Fitzsimons Jeanette: Resource Management Amendment Bill (No 5) Electricity Amendment Bill (No 3) — Third Readings 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Resource Management Amendment Bill (No 5) Electricity Amendment Bill (No 3) — Third Readings 
[Volume:627;Page:22347] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 The Resource Management Act has for 14 years had the purpose of ensuring that people can provide for their social and economic needs without damaging the life-supporting qualities of ecosystems while ensuring that resources are still there for future generations and avoiding—or at least minimising—adverse effects on the environment. For 14 years it has done a rather imperfect job but nevertheless has done the job of protecting our future protecting our environment and protecting the rights of the public to participate. Some projects get stopped as they should. An Act that ticked off everything would not be doing its job. 
Today we have seen three approaches to the future of that Act. It is perhaps fitting that today Parliament ends a session and goes into an election campaign because this issue will be an issue in the campaign. We have seen Labour scared to leave power with communities. It started off supporting the environment and people but it has given into pressure and has been panicked by National’s relentless demands for more “think big” projects more big roads more big power stations and more power lines. The Labour Government has amended the Act to give itself the power to override communities and to impose big infrastructure projects on them. 
But as we go into this election we need to look at what National would do instead. It wants to wipe away all impediments to anyone’s development projects. In particular it does not want the Environment Court to have the benefit of all the relevant information on a project; it wants only the information that comes from the developer. Nick Smith has been claiming all day that the amendment in this bill that allows called-in projects to be referred directly to the Environment Court is the same as direct referral as proposed in the Upton bill in 1999. That is absolutely not true. The difference is that in this bill the power of the Minister to directly refer a project is subject to criteria in new section 140 and it is judicially reviewable against those criteria. By contrast what the National Party wants is an automatic right for any developer that wants to bypass the local community and local council just to go straight to the Environment Court in order to save itself time and money. 
National wants to cut out any reference to the treaty or Maori cultural values in the Resource Management Act. It wants a monocultural society where Maori are expected to be brown Pakeha. It wants a law that does not recognise that the values of the indigenous people of this country have special status here because they exist nowhere else. 
National wants to reintroduce standing like we used to have under the Town and Country Planning Act where only those directly affected are able to have a say. Standing has a history that we should be very worried about. “Directly affected” is interpreted by the courts to mean that one’s property is affected. People whose personal health may be affected have often been held by the courts to have no standing to make a case. Nick Smith is saying that he as a South Islander should have no right to be heard on the question of how polluted Lake Taupo should get because he does not live there. It is a national icon but he does not want to have any say about it. He is saying that I as a resident of the Coromandel should have no right to comment on the ecological importance of our South Island braided rivers which are unusual in a global sense. 
National wants to scrap the environmental legal aid scheme. It costs less than $1 million a year so it is obviously not the costs that he is concerned about. What he is concerned about is that when local community groups form incorporated societies and want to bring the information they have to the table at the Environment Court he does not want that information heard. He wants to shut them out. He knows that the David and Goliath battle between the local environmental protection group and a multinational is such an unequal contest that if the group does not have that $25000 to $30000 of legal aid it is unlikely to be able to make a good case. He is also ignoring the fact that without that money and without the legal advice it can give the group it is likely to waste more of the court’s time by raising issues that are not relevant under the Act. So in fact he shoots himself in the foot. And he wants to put back the provision that was in the Act for a few short years until the previous committee removed it whereby a developer can stop a community group from bringing any evidence and taking part in a case at all by saying that if it puts in an objection the developer will seek security for costs against it right upfront. The developer will go to the court and demand that the group put up $30000 to prove that if it loses it can pay. At that point most community groups drop out of the process because they cannot participate. 
So the National Party’s programme is a clear and unambiguous recipe for cutting out public participation and for degrading the environment. The Green Party initiated that environmental legal aid project and we persuaded Marian Hobbs in the year 2000 that it was a good idea to resource the community to participate well. It has meant that David when he faces Goliath is not totally barefoot. 
The Green Party says that property rights which we have heard a lot about today stop at one’s boundary. The idea that people can do what they like on their own land does not give them the right to affect the rights of others by imposing noise spray drift flooding sedimentation nitrate runoff or faecal coliforms into other people’s space on to other people’s land or into the common property of rivers the coast our air and our water bodies. Property rights have never meant the right to damage and downgrade the property of others or the public property that we all hold in common. If property rights are circumscribed in that way so that people cannot have any impacts outside the boundaries of their own land people will find that property rights are actually a great deal less than what some members of this House have been arguing for for some time. The Green Party is now the only party that stands up completely for the right to participation under the Act for the right for all the information to be brought and heard in court and for the natural environment. 
I finish by reading a short piece from an editorial in the  
Otago Daily Times 
 which the Associate Minister for the Environment has been quoting from considerably during the debate. I want to read a bit that he has not been reading: “Despite the tourist advertising about some fantasy New Zealand where everything is 100 percent pure the realists who actually live here know this is far from the truth. The destruction of much pristine land with ribbon housing development the conversion of top-class agricultural and horticultural soils to accommodate vanity farming the gross pollution of many if not most of our rivers and the wholesale assault on ancient and limited aquifers for immediate commercial gain—there is hardly a limit to the examples of our longstanding reckless environmental stewardship.” That is why we need to protect the Resource Management Act.