mechanism to insert tailor-made Government policy statements to which weight must be given by panels.” I want to touch on that. We have laid it out very clearly in the Labour Party differing view in the select committee report. It is a shame that the chair of the Environment Committee didn’t bother to mention this point that was raised by so many submitters in the very short period of time, given the unilateral decision by the chair to shorten the submissions process. Parliament did not have the opportunity to debate that as we usually would. Labour members on the select committee put up quite the fight over the process, because it is so undemocratic, and yet, unfortunately, the Environment Committee chose to go with the chair’s unilateral decision.

Despite that, there were a number of submissions on this very point. The bill introduces a new type of document that is relevant for decision makers, and it is the undefined “Government policy statement”, or the “GPS”. Now, this GPS is discretionary. There are absolutely no criteria laid out for what the Government policy statement should entail. There is no specified process for the development of the GPS. There is just the requirement for the Minister to come up with this GPS; it can be whatever the Minister decides to put in it and as wide as the Minister wants to go, and the only requirement is to consult with other Ministers and then to publish it. This means that the GPS could be anything, and if that had been confined to supermarket competition, as this Government claims the bill is about, then we would have had no problems with supporting that, because on this side of the House, we do want to see progress. We do want to see development. We want to see a strong economy as well—but not at the expense of a healthy environment—and we struck that balance with our fast-track bill.

Unfortunately, we’ve got a Government that doesn’t care about the environment, that runs roughshod over it and brings in a bill that was egregious and that tens of thousands of people marched in the streets against. They changed it in response, and now they want to change it back by stealth. That’s what this bill does. It moves towards concentrating power in the hands of the Minister through the GPS; it severely limits the participation of third parties. We’ve heard that through a number of submissions from environmental NGOs and conservation groups who submitted to the Environment Committee. Many of them also pointed out what the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment said: it “speeds up the process that already makes heroic claims on the ability of parties to assemble material to the point that proper scrutiny cannot be reliably undertaken.”

I want to point, at this juncture, to a couple of projects that have initially applied through the fast-track approvals process; things like the open-cast mine on Denniston Plateau. The Denniston Plateau is a unique ecosystem in New Zealand; it’s a hotbed of plant biodiversity and birdlife as well. There is a project for open-cast mining on Denniston Plateau. The Te Kuha coalmine out on Westport—rejected by the Environment Court in 2020, brought back, taken to the Supreme Court, and rejected by the Supreme Court in 2023—reapplied under the fast-track approvals process, and it was returned by the panel because it raised serious concerns there. The fast-track panel and its ability to be able to invite commentary by the likes of conservation groups like Forest & Bird adds rigour to the process, and that is the process that this Government seeks to undermine through this bill, which is ostensibly about supermarket competition—and it’s not. It restricts the discretion to invite comment; it brings in a whole number of steps. For a Government that seems to hate regulation, when it’s convenient to them, and they want to bring in red tape to slow down the processes of the fast-track panel and the rigour with which the panel can operate, it does that. No problem, we’ll bring in a whole bunch of extra steps there, and we’ll reduce their ability to make robust decisions.

The panel convenor submitted on this very point. We heard that the time frame is too short. It was interesting: even the applicants of fast-track projects—many of them who submitted to the select committee—made this point: that the required time frames, that are now reduced within this piece of legislation, are too short. It’s egregious from the point of view of environmental protections; it’s not good enough even from the point of view of applicants. It’s a pretty bad piece of lawmaking that this Government is bringing in.

The final point that I want to make is that Shane Jones has waxed lyrical and has been very public in his criticism of the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA). He’s called the fresh limitations on appeal rights and the ability of the Government to give a general direction to the EPA as of particular importance in this piece of legislation—and that’s what this bill does. It inserts a new section that allows the Minister to give general direction to the EPA in relation to its performance and its exercise of its functions, duties, and powers under the Act. We are concerned that the administrative role of the EPA is not being respected and that the Minister could very well interfere in the decision-making process.

So I end where I began: 20,000 people marched on Queen Street because of the ministerial overreach in the original bill. That was changed, and it is now being brought back by stealth through this very bill that the Government claims is about supermarket competition. It is absolutely not, and, for that reason, we don’t commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Earlier this year, our Prime Minister, in his state of the nation address, talked about the culture of “no” that was encompassing this country. It’s what we have become known for. In fact, I’ll give you an example of how that culture of “no” has made it international. Recently, the CEO of Port of Auckland, Roger Gray, was overseas on a cruise ship at a cruise industry conference, and he said, “Why will you not come to New Zealand?” He was asking the cruise lines people—the owners and so forth—and they said, “Well, actually, we don’t call you ‘New Zealand’. We call you ‘No Zealand’ ”. That was the quote and that is an absolute disgrace. It’s a sad reflection of where we have got to as a country. [Interruption] Clearly, the Opposition aren’t interested in tourism. They don’t want tourism. They don’t want tourists. They don’t want things happening. Listen to them—they are quite happy to live in a bubble that exists in a special place where no one else wants to live. What a lot of nonsense coming from the other side, as normal. That was a really sad story.

Now, about supermarkets, it’s interesting. They say, “We support the supermarkets bit.” Well, really? It’s interesting that when we were in the select committee, I asked the Mayor of the Far North, Moko Tepania, this question: “Is it important for the Far North, the reduction of restrictions for opening a supermarket?” He said, “Absolutely.” You know why? It was about grocery prices and it was about the town of Kaitāia. It was about the town of Kaitāia, where, as he highlighted, there is one supermarket and the Far North District Council is very, very keen to see some competition, so that people of the Far North get the opportunity to choose and have better grocery prices. It’s a really, really important thing.

Now, there is something I’d really like to address in my call, and that is the disgraceful stand of the Greens in terms of wanting to cancel consents. It’s an absolute disgrace. They are saying to people who come and invest in this country and build and create jobs: “We’re just going to take that consent away and stop it.” That is a disgrace. It’s a sad reflection on the Green Party. The Green Party of Rod Donald would never have done that. The Green Party of the past would never have done that.

It is a disgrace. We as a country need to be responsible players in the global sector if we are to be taken seriously and attract the investment to create jobs. The Greens are a disgrace and a sad reflection for Green parties that have come before. I commend this bill.

This is a five-minute split call. I call Cushla Tangaere-Manuel.

Tēnā koe e te Māngai o te Whare. My, how the mood has changed since the Emergency Management Bill. Heoi anō rā, tēnei te mihi atu ki a koe, Katie, nau mai, hoki mai.

[However, I hereby acknowledge you, Katie: welcome, welcome back.]

We received 2,518 written submissions on this in the small window of 10 days, and 95 percent of you oppose this bill and this Government doesn’t care. They don’t care about your voice, and they are taking us backwards. If they’re going to give you 10 days to consult on this, imagine what they’re going to do when the bulldozers come into your town. Will you be there? Will you know about it? Perhaps—perhaps, because you will be notified.

This is one of the bills that sends shivers down the spines of constituents throughout Ikaroa-Rāwhiti, and especially the East Coast. When considering this, my mind went back to the early 2000s when the East Cape rose and activated against seabed mining—drilling. That’s going to happen again, but it shouldn’t have to if in fact this Government takes heed and actually takes the collaborative approach they are espousing to take.

One of the main issues here is kaitiakitanga; one of the members opposite has said, “Oh, they’re talking about things we can’t see, touch, and feel.” Ko Hikurangi te maunga, ko Waiapu te awa, o Ngāti Porou te iwi, nō Rangitukia awau.

[Hikurangi is my ancestral mountain, Waiapu is my river, Ngāti Porou are my people, I am from Rangitukia.]

Those are all things we can see, touch, and feel. But what you can’t see, touch, and feel is the connection as kaitiaki; that, in fact, is invisible, and that’s why this is so important, because we get one go at this. Our whenua, our awa, and our moana have to endure for ever, for ngā uri whakaheke [our descendants].

There’s been a lot of talk about property rights, and I’m sure everyone here understands that most general land can be bought, sold, developed at will, but whenua Māori and ture whenua Māori is often multiply-owned, has all sorts of different interests, according to whakapapa. Now, these are going to be voluntarily considered under this bill. Don’t just take my word for it. I took the opportunity to read some of the submissions from Ikaroa-Rāwhiti and the submission of Te Hunga Roia Māori o Aotearoa, who absolutely support the whakaaro of my colleagues on this side of the House. Te Hunga Roia Māori warn that this bill materially reduces the practical ability of Māori to exercise rangatiratanga. Well, we know that doesn’t matter to this Government—the exercising of rangatiratanga—that’s why they’re trying to delete it from every legislation in this country. It diminishes the Te Tiriti partnership, it curtails natural justice, and it permits executive overreach. I’m having a bit of an internal giggle ‘cause there’s someone on that side trying to say my speech.

But furthermore, local and regional councils have concerns about this. Greater Wellington Regional Council stated in their submission that this will erode the ability of iwi and hapū like Te Awa Kairangi, Te Whanganui a Tara—which, for those of you who don’t know, is where we are—Te Awarua o Porirua, Wairarapa Moana, and Kāpiti Coast wetlands. The Upper Hutt City Council is deeply troubled by the removal of meaningful consultation. They state that meaningful consultation is replaced with “ ‘notice in writing’ and only 20 working days notification.” That’s despicable.

I know that one of the claimed intentions is that this will bring all the voices together: iwi, councils, hapū, landowners, but, in fact, as my colleague Priyanca Radhakrishnan said, this is actually a Trojan horse. This is trickery in disguise. The genuine intention will not be honoured.

We can move forward in a collaborative way if every voice is counted as genuine and people are not treated as Tom, Dick, and Harry. When 95 percent of submitters make a statement, surely that is valid to be listened to. We do not commend this bill to the House.

Oh, it’s good to be back. Look, I appreciate all the acknowledgment, especially from my East Coast colleagues, who are all lined up here in good order.

Look, I just want to talk about supermarkets. We’ve talked about them a little bit. I think that it’s actually really important to make this point. We love a good pun, right? While in this particular bill supermarkets can’t take themselves through self-checkout, they can go through the express lane.

I just need to take you back to Hawke’s Bay and the farcical situation that we’ve had in Hawke’s Bay that does not help one single person get a more affordable grocery basket. Now, you want to build a new supermarket in Hawke’s Bay, do you think that you could do it in the middle of Napier? No, because Countdown has two Countdowns across the road from each other; in fact, right by my office. It’s actually a real tourist attraction. You can’t build a new supermarket anywhere else in the area, because, of course, all the plans disallow it.

There’s another little story, in Catherine’s electorate no less, where my family used to have a bus company; got sold to a supermarket. They couldn’t get consent to build a supermarket. So, of course, because they couldn’t, they didn’t want to sell the land to another supermarket because, heaven forbid they could get the consent, there might be some competition. They divided it up into four different titles so that nobody could ever build a supermarket. They had to do some different trades around and potentially trade the land with someone else so that they could build a supermarket where there was consent to be able to operate a supermarket. Oh my goodness! The lengths we go to to build a supermarket to bring in competition.

Now, I don’t think that it’s going to work if the same people just expand and build a bigger supermarket. We need new people. We need to be able to build something new where we don’t already have it. Do you think that we could do that any faster than we build wind farms, as my colleague Catherine Wedd mentioned earlier? No. We can’t expect the existing operators to decide between themselves that they’re going to make groceries more affordable. We need new people to come in. Yes, we’re getting a second, bigger Costco. Do you know how long that took them? It’s absolutely unreasonable. This bill is a very, very necessary amendment.

We need to add things to the fast-track bill. We see it working. When it’s working, we need to expand it to make sure that every single competitor that needs to be in this market is able to operate. If we can make sure that the consent is available, we can fast-track it, by up to six weeks in some cases, to get the very necessary building to happen. We’ve just opened IKEA. You can go and get meatballs in Auckland, furniture that was far less affordable. We’re talking about the grocery prices, but this goes far beyond that, and my colleagues have talked about it as well. It’s a very, very important amendment to make.

I think members opposite are far dramatising some of the very, very practical decisions that are being made here. Bring on the Resource Management Act reform that has been introduced. It is going to make a massive, big difference to our economic recovery, to our economic growth, growing the pie in New Zealand, because that is what this is all about. We are absolutely supportive of economic growth, and that is what we are here to do, make no mistake. I commend this bill to the House.

Kia ora, Mr Speaker. It’s interesting to listen to what has been said across the House this morning, and the previous speaker, Katie Nimon, talking about her two Woolworths in Napier. Lovely. Wonderful. But the thing is: where are supermarkets mentioned in this bill? If I look through, not once do I see supermarkets actually mentioned in the bill—not once.

What about groceries?

Yes, groceries. Oh, yes. They were mentioned one time. Once. Just once. That was the only time groceries were mentioned in this bill.

As we look at some of the rhetoric that’s come out this morning, we’ve actually got to look at what it actually is. I think this is a fast track to, yet again, undermining our environment; it’s a fast track to, yet again, undermining democracy. We look at the process we went through, and it was a challenging process. Therefore, we cannot support this bill. In fact, we need to stand up and we need to oppose it. We do not commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s great to speak to this bill, the Fast-track Approvals Amendment Bill. There was some resistance to the Fast-track Approvals Amendment Bill when we brought it in and we actually got to hear from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) during the select committee process. I think it was the CEO who said that she had some reservations, she had some concerns.

The CEO of the EPA is not a she.

In fact, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment—do you remember that, Rachel Brooking? You were there. The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Simon Upton: he said he also had some concerns, but he was actually pleasantly surprised by the way the process has been going. I think we’ve had five approvals so far, but quite a few more in the pipeline are yet to come, which is really a good indication that it’s actually working quite well.

I guess the intention of this bill was to enhance those aspects where, well, it wasn’t working so well; to streamline some of that process. That’s really the intent of this bill, but also, of course, the supermarket aspect of it as well was really important. There’s been a little bit of talk from the Opposition that we haven’t talked much about the supermarkets, but it’s actually a really integral part of it. A previous speaker, Katie Nimon, actually just mentioned Costco and IKEA, which we’ve been talking about in New Zealand for a long, long time. Those things are really important not only for the economic benefit of New Zealand in terms of the employment they bring but, of course, also the wider impact they bring to the competition sector in offering a cheaper deal for New Zealanders. We’re really excited about that.

In fact, recently, I had the privilege of going on a parliamentary trip to Canada. I got to go with some of my colleagues: David MacLeod and, in fact, Dr Tracey McLellan from Labour as well, and a Green Party member, Hūhana Lyndon. The reason why I tell that story related to this particular amendment bill is we sat down in Manitoba and talked to some of the First Nations chiefs because, as you’d appreciate, they have challenges similar to us or parallel to us with their First Nations people and for us, obviously Māori iwi. They were very interested in our Treaty settlements, particularly with this fast-track bill and how the implications play out legally and, of course, the intricacies of Treaty settlements and Te Tiriti, which the Green Party members spoke about earlier, as did Rawiri Waititi.

David McLeod asked them how long it takes them to consent a project in Canada. Of course, the First Nations chief said, “Well, it depends on the project. Obviously there’s different complexity and nuance with every project that we come across.” But David said, “As an example, just a general big project to consent?” and the First Nations chief said, “About two years.” That was quite an eye opener for us because, with our fast track, we will be doing well if we approve things within two years.

What? They’ve got a completely different system. You can’t even compare them. They’ve got indigenous safeguards in their legislation.

But that was an example of just how slow we are to do things. We have got safeguards too, Ingrid Leary.

Read the bill.

That’s right. Our chair, Catherine Wedd, was referring earlier to a wind farm in Hawke’s Bay, which took about two or three years to build but 20 years to consent. It’s just not sustainable any more for us to do that. That’s why we’re making some big changes. Of course, the macro changes around the Resource Management Act are key to that and key to this in terms of streamlining the process, but this amendment bill specifically is around improving that fast-track process.

We have looked at truncating some of the turnaround time for the submitters when they approach to make a consent. We tried to maybe fast track the fast track and there was a bit of push-back from the EPA, from the Parliamentary Commissioner, and from some submitters. I believe that the Minister is considering an amendment in the committee of the whole House where we will actually adjust that. We had some comments from the Opposition that we weren’t listening, but the Minister is listening. That select committee process, although it was quite quick, still enabled a good—

Efficient.

Yeah, efficient. We had submitters present to us here in Wellington, and of course, during the recess week, we also held Zoom meetings and heard from some other submitters as well, which is really important.

Just on the supermarkets, one of the, I guess, precedents we’ve seen is—for example, many of you will know about Halswell in Christchurch. Did I say that right, Vanessa?

No, it’s “Halls-wall”.

Halswell, where Woolworths took four years to get a resource consent. They, effectively, said that it’s a multi-year, multimillion-dollar barrier. Of course, those costs—when we’re talking about the price of butter and the price of cheese—to set up the infrastructure to house the very thing that we’re trying to increase competition with has to be passed on. For that $4 million of resource consenting, you can imagine how many percentile increments on 500 grams of butter are going to be passed out. Again, that’s a really good example.

Another example is the Wairau Rd Pak ‘N Save that some commentators say took nearly two decades to consent because the resource consent actually got declined twice, such was the process. That was a really quite a drawn out example, but what this tells us is that New Zealand is just not attractive for these big supermarket players. In fact, there was another one in Rolleston on Levi Rd, the Selwyn Pak ‘N Save, where the re-zoning and the resource consent just took too long. Consent was eventually granted, but the project needed to proceed to construction, but only after a very lengthy consenting plan change interaction with the council. In fact, there was another one: Pioneer Highway Countdown in Palmerston North. Time line, again: it was a proposed $16 million new supermarket, but the application was refused by independent commissioners for failing to meet urban design integration rules. That’s right, a supermarket in Palmerston North—Palmerston North—not necessarily known for its urban design, potentially; I don’t want to speak out of turn.

Certainly not the MP for Palmerston North.

Yeah, I don’t think there are any MPs from Palmerston North here. Failing to meet urban design and integration rules, the consent was refused. What about Central Otago and Otago? Anyone here from Alexandra? A proposed Countdown in 2020: the planner recommended a decline of a new Countdown because of adverse effects on urban traffic and amenity. Again, “amenity”. This is a supermarket. They’re not designed to look particularly sexy; they’re designed to sell baked beans, butter, milk, and bread, and it was declined. The outcome recommendation was against consent.

What about Hamilton?

Hamilton’s got some new supermarkets, but actually—thank you for mentioning Hamilton—if you will indulge me, it is the city of the future. It is the fastest-growing city. We have got international flights. We have got a Pak ‘N Save being built, but the council made them do significant traffic management, which Pak ‘N Save had to pay for, which is fair enough from the ratepayer perspective—

Should they not have paid for it?

—but at so much cost that the Pak ‘N Save has to incur, and that cost is going to be passed on. So Rachel Brooking, when you come through on the 110kph expressway from Auckland listening to cruise control, if you want to stop in to that Pak ‘N Save, unfortunately, the price of butter just went up because they need to pass on that cost. This is really the intent—

Should they not? Is that what the bill does? Is that what you’re telling us: the bill is going to change the costs?

Yes, that’s what I’m saying, Rachel Brooking. Because if the capital cost is reduced because the resource consent is more streamlined and easier—

Oh, so supermarkets don’t have to pay for traffic controls any more? That’s what the bill says, does it?

It’s going to be much more—

You can sit down.

OK—it’s going to be much more streamlined and therefore that cost saving and cost efficiency will be able to be passed on. I commend the bill to the House.

This bill is set down for committee stage immediately. I declare the House in committee at the conclusion of question time, so the House will now break for lunch and we will be in committee at the end of question time.

The House is resumed. I’m sure that members would wish to welcome the visiting delegates on the Australian Political Exchange, who are present in the gallery.

I’ve received a report of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment entitled Reviewing the land use capability system in a regulatory complex. That paper is published under the authority of the House.

Members, we start with Part 1. This is the debate on clauses 4 to 54, amendments to Parts 1 and 2 of the principal Act. The question is that Part 1 stand part.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Look, I want to start by acknowledging that the Minister has put Amendment Paper 473 on the Table this morning, and that rewrites the bill, in a way, in terms of it would be similar to, maybe, a revision-tracked (RT) version that would come out from the select committee.

However, the select committee didn’t have an RT version because of timing, and there are a number of amendments in my name, and also in Lan Pham’s name—there may be others, as well. I have gone through my version of the bill as introduced, and I’ve got different coloured markings all over it, including references to the Minister’s Amendment Paper. We might be going between those documents as we go through this committee stage; I’m basing most of what I’m doing off the version of the bill as it was introduced.

And it would be helpful for members to highlight the clause they’re speaking to.

Yes, yes—no, I will do. I’m just starting by saying that we’re here under urgency, and this fast-track bill was at select committee, but not for long. We are on Part 1, and I’ve got a lot of questions and comments throughout the bill, and I would like to go through it fairly carefully.

Chop, chop.

Oh, I see the Government members are already in a hurry. That doesn’t surprise me.

The first question—I’m on page 5 of the bill as introduced, and I note that the Government has an amendment to clause 4, and it is the deletion of subclauses (4) and (5), which regards priority projects and the processing of that. My first question is whether the Minister can explain why they are being deleted—what the rationale is for that.

Then my second question, and bigger question, is around Government policy statements. In clause 4(7), there is a definition of Government policy statement (GPS): it means “a Government policy statement issued under section 10A”. Now, there are some amendments, one in my name—and I’m sure the Greens will talk to their amendment, as well, which is in new section 10A—but my amendment was to suggest that, at new section 10A, we specify that these Government policy statements are about grocery competition. That is because the Minister has said on multiple occasions that this bill is about supermarkets. We heard a very long—surprisingly long—contribution in the second reading from Ryan Hamilton that went through the ins and outs of an awful lot of supermarkets around the motu. The Minister may be interested to know that it included Pak ‘N Save in Hamilton, with a roundabout; apparently, if this bill has effect, then the Pak ‘N Save’s roundabout will no longer be the responsibility of the Pak ‘N Save, and so somebody else is going to have to pay for the traffic management. I’d be interested in the Minister’s thoughts on that and how it relates.

The question here is around the Government policy statement: if this bill is all about supermarkets and grocery competition, why is the Government policy statement so wide and why can it apply to a good number of issues? Further to that, if we jump ahead to clause 5—again, I’ve offered up an amendment to circumvent the policy statement related to grocery competition. There’s an amendment in the Minister’s name about enabling the Minister to consult any other person. Really, this does not provide any criteria that the Minister can consult other people as they think it’s appropriate. There’s no criteria here about how the GPS will be made, noting that it can be on a range of subjects outside of grocery competition. Would the Minister consider some more criteria in the development of the Government policy statement?

I note that in other legislation—in some health legislation—they do have criteria for the making of a GPS. I have provided an amendment taken off that legislation—but with some tweaks so it makes sense for resource management legislation—that would give some comfort to the Labour Party, who is concerned that, at the moment, the Government policy statement can be about anything. A Minister can have a whim and then, as a consequence, that Government policy statement does have to be published—and the Minister can talk to whoever the Minister wants to—but that’s it; that’s it in terms of process. Then the consequences of that Government policy statement is at new section 10A(6): it relates to the decision making on a substantive decision. That is a very important point.

I would like the Minister to—I think that’s four questions I’ve got here. One is if he can explain at clause 4 the deletions to subclauses (4) and (5), but that’s a little question. The bigger questions are: will he consider the changes in my name around limiting the Government policy statements to just groceries—because he said that this bill is about groceries, so make it just about groceries? If he will not do that, will he consider adding in some criteria about that Government policy statement—how it’s made, what the confines of the GPS are? And then, finally, if he can also comment on the role that the GPS has in decisions that are made and referred to in subsections (5) and (6) of that new section 10A.

In relation to the member’s first question around priority projects, it’s largely an administrative change that, essentially, means that the ability to classify something as a priority project is dealt with at the substantive stage rather than earlier, which is the appropriate juncture to deal with it. It’s largely an administrative change.

In relation to the Government policy statements (GPS), the member rightly highlights clause 5, which inserts new section 10A and inserts the ability to issue a Government policy statement. The member asked about the series of questions. The first GPS the Government intends to issue is, of course, the grocery competition. We’ve issued that already. We’ve publicised that. There may be others. The member asked why the Government is just not limiting it to grocery competition, and the answer is because there may be others. The ability for the Government to issue a Government policy statement, we think, will be a useful device in terms of signalling Government intention in relation to other areas. I’m not going to prejudge where Cabinet or the Government may get to in terms of other areas. Clearly, grocery competition is an area that the Government is interested in, but, for example, without prejudging anything, it may be that renewable energy generation is an area that the Government wishes to signal as a priority. I think many members would be interested in that.

In terms of how it works, it allows the Government to signal its position on what may be regional or national benefits in particular sectors. We’ve talked about grocery and retail competition, but I think the key point is this: it’s not determinative for particular projects. A GPS will be a factor for consideration by the Minister on referral applications and by an expert panel on substantive applications, alongside all the other information presented with an application and the comments. The underlying test in the Act is not changing, which requires panels to weigh up the regional and national benefits with adverse effects in making those decisions. That is not changing. It’s not determinative of outcomes. There’s been a bit of public commentary that it gives the Minister carte blanche to force things through. That’s not the reality. It’s not borne out by the facts and the law. It’s a signalling device, and there are legal requirements there around it to be a factor for consideration on referral applications.

Thank you. I would like to begin on clause 4, Part 1, and particularly clause 4(3), “In section 4(1)”—and this is regarding the definition of “complex freshwater fisheries activity”, which has had a change from the original Fast-track Approvals Act. The first of the changes in the original Act were under complex freshwater fisheries activity in section 4(1)(c)—this was on page 9 of the original Act—and they deemed that, to constitute that activity, works are “within 500 metres of the coast and occur during the whitebaiting season” and then, thirdly, they are “in an area known to be used for trout, salmon, or native fish spawning and occur during the spawning season”.

Now, the changes that they have now in the amendment bill—that, again, was introduced this morning and we’re just making our way through—in subclause (3)(ii), amending section 4(1), it now says, “that require disturbance of any duration during the whitebaiting season to a water body within 500 m of the coast; or (iii) that require disturbance of any duration during the relevant spawning season to a water body that is known for the spawning of trout, salmon, or native fish;”. Now, I’m interested specifically about this change. Why this change, particularly when it comes to just limiting it to whitebait species, and what is the intention with the disturbance aspect of it? Is it that there was not enough clarification in the earlier definition, or have there actually been instances or activities that have occurred that are now of concern to the Government and are why they are undertaking this change? I’d really like some clarity on that.

Then, further down—again, this is still clause 4—in subclause (7), it’s talking about the definition of the relevant portfolio Minister. It still retains the start of the definition about meaning “a Minister of the Crown who, under the authority”—etc., etc.—“is responsible for”, and then it says, in subclause (7), “(a) in relation to a proposed Government policy statement, a portfolio that is directly related to the subject of the proposed Government policy statement”. My question with this is: is the subject of that statement simply the sector in which it sits, or is it about the potential impacts of that Government policy statement? Why I’m asking that is because I’m particularly interested in the Minister for the Environment’s role within the Act, because what we’ve seen in the actual operations of the Act is that even though she has been legislated to be providing comment when it comes to applications, we know very clearly that she actually has not been undertaking that role and that legislative role.

I’m interested specifically in what the consideration has been about the Minister for the Environment’s role, specifically in the Government policy statements and whether she is considered to be a relevant portfolio Minister given that the entirety of the fast-track proposals that we have in the approvals process so far have, clearly, impacts on the environment. I would really like and appreciate some clarification on that.

Then, thirdly, just to move to where my colleague Rachel Brooking was in clause 5, where there is a number of very important questions to be answered on this—because, again, we have not had a very clear select committee process at all; it’s been very rushed, but we heard very clearly during that process particularly from the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment that he considered this provision of the Government policy statements offers no guardrails when it comes to environmental protection. He described it as an open-ended power to determine what national or regional benefits mean. Basically, there were many contributions to the Environment Committee that people considered this to be a return back down the track of the expansive ministerial power that the Government actually backtracked from when we went through the select committee process on the Fast-track Approvals Bill.

I’m really interested to hear the Minister responsible for RMA Reform’s take on why those concerns weren’t paid more attention to when the Government actually landed on where they are for this area.

Good questions. I thank the member for them. In relation to the first one around complex freshwater fisheries and whitebait, I’m advised by officials that clarification was requested by the Department of Conservation in relation to that. It’s, I suspect, a largely administrative clarification.

In relation to her second question, it was, I think, about the Minister for the Environment. As I think the member knows, the Minister for the Environment is not the responsible Minister for the purposes of the Fast-track Approvals Act. That’s not to say the Minister for the Environment is not a good person; it’s not to say the portfolio is not important. They both are, but they are not the responsible Minister. The Minister for Infrastructure is that person.

The issuing of the Government policy statement (GPS) is done by the Minister. Cleary, that’s a Government policy statement, so there’d be a Cabinet process; certainly the Government policy statement on grocery competition, for example, has been issued as a Government document by Cabinet. The proposal in clause 5 to insert new section 10A says that “the Minister must consult the relevant portfolio Ministers.”

For example, just to take the example I was using before, without prejudging where the Government might get to, if the Government issued a GPS on renewable generation, for example, the relevant portfolio Minister at that point would be the Minister for Energy. The proposal is that that is mandatorily required to take place, but they then also may consult any other person the Minister thinks appropriate.

In relation to the third point around the GPS, all I can do is repeat what I said before, which is I think there has been a degree of inaccurate commentary around the role of Government policy statements. The underlying test that the expert panels are required to give effect to through the Fast-track Approvals Act is not changing. This idea that it’s unlimited, unconstrained, Muldoonist power without any guard rails is not actually borne out by the law.

Thank you. Going back to the answers the Minister gave to my questions around clause 5, new section 10A, and the contribution the Minister has just made now. On that contribution, the Minister is saying the underlying tests do not change. Those underlying tests in the Fast-track Approvals Act are at section 81, and the ability to decline is at section 85, and what we and submitters are particularly concerned about is that when making a decision under section 85—and this is from our differing view in the select committee report—most applications can only be declined if the adverse impacts in relation to the application are “sufficiently significant to be out of proportion to the project’s regional national benefits”. The concern that we have is that, with the addition of a Government policy statement (GPS), with no criteria, that will have a relationship to this test that I just read out about the impacts being “sufficiently significant to be out of proportion”. I would very much appreciate the Minister being clear, in his answers, that he does not see the GPS as being able to be part of that weighting in section 85 in the ability to decline and that, maybe, the GPS is only part of a weighting in the section 81 decision. That would be of some comfort. But if he can go through that relationship between sections 81 and 85 of the principal Act, that would be very useful.

He’s talked about how the underlying tests do not change. Is he referring to these tests in sections 81 and 85? Then he’s also said that in terms of going back to the GPS generally, they might be about all sorts of things that he can’t think of at the moment but that, because they have to go through a Cabinet process, that’s enough. I really want to challenge the Minister on that assumption because, apart from the Crown Minerals Act, which was passed by this Government recently, other instruments, such as national policy statements and a GPS made under the Pae Ora (Healthy Futures) Act 2022, have criteria not just about who you consult but some criteria, some guard rails, about what those GPSs are about and how they will influence the decisions made under this Act. I’m always asking for this Government to put sustainable management into the fast track. It could be that there is some criteria around sustainable management, for instance. It does not give me any comfort if the Minister says, “Well, we can go back to the purpose of the fast-track Act.”, because that purpose is simply to facilitate projects and that purpose is not to facilitate projects in accordance with sustainable management. That is where all of our concerns come from and why we say, over and over again, that fast track does not protect our environment.

I’m happy to work studiously on more amendments, although I do have one up already about what those guard rails could be, and I note, as well, that Lan Pham has an amendment saying that GPSs must follow the same process as set out in section 46A of the Resource Management Act (RMA) for a national policy statement. That would also do the trick.

The questions there are: can he please think more about criteria, some guard rails? Also, it would be useful if he could think of any other examples rather than supermarkets. He’s said renewable energy, but, surely, there are other national direction documents for renewable energy and significance in the RMA that would already make them part of the section 81 determination process. Can he say what he is referring to when he says that the underlying test does not change, and the relationship between sections 81 and 85 in the principal Act, and what role the GPS, any type of GPS, will have in that decision making?

Thank you, Madam Chair. I want to pick up where my colleague Rachel Brooking has just left off, because this is a really substantial part of the Act. What my concern is is that we heard really clearly about concerns from submitters about this being, essentially, executive overreach—that, quite aside from speeding up the process and making it more efficient and effective, it actually could open it up to risking robust decision-making, and especially if it’s not evidence based, then the risk of judicial review.

There were a number of suggestions, made by a number of submitters, that could have quite clearly resulted in processes that these Government policy statements were much more robust and much more informed by expertise or community. These were things like criteria around the Government policy statements actually undergoing some form of cost-benefit analysis, or at least consultation, and this is particularly when it comes to iwi, hapū, mana whenua, and the public. If there was some form of consultation that could strengthen the rationale for these Government policy statements, and perhaps somewhat avoid the clear risks that have been set out not only by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment but a number of very influential legal minds—I think what I’m proposing, which I’d love Minister Bishop’s thoughts on, is very simple: it’s simply about section 46A of the Resource Management Act (RMA), where the same process that’s set out in there would actually apply to these.

Now, I’m obviously aware that the Government is getting rid of the RMA, and I’m absolutely not attached to that specific process. What I am encouraging, and would like the Minister’s consideration of, is, again, simply some semblance of safeguards and consultation that may give some opportunity for relevant expertise or community experience, and iwi and hapū, particularly when it comes to Treaty obligations, to have their voices heard, to actually inform these Government policy statements. I’d really appreciate a response to that. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I am going to move on now to clause 6, “Section 11 amended (Consultation requirements for referral application)”. Both Lan Pham and I have different amendments to delete this. The change is that we’re moving from consultation to notification and we’re worried—well, I’m worried; I’ll speak for myself—that that is a reduction in the involvement of the iwi groups that are described later in that clause.

We did hear from iwi groups that already the time frames are very tight and any further tightening of them will just make it impossible to give any meaningful contribution. In the Minister’s Amendment Paper, there is some change to the language around the 20 days and where the 20 days happens. My questions to the Minister are simply if he can explain what the change in the Amendment Paper is and why it’s there, but also if he has given any consideration to the submissions that were made by iwi saying that 20 working days is not enough, and, further, what his rationale is for this change in the title from “consultation” to “and notification” and the difference between simply being notified of something rather than being consulted on it.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I think that’s a really important distinction, and before we get a response from the Minister, I would like to table and ask his consideration of my amendment to simply delete clause 6. We think this is a really inappropriate new consultation requirement, in that it actually reduces what one would think of as consultation literally to a one-way process. This could have really ill-thought-out impacts, particularly when it comes to a reduction or a disincentivising of applicants actually working proactively and productively with local authorities and with mana whenua to actually identify and resolve issues in advance of lodging an application.

We know, councils know, and we know from their submissions and experience that having some really basic stuff at the front end here can result in so much cost and time saving down the track. I think that because the bill, as we’ll get to in later parts, so inappropriately narrows that ability for appeal, this upfront consultation rather than simply one-way notification, would be a really valuable and wise track for the Government to actually go down to actually reduce that risk of appeals later down the track or potentially judicial review. I would really appreciate the Minister’s comments on that.

I’ll deal with a range of issues in relation to these questions. Change has been made in relation to moving from consultation to notification, and we think that’s a more objective test. Actually, in relation to Ms Pham’s comments around judicial review, it’s really clear that when someone’s been notified, there is a debate about what consultation requires, so we actually think this creates more clarity.

The Amendment Paper change is to clarify that an application can’t be lodged before the 20 - working day notification period ends. I understand there was a bit of debate at select committee about how people would just send them off and then lodge the next day. They can’t do that. Twenty working days is the minimum period applicants must allow. We think that’s appropriate.

In relation to the other questions that were raised—why not use a section 46A Resource Management Act process? Well, that’s quite a cumbersome process to issue what’s actually a relatively simple document. We’re not intending to take up the member’s suggested amendment around an national policy statement - style process. We think we’ve got the balance about right in the current form.

In relation to Ms Brooking’s questions, all I can do is repeat what I said quite a long time ago—or at least half an hour ago—which is that the underlying test is not changing. Clearly, the Government policy statement will be a factor that is weighted by the panels in saying yay or nay, but it is not a determinative factor, and my comments around that were in relation to some commentary that that is the case when, in fact, it’s not.

Thank you. Given the Minister’s answer then—he’s saying it is a factor, but not a determinative factor—he could be clearer in terms of section 85 and that balance that I was referring to in my earlier contribution. I won’t repeat it, but my interpretation of what he just said is that it is a factor, so, presumably, if it is a factor, it could change that proportionate decision-making test under section 85, which is the opposite of him saying that the underlying test doesn’t change. It either does change or it doesn’t change, and he’s not being clear about where that sits, and I think it would be useful for everybody if he did.

I also note that, while he is rejecting Lan Pham’s section 46A of the Resource Management Act (RMA) process, I do have an amendment as well that’s copied from the Pae Ora (Healthy Futures) Act 2022, and that is that in doing one, the Minister must be satisfied that the Government policy statement contributes to sustainable management, have regard to the relevant policy documents in the specified Acts that the fast track refers to, consult the Secretary for the Environment, and engage with organisations as the Minister sees as reasonable—I’m paraphrasing somewhat there. I would like a response to that as well.

I will move on to clause 9, and this is a very important clause. It amends section 17 of the principal Act, which is “Minister invites comments”. What we’re particularly interested in are the changes that are made here, because this is one place in the Act where there has been some discretion to invite comments from parties that are not local authorities and that are not adjoining landowners. What has happened—and this is relevant to the Minister’s amendment today—is that we have been worried that replacing subsection (3) with the new paragraph (b), which is included—it says, “Replace subsection (3) with: (3) A local authority—(a) must provide comments”, and there are some subparagraphs there, and “(b) may provide other comments, but only if those comments are relevant to the application and the decision on the application that the Minister is required to make under section 21.”

I see that there’s a small change that the Minister’s made—I’m sorry, I was getting ahead of myself with reference to his Amendment Paper; apologies for that. The issue here is that “Replace subsection (3)” is simply replaced with “section 17(3)”—so my check here is that that is just a typo being corrected, but also if the Minister can comment on why the local authority is being restricted at paragraph (b) to providing other comments only if they “are relevant to the application and the decision on the application that the Minister is required to make under section 21.”, and the new “(3A) Any comments made by the administering agency must be relevant”. I totally accept that any comments should be relevant, but is this change necessary because comments were not relevant—if the Minister can comment on that?

Then, also, I note that at subclause (4)—this is an important one, because it says, “In section 17(6), replace ‘20’ with ‘15’.”, and Lan Pham has an amendment to delete that subclause (4). I meant to, but I accidentally said clause 6. But that “ ‘20’ with ‘15’.”—we heard that that would be difficult for councils to decrease from 20 to 15, that being five working days in a week. I was wondering if the Minister has considered—and I don’t think there’s anything in his Amendment Paper about that time frame, and if he’s talked to local authorities about how that will work.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I have some questions on clause 7, still in Part 1, so this is page 7 of the bill. This is particularly around the amendment to section 13, which is actually to do with the referral application. Subclause (1) of clause 7 is about, in section 13, “after ‘environment’, insert ‘and the significance of those adverse effects’.”

Now, as I understand it, the intention of this change to this section is to strengthen the information that is given to the Minister so that they have more fulsome information to consider when they’re actually deciding the referral stage of the fast-track process. It’s clear, within the bill, that the Minister may decline an application for referral, even at that stage, if the project may have significant adverse effects. I understand the rationale—that this is trying to expand that.

Now, what my concern is, and what the concern of many submitters was on the fast-track amendment bill submissions process was that it shouldn’t be left to the applicant to actually decide the significance of those adverse effects. Is there a consideration about any additional scope where it could be more clearly spelt out—the obligations of the applicant to actually expand on their responsibilities?

Now, we’ve had some quite concerning submissions throughout the process, where submitters would talk about applicants who actually claimed things, whether that be in consultation or in assessment of environmental acts, that were actually proven to be untrue. So when the Government like to describe this as there still being some form of environmental safeguards, this could actually be one area that clarified the obligations of the applicant to provide a fulsome assessment of environmental impacts, ideally outside of their own companies or whatever consultants they may use. But that would actually help the Minister in their determination and, presumably, result in much better outcomes for the process. So I’m really interested to hear whether the Minister has any thoughts about that.

In relation to Rachel Brooking’s amendment around clause 9, I think it was, in relation to, “may provide comments only if those comments are relevant to the application”—this is really just a kind of clarificatory change to make sure that councils in particular are making sure that they provide comments that are genuinely relevant to the application. Some of the feedback coming through so far, as they’re stuck in Resource Management Act land, is such that we’ve got chapter and verse about everything, which is not relevant to the application. I don’t think a lot turns on that. It’s kind of clarificatory.

In relation to Miss Pham’s suggestions around section 19, on adverse effects, this is actually something I would have thought she would support. It’s to make sure that the Minister has fuller information at the referral stage around information on adverse effects. Clearly, there’s an obligation through the actual panel decision-making for all of those things to be, you know, published—well, furnished, to the panel. But this is just a measure to make sure the Minister on referral has access to some of that information earlier on in the process.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I wanted to move on to clause 9 and particularly pick up on an area that we had very compelling submissions on, particularly from councils, but it was actually the New Zealand Law Society who talked about the unworkability, particularly of clause 9(2). So this is about where the local authority must provide comments advising on any applications that have been lodged, any in relation to the proposed proposal, and may provide comments but only if those comments are relevant to the application and the decision on the application that the Minister is required to make under section 21.

Now, what was concerning about this was—and this is throughout the bill, in numerous instances which we will be able to pick up on, but particularly this: we heard that local authorities are really concerned about the workability of these proposed changes, and my amendment proposes to delete clause 9(2) mainly because that will delete the actual limiting of the scope of local authorities’ comments on the applications. Because what we heard is that when they first get these applications and make an assessment, even under the current framework they have so little time to actually comprehensively get a snapshot of what the application actually means for them and their community. And they considered it to be unworkable in that they have to so soon be providing these comments when they haven’t had the opportunity to more fulsomely assess the application and actually understand its implications.

We know that decision makers are already constrained to specific considerations regardless of the comments made by local authorities or mana whenua under the bill. But these provisions, as they are now, would also limit that ability for local authorities to incorporate the views of mana whenua into their comments. So we don’t like the fact that that limits that. We think that local authorities should have more discretion, and I’m interested as to whether the Minister has given consideration to that, given the very clear risks that the rest of this bill are opening in terms of risk to the processes.

Thank you, Madam Chair. A couple of questions around timings as well, so moving past clause 9 and into 10 and through into 14. Clause 10 is “Section 18 amended (Report on Treaty settlements and other obligations)”. The primary Act at the moment says, “(3) In preparing the report required by this section, the responsible agency must—(a) consult relevant departments; and (b) provide a draft of the report”. So what this bill does is get rid of that “and provide a draft of the report”. I note that Amendment Paper 473, in the name of the Minister responsible for RMA Reform, has some changes to this section 18, and I was wondering if he can tell us what those changes are doing, and why it is that—not in his Amendment Paper—in the bill as introduced, that requirement for providing a report has gone.

Then, related to that, is clause 14, “Section 29 amended (Pre-lodgement requirements for listed project)”, and there are some amendments about 20 working days in his Amendment Paper, around clause 14. So if he could explain why those are in there, that would be useful as well.

So those are two timing questions, but the—

Sorry, what was the second one?

At clause 14. In the Minister’s Amendment Paper, there are, I think, given my—I’ve got different coloured pens on my copy here, sorry. I’ve copied them over in black pen; black for the Government, Mr Minister?

Is that because we get the books in the black?

No, it’s because of the influence of New Zealand First that I’ve used the black pen; red pen for Labour, obviously.

The question is around the Minister’s amendments in terms of the 20 working days in clause 14. Also, going back to clause 10, the amendments that the Minister’s making, and why a draft report is not prepared in amended section 18.

Then, my last question on this little set of clauses is in relation to clause 13—this is not a timing question, despite it being called “(Timing of decision to decline referral application)”. Clause 13, amending section 25(1), deletes “on the application” in each place. I am wondering, Madam Chair—and to the Minister—if this is in fact a rats and mice provision.

I’m just looking at clause 10 as well. Again, looking at clause 10 and the Minister responsible for RMA Reform’s original clause 10; both of them amend section 18 of the Fast-track Approvals Act. So it’s about preparing a report on Treaty settlements and, very roughly, “the responsible agency [has to] consult relevant departments.” Those relevant departments, says the Minister’s Amendment Paper, “must provide [the] report to the Minister not later than 20 days after the date for providing comments”. So it’s giving the responsible agency 20 working days to get their comments back or get the report back to the Minister.

In terms of consulting relevant departments, though, I can’t see where there is an obligation—although I suppose it might be somewhere, because I’m not especially familiar with this—on the relevant departments to get their comments back so that the responsible agency can prepare its report. So—it’s taken me a while to work this out—the responsible agency has to prepare a report which has to go to the Minister. It says to the agencies it’s consulting that it requests comments from relevant agencies, and then goes back to the Minister not later than 20 days after the date of getting those comments. That’s fine; it seems reasonable to give time for the relevant agencies to comment and then for the responsible agency to prepare the report.

But what I’m looking for is, given that this is supposed to be fast track, some obligation on the relevant agencies to give their comments to the responsible agency within a certain time frame as well. So I can just sort of see a situation where the relevant agencies, whatever they are, through no particular fault of their own, maybe don’t get something done. I can see it running into problems, you know; they don’t get comments back in a timely fashion. Of course, that undermines the whole purpose of the fast track. The place where that might obviously happen is over the Christmas break when, despite all the allegations in the paper, people do take time off but not 10 weeks, but they do take time off. So there’s a little bit just there. So I want to know how we make sure that those relevant agencies actually reply in a timely manner as well.

In relation to that, firstly, the Christmas break doesn’t count as working days; it’s the summer closedown period, so that deals with that issue. The changes here are actually relatively straightforward. There’s an update to reflect that the Minister for Māori Crown Relations and the Minister for Māori Development are now invited to comment under section 17, which is in clause 9. The 20-working-day time frame is for the Ministry for the Environment to provide the section 18 report to the Minister. After the closure of comments, I don’t think there’s any requirement to really dive down into time frames around reports flying around between the Public Service. The point is that the Minister needs the report, and the Amendment Paper creates a 20-working-day time frame for that. I think it’s all relatively straightforward, and I think it’s a good change.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Moving forward, then—thank you to the Minister for the answers to those questions. At clause 18, there’s “Section 35 amended (Director-General of Conservation’s report on land exchange)”, and what I’m interested in is subclause (2), and that replaces “sections 53(3), 54, and 55” with “sections 54 and 55”. What that means is that section 53(3) is removed, and 53(3) is the “Panel invites comments on substantive application” and they “may be invited from any other person the panel considers appropriate.” We are going to get to that section later, but I think it does get amended in the Minister’s Amendment Paper, so just asking officials to consider whether or not—and apologies if it’s in the Amendment Paper and I’ve missed it—that subclause (2) should also be deleted, so it still refers to 53(3), which is that change coming up later that I’m very keen to talk about, so 53(3) doesn’t happen. That’s one small question.

Then moving on to clause 19, inserting new section 37A: this is about “Listed projects proceeding in stages”. I just note that the Minister, in his Amendment Paper, has changed “a written request” to an application and then also said that an application must not be made unless any relevant fees or levies have been paid.”—I think that will be reflected later on, when we get to the regulation-setting clauses. So I’m really just inviting comment from the Minister that his changes are as simple as what I’ve explained there, but could he also comment on clause 18.

Clause 18 says that certain parties must be invited to comment on land exchange applications. The change enables the Director-General of Conservation to invite comments from other persons on a proposed land exchange as appropriate, to be used at the Director-General of Conservation’s discretion. So I think that’s pretty sensible.

Clause 19 is the change around listed projects, as the member says. I’m advised that the Amendment Paper has minor wording changes and the inclusion of a requirement for fees to be paid, which aligns with other similar clauses to bring it into line.

I think maybe the Minister misunderstood me. So if we look back at clause 18(2), what is happening there is that the reference to section 53(3) is being deleted. That is because the bill as introduced deleted section 53(3) but his Amendment Paper now undoes that deletion, I think, so should this subclause (2) now also be deleted?

I’ll check.

It’s a checking question?

Yeah.

Kia ora, Madam Chair—thank you. I’m keen to make a contribution and seek to understand further from the Minister in terms of the way in which this bill honours Treaty settlements to date for iwi Māori. I remember the strong submissions from Waikato-Tainui and Ngāi Tahu, who reiterated that they believe—and they can see within the legislation—they are not being seen, or heard, or honoured in the way this legislation is going to impact on their settlement.

Can I just ask the member—sorry to interrupt. What clause?

Clause 10, “Section 18 amended (Report on Treaty settlements and other obligations)”. I want to just canvass with the Minister, knowing that there are some significant changes being made in terms of both iwi Māori input in council and time frames, but, actually, it’s more around Treaty settlements and how the obligations and the signed settlements of those who are settled—how will the commitments made be honoured, and how will their views as rūnanga and trust boards of post-settlement governance entities be considered in the deliberations of panels?

Further, regarding Bridget Bell from the Manawatū, who shared that in the Manawatū district, it’s different again. There are 10 hapū who are unsettled, and they don’t have the legal protections that Treaty settlements offer. So you’ve got the settled, and we’ve heard strongly from groups like Ngāi Tahu, Waikato-Tainui, Ngāti Toa Rangatira—a whole range of them with those concerns for the protection of their settlements and those obligations—but then we hear from those iwi Māori, like the hapū of Manawatū, who are unsettled and therefore they don’t have the legal protections that accompany Treaty settlements.

The original bill failed to provide the meaningful safeguards for these groups, let alone what this amendment bill could potentially do, which is to continue to expose unsettled hapū and iwi in the space where consents are being considered—and that’s if they even get in the door to offer comment and contribution. It’s unpacking both Treaty settlements and their obligations, but then also the unsettled, and how do hapū and iwi engage in this new system being proposed?

On that, I find it interesting to be taking lectures on this from the member who abused that process as part of it. But, anyway, I’ll leave all that aside—and she knows what I’m talking about. Both the Minister and the expert panel have to comply with section 7 obligations in relation to Treaty settlements and customary rights. It’s been quite interesting, actually, the number of projects that are coming through from iwi seeking to use fast track. One of the first projects that was actually consented—in fact, I’m visiting it tomorrow—is the Maitahi housing development in Nelson. This sort of rhetoric that it’s an abuse of iwi rights and things like that is, frankly, the opposite of the truth. They are as equally frustrated by the strictures of the Resource Management Act as everybody else is, which is partly why we’re changing it. There are participation rights, which I think have been well canvassed, and invitations to comment in the section 18 report that we’ve just been talking about with Ms Brooking. I think those concerns are well catered for.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I will run through, though other people might have things to say about other clauses. I note that there are a number of changes in the Minister’s Amendment Paper to the section around the fact that the Minister may determine that the project is a priority. So it might be useful for him to comment on what those changes are doing.

I move now to clause 24, “New section 45A inserted (EPA may provide substantive application to panel convener)”. This is a new section inserted and it has that word “may” in it. But now the Minister’s amendment is changing the word to “must”. Obviously, this is an important difference—between “may” and “must”—which I won’t relitigate in the committee. But my question is: why was it not “must” to start with? Is there some change of thinking that we should know about? The Minister looks interested in answering this question—thank you.

I will just go to section 45A, where it says—and there are some changes here that his Amendment Paper 473 makes—“The EPA must, within 5 working days after a substantive application is lodged, provide the application to the panel convener.” So what analysis or conversations has he had about the five working days being the appropriate amount of time?

In relation to the member’s question, the Amendment Paper requires the Environmental Protection Authority to provide a substantive application to the panel convener within five working days of receiving it, rather than this being optional. I’m advised that this is in response to a submission from the panel convenors themselves, around that.

Priority projects?

Well, priority projects—I mean, I sort of dealt with that earlier when I said that the changes to give the ability for the Minister to issue a priority—or to say something is a priority project at the substantive application phase rather than earlier, because it’s only once you get to the substantive bit—like, it’s the appropriate juncture to make that determination rather than earlier, and, frankly, we probably should have picked that up in the original bill. But, you know, that’s part of the reason why we’ve got an amendment bill going through—just a bit of finessing and fine-tuning. You know, this is another example of it. Nothing’s perfect first go. So, you know, we’re an iterative Government.

Kia ora. I’m wanting to revisit what the Minster raised earlier, considering, particularly, those who are in the system and are respondents. The resource and funding available to hapū and iwi in the pipeline to responders is quite a small figure, and with the turnaround being changed within the legislation and with the truncation of the process to replace the sum “20 working days” with, I think, “15”, I’m wanting to understand whether there will be further support for hapū and iwi, settled or unsettled, to be able to respond in this much faster process. From my understanding, it’s like $10,000 for a group to engage consultants, legal advisers, technicians, and all of that to put forward responses, and there might be some $2,000 earlier when it’s first notified. That’s a small amount, particularly when the pool of technicians to support these matters might also be stretched as the fast track starts to amp up further.

Settled iwi, and, also, unsettled hapū and iwi, might be impacted significantly by the pace and by the demand in their tribal rohe, and, then, there’s a small amount of pūtea offered to them. How do we support those who are invited for comment to gear up so that the system can then support them better to be able to respond at pace?

The member makes a good point. I’m advised that there is the ability for groups that the member’s referring to who comment to get a contribution through the cost recovery regulations, as per the Act. I’m also advised that there’s intention to review those cost recovery regulations next year to see whether or not they’ve been set at the appropriate amount. So that’s a next year thing. But my understanding is the process is working pretty well to date. People will always want more, but it’s cost recovery; it’s not a free for all.

A small question now from me. I have moved on to clause 26 of the bill. The small question relates to section 47 and 47A of the principal Act; there’s a reference in both replacement section 47 and then down in replacement section 47A(1)(b) to consent authorities. I’m wondering why this is a reference to consent authorities and not regional councils, because there’s a change earlier in the bill—I think that is at clause 15, to section 30—that consent authorities be replaced with regional councils.

These new sections 47 and 47A relate to competing applications or existing resource consents for the same activity. So I presume—and I’m happy for an explanation to tell me my presumption’s wrong, but I’m presuming that these will be applications that are about water resources or maybe airsheds for them to be competing.

So that is why my question is about whether the consent authority should be swapped out with the regional council or if it is in fact meant to be consent authority. Could the Minister explain to us if there are other sorts of competing applications that don’t relate to the types of consents that a regional council gives.

Again, I’ll just refer back to clause 15—I’ll go to it now—where there is a replacement where it says that “each consent authority that has jurisdiction over an area” is replaced with “each regional council that is the consent authority for an area”, and then other replacements of “consent authority” with “regional council”. So it’s just a consistency. The first question is: is this a consistency issue? If it’s not a consistency issue, can the Minister explain the rationale for consent authorities that aren’t regional councils having competing applications? That would be helpful. Thank you.

Moving on, still on clause 26, and this is section 47B, “Minister gives notice that the panel be set up”, there is a lot of “may’ in this—the Minister “may notify the EPA in writing that a panel may be set up for a substantive application” and again there seems to be a lack of criteria so it would be useful if the Minister could give us some examples of how this would be used. Is this a new discretion for the Minister or is it a rewriting somehow that I haven’t picked up? Could the Minister explain what’s happening there? Also, I note that in his Amendment Paper, at what will be section 47B(2)(b), (b) is deleted, and that is “provide the application to the panel convener, if the EPA has not already done so”. Is that just a consequential change to what we were discussing earlier or is it something else?

Which section?

I’m on 47B(2)(b).

I’m advised that “consent authority”, the reference in replacement section 47A, inserted by clause 26, is not wrong; it arguably could be more correct to suggest “regional council”, as the member puts it.

I’ve got an amendment.

Have you got an amendment?

Tabled, yeah.

You’ve got one. Oh, well, I’ll have a good look at it. There may be arguments for that, so I’ll have a good look at that.

The reference is not wrong, because they are relevant consent authorities because we’re dealing with regional consents here. So it’s not wrong, but your amendment is probably more right, put it that way.

Good to hear.

Hang on, hang on—hold fire. It’s good to see you hear, though. Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. In relation to replacement section 47B(2)(b), inserted by clause 26, I think it is, essentially—I’ll come back to you on that, but I think it is unnecessary, hence the deletion.

Tēnā rā koe, otirā tēnā rā koe e te Minita.

[Thank you; indeed, thank you, Minister.]

My questions are just basically supplementing off Hūhana Lyndon’s—specifically on clause 10, “Section 18 amended, (Report on Treaty settlements and other obligations)”, in Part 1—and just getting into more detail around my electorate, Hauraki-Waikato. I’ve got two, maybe three questions within this pātai.

First of all, Waikato-Tainui’s response to the Fast-track Approvals Amendment Bill—and, I guess, the context behind this is our 1995 settlement, our 2008 river settlement, and then the 2010 Te Ture Whaimana. My first question is around our response and our submission on the Fast-track Approvals Amendment Bill, in section 23: “The absence of concrete provisions to uphold Tiriti settlements in the bill is a fundamental defect. It displaces established arrangements [and] legal commitments binding the Crown and WaikatoTainui, and risks inconsistency with Te Ture Whaimana.” My first question is around how the Minister sees Te Ture Whaimana being upheld. I know that, in my electorate, we’ve gone through many different councils and mayors across the electorate, and through their understanding of Te Ture Whaimana being upheld within a settled electorate like Hauraki-Waikato. That’s the first one—Te Ture Whaimana.

The second one is a local issue on the ground where, yes, like Hūhana said, there are settled iwi and non-settled iwi. Within our electorate, while we’ve got the Waikato-Tainui settlement, we also have hapū. Last time we ran this process in the first stages of the Fast-track Approvals Amendment Bill—maybe the beginning of this year—I had on the Hansard asking one of the Ministers “Will you consult with hapū and iwi?” Hapū are the subtribes and the mana whenua who reside in these areas, as well as post-settlement governance entities (PSGEs). That’s a genuine question I’m wanting to know from the Minister, because that can be quite a challenging task even for us—making sure that there’s communications going from subtribes and tribes. It’s really important.

Some of the projects on this are the Rotowaro Bathurst mining area. The Rotowaro mining area is my hapū area of Ngāti Mahuta and our Lake Waahi. If that mine expands, that—I don’t know the English word for it, but tērā para ka whai atu ki tō mātou [that waste that will follow on to our]—

Waste.

That waste will go into our close lake of Lake Waahi next to our marae, and that can be very dangerous because a lot of our local tamariki go there for waka ama training. That’s a huge issue, and we haven’t, as of yet, had any consultation between iwi and hapū—and my office is willing to do that mediation part. However, I’m just wanting to see from the Minister if he intends on doing that with any of these projects. That’s the first one—Rotowaro.

The next one is Taharoa Ironsands Ltd. I don’t want to get too much into the detail about it. However, whānau who reside there—Ngāti Mahuta ki te Hauāuru—are having conflicting issues with papa kāinga next to the mining that is in Taharoa. Basically, I’m wanting to know what the communication streams are that are happening between hapū and iwi. If those aren’t happening, I’m more than happy to follow those up and make sure that that communication line is happening, because that is, essentially, what my role is as the MP of that area.

Before I take the Minister’s call, individual projects are Part 2 of this bill, so—

Oh, ka pai. The only reason I brought that up is because that is in relation to our Treaty settlements within my electorate.

I understand that, but getting into detailed discussions about individual projects is better in Part 2.

Well, Madam Chair, I’m not going to comment on individual projects. That would be, obviously, inappropriate. I won’t go there, and I won’t in Part 2 either, because there may be things I have to consider in relation to them and I don’t want to prejudge those applications. That will be the legally sound thing to do. All I can say to the member is that a core commitment of this Government is to uphold Treaty settlements and the existing settlements that are in law. The fast-track Act does not cut across those, and there’s a variety of provisions in the Act to give effect to that. That’s in relation to Te Ture Whaimana as well.

I’m looking at clause 26 and, in particular, I’m looking at new section 47C in there, and that’s “Delegation of decision by Minister”. The Minister can delegate her or his powers and duties under section 47A and 47B to the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA). Then there’s a set of rules about how that delegation is revocable and so on. If the Minister’s looking, it’s on page 17 of his Amendment Paper.

So section 47A is about deciding if there are competing applications or existing resource consent for the same activity, and then there’ll be a set of decisions under there. Section 47B is about setting up a panel for a substantive application and getting all these sorts of things set up. You can see that’s kind of a tricky situation for the Minister to be in, or for the EPA to be in, if there are competing applications sitting in there—and delegating those decisions to the EPA becomes tricky, as well.

I guess what I’m worried about is that, in some senses, deciding between competing applications is a pretty political thing to do. It’s something for which people really do have to make some judgment calls and, obviously, where political decisions are being made like that—and Ministers have to make them—it’s just wondering where accountability sits in that case. I’ve got another point on this, I’m sorry, Minister; you might want to take them both at once. So there’s that accountability issue: if it’s been delegated to the EPA, then where does that accountability sit? I know, ideally, the Minister takes responsibility—that’s how our system is supposed to function, but, in actual fact, oftentimes it doesn’t. I can just see a danger there around the inherently political nature of those decisions.

But then—and just something for the Minister’s amusement, I hope; hard to think of, really, when we’re sitting in a committee stage and doing this. But I just want to direct his attention to new section 47C(5): that if something has been delegated to the EPA, then it can comply with it without having to notify itself of complying. I just have this vision in my mind of this Spider-Man, the duplicate Spider-Man [Hon Chris Bishop makes Spider-Man pointing actions]—yeah, exactly so! I just wondered if the Minister had that in mind too.

It’s the meme—it’s the Spider-Man meme.

Yeah, it’s the meme—it’s the meme.

Chris Hipkins answered a blimmin question about it one day—forgot about that—the Spider-Man meme.

See, I knew I could amuse the Minister!

Yeah, there you go. It’s good times, you know. It’s not even that late in the day.

I mean, the member’s right; it’s an interesting turn of phrase. The law produces odd terminology. The status quo is that decisions around competing applications are delegated to the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA), but this is just an administrative mechanical machinery of legislation. I mean, there’s a vast swathe of legislation where the Minister makes a decision, including the fast-track Act, or many other pieces of legislation. But in reality, the decision is not made by the Minister; it’s delegated under authority to the Secretary for the Environment or secretary of the relevant Government department, etc., etc. So, in practice, at the moment, those decisions are made by the EPA.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I just want to check with the Minister—and apologies if this question has been asked—whether he could just nod to say that “You know what? We’ve covered this.” More broadly, as we’re going through this, noting Amendment Paper 473, I just want to check, from a process perspective, what the process is for the Minister to introduce additional amendments that were not a part of the recommendations of the select committee. If the Minister could just nod his head to say, “You know what? We’ve covered that point.”, that is all good, because, I think, broadly, that is setting the tone of this quite substantial Amendment Paper that the Minister introduced at the last minute. If you want to answer that, I have further questions.

As I said during the second reading debate, because there was no revision-tracked version, we’ve picked up some of the amendments suggested by the select committee and put it all into an Amendment Paper, which is on the floor. The best way is to say that the Amendment Paper is, essentially, the bill, and it’s sort of tidy to look at it in that context.

No.

But it—what was that?

No, all my notes are on the other one.

Oh, OK. Well, not all of us have the old colour-coded things out, Ms Brooking. The Amendment Paper picks up some of the suggested amendments from the select committee, some of which we—the Government—have agreed to, and some of which we haven’t, and we’ll just go forward from there.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I totally understand where the Minister is coming from, but I also want to point to the fact that there are a number of amendments the Minister has made, in Amendment Paper 473, that weren’t a part of the recommendation by the Environment Committee. Those are the ones I really want to get some guidance on from the Minister, on the rationale or the process to determine some of these.

To give an example to the Minister, the one I’m drawing to is clause 20, “Section 38 amended (Minister may determine that project is priority)”, which, according to the departmental report, isn’t something that was recommended. But over here, rather than repealing section 38, it is replaced by a different section: “(Minister may determine that project is priority)”. So I’m using that as an example of what was the Minister’s rationale behind that.

I’m just focusing on this particular clause, clause 20(1) in the Amendment Paper. Obviously, this is the first time we are seeing it, and we’re seeing it in other parts that I’m sure that others have discussed. I’m curious to know, from the Minister’s perspective, how the Minister is expected to determine that the project is a priority, especially when you have section 38(1)(b) that says “on the Minister’s own initiative”. The Minister before mentioned that they’re not likely going to be asking questions on specific projects later on in Part 2, just because the Minister may need to make those kinds of decisions.

In lieu of anything in this Amendment Paper, just on that reading, what does “the Minister’s own initiative” entail, what is the process for the Minister to determine that, and what are some of the checks and balances available to the Minister when it comes to making those decisions on priority projects?

We’ve covered this issue a couple of times now. The change is to make clear that the priority projects are dealt with at the substantive stage rather than earlier because that’s when the appropriate juncture is. We’ve covered that a couple of times now.

In relation to the wider point around priority projects, this is really, I think, quite a pragmatic thing, regardless of your views about fast track. It’s really a pragmatic view that there may be a project that applicants or the Government want expedited, even ahead of other projects. That hasn’t proven to be an issue so far, because the fast track is actually working pretty well.

There’s a steady stream of projects applying, either referred or substantive, and they’re working their way through the conga line of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Ministry for the Environment and consultation. There’s a steady stream of projects, all of which are publicly available, by the way. They’re on the EPA website. It’s quite a sophisticated back end in which you can see all of that stuff. It hasn’t proven to be an issue so far, because there’s been no issue with the timely setting up of panels, but it’s possible to imagine a scenario in the future. Potentially, it’s a bit of a backstop. It’s possible to imagine a scenario in which there’s not the capacity in the system to cope with a project that everyone wants to have happen, either the Minister or the applicant. The applicant can apply; the Minister doesn’t have to agree. The member asked: what does “on the Minister’s own initiative” mean? Well, it literally means on the Minister’s own initiative.

Using your brain.

Yeah, using your brain, as Judith Collins says. If there are no fetters on that and there is discretion around that, then they can do that.

Clause 20, which amends section 38, says that it has to be “with the written agreement of that authorised person.”, which I think is appropriate; and then subclause (2) of clause 20 is in relation to whether or not “there is risk that a panel may not be set up within a period that reflects the urgency of the project;”, which is precisely what I was just talking about. I think it’s a pretty pragmatic section, and, so far, it hasn’t been used, but it may be in the future.

I move, That debate on this question now close.

We’re not quite at the end of Part 1 yet, but looking to make some significant progress. Can I just point out to members that we are referring back to some clauses that have been debated two or three times. So we are looking for new material.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Listen, I’m going to refer to a clause that’s been touched on but in a very specific detail.

After what I just said?

Yes, I did hear that, but I’ve been waiting for some time to make a specific question about this clause. It’s around the land exchange requirement. I understand the director-general has to be notified on land exchange—

What clause are you referring to, please?

I’m referring to clauses 16 to 18, and there’s a very specific submission from Tureiti Keith requiring that applicants for land exchange should be required to consult with relevant iwi, hapū, and Treaty settlements. Now, this is not the broader question around Treaty and hapū-iwi engagement that my colleagues Hūhana Lyndon and Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke have made. This is very specifically around land exchange, which is a significant component of some potential applications.

Further, there was the question from Tureiti Keith that that be a requirement of the lodgement. My question for the Minister is: why was it determined that that not be a requirement? It seems that it would potentially speed up processes if there was the requirement that where there’s a land exchange, the local iwi and hapū are consulted. On top of that, the Royal Forest and Bird Society of New Zealand requested clarification as to how land exchanges will apply to council reserves as this was not reflected in the amendment bill.

Thirdly, in regards to that very specific question of land exchanges, Fish & Game also suggested that they should be pre-consulted on land exchange so that they can be involved in articulating what the habitat is of Fish & Game birds prior to land exchange applications under section 33, so that the impacts on game bird hunting and angling and recreational impacts can be identified. So my question is very specifically: would the Minister consider those things, or why has the Minister ruled those things out?

Currently, the Department of Conservation are supposedly responsible for administering that part of the process, and the director-general has the power to invite others to participate, but there is no requirement that he or she invites iwi and hapū. I wonder if the Minister can expand or express the logic around that. Thank you.

Well, there’s no requirement, but there’s the ability to, and so there’s just nothing more to it than that, really. I mean, there’s an argument that you could layer layers and layers of mandatory consultation and all the rest of it, but I think we’ve tried to strike the right balance. As an argument, you could include Fish & Game, and as an argument, you could include everyone else. We haven’t done that. It’s meant to be an expeditious process. Reasonable people can disagree about some of these facts, but I think we’ve got the balance about right.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I wish to ask the Minister a question about clause 54, which inserts new section 117A. That is the provision that allows the Governor-General, by Order in Council, to be able to amend the project description of a listed project or the description of the approximate geographical location of a listed project. I want to draw the Minister’s attention to submissions, particularly one off the top of my head by BusinessNZ, that has raised this as an issue. It is basically a “Henry VIII” clause that allows the Governor-General, by Order in Council, to amend something by Order in Council that is quite substantive. It “confers on the executive”—is what they’ve said—“the power to amend primary legislation without returning to Parliament”. They have raised, through their submission, a number of issues there and have pointed out that this raises a constitutional risk. They’ve also said, quite clearly, and I would completely agree, that “Parliament is the proper forum” for substantive changes to be made and that altering the scope of statutory regimes that affects the rights, the obligations, the distribution, or the allocation of public resources is just too big for it to be done through what this clause allows this legislation to do, basically.

It goes on to say, in new section 117A, that the Minister shouldn’t be making this recommendation unless they’re “satisfied that the scope of the listed project will not be substantially different”. However, the scope of what is actually allowed through new section 117A, inserted by clause 54, is pretty wide and it is substantive change. I would agree with the suggestion by BusinessNZ that this particular clause be limited to technical corrections and allowing the Governor-General to make changes, for example, to something that’s a factual error rather than something that’s quite as substantive as this clause allows it to be.

So I would like the Minister to clarify why it is quite as broad as it is in clause 54 and whether there was any consideration that was made to limit this clause to what has been suggested around technical corrections, because that is more in line with what we would support as well.

I thank the member Priyanca Radhakrishnan for her question, which is a good one. I mean, the member is right that this is not ideal in the sense that it is technically a “Henry VIII” clause, but I would argue it’s at the lower end of the scale because I think it is relatively narrowly constrained in the way that the member talks about.

It does allow the Governor-General, by Order in Council, which is, essentially, Cabinet—“made on the recommendation”—to amend the “project description of a listed project” and “the description of the approximate geographical location”. But the Minister can’t do that “unless the Minister is satisfied that the scope of the listed project will not be substantially different as a result of the amendment, taking into account—(a) the … regional or national benefits of the project; and … the location, scale, and nature of the works involved”. There’s an argument that it could be more narrowly constrained, but I think it is relatively narrow, and the Minister can’t add to the Schedule 2 list.

The member said that Parliament should do this. Well, the proposal is that Parliament does that. There’s a range of clarificatory project descriptions and things like that in Part 2, which we’ll come to at some point. It would be fair to say—how do I put this politely? Some of the project descriptions could have been better put by applicants. It would also be fair to say that there has been a relatively pernickety approach taken—I’m just trying to keep—

“Pernickety”—how do you spell that?

Well, I’m just trying to uphold comity because I see the Attorney-General is present in the Chamber. There has been—how shall I put this?—an interesting approach taken by some people, some bodies, in relation to project descriptions, and so for the absolute avoidance of doubt, we are updating a variety of project descriptions. Somewhat embarrassingly for me, the New Zealand Transport Agency has had to have a number of projects updated—for example, the Hope Bypass, which doesn’t actually go near Hope, but that’s neither here nor there, and then there’s a range of other projects.

So, just for the absolute avoidance of doubt, we’ve updated those project descriptions, and this is a kind of catch-all where there will be, potentially, others. There was a High Court ruling in relation to the Stella Passage development, which I think took everyone a bit by surprise, frankly, and that’s OK—that’s OK. That’s the role of the court. But it was a bit of a—

Was it pernickety or interesting?

Well, it was pernickety—I said “pernickety”.

It’s a very nice word.

It is a very nice word. It was a surprising ruling and a surprising judgment. But the way our constitutional system works is that the courts rule and Parliament can change the law, and so that’s what we are doing.

The member has raised a really good point. I was pretty frustrated by the process, to be honest. I’ve taken quite a bit of time to make sure that we’ve got the project descriptions right, but for the avoidance of doubt if we haven’t, there’s the ability to update them. But there are some quite narrow guard rails around it.

Tēnā koe, Madam Chair. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. My first question was about—and this is the first time I’ve spoken in this debate—clause 42, because it looks like the Minister’s Amendment Paper, which was put forward relatively recently, makes some changes to clause 42.

During the select committee process, the majority of submissions—and there were 93 submissions—specifically commented on clause 42 of the bill. Sixty-five of them were expressly opposed to the proposal, and they were concerned that the nature of modification in the bill for clause 42 could allow expansion of the scope. Now, we did—and I did want to speak to our amendment—put forward the Green Party amendment that would delete clause 42, but I was wondering if the Minister could comment on the changes in the Amendment Paper, because it looks like clause 42 has been amended to say, basically, that the modification can only be a “reduction in scope”.

I’m curious about the definition of “reduction of scope”—because, I mean, it could theoretically put forward something that actually does mean that the project is going to have a greater impact on the environment—on the natural environment—but they’re able to claim that it’s a “reduction of scope”. I’m wondering about those changes that are in the Amendment Paper and whether reducing the scope is clearly defined anywhere and that it’s clear that the reduction in scope can’t increase emissions, for example, or increase harmful impacts on the natural environment. So that is my question to the Minister.

The member’s right. It’s picking up on the select committee submissions. They can only be reduced in scope. They can’t go up; they can only go down.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I’m just wanting to address clauses 24, 25, 26, 28, and 43, in relation to requiring specific process steps to happen concurrently. So that is a change, and there were 88 submissions considered on this part of the bill enabling process steps to now happen concurrently.

The majority of submissions opposed these amendments and expressed that running multiple statutory steps in a parallel process could compress the already short time frames and reduce the ability of the panels and agencies to undertake the necessary preparatory work and increase the likelihood of administration or technical errors. I’d like to draw attention to a comment made from an independent panel convener for the fast track, who said to the select committee, “The proposed time frames are simply unworkable. Many process steps depend on outcomes of earlier steps and forcing these to occur concurrently will compromise the quality and increase the risk of error.”

I draw the Minister’s attention to the submission of Patuharakeke Te Iwi, who are in southern Whangārei, who are being impacted by some five fast-track processes in the southern Whangārei rohe: Brynderwyns, the road realignment, the railway spur to Marsden Point, the dry dock, and also McCallum Bros sand mining. They came through and they said in their submission that they strongly object to the restrictions and the reductions in time, the 15 days for the invited persons to comment. But then with the concurrent multiple applications that they have in their district as it is—they have to cope with these five applications—having the concurrent approach that is being proposed is completely unworkable for them. They don’t have capacity and capability. How on earth are tangata whenua, let alone councils, to respond in such an environment?

I’m really keen to understand the intentions and how the resource is going to be supporting both the panels and those invited to comment when you’re going to be having to juggle many things within one project—so that’s the concurrent stuff that’s going to happen. Is the process going to be fuelled and resourced and have the adequate staffing to support the panels to not make the administrative and technical errors? Also how do we in hapū, iwi land, or in council try and respond as well, knowing that like in an area of southern Whangārei, we’ve got five current fast-track projects listed? Kia ora.

The concurrent changes that the member refers to throughout the various different sections are an efficiency thing. It’s consulted on with the panel conveners and there’s a lot of things that can happen contemporaneously or concurrently, as the member raises. In terms of resources, it’s a cost-recovery regime, as I think the member knows. As I was saying to, I think, one of her colleagues earlier, there’s the ability for contributions to comments and participation in the process by iwi and hapū. So that’s all I have to say, really.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Just confirming, related to the timing issues that there’s just been some discussion about, clause 29 amends section 50, “Panel convener sets up panel”. There was this provision in the bill as introduced that “(2) The panel convener must set up the panel within 15 working days ”. But I think that the Minister’s Amendment Paper has deleted that subsection (2). So if we could have some confirmation—yes, he’s nodding. I’ve got other questions.

Just in relation to that—yes. That didn’t go down well with people, so we’ve backtracked on that one. The feedback was voluminously negative. We’re a listening Government, so that has been deleted.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Good news, there, thank you for that clarification—or it’s not even clarification, is it? It’s confirmation—it’s a confirmation.

It was an answer.

It was an answer, that’s right. Thank you for the answer, Madam Chair! It’s great.

Now, maybe I will get a similar answer to this question. I want to move on now, although I invite the Minister to comment on—he’s made a number of changes, in his Amendment Paper (AP) 473, to new section 52A, inserted by clause 30. So clause 30 of the current bill is deleted, and then there’s a lot in the AP. I haven’t gone through a detailed reading of it and cross-checked it all, but if he can—[Minister rises to take call] Oh, he’s going to do that as well. And then I’ve got another question for him.

This is a good way to operate.

I mean, it’s all pretty straightforward. So, look, we’re keen to get people to crack on with the work, so new section 52A says the panel must, no later than five working days after the appointment of all panel members, commence work on a substantive application. The panel has to tell the Environmental Protection Agency on what date is commences work. The reason for that is that we have had some panels established, which everyone got very excited about, and then there was not the requisite progress.

So, then, any time frame?

Not later than five working days, they have to commence work on a substantive application. They’ve got to get on with it. The whole point of this is to crack into it. It’s what’s in the name. It’s in the name. So there you go.

The Hon Rachel Brooking, working in the spirit of how this committee is supposed to work—question, answer, question, answer. It’s working quite well.

Thank you—[Interruption] Barrage. So, then, on to—I need to turn the page. I was getting to clause 33, which is an important one that many, many people submitted on, and this relates to “Section 53 amended (Panel invites comments on substantive application)”. The bill as introduced had a limit on subsection (3) of section 53. Subsection (3) of section 53 enables the panel to consult with whoever they thought was appropriate, but what the amendment in the bill as introduced said was, “Well, they can still get there, but first they have to go through the local authorities to see if the local authorities are going to comment on that matter or not.” We heard a lot about how this would be unworkable and how it would be the end of many participation rights in this process.

But I note that in the Minister’s Amendment Paper, subclause (2), which was “Replace section 53(3)”, has been deleted. So that means—and I’d like confirmation of this, as well—that we revert to section 53(3) of the Act, which does allow the discretion for the panel to invite comments from whoever they think is appropriate.

Yes.

Yes—he said yes. OK, thank you. That is a good change.

That’s good to know, because we did talk about that a lot in our differing view, as well. Given that there’s a few other changes in the sections in clauses 34, 35, and 46, with some deletions, it would be useful for the Minister to say if there’s anything substantive in them, but I’ll run right through to clause 40—no, he’s shaking his head. Nothing substantive, it’s all tidy-ups; rats and mice? OK.

Now we get to clause 40, “Section 66 amended (Return of substantive application)”. There’s a lot of sixes in this clause. There was a minor change, but now, by way of the Minister’s Amendment Paper, there’s a change in section 66, subsection (6)—66(6); I don’t see that very often—to “replace ‘50’ with ‘100’ ”. If the Minister could tell us what the “50” and “100” relate to, that would be useful, as well.

I’ll end my questions here. I note that we’ve already covered, to some extent, clause 42 with new section 68A—that was the question that the Hon Julie Anne Genter was just asking, about the reduction of scope.

That’s the suspension of applications. You can suspend it for up to 100 working days.

So under section 66, subsection (6), something can be suspended for up to 100 days, I’m hearing from the Minister.

Correct.

Thank you, Minister. Moving on to clause 42, about the “reduction of scope”: we’ve already discussed the change of wording, and I think that is a good one. I do just want to go to the criteria. At (3), the reduced project still has to have “significant regional or national benefits”, even though it’s reduced. I guess, because it is reduced—I do have a tabled amendment up that says, at 68B(1), at the end of it, “and does not increase adverse environmental effects”, but because this has to be a reduction, there’s no need for that criteria? The Minister is nodding—thank you.

Now, if I move forward, then, to section 79. This is clause 44 I’m on to now.

The Hon Rachel Brooking, I’m giving you another call. The member is operating in the spirit of efficiency, so she has another call.

Are you telling me I’m doing the Government members a favour? That doesn’t sound very good.

No, I’m telling you that you’re operating in the spirit of the committee stage, which is a question-and-answer session.

Parliament at its best.

Absolutely. I’m enjoying it.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Moving on to clause 44, “Section 79 amended”: this is the “Timing of panel decisions”. It is a clause that I’ve got a tabled amendment on to delete, and so does Lan Pham; hers got in earlier, but we’re both there. Why we have this deletion is because the time frame for the panel decisions as the bill was introduced does not exceed 60 working days, but I note that—and we heard a lot from the panel conveners—that 60 working days was totally unworkable, and that it would stop some people from agreeing to be chairs of the panels because they would not be able to, in good conscience, say that they could make a robust decision for complex projects—not the simple projects; just the complex ones—in that time frame.

I note that the Minister’s Amendment Paper has changed that 60 working days to 90 working days, and 90 working days is better than 60 working days. I presume that most of the approvals that have been through so far have actually been under 60 days, but the really complex ones have been under 100 days. Does the Minister want to comment on why that 90 days was chosen?

Well, the member makes the point herself: it’s just in response to the feedback that the 60 working days is unworkable, so fair enough, we’ve gone to 90 and there’s the ability to extend beyond that as well, of course, with agreement.

The Hon Rachel Brooking still has time on the clock.

Oh, thank you, Madam Chair. Is the Minister aware of analysis about whether that 90 days will always be enough in complex circumstances? I realise he’s just said that it can be extended, but I think it can only be extended if the applicant agrees to the extension—

Yes.

—and so the question is: is there analysis over that 90 days?

Well, I mean, that’s true. But it would be a pretty stupid applicant who didn’t agree to an extension if the panel convenors came in and said, “Now listen, this is pretty spicy, and we think it’s going to take us time to work through the issues. We’re going to need another month or something.” If I was an applicant I’d say yes, because if I didn’t, I’d be running the risk of my project being turned down. So I suspect in reality that these things will resolve themselves. But I think there’s also some merit in having a time frame. Sixty days was clearly not appropriate, so we’ve gone for 90. Reasonable people can disagree around the exact length, but I think that’s about right.

The Hon Rachel Brooking still has time.

Thank you—maybe Government members want to listen to the Chair of the committee of the whole House. Thank you, Minister, for that answer. Moving on now to clause 45, section 81 amended, “Decisions on approvals sought in substantive application”, I have a tabled amendment to delete this, because it does refer to “[they] must consider a relevant Government policy statement:” at new section 81(2)(aab). I think I have here in black pen—it’s my very technical analysis of the bill—that the Government Amendment Paper is deleting (aab), so that would mean they don’t have to consider a Government policy statement.

Then I have another question at new section 81(2)(aaa), which is that, for an unlisted project, they must “consider the Minister’s reasons for accepting the referral application”, and I’m wondering if the Minister can provide for us any context about what “consider” means and what the weighting is that he expects for “considering”?

You can continue and he’ll come back with the answers.

I will continue on—OK. I will continue on into clause 48. I note that I’m jumping over clause 46, which is about conditions relating to infrastructure, and I think other members will have questions on that particular clause. I know there’s an amendment from the Greens on that one, and also on clause 48, which is what I will move to.

Clause 48. “ New section 93A inserted (Directions to EPA) is a really important clause that we got a lot of feedback on as well, and I note that there have been some tweaks to this in the Minister’s Amendment Paper, but I don’t think they go nearly far enough. What submitters were really interested in here is that a Minister can meddle in giving directions to the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA)—they “may give a general direction to the EPA”. There are now some constraints relating to the—well, there were already constraints relating to the Crown Entities Act, but also a statutorily independent function.

I would be interested in the Minister’s comment on how the EPA will be protected from undue ministerial interference when we have had, on the day that this bill was introduced, the chief executive officer of the EPA resign and another Minister make some derogatory comments about him and how the culture of the EPA was all wrong. We asked the chief executive questions last week, in Scrutiny Week, about this issue, and he was very much clear that it is not the EPA that makes decisions; the EPA is following the fast track and has an administrative role.

And the chief executive of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is right about that: they are, essentially, the administrative agency. I think a little bit too much is being read into clause 48, which is the directions to the EPA. It doesn’t interfere with their statutory functions. That would obviously be inappropriate. It’s really just to, you know—almost like it allows the Minister to write a letter of expectation to say, “We expect you to operate in accordance with the law and expeditiously and, you know, make sure that you’re providing good quality service to applicants.”

In relation to clause 45, I’m advised that the (aab) is there, but it’s a consequential amendment based around the other changes to the Government policy statement provisions that I think we’ve well canvassed.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Still going through, then, I’ll move on to clause 50, “Section 99 amended (Appeal against decisions only on question of law)”. I’m interested in how this relates to the earlier change that the Minister responsible for RMA Reform confirmed at clause 33, around section 53 and section 53(3) of the primary legislation now not being changed. I want to know how this appeal provision works given that that change we’ve already discussed has happened.

I welcome the new Minister in the chair, the Hon James Meager. So the Minister knows, I’m at clause 50, section 99. I have an amendment and Lan Pham has an amendment to delete clause 50.

But I want to know what now are the appeal rights of those people who have been able to make a comment under section 53(3), which is retained, in relation to this appeal section. The bill as it was introduced would have meant that these discretionary groups under section 53(3) would not have been able to have made an appeal—and there are transitional provisions that we will come to about this ability. So the question is: is clause 50 needed now that section 53(3) is reinstated? Madam Chair? I’ll keep going?

Keep asking the questions. We’ve got a replacement Minister, so we’re just working through.

Give him some time. Thank you for that.

Moving on now to clause 53, and this is related to an amendment to section 108: “Regulations may set fees, charges, and contributions”. I see that the Minister’s Amendment Paper 473 has made some changes so that rather than just excluding certain categories of costs, the regulations can now include certain categories of costs. I think that is an improvement. But my worry about this regulation setting is that it could be strengthened by being in accordance with section 10 of the primary legislation—that is the principles section that is in section 10—and the principle of full cost recovery.

The way that the Government has talked about this fast-track process for some time has been that one of the benefits of it is that if the applicant—if the developer—really wants to go ahead and do something, they are paying for this special process that they are getting through the fast track. My concern is that these regulation settings—where they set upper limits and they set criteria and they exclude certain criteria—means that that is a backwards step on that principle of full cost recovery.

We heard it again in Scrutiny Week—but I think in some of our submissions as well—and we understand that there has been tension with some applicants saying that people—and when I say people, I mean agencies—are doing too much. Local government agencies are treating the application as if it was an application made under the Resource Management Act, which is more extensive than an application made under the fast track, and, because of that, that is leading to additional costs.

Part of the answer is all of the rest of this bill that we’ve already talked about, which is to really confirm exactly what is required and when it is required. So I don’t understand why we need this additional step of regulations that cut what it is that the applicant will be paying for. I do have an amendment on this, and I would love the Minister to take it up, because it is really bringing back this idea of full cost recovery, which is something that I’ve heard the Government talk about a lot.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I’ll address the question around appeal rights. This is in relation to section 99, inserted by clause 50. The Government considers that when an invitation is made, that is discretionary—so an invitation to comment doesn’t automatically mean that parties should also have a right to appeal—but that judicial review is retained. It would be a significant policy shift to remove the right for judicial review. The bill does also include savings provisions to preserve appeal rights for those that have already been invited to comment.

I’m just going to give the Hon Rachel Brooking one more call because there’s a couple of other pieces that you’ve alluded to that you were going to ask some questions on.

Yes. Well, I haven’t had an answer then on the regulations. That was quite a long contribution I gave there, and I would like the Minister to answer that. Look, my final point before yielding to other members—not yielding specifically—

The Minister’s just asked if you could just repeat the question on the regulations.

Yes. The question was about clause 53, amending section 108. This is that regulations can be set. My point was that the Government has talked about this whole process, the whole fast track, as being cost recovery so it’s not a burden on taxpayers or ratepayers; if somebody wants to do a big project, then they can pay for it. My concern is that this regulation-making power is undermining the cost recovery principle. I have put up a tabled amendment that would import a cost recovery principle into this regulation-making power. Apologies for repetition, but the Minister asked.

I was noting before that there has been some tension around what councils in particular, I think, have been charging for and seeking cost recovery for, because under the Resource Management Act (RMA) they’re used to doing a bigger piece of work—the Minister in the chair referred to this earlier; Minister Bishop referred to this earlier. We have all these other provisions of this Act that set more constraints and give more clarity on exactly what it is that those local councils have to do so they won’t be overdoing that work, because the point is that in the RMA, you produce more; in the fast track you don’t produce as much. You might have issues with—that’s the legislation. Why is it that we need regulation to set upper limits if this is all about cost recovery and those other issues about councils may be doing too much have now been constrained by the earlier provisions that constrain them to only relevant issues under the Act. That was my question about regulations.

Just before you stand up, I’ve just got a very small comment to make on the “Henry VIII” clause, and that’s simply that I have an amendment to delete that and I think that would be a very good thing to do.

Do you have other questions while you’ve still got some time on the clock?

No.

Nope, you’re all good.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Just to clarify, the purpose of the regulation-making power there is that the advice is that the current powers are actually insufficient to provide the clarity needed to—well, councils and applicants have been asking for clarity about what is and what isn’t out of the scope of “full cost recovery”. Up until now, I’m advised, the current powers were insufficient to provide that clarity. The intention is still to provide full cost recovery, but this gives the ability to do that. I’m advised that before this change was made, that ability was not there.

I’m going to take a call from Lawrence Xu-Nan, just bearing in mind that a lot of ground has been covered on this part, so I’m looking for new questions on new parts that we haven’t covered.

Thank you, Madam Chair. In addition to your direction, Madam Chair, I also have a number of amendments on some of the sections that haven’t really got the full consideration from the Minister, as well, so if I can also speak to some of my amendments on those sections.

Yes, as long as you do it really quickly. I wouldn’t like to suppose that the Minister hasn’t given them consideration, because he has likely seen them.

Cool. Thank you, Madam Chair. I want to start with continuing on from some of the conversations we’ve had in terms of clause 44. Now, one of the things that has been asked by officials is the requirement to extend 90 days. My amendment over here, if the Minister wouldn’t mind considering, is an extension of the 90 days to 120 days, noting that it is a substantial amount of work—and potentially paperwork—for the panel to consider some of the decisions that are required when it comes to an approval process.

I want to check with the Minister in terms of the interactions between clauses 44 and 45, because I don’t think we’ve actually touched on clause 45, and noting that the Minister has made a number of changes in Amendment Paper 473 that are not a recommendation in a departmental report or something that we’ve seen from a public perspective, I wanted to check with the Minister if clause 45 is something that the Minister wouldn’t mind elaborating on: why we’re seeing a deletion of subclause (2)—and also a replacement of subclause (4).

Also, moving on, I note that the previous speaker, the Hon Rachel Brooking, has travelled to, in some ways, the end of Part 1—but noting that the Greens haven’t actually had a chance to contribute to some of the later sections to this. We’d like, really, just to get a few thoughts and clarities from the Minister.

The next one we’re looking at is clause 48, when it comes to new section 93A. I do have a tabled amendment on this, and the reason I proposed this particular amendment is—unless the Minister is able to clarify that the wording that’s being used under clause 48, new section 93A(5) is the same as the recommendation as we’ve found in the departmental report. The reason that I put my amendment in there—which is in clause 48, new section 93A(5)(b), after “may not give directions”, insert “including directions to a Crown entity under section 113 of the Crown Entities Act 2004”. Now, noting that, in new section 93A(5)(b), it does say that “any matter in respect of which this Act provides that Ministers of the Crown may not give directions.”, what I’m not entirely clear on is whether that then also includes or encompasses a Crown entity under section 113 of the Crown Entities Act.

Now, in the departmental report, the recommendation is, for added assurance that the general direction cannot undermine the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) independence, a reference should be made explicitly to section 113 of the Crown Entities Act 2004. I just want to check with the Minister if new section 93A(5)(b) naturally captures that; if not, would the Minister consider my amendment, which is the recommendation from the department?

Moving on, I do want to check—and I’m really glad that the previous speaker picked up on clause 53 around regulation-setting fees. I wanted to check if there’s any consideration, at any point, where the cost recovered extends beyond what is considered the definition of a “fee” and potentially wading into tax territory—as in, is the cost recoverability going to be used for things outside of the expectations of section 104 of the principal Act? And that’s also substantially different from the conversation that we’ve had previously.

Finally, I just want to check with the Minister on clause 54, and I do have an amendment to this. Noting that Minister Bishop mentioned that this a “Henry VIII” clause, but I think that there is a bit of downplaying of what the “Henry VIII” clause would potentially entail—Madam Chair, I am almost done. This is my last point.

OK. Last point—last point.

Last point—and just to say that I have an amendment to amend new section 117A(3), inserted by clause 54, because I do worry, in terms of the scope of what is going to be done, although it says that there is going to be no new projects added to the list—but I think it is prudent to consider how ancillary activities or additional works may be added into that as part of Order in Council, noting that the Minister did say that this potentially could be a concern.

The other question I have for the Minister is that, in general, when you look at something like an Order in Council—and particularly when the Minister himself acknowledged that this is a “Henry VIII” clause, there is usually some sort of checks and balance, in terms of a review or a recommendation of what the Minister is going to be able to produce, like a report. We’ve seen that in the immigration fiscal sustainability paper as well, where the Minister is going to actively release some of the changes, etc. I’m just checking that that is captured within new section 117A(1); if not, just checking if the Minister would consider my tabled amendment.

Thank you, Madam Chair. There was a bit of a potpourri of questions there from Dr Xu-Nan, so I’ll do my best to take them in order. So from the top, the question was asked about whether we would support an amendment to the time frame in clause 44 of Amendment Paper 473, from 90 to 120 days. I think Minister Bishop covered that off earlier in the debate by saying that it’s arguably the way—it’s finely balanced, but the extension from 60 to 90 days was seen as a pretty reasonable extension to go to, and I’d just note that, I think, that apart from one application, all applications to date have been processed in less than 90 days. So I think it’s a reasonable limit to go to.

The next question was around why add, in clause 45 of the Amendment Paper, the reference to section 42(1)(aa) as well as “or (b)”. That’s because that is a new section which is being included in Amendment Paper, and it needs to be referred to alongside paragraph (b) as well, so that’s why it’s in there.

The question around does clause 48 reflect the Crown Entities Act, yes clause 48 is amended in the Amendment Paper to reflect section 113 of the Crown Entities Act

Then I think I’ll just try and cover off that last question around what review mechanisms or oversight is in place for what you’ve described as “Henry VIII” clauses. Because they are done by Order in Council, they are subject to both judicial review oversight by a regulations review panel and all the principles around proper lawmaking. So any Order in Council would have to be within scope of the power envisioned by the regulation-making power, but it would have to be with consistent rights of natural justice. All of those are considerations that the Regulations Review Committee would take into account, but judicial review would take them into account as well, and so there is oversight for those kinds of changes.

I move, That debate on this question now close. [Interruption]

I’m seeking a vote. The question is that debate on this question now close.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to Amendment Paper 473 amending clause 5, new section 10A(3), to insert paragraph (c) requiring consultation with “relevant iwi authorities, hapū, and Treaty settlement entities”, be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to Amendment Paper 473 amending clause 5, new section 10A(3), to insert paragraph (c) requiring consultation with “relevant local authorities”, be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to Amendment Paper 473 amending clause 5, new section 10A(3), to insert paragraph (c) requiring consultation with “relevant environmental organisations”, be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to Amendment Paper 473 amending clause 5, new section 10A(3), to insert paragraph (c) requiring consultation with “the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment”, be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to Amendment Paper 473 amending clause 6, section 11, to allow “30 working days”, be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to Amendment Paper 473 amending clause 44, section 79(2)(b)(ii), to provide a “120 working days” time frame, be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to Amendment Paper 473 amending clause 48, new section 93A(5)(b), to include “directions to a Crown entity”, be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to Amendment Paper 473 amending clause 54, new section 117A(3), to include “ancillary activities and additional works”, be agreed to.

The question is that the Minister’s amendments to Part 1 set out on Amendment Paper 473 be agreed to.

The Hon Rachel Brooking’s tabled amendment to the definition of “relevant portfolio Minister” in clause 4(7) is out of order as not being in a correct form of legislation.

The Hon Rachel Brooking’s tabled amendment to clause 5, new section 10A, to delete subsections (2) and (3), is out of order as being inconsistent with a previous decision of the committee.

The question is that the Hon Rachel Brooking’s remaining tabled amendments to clause 5, new section 10A, be agreed to.

The question is that Lan Pham’s tabled amendment to clause 5, new section 10A, to insert new subsection (7), be agreed to.

The question is that Mariameno Kapa-Kingi’s tabled amendment to clause 5, new section 10A, to insert new subsection (7), be agreed to.

Lan Pham’s tabled amendment to delete clause 6 is out of order as being inconsistent with a previous decision of the committee.

Mariameno Kapa-Kingi’s tabled amendment to clause 6, to replace the section 11 heading and text, is out of order as being inconsistent with a previous decision of the committee.

The question is that Mariameno Kapa-Kingi’s tabled amendment to clause 6, section 11(1)(a), to insert new subparagraph (iii), be agreed to.

Mariameno Kapa-Kingi’s tabled amendment to clause 6, to replace section 11(3), is out of order as being inconsistent with a previous decision of the committee.

The Hon Rachel Brooking’s tabled amendments to clause 7 and 14 are out of order as being inconsistent with a previous decision of the committee.

The question is that the Hon Rachel Brooking’s remaining tabled amendments to clause 6 and 23 be agreed to.

Lan Pham’s tabled amendments to delete clauses 9(2) and 14 are out of order as being inconsistent with a previous decision of the committee.

The question is that Lan Pham’s remaining tabled amendment to delete clause 18(3) be agreed to.

The Hon Rachel Brooking’s tabled amendment to delete clause 9(2) is out of order as being inconsistent with a previous decision of the committee.

The Hon Rachel Brooking’s tabled amendment to delete clause 9(6) is out of order as not being in the correct form of legislation.

The question is that the Hon Rachel Brooking’s remaining tabled amendments to delete clause 18(2) be agreed to.

The question is that Lan Pham’s tabled amendment to delete clause 9(4) be agreed to.

The question is that Mariameno Kapa-Kingi’s tabled amendment to clause 9, section 17(6), be agreed to.

The question is that the Hon Rachel Brooking’s tabled amendment to clause 10, section 18(3), be agreed to.

Mariameno Kapa-Kingi’s tabled amendment to clause 10, to delete the replacement of section 18(3) and (4), is out of order as being inconsistent with a previous decision of the committee.

The question is that Lan Pham’s tabled amendments to clause 12 be agreed to.

Mariameno Kapa-Kingi’s tabled amendment to clause 19, to replace section 37A(2), is out of order as not being in the correct form of legislation.

Lan Pham’s tabled amendment to delete clause 21 is out of order as being inconsistent with a previous decision of the committee.

The question is that Lan Pham’s tabled amendment to clause 25, section 46, to insert new subsection (2D), be agreed to.

The question is that the Hon Rachel Brooking’s tabled amendments to clause 26 be agreed to.

Can I say that both Labour and National caucuses should know that we don’t have debates across the Chamber while we’re voting. Thank you.

The Hon Rachel Brooking’s tabled amendment to clause 29, new section 50, is out of order as being inconsistent with a previous decision of the committee.

Lan Pham’s tabled amendment to delete clause 33(2) is out of order as being inconsistent with a previous decision of the committee.

The Hon Rachel Brooking’s tabled amendment to delete clause 33(2) is out of order as being inconsistent with a previous decision of the committee.

Mariameno Kapa-Kingi’s tabled amendment to delete clause 34(4) is out of order as being inconsistent with a previous decision of the committee.

Lan Pham’s tabled amendment to delete clause 42 is out of order as being inconsistent with a previous decision of the committee.

The question is that Mariameno Kapa-Kingi’s tabled amendment to clause 42, new section 68A, to insert new subsection (3A), be agreed to.

The Hon Rachel Brooking’s tabled amendment to clause 42, new section 68B(1), is out of order as being inconsistent with a previous decision of the committee.

Lan Pham’s tabled amendment to delete clause 44(1) is out of order as being inconsistent with a previous decision of the committee.

The Hon Rachel Brooking’s tabled amendment to delete clause 44(1) is out of order as being inconsistent with a previous decision of the committee.

Mariameno Kapa-Kingi’s tabled amendment to clause 44, to replace section 79(2)(b), is out of order as being inconsistent with a previous decision of the committee.

The question is that the Hon Rachel Brooking’s tabled amendment to delete clause 45(1) be agreed to.