Mackey Moana: Waste Minimisation Bill — In Committee 
Mackey Moana: Waste Minimisation Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:648;Page:17601] 
MOANA MACKEY (Labour) 
: 
 I rise to take a call on Part 7 which deals as Nicky Wagner has said with the Waste Advisory Board. The Local Government and Environment Committee made quite a substantial change to the bill in this area. Part 2 of the bill as introduced to the House and brought to the Local Government and Environment Committee provided for the establishment of a waste minimisation authority. The proposed authority was to have been slightly bigger than the Waste Advisory Board but it had a significantly expanded range of responsibilities compared with the responsibilities in the bill that came out of the select committee. 
I know for example that the Zero Waste New Zealand Trust was very keen on the idea of a waste minimisation authority. It felt that it had the kind of gravitas that perhaps an advisory board would not have. Certainly the select committee considered all those opinions carefully. If I could summarise how the debate at the select committee went I would say it acknowledged that we have a Ministry for the Environment in New Zealand. We did not see the need to set up a parallel body with exactly the same powers and functions when we have a ministry that is already there that is mandated to look at areas of environmental concern and that is best placed to coordinate waste-related measures. We did not want to reinvent the wheel with all the costs that would come with that and with the potential problems that could come from having two authorities working in the same area but not working together. The other reason for the change was that we also looked at the potential costs and at how the money that comes into the waste minimisation area could best be used. All of us agreed that wherever possible we wanted that money to go towards waste minimisation initiatives not towards funding a body to do the work that one of our ministries is already doing. 
The other major area of debate regarding the Waste Advisory Board was about how much work we should give it. We often found ourselves going down the path of making the board do everything which was just creating a waste minimisation authority once again. We had to prioritise the areas in which we felt that the board could have the best impact. We gave the Minister the power to go to the board on any matters where he felt it important to engage with it and on areas where he felt he should get its advice but we did not go the other way round and say the board should be consulted on everything. Again we felt that to do that would be to go back to what the original authority had been mandated to do and away from the whole point of having a board as opposed to an authority. 
We decided that the Minister should be required to seek the board’s advice in a certain range of areas as has already been said. Those areas include declaring a product to be a priority product—which of course forms the basis of our product stewardship schemes and is important enough to make sure that the board is involved—making the guidelines about those product stewardship schemes and setting the criteria for the contestable portion of the levy fund. That is very important and it is one of the areas where it is very important to have a body that is independent of the Minister and staffed by people who are well regarded within the sector to make those decisions. Sometimes when we have a contestable fund and a Minister ultimately makes the decisions there can be claims of political intervention and of preferring certain providers or areas over others. 
We felt that having the board set the criteria for the Minister to use would be a very good compromise—and we are very big on compromises in this committee. We felt that would be a good balance that would help to ensure people felt that the contestable part of the fund would be allocated fairly. As we know that fund will not be as much as it would have been had the levy been set at $25 instead of $10. I imagine there will be a lot of competition for this fund and a lot of interest in it particularly in the first few years before the review. So we wanted to make sure that people would feel the fund was being allocated fairly and that there could be no questions about the criterias that were set. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: Criteria. 
MOANA MACKEY 
: What did I say? 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: Criterias. 
MOANA MACKEY 
: Sorry I am a science graduate not an English graduate. 
This is an important part of the bill because it is very significantly changed from that in the bill as it originally came into the House. These were not decisions that we took lightly. Again I think we found a good way through the issues and a good balance between ensuring that we have an independent advisory board there to provide advice and set criteria and which is seen to be separate from the Government and at the same time ensuring that we do not reinvent the wheel and create another bureaucracy that just duplicates what one of our ministries is already doing. We are also making it clear to the Ministry for the Environment that waste minimisation is one of its core areas and something that it should be engaging in. Waste minimisation should be core to the work that the ministry does and perhaps it would send the wrong message to the ministry if we were to take this area away from it entirely and put it under another authority. Thank you Mr Chairperson.