Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): Thank you, Madam Chair. There's a long background to these reforms. There has been considerable civil society disquiet with the ineffectiveness of the Resource Management Act (RMA), both as a tool to manage and encourage appropriate development and to protect environmental bottom-lines. That civil society endeavour has included reports by the Productivity Commission, with recent reports showing that infrastructure consenting costs are 250 percent of where they were about 10 years ago, so it's been a very costly system. 