Sage EugenieEUGENIE SAGE (Green): I am pleased to take a call on the Hurunui/Kaikōura Earthquakes Emergency Relief Bill. It was a very constructive process in the select committee and like others I would like to acknowledge the extraordinary work by officials from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and also the Ministry for the Environment particularly when some of those officials have been displaced from their buildings in Wellington.This bill makes quite major changes to existing legislation particularly the Resource Management Act. It is giving rural landholders in Kaikōura Hurunui Marlborough and potentially also Tasman and the Nelson area quite wide powers to do activities on their land in response to the earthquake; to do vegetation clearance undertake earth works and activities in riverbeds if those are proportionate with the response that is needed to the damage that is being done by the earthquakes or there is a significant risk of injury or risk to stock. So it is giving very permissive status around this. There is a good deal of trust that landholders will not use this power to do things that they might want to do without getting a resource consent. I guess it requires the councils in the districts to actually monitor perhaps by ear and get a reasonable handle on what is going on.Because a lot of these properties are thousands of hectares in size the damage has been significant. We do want people to be able to recover as quickly as possible but we also want to ensure that the environmental effects of these activities are of a proportionate scale in accordance with the legislation.The other major area that the bill deals with—and there were improvements made in select committee as Mr Parker has noted—was in relation to the blasting dredging and related works in South Bay and around Ingles Wharf in North Harbour around the Kaikōura Peninsula. The bill allows over a radius of 0.6 nautical miles so it extends as far as Cone Rock I think in South Bay and beyond Nine Pin Rock around the North Harbour. It is allowing the regional council Environment Canterbury and the Kaikōura District Council to do these works as a controlled activity. The current plan for the area highlights that the peninsula is an area of significant natural value and that any such works have to be undertaken very carefully as a non-complying activity which of course is subject to a great deal more scrutiny under the Resource Management Act and to stiffer tests than controlled activity. So this a commitment by Parliament to allow the councils to restore boat access to those harbours through doing these rehabilitation works.We were pleased by the clarification in select committee around where the material is to go making it very clear that that rock is to be dumped on land and is not able to be dumped at sea. There were changes to ensure that the councils actually can consult the wider public if they wish and we would strongly encourage the councils to do that because there were strong submissions from people like Ted Howard who is involved with community organisations about the fact that we are dealing with very complex systems in the marine environment and as he said: We have a great deal of local knowledge present in the community. We ask that at every stage of this process all plans and the rationale for them are made fully publicly available rapidly and that locals are given an opportunity for a few hours even to comment on those plans and any reasonable alternatives." When communities are involved in critical decisions in response to natural hazard emergencies they feel they have a stake in those decisions; the decisions are legitimated. So the council because of the changes made to the bill has an opportunity to invite comment not just from Government agencies not just from other Ministers like the Minister of Defence the Minister for Primary Industries and the Minister of Conservation but others in the community. We would encourage the councils to do that so that they have as much information as possible contributing to a good decision.The other changes in the bill in relation to the time frames were in response to very practical pragmatic submissions by Federated Farmers that highlighted the difficulty that the time frames in the bill imposed. We would like to see the councils work alongside landholders as they are doing already because we think that people can often make decisions under stress while trying to get their farms up and operating again—to go ahead with things like earthworks when often it will be a combined approach to those problems working with the council and neighbouring landholders that may actually develop a better solution.So it is continuing the good communication that has occurred in the immediate aftermath of the earthquakes to ensure that people are not putting themselves and rivers and land at risk by undertaking quite high-risk activities with a "she'll be right" attitude. These things have to be done carefully. The land is still very unstable and people need to do it in quite a considered way. Supplementary Order Paper 254 in my name seeks to remove the block that clauses 13 and 22 put on third parties taking enforcement action in the Environment Court against local authorities if they do not carry out their duties responsibly. The Green Party thinks that the ability to take action for a declaration to actually clarify what the council's legal responsibilities are under the Resource Management Act (RMA) and the ability to require the council to implement its responsibilities are a really important check that should be maintained. Those provisions exist in the Resource Management Act and what the bill does is override them and say that third parties cannot take enforcement proceedings. Given that the bill creates a very permissive environment for activities on extensive areas of rural land in the northern South Island and given that it is allowing quite enlarged powers in relation to the works around Kaikōura Harbour we think that there needs to be this safeguard which may not even be used but should remain in the law so that if third parties think that councils are not undertaking their responsibilities appropriately they can go to the Environment Court and seek clarification of those responsibilities or a direction that the council actually implements the Act. So we hope that the Minister will consider the Supplementary Order Paper and those deletions to provide this check and a balance on the powers that are being given here to rural landholders to get on with the job but without all of the constraints that you get by going through a normal process under the RMA and the consideration of impacts that that process provides. We hope that this check and balance really remains in the law rather being removed and it being only consent authorities themselves that can undertake enforcement proceedings. But the select committee process has been a good one though a tight one and we look forward to the bill proceeding."