Amend away, amend away
She wasn't keeping count, but by my tally she delivered 31 speeches this week — and it would have been 32 but for her having to leave for the airport on Thursday afternoon to catch the last convenient flight home.
As would be expected, it was the Resource Management Act which dominated Brooking's week, although she also found the time to delve into the inner workings of the Local Government (Water Services) Bill, and the Hauraki Gulf / Tīkapa Moana Marine Protection Bill as well.
It was the Resource Management (Consenting and Other System Changes) Amendment Bill which kept Brooking going for most of the week though. The relevant minister, Chris Bishop, has been labouring with a heavy cold all week and his heart must have sunk as Brooking — armed with pens, post-it notes and slabs of drafts and amendment papers — rose to her feet on Tuesday afternoon.
Parliament is blessed with many MPs who can pick the minutest bone with any word or sentence — the Greens' Lawrence Xu-Nan and Bishop himself when in Opposition spring to mind — but few are as forensic and diligent as Brooking when it comes to working through clauses and sub-clauses.
And she had plenty of material, the minister having just that morning tabled a substantial amendment paper. So substantial, in fact, that what Brooking suspected had happened was that the version of the Bill reported back from select committee — and not as yet agreed to by Parliament — had been used as the template for the soon to be amended again Bill.
"This is a terrible way to make laws," Brooking lamented.
"It's very frustrating, when you have been through a select committee process and have asked about the wording of different phrases and made amendments in the select committee process, to see that all upended on the day of the committee stage of the Bill."
Bishop, to his credit, was somewhat repentant about that: "In mitigation, most of the changes in the Amendment Paper have been publicly announced, in some cases, a couple of months, if not earlier, than today. So members have had a good opportunity to kick those issues around."
As it turned out, they were about to do a lot more kicking ... and not without good reason, as the Bill — now an Act — attempted to achieve a heck of a lot within its many pages.
The much-criticised RMA is due to be axed next year: in the meantime the Amendment Act makes a many short-term changes to time frames for consent processing in areas such as infrastructure, renewable energy, farming and consenting after natural disaster. It is very broad in some places and narrowly specific in others — such as allowing the demolition of Wellington's Gordon Wilson flats and allowing Auckland to develop land around its railway stations.
A lot of this is reasonable, Brooking agreed, in her third reading speech.
"Labour was supporting this Bill when it was introduced and even at the second reading, despite having concerns about some of the changes that were made at select committee," she said.
"But something happened on Tuesday morning. That was that a very large Amendment Paper was dropped and it made significant changes to the Bill. Changes that we were not even able to debate in this House because government members chose to stand up and close the debate on these very important aspects."
Brooking then proceeded to give the government a stern and emotional telling off for its terrible law making ... none of which was enough to stop it being passed by lunchtime Thursday.
Best supporting actor
Taieri Green list MP Scott Willis also deserves an honorable mention in despatches for his efforts this week.
Not only did he put his shoulder to the wheel with a succession of interventions on the aforementioned RMA Bill, he also had a crack at Science minister Shane Reti during Question Time on Thursday concerning job losses in the sector.
Answering Willis' question about how many jobs had been lost in the sector since the formation of the government, Reti conceded that 134 jobs were to go with the disestablishment of Callaghan Innovation — the point that Willis was trying to make — but Reti also highlighted a Stats NZ survey which suggested a recent increase of people working in the sector.
Which is not the same as jobs being lost, a point Willis soon made ... as well as pointedly asking if those laid-off scientists would be heading to the airport departure lounge post-haste.
"I think that scientists who have been disestablished through part of the reforms will have a skill set that will be able to be applied in other parts of the science sector," Reti replied — which is true, but which also side-stepped the question of in which country's science sector that might be.
mike.houlahan@odt.co.nz
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