Sage Eugenie: Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Sage Eugenie: Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 18 September 2012. Volume:684;Page:5308. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
EUGENIE SAGE (Green) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Speaker. This euphemistically titled Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Amendment Bill is about stealing democracy broken promises mistruths misrepresentation denying access to justice and more water pollution. The  
Press  
described the Government’s decision to suspend regional council elections for another 4 years as “the most radical denial of voting rights that this nation has experienced in recent times—a fact that disadvantages Cantabrians and besmirches the Government.” 
Tomorrow is women’s suffrage day. New Zealand’s leadership in strengthening democracy and giving women the vote in 1893 is part of our national identity and national psyche. The National Government is trampling on that identity and our previously robust democratic tradition. As constitutional law expert Philip Joseph has noted New Zealanders have unreservedly voted down proposals to extend Parliament’s life beyond 3 years. The principal Act in 2010 suspended regional council elections in Canterbury for a period longer than the term of any one Parliament. Now the Government is compounding that in this bill which steals democracy for 6 long years. The Green Party opposed the principal Act and will be opposing this bill. 
By 2016 Cantabrians will have paid more than $450 million in rates to the regional council with no elected voice at the council table on how that rate money is spent. Cancelling elections until 2016 is occurring in this bill because the Government wants its hand-picked commissioners to promote irrigation ahead of healthy rivers and healthy aquifers. It cannot trust Cantabrians to elect a new regional council that would promote National’s agenda of capital-intensive dairying and irrigation development. 
National members keep harking back to 2010. They keep giving the same tired excuses and recycling the same arguments that they gave in 2010 for the principal Act to justify this bill. It would seem as if the commissioners have been doing nothing for the last 2½ years. 
This bill is about broken promises. In 2010 when National axed regional councillors suspended elections and rammed through legislation in this House under urgency with no opportunity for public submissions and select committee scrutiny it promised that democracy would be returned in October 2013. The principal Act explicitly provides for this in the sections that this bill is now amending. 
This bill is about misrepresentation. Both Dr Nick Smith and now the Hon David Carter keep on claiming that Environment Canterbury councillors were not processing resource consents quickly enough. Yet information in Environment Canterbury’s 2009-10 annual report which the Parliamentary Library has provided shows that by the end of the 2009-10 financial year over 80 percent of all new resource consent applications were being processed in accordance with statutory time frames. Because commissioners took over 2 months before the end of that year the bulk of that improvement in processing times happened under councillors who were elected not under commissioners as the Minister repeatedly claims. 
Cantabrians should be very worried about Part 2 of this bill and its review of Environment Canterbury’s governance structure membership powers and functions. The Auckland super-city model is not appropriate in Christchurch. A large unitary council would be remote from and less accessible to citizens and much more bureaucratic than local councils representing their local communities. A super-city Christchurch unitary model would not reflect the distinct identities of Christchurch of Selwyn and of Waimakariri. 
National just does not understand or respect local government. It regards local councils as branch offices of central government and subject to ministerial direction and interference rather than as a separate and competent arm of government with its own constitutional mandate and its own relationship with electors. We have certainly seen that in the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill. Submitter after submitter to the Local Government and Environment Committee has strongly opposed National’s proposed changes to the purpose of local government and the removal of the well-beings from its purpose. 
This bill interferes with the rule of law. As Professor Philip Joseph has noted “The right of access to the courts is one of the fundamentals of a civilised society under the rule of law”. This bill like the principal Act undermines the rule of law not only by stealing democracy but also by restricting Cantabrians’ access to justice. It denies Cantabrians access to that specialist court the Environment Court by restricting appeals on regional plans and the regional policy statement to appeals on points of law and only to the High Court. This compromises the quality of decision making under the Resource Management Act in Canterbury because it is the Environment Court that has developed a sizable body of case law on how the Resource Management Act should be interpreted and its scrutiny of councils’ decisions can substantially improve those decisions just as the Environment Court did recently with Manawatu’s One Plan. The court upheld the strong rules in that plan to control erosion and control nutrient leaching from intensive agriculture. 
In Canterbury the second-generation land and water plan is critical in both its policies and its rules around water allocation and nutrient management. This bill means that Cantabrians are denied the ability to appeal the commissioners’ decision on that plan to the Environment Court and the checks and the balances that the Environment Court provides through its de novo hearings are outlawed. 
Water conservation orders are the closest equivalent we have to national park status for rivers. This bill is about water pollution because it perpetuates the gutting of water conservation orders that occurred in the principal Act. The Act did this by replacing the preservation purpose of water conservation orders with a sustainable management purpose. It removed them from the jurisdiction of the Environment Court and made the recommendation of the commissioners to the Minister the final sign-off rather than the courts being the final sign-off. That change benefited dam proponents in the Hurunui catchment and it benefited TrustPower. Without this new bill the water conservation order provisions and processes in the substantive Act would have terminated in 2013 and we would have gone back to the situation that applies in the rest of New Zealand. 
Continuing the gutting of water conservation orders is contrary to officials’ advice. It flies in the face of the statements in the regulatory impact statement by the Ministry for the Environment the Department of Internal Affairs and the Ministry for Primary Industries which considered that there was “insufficient justification for continuing special provisions for WCOs”—water conservation orders—“in the Canterbury region.” The Government has rejected this advice and continued with these weakened water conservation order provisions. 
“Representative democracy and independent courts are the twin pillars of the legal system.” Philip Joseph has said in a seminal article in the  
New Zealand Law Journal 
. “The abrogation or suspension of the former … has menacing implications.” Dr Joseph said. That is what this Government is doing. It is stealing democracy. It is restricting access to justice so that its hand-picked commissioners can make sure that they shape the plans that will determine how water is managed now and in the future. Certainly the Canterbury Water Management Strategy has been rolled out but that strategy was developed by elected councillors not commissioners. But it is the statutory plans that set in place the rules. They are absolutely critical. By denying the appeal rights to the Environment Court the check that that specialist court can provide on the commissioners’ decisions is removed. By gutting water conservation orders we are putting Canterbury in a very different situation from the rest of New Zealand. And by trampling all over democracy the Government is saying it does not trust Cantabrians to elect a new regional council. It does not trust Cantabrians to elect councillors to make decisions about how their environment should be managed. The Green Party opposes this bill.