Post-Cabinet Press Conference: Monday, 24 March 2025

We leave India having broadened and deepened our relationship on all fronts, whether that be in peace and security, trade and commerce, and people-to-people [Inaudible]. As you know, India is the most populous country on Earth, soon to be the world’s third largest economy, and is a major regional and global player in an increasingly multipolar world. Our team is now looking to build very quickly on the momentum of the visit, which will be made clear with our comprehensive FTA negotiations. When one out of four Kiwi jobs are tied to trade, we’ll continue to do everything that we can to drive all of our partnerships to new levels, and the work that we’ve done with the UAE and the GCC FTAs, as well as hopefully the Indian FTA, I think are good examples of that work.

The recent Investment Summit in Auckland ten days ago was another example of our Government’s relentless focus on growth, an the level of interest by major infrastructure and investment companies and entities from across the world, with $6 trillion of investment funds, was substantial. This was the message that investors had been waiting for, that a New Zealand Government now is open for business and investment with great clarity around the investable opportunities, a New Zealand Government hell-bent on making doing business in this country easier and more seamless, and a pitch for New Zealand as a good investment proposition and a safe haven in a more volatile and competitive investment world. I thought the CDPQ from Québec summed it up pretty well when they said, “We’re looking for predictability and stability”. I’ve been covering this region for more than ten years and we now feel—we are now very happy to feel our capital is so welcome in this country”, and that sentiment was expressed again and again by investors at the summit.

But ultimately the reason we want to attract more investment and economic growth to New Zealand is because it is the key to raising living standards, creating higher-paying jobs and delivering the public services that Kiwis want and deserve. And that is why we’re so determined to unlock even more investment, more innovation and more entrepreneurship. The bottom line is that we need to take every possible step to lift New Zealand’s economic performance, and we know many families and businesses are still suffering the after-effects of high inflation and interest rates but we also know that we are starting to turn the corner economically and that better days lie ahead for all of us.

We are officially out of recession and proof of that was the 0.7 percent increase in Q4 2024 GDP announced last week. We are winning the battle on inflation, creating a sound, stable platform for business and future growth—two years ago, inflation was 7.1 percent and right now it’s at 2.2 percent—and most importantly, wages have been growing faster than inflation for the last five quarters, putting more money into Kiwis’ back pockets. Interest rates continue to fall, retail rates have fallen steadily as the OCR has dropped from its peak of 5.5 percent to 3.75, and economists expect further rounds of cuts in both May and April, April and May. Business confidence is around its highest level in a decade, farmer confidence is breaking records, and the forward outlook for dairy, red meat and wool is really encouraging. Annual tourism expenditure was up 23 percent last year and services and manufacturing activity have also returned to growth after extended periods of contraction.

Even though we are turning the corner and we’re on the right track, it’s still tough for some Kiwis and it’s important that we keep the foot firmly on the growth pedal, and there’s no way that we will maximise the massive opportunities from international trade and investment if we don’t unleash growth here at home. Travel around the country and you’ll see examples every week of growth and opportunity being blocked by busybodies weaponising the Resource Management Act. The RMA has enabled a cottage industry of lawyers and consultants drafting thousands of pages of papers and reports all designed to block new roads, new wind farms, new apartments in our central cities, and farming in rural New Zealand. It’s the culture of no that I spoke about earlier in the year, brought to life.

Kiwis are sick of it, I’m sick of it, we’re all sick of it and now we’re taking action to completely dismantle and scrap the RMA and replace it with fresh legislation that just lets Kiwis get on with it. Today I’m pleased to announce that Cabinet has agreed to the high-level design of that replacement, and with that I want to hand you over to RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop and also Simon Court to take you through more of the details. Chris.

Thank you, Prime Minister. The RMA is broken and everyone knows it. It makes it too hard to build the infrastructure and houses New Zealand desperately needs, too hard to use our abundant natural resources, and hasn’t resulted in better management of our natural environment. Whether it’s aquaculture off the coast of the South Island or a new green building replacing a heritage gravel pit next to a train station in the centre of our biggest city, the RMA has obstructed growth instead of enabling it. This Government says enough is enough.

When we came into Government, we repealed Labour’s botched reforms. We subsequently made a series of quick and targeted amendments to provide relief. Last year we passed the Fast Track Approvals Act to make it easier to deliver significant regional and national projects. We’ve now agreed as a Cabinet on the shape of the Government’s replacement legislation.

This is a radical transition to a far more liberal planning system with less red tape, premised on the enjoyment of property rights. Last year we set ten principles of the new system and we tasked an Expert Advisory Group to work at pace to test and refine those principles and develop a blueprint for reform. We received that blueprint earlier this year and I want to thank Janette Campbell and her team, who did a great job producing it. We’re releasing that report today.

Cabinet has agreed that the blueprint provides a workable basis for the new resource management system and we’ve agreed on a range of new features of the system, adopted and adapted from the blueprint. The key features we’ve agreed include two new Acts, a narrower scope, property rights at the core, simplified national direction, clear environmental limits, more standardisation, streamlined council plans, including spatial planning, and stronger environmental compliance enforcement and monitoring.

Commonsense ideas like standardised zoning will be a key feature of the system. Right now, every individual council in New Zealand determines the technical rules of each of their zones. Across New Zealand there are 1,175 different kinds of zones. In the entirety of Japan, which uses standardised zoning, there are 13. These are 1,175 different sets of technical zoning rules. In a country the size of New Zealand, our view is that it’s totally nuts. There is really no legitimate justification for the maximum building height in a residential zone to be 8 metres in Kāpiti and 9 metres in Dunedin. There is really no justification for the people of Napier experiencing height in relation to boundary rules, in relation to their residential zone, of 3 metres and 45 degrees, versus the people of Upper Hutt, where the rule is 4 metres and 60 degrees.

Standardised zoning, which we’ve agreed to, makes up one part of our new system but it gives you a sense of the level of ambition we are aiming for. There’s some economic analysis done of the blueprint that estimates a 45 percent saving in process costs compared to the RMA. The same analysis done on the last Government’s reforms estimated only a 7 percent saving.

There’s a lot of work still to do, including the work we have to do alongside councils, but we are committed to delivering these reforms as soon as possible to unlock the economic growth we need to make it easier for New Zealanders to get things done. Simon Court, my Under-Secretary, who’s done a lot of work on this alongside me, is now going to make some remarks, and then happy to take your questions.

Thank you, Minister. Thank you, Prime Minister. This is the RMA. That’s what we’re getting rid of. Minister Bishop’s just given a really good outline of just what we’re dealing with in terms of the RMA, how bad things are, and why wholesale replacement with a system based on property rights is vital. The RMA is akin to a gale force headwind, battling any attempts to develop anything anywhere. We need to develop homes, schools, hospitals, ports, wind farms, gas fields, and farms, of course. These are needed to deliver the quality of life that New Zealanders expect from living in a modern nation in the 21st century. Infrastructure is falling apart while our population has ballooned and now we’re jumping over unnecessary hurdles trying to catch up. It’s $1.3 billion annually spent on consenting, according to the Infrastructure Commission. That’s an astronomical waste of taxpayer funds. At a recent peak, around 40,000 consents were demanded in a year.

Most of the stuff we’ve been doing for years. We know how to do earthworks. We know how to install a culvert under a road. We know how to build a wastewater treatment plant while protecting the environment. In the new system, by codifying best practice in the terms of national standards, we’ll bypass the need for most of these type of consents and we will continue to protect the environment.

The RMA provides for objectors to object to just about anything, anywhere, based on a concept of effects. It tangles progress in a web of process and absurd conditions. Our reforms are going to rationalise the system in a way that stops every Tom, Dick and Harry from objecting to things and weaponising the planning system to block progress. Under the RMA, currently there’s no cost when decision makers might want to impose things like heritage controls or SNAs on people’s private property, and that’s why councils and busybodies keep doing more of this stuff. In the new system, instead we’re going to include a robust approach where compensation is found to be deserved for regulatory taking where questionable restrictions are imposed on people’s private property. The bar for people and organisations telling other people what they can and can’t do with their land has been too low for too long. We’re going to make it much higher. That is what the new system will do. Thank you. Over to you, Prime Minister.

Well, thank you, Simon, thank you, Chris, and congratulations on the work you’ve already done on RMA, and I love the speed by which you’re wanting to move by getting the Bill in the House by the end of the year.

Can I just say before we go to questions, I’ll be welcoming Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape tomorrow in Wellington for formal talks. I look forward to talking with Prime Minister Marape again after our last conversations in CHOGM in Tonga. In the House this week we will be moving urgency to pass a range of legislation, including the remaining stages of Bills in our Q1 plan. These are the Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Bill, the Sentencing Reform Amendment Bill, and the Customer and Product Data Bill. With that, we’re happy to take your questions.

I’ll let Chris talk to that, about the first reading and the Bill this year.

Yeah, so the aim is to have the Planning Act and the Natural Environment Act into the House—well, they’ll be Bills—into the House by the end of the year. They go to Select Committee through 2026. We want them passed by the time of the next election. In 2027 councils start their new long-term plans, so the aim is to have the new system in place as the councils do their long-term plans in 2027. Allied to the new RMA system, we’re also making a whole series of quite complicated changes to infrastructure funding and financing. Those are the decisions that Simon and I announced two or three weeks ago at Local Government New Zealand, and so those changes are really important that they happen at the same time. So 2027, as the new council plans, is the aim.

It’s also worth noting that the last Government had a 10-year transition, so we are moving really quickly. You know, we’re 15 months into this time in Government, we’ve, you know, essentially agreed on the shape of the new legislation, we’ll be drafting it over the next few months and taking detailed policy decisions, and then it will be passed by the end of this time in—this term of Parliament.

And the only thing I’d add is that we also have our fast-track legislation, which will continue, so that we can actually expedite projects of national and regional significance as we’ve been doing.

Absolutely not. Labour’s reforms were a disaster. They introduced wholly complicated new legal terms that were unknown to New Zealand law. They stuffed the legislation with a whole range of conflicting goals and objectives that made it impossible for anyone to negotiate the system. This RMA is 900-and-whatever-it-is-pages. The NBA, the National and Built Environment Act that Labour passed, was longer than the RMA it was replacing, in a system that was designed to be simpler. So, absolutely not. We did the right thing, and all three political parties that make up this Government campaigned on repealing Labour’s reforms.

I will be reaching out to Labour and the Greens in order to see if there is some common ground where we can work together. Some of the concepts in the report that have been developed by the Expert Advisory Group have received positive noises of support in the past, so there is potentially some common ground, but this is Government policy. We’ll be proceeding but I will be reaching out to Labour.

Our goal in Government, our first duty as elected decision makers, is to create the best public policy we possibly can create. The RMA has been a disaster for 30 years. It is the direct cause of the most unaffordable housing market in the Western world. It is a direct cause as to why it is impossible to build infrastructure in this country. It is one of the reasons that is driving our energy shortage. It has been a millstone around the neck of the New Zealand economy for far too long. Our goal is to completely replace it with new laws based on the fundamentals of a market economy, which is private property rights. We are going to do it.

Well, we’ll be reaching out to the Labour Party and the Greens about this reform, but I might just point out that we did that a couple of weeks ago on public-private partnerships and Barbara Edmonds wrote a foreword for the public-private partnership blueprint that the Government launched, and then in the space of a day their position changed about 14 times. So, you know, let’s wait and see what they have to say, but at the moment the signs aren’t exactly promising.

I’m laughing because we are the elected Government of the day. All three political parties campaigned on a mandate of scrapping the RMA and a new regime based on—largely on the concepts that we have developed, so we are implementing that. We have the right to govern. We’ll be putting legislation before the Parliament. That’s not to say that there isn’t room for some consultation and negotiation as we go through. I do think it is important we have some degree of stability when it comes to our planning laws. But we wrote to David Parker back in 2021 and suggested exactly the same thing, and that letter is still yet to be responded to by David Parker. So we will reach out in good faith, but we also have a mandate to implement good public policy to fix the resource management laws that have held this country back.

Yeah. The ultimate way to create—

The ultimate way to create good, enduring legislation that goes beyond a particular term of Parliament is to make it good law, to create good public policy. That’s what happened with the Reserve Bank Act 1999. That’s what happened with the Fiscal Responsibility Act 1994. If you go back through history, the starting point for good stability in public policy settings is good law, and that’s our first job as elected decision makers, to create good law.

Perpetual leases is an issue that you’ll have to maybe take offline and expand a bit more, but there will be no generic Treaty clause in the new legislation. So the RMA right now has a Treaty clause which is a generic “uphold the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi”. Cabinet has ruled that out.

No. No, Claudette, you—

I think that might be an issue unrelated to the RMA. It’s more an issue for Te Ture Whenua Māori Land Act 1993. Tama’s doing some work on that.

I was going to say, Claudette—

No, Claudette, you raise a very good issue, which is the productivity of Māori land, the potential to unlock it is actually really huge. So Tama is—Tama Potaka is doing some really good work and is starting to get the thinking straight on Māori land and how we get more productivity out of it and how we unlock it.

Correct. Correct.

No, we are, we’re—

No, so, no, it’s really part of a separate stream of work that we really want to focus on about: how do we unlock the Māori economy? How do we lift living standards amongst Māori? And one of the bigger aspects, exactly as you’ve identified, is the efficiency of Māori land and the productivity of it. That’s going to be led through a separate stream of work through, that Tama Potaka’s leading. And you’re right, it builds on the work that was done before, but also other things, and we really hope we can get consensus on that. I know we tried in Opposition to put that out as an idea as well, and it was turned down at that time by the Labour Government. But, you know, it is right, I think, you know, there’s a huge opportunity, as you’ve identified. So we fully agree with you, just Tama Potaka will lead a separate stream of work around that as part of a Māori development agenda.

It comes from an Infrastructure Commission report in 2022. It’s $1.3 billion in direct consenting costs as a result of the Resource Management Act—so it applies to Government but also private sector players using the RMA for consenting—and it’s only relating to infrastructure, so it’s $1.3 billion in direct infrastructure consenting costs. It’s Infrastructure Commission 2022.

It will include legal fees but I—

It’s essentially—it’s essentially doubled, or the time’s doubled.

It’s financial costs, yes.

And I think, Luke, the only thing I’d say is, you know, that, as I remember it, has actually doubled in a short period of time. The time has doubled to get a resource consent done.

Yes.

I was very struck, you know, I was out on a—on a project, home-building site, subdivision, and it was interesting. You know, it now takes New Zealanders 19—it takes us 19 months to build a standard three to four-bedroom project home, and that costs us 50 percent more than it does in Australia. And when you dig down into why is that the case—why should it cost—forget the land value, just the building costs associated with it and the resource consents that are with it is huge. And it’s the resource consenting time. It’s the 14 different inspections from the council that are required through that build. When one of those inspectors does get sick, we’re waiting two weeks. Time is money. The resource consent has cost a lot, it’s taking a long time and it’s adding a lot of cost to things, and that’s why New Zealanders end up paying a lot for their housing. So it’s a small example but it’s illustrative of what we see across the whole piece, whether it’s infrastructure for wind farms or other things we want to do as well, so we have to tackle it.

Well we’re going to work our way through that. There’s 1,175 in New Zealand. There’s 13 in Japan. I’d like to get it down much closer to the 13 than it is.

Well, let’s just wait and see. We want to go through an iterative process with councils. Look, it doesn’t make any sense for Canterbury, for example, to have 221.

Why don’t we let Simon [Inaudible]?

Simon’s done some work on this. We’ll let Simon take it.

Thank you, Minister Bishop, Prime Minister. So, the concept of land use zones is that we essentially want to have a Lego box full of different land use zones that councils can pick and mix, but the intention is—

Duplo.

Or Duplo, the Minister says. He’s clearly been playing on the floor with Duplo recently. But the intention is that, look, councils are going to have to meet our objective of providing for 30 years of growth. That’s housing and business and commercial land. They’re going to get to choose where they grow up and where they grow out, but using standardised zones. So if you’re a property developer or you want to build a distribution warehouse in Auckland or Christchurch or Timaru, you’re not going to be faced with having to interpret a whole lot of different zoning conditions. The intention is to standardise it, simplify it, and make it much more cost-effective to do the development we need.

The intention is that there is one plan per region, made up of a plan for environmental management, what we might call a regional council plan, and chapters for each district or city. But rather than having it in a hierarchy as it currently is, with the regional council developing their own policies and their own plans, and every city and district having to work out how to comply with the regional council as well as national rules, there’s going to be one plan per region. It’s going to be far simpler.

Yes.

That’s right.

Yes.

That’s the intention but I must make it clear this is nothing like what Labour proposed under the NBA and Spatial Planning Act. Of course we’re going to have spatial planning. That has statutory weight. That’s important. But what we won’t be doing is outsourcing the planning process to a whole lot of remote people. We’ll actually be asking councils to plan and get democratic sign-off for their plans in their areas. We actually do believe in the principles of subsidiarity and localism, and that’s one way we think we can deliver it.

Now we get to do it.

Look, no decisions have yet been yet made about how the plans will be put together and who will get to contribute, but I think it’s really important to acknowledge that iwi and hapū have specific Treaty settlements that provide for their participation in the resource management system and we’ve upheld—we intend to uphold those settlements and make sure that the way they enter the system is very explicit, it’s in black and white, so nobody’s under any illusion.

That’s right.

We’ll work it out.

Well, we will—we will be working that out. We’ve been delegated decision making on that, but I think it’s important to acknowledge there are groups that haven’t settled and there are groups that have interests. In fact, that’s set down in law. We’ll be making sure that we uphold the Crown’s obligations to iwi Māori.

Look, as I’ve said, you know, let’s see the detail when it actually comes through and it’s actually—

Yeah, no, we have, we have, and we’ve met with—we’ve got good contacts and we’re starting to build good relationships in with the administration. But for us at this point, what that meeting was really about was to get an understanding of the areas of commonality and how we want to work together with the new administration, particularly with challenges in the Indo-Pacific region, and it was a very successful meeting. He had good access to a number of key players and we talked about what we can continue to do and build out together as the US and New Zealand.

No, no, no, there wasn’t.

No, not at all.

I’d just say to you I think last week was a pretty big week. You had a Prime Minister in India and you had a Foreign Minister sitting down with the Secretary of State of the US. And as a small country we’re out there in the world engaging with our key partners and friends and looking to deepen those relationships, and that what that—that’s what that meeting was about.

Yeah, no, I get it, but no, we don’t. You know, we had a good—this was a top-to-top meeting between the Secretary of State and the Foreign Minister, an annual meeting that we now have in place. But it was a very good meeting with the new administration to build that relationship, to build that rapport, to talk about the areas of common interest, but we didn’t get into specifics.

Sorry, which part, sorry?

No, I’ve read the full—no, no, Winston and I have spoken. It was a very successful set of meetings and I’m fully aware of what was discussed in those meetings.

You’ll have to wait until the end of the month.

So one of the things we’ll be working through is the concept of regulatory takings. So the starting point for the new regime will be a presumption of land use, so if you own a piece of land you can do with it what you like, and you have to take account of effects on—when that land use will affect others. But the equal principle is that when there is an impact on what you own, it is important that the system takes account of the impact of a regulatory restriction, or what is sometimes called a regulatory taking. That is a difficult issue to work through. So heritage laws, for example, do have an impact on what you can do with your property, likewise outstanding natural landscapes. There’s a whole range of different ones. Some are akin to a taking, others are not. One of the things that Under-Secretary Court and I will be working through over the next few weeks and months is exactly what will count as a regulatory taking that would be subject to compensation and what won’t be.

So I know that’s a long-winded way of saying we’re not quite sure yet, but the start—the change is significant in the sense that the RMA at the moment does not have a particular presumption in favour of private property rights. The new laws will. And once you establish that from the start then a whole range of other factors start to come into play around regulatory takings, which we’ll work through.

Yeah, look, I’ve seen those recent figures as well and am quite concerned about it. I’ve actually—it’s a reason for why we’ve gone so hard on gangs, which are an organised crime which is driving a lot of the drug trade. It is an issue that’s been a topic of conversation, frankly, around transnational crime across the Pacific as well. We’re seeing huge increases throughout the Pacific Islands as well. But I’ve actually asked Ministers Bishop—Ministers Goldsmith and Mitchell to say what else can we be doing. But it underscores exactly why we need to be incredibly tough on gangs, who are actually driving a lot of that drug trade. But there’s obviously—you know, it is concerning and there’s more for us to do.

I really want to get the facts first so that we can actually understand what has driven that spike. It’s important that we understand that fact before I comment on it too much.

Yeah, yeah, it was, yeah.

What I was really referencing was what we were observing in the Baltics, to be honest, which was that—you know, you’ve seen that around gas pipelines potentially and also subsea cables, and of course they are critical instruments for, you know, commerce and trade and therefore prosperity. And so to protect prosperity, you’ve actually got to have security. That’s back to the same point that I’ve been trying to make for the last 15 months, which is the two are interdependent. But nothing specific, you know, is in our region that I’m aware of.

No. What I was referencing was, as I said before, the Baltic examples that we’ve seen, and Baltic countries have talked about that.

Well, it’s something that we are aware of, and it’s a risk that we are well aware of and a risk that we will look to manage as best we possibly can, but it just underscores yet again the point that I’ve been trying to make, which is that, you know, we’ve got a very—you know, the Pacific is no longer a benign environment. And as a result, you know, that’s why we’ve actually got to keep advocating for our values but importantly follow through with some actions, and that’s where the Defence Capability Plan, which we’ll talk more about in the next few weeks, comes into play.

No, I think we will talk through the capability and the strategy and the components of the plan, because it is a 15-year plan, we want to make sure that we’ve got some strategic consistency that we can build into over time, and also at the same time we’ll talk about the budget and the level of funding required.

Again, I’m not going to pre-empt that conversation because when we talk about it I want to be able to open it up properly and actually talk it through with the country and also with all of you at the right time.

Well, we’ve got one more—we’ve got a conversation still to have on it. Obviously, Winston’s got to the end of the month to see whether he can improve on the offer and the plan that we’ve got in place. We’ll have a Cabinet conversation and then we’ll detail that in due course.

No. I thought he attacked Labour beautifully. I thought he stood up and advocated for why they should not be allowed to be back in Government again, given the economic mismanagement that has caused so much pain and suffering for all New Zealanders, and I thought that was outstanding.

Well, again, you know, the reality is that we are in Paris because it’s in our national interest to do so. Farmers that I talk to up and down this country tell me very clearly if we’re not in Paris, what happens is large multinationals and also competitor countries kick New Zealand products off shelves. So we want farming pumping, we want the economy growing really hard, and it’s in our national interest to make sure that we don’t punish our farmers by withdrawing. That was a decision made by the coalition Government or parties in the coalition Government. As to what individual party positions may be going into a 2026 election, that’s party decision. But from a Government point of view, it’s in our interest, it’s in our national interest to be very much part of it and we’ve done so very pragmatically, I think, is the answer.

Well, my argument’s very clearly having inherited the mess that we had to inherit and the things that we saw happening, it wasn’t great, when you think about things like Pharmac programmes, ferries, Dunedin Hospital—all underfunded, not funded, not money put aside. But basically, you know, when you saw a huge increase in Government spending in the way that we did, a huge ramp up in our debt in the way that it is, that now we’ve got nothing to show for that, there’s—

I think there could have been a lot more transparency, you know, going into the election, for sure, and I think what we didn’t see was—we saw a number of fiscal cliffs. We saw a number of projects underfunded. We saw a number of projects being poorly managed and then blowing out. We’ve inherited that mess. We’re fixing it up. But I just—

Yeah. Well, what’s the bigger issue is actually the 84 percent increase in Government spending that lead to domestic inflation, high interest rates, a recession and therefore people losing their jobs. We lost complete economic formation and management and that’s why—as hard as it is for Kiwis right now, that’s why this Government is very focused on making sure we repair our books, we get the conditions right for growth, we clean up the ungodly mess that we inherited, and they shouldn’t be trusted to run the economy again. It’s quite outrageous what actually happened and the pain and suffering and the slowness by which New Zealand has had to come out of that pain and deal with that as we worked our way through it. So it’s—that leads to hard decisions, tough decisions, but good economic management is how you look after low and middle-income working New Zealanders, because if you don’t, they end up feeling it with job losses.

Look, I think there’ll be a range of quite sensitive issues on both sides, frankly. And again, what I’m not going to do, though, is get into a conversation with media about those negotiations. I know that’s not what you want to hear, but the reality for us is that we are really serious and fixated on actually getting an FTA agreement done and delivered. We want to argue for—as hard as we possibly can to get the best deal we possibly can for New Zealanders in New Zealand. That’s really important to me and I’m frankly just not going to get into a conversation through media for negotiations that are yet to take place.

Just before we enter into an FTA negotiation we get a mandate from Cabinet, and so that’s pretty clear for us as to—we know what our mandate actually is.

No, I disagree with that. I don’t—I wouldn’t—I wouldn’t represent those remarks in that way. What I would say to you is that we’ve got a series of sensitive issues. There’ll be a number of them. It could well be labour mobility. It could well be dairy. It could be a range of other things as well. We will work our way through that. We have got ourselves to a very good point to be able to launch these FTA negotiations. They will be hard. They will be very difficult. They will be pretty tough negotiations.

I’m very confident, because we’re—the way our internal dynamic works of how we sign off on things before we commit to doing things—

I know, I know. He’s bee very—and we’ve been very clear with each other as we’ve gone into opening up FTA negotiations with India. We know there will be a bunch of issues. It will be tough. It’ll be hard, but we’re going to go for it.

Yes.

Yes, absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, I mean—

I mean, that was one of the reasons why we invited—

Iwi in.

—Tuku and Jamie and Justin to the summit, and Rukumoana Schaafhausen. They gave excellent presentations, were extremely impressive and we had a number of pieces of feedback from the international investors who were there. And, you know, the Government doesn’t have to be involved. I’m a small Government guy. If there’s foreign money that wants to partner with iwi to use their whenua up and down the country to grow jobs and economically develop particular parts of the country that doesn’t involve the Government, as far as I’m concerned, that’s fantastic. Get on with it.

[Inaudible]

Well, I would hope so, but Tama’s—

I hope so, but Tama’s working away on that. But as you know, Claudette, Māori land law reform has had a difficult and vexed history, including under the last Government and the last National Government before that, but it is very important.

Look, it’s an issue for the Minister and Corrections to manage and let them run through their process.

Sorry, in what way?

Well again, I’m not going to pre-empt a Corrections investigation that’s underway. It’s entirely appropriate that they look very clearly at it. We don’t—we want them operating within the law. We want them to be respectful and carrying themselves well. But that’s up to Corrections to do that investigation before I start commenting on it without knowing the detail of it.

Mate, I was full on. I think I’d talk to anybody about my intensity through that week. As you know when you’ve been on tours with me, it was no different. Cool. Awesome, team. Oh, sorry, last one.

Yeah, look, we’ve got a review of the firearms registry up and running at the moment, and what we really want to make sure is that we continue to enhance public safety through that review. And so we’ll have separate thinking on that when we do a full [Inaudible] of it. But what I’d just say to you, I am conscious there was a couple of gun incidences—or more than a couple, I think five—over the course of the weekend. And again, it’s the reason why we’ve got, you know, warrantless search powers for illegal guns with gang members and firearm prohibition orders. You know, that’s really important if we’re going to crack down on violent crime. We’re making some good progress on that. We’ve got to continue to keep those rules in pretty tough places.

So, you know, there’s two parts to it. One is: yes, we’ll look at the firearms registry and make sure it’s working effectively but more importantly that it’s enhancing public safety, and what more could we do to do that. And then the second bit is: keep really tough on gangs in particular and illegal guns. OK, team, thanks so much.