Hague Kevin: Freedom Camping Bill — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hague Kevin: Freedom Camping Bill — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 11 August 2011. Volume:674;Page:20572. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
KEVIN HAGUE (Green) 
: 
 I would like to say it is a pleasure to take a call on the ridiculous Freedom Camping Bill but sadly that is not the case. 
I begin in the usual manner by thanking the officials who assisted the Local Government and Environment Committee considering this bill. I think those officials did a fantastic job under a lot of time pressure but also under pressure from the extraordinarily tricky drafting tasks that were put in front of them. They did extremely well. Thanks also to the submitters. The submitters also made their submissions in a very tight time frame. We received a lot of thoughtful submissions and a lot of submissions expressing quite different points of view. It is very difficult to reconcile some of the views that were expressed. 
I note that the tightness of the time frame for submissions to be made and for the select committee to do its work has not been reflected in the bill coming back to the House for the second reading. I must say I had hoped that that reflected a difficulty for the Government in getting support for the bill from its confidence and supply partners in particular the Maori Party and ACT Party. I am sorry to say it appears that that is not the case. 
The Green Party for its part remains steadfastly opposed to the bill. We restate our position that although there is a genuine problem this is the wrong approach to resolving that problem. In fact we do not believe that this approach will resolve the problem. We welcome Labour’s change of heart and its opposition to the bill in the second reading. We wish that other parties had also been prepared to re-examine their views. 
Having said that we will continue to oppose the bill I do thank the select committee itself because I think the committee did a very good job in trying circumstances. The bill that has come back to the House is considerably better than the diabolical mess and Draconian bill that the House was presented with at the first reading. I know that for many of those people who have been expressing strong opposition in emails to us many of their fears will have been at least eased by the changes made by the select committee. I think that was very worthwhile and I thank Mr Auchinvole in particular as the chair of the committee for his work in steering it through. 
One of the issues that continue to sit uneasily is the set of transition measures that are embedded in the bill largely to deal with the concern that some people have that the Rugby World Cup will be an opportunity for the serially inappropriate in toileting habits to exacerbate the problem. The bill effectively grandfathers for the period of the Rugby World Cup the provisions that local bodies have already put in place. But it is critical for this House for the general public and for local authorities to understand that by doing so the bill does not confer any greater legal status on those by-laws than already existed. That is incredibly important because the select committee received advice that it was quite likely that if existing by-laws were challenged many of them would not stand up to scrutiny in court. 
We have a number of territorial local authorities for example that have imposed blanket bans on freedom camping throughout their districts or that have made extensive restrictions on freedom camping. It is quite likely that those by-laws would not stand the test that a court would place on them. The law requires that any by-law must first result from genuine evidence of a real problem in a particular location and clearly a blanket ban or an extremely extensive restriction would fail that test. The by-law has to be the best possible remedy that is available for that problem and again that is highly contestable. The by-law almost must be proportionate to the size of the problem. So it is crucial that it is widely understood that the grandfathering of those provisions in this bill does not provide any protection for local authorities that have in fact illegal by-laws. That may be a very real problem for some of those local authorities in the months to come. 
I will raise almost a philosophical question and I have done so previously in the House: what is the best approach to changing behaviour that we consider to be undesirable? Clearly there is a whole spectrum of possible approaches from at the one end simply leaving the matter to free choice. There are people who simply believe that if everyone has absolutely free choice and is unhindered then by a magical process the best outcomes will result. There are ways of skewing that by providing some incentives for different action. At the other end there are I guess regulatory approaches. It is a question of choosing the right approach for a particular situation. 
I think there are lots of examples of inappropriate deregulation. I have been speaking about some of those in the House over recent months. For example deregulation of the building industry resulted in leaky homes deregulation of the finance industry resulted in the catastrophic loss of wealth for many New Zealanders and deregulation of mine safety has at least arguably—and I believe that it will be found to be the case—resulted in even greater tragedy for at least 29 men on the West Coast where I live. So deregulation I believe has clearly occurred in some circumstances where it was inappropriate. 
We have seen from this Government a particular fondness for deregulation. One of the first things it did when it came into office was to repeal the law that regulated biofuel requirements for fuel companies. It then immediately introduced its own approach which was to provide some kind of subsidy. We clearly see nowadays in the results that that approach has been less effective in encouraging the development of biofuels. So it is a question of horses for courses. 
What I have argued and what the Green Party has argued both in this debate and at the first reading is that the correct approach to this problem is to recognise that people want to do the right thing. We should use regulation where people are disinclined to do the right thing: where they want to do something different or they have incentives to do something different. In this case they have come to this country because of our clean green image. They want to respect our environment. We need to assist them to do that and the best way of doing that is through the provision of appropriate facilities and appropriate education. Colleagues have already spoken about the Sanitary Works Subsidy Scheme for those local authorities that cannot afford to put in extra toilets. That is exactly the right approach because we all benefit from tourism in our country. 
I will make one brief comment about the comments of the Hon Dr Nick Smith. I think it is very sad and indeed worrying if the Minister for the Environment is unable to distinguish between the infinitesimal contribution that inappropriate toileters in campervans make to fresh water quality in this country and the disastrous impact of agricultural intensification that his failure to act on fresh water quality has resulted in. This is the wrong approach to this problem it could have been dealt with in a much better way and we encourage the Government still to do so.