Hutchison Paul: Imports and Exports (Restrictions) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Hutchison Paul: Imports and Exports (Restrictions) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:609;Page:6948] 
Dr PAUL HUTCHISON (NZ National—Port Waikato) 
: I must say that I too am extremely befuddled by the Government confining the title of this bill entirely to imports and exports. Clearly in no way does that reflect the inextricable link that this bill has with the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Stockholm Convention) Amendment Bill. Those bills clearly interdigitate. I ask the Minister who is sitting opposite me to give me an assurance that anyone in New Zealand could in any way guess that this bill has anything to do with persistent organic pollutants. Yet it is inextricably linked with that. Therefore it would have been only right and proper if this Government had actually thought about it and called this bill something along the lines of the “Imports and Exports (Restrictions)”—because indeed restrictions are imposed and provided they do not go too wide are beneficial for New Zealand—and then added “and Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Stockholm Convention) Amendment Bill.” 
There is no doubt that not only the Stockholm convention but also the Rotterdam convention the Waigani convention and of course the Basel convention need to be mentioned when referring to the title of this bill. They are all interlinked with the fact that controls on imports and exports relating to persistent organic pollutants are required to be signed up to by international convention and treaty of which it is indeed right and proper that New Zealand becomes a signatory. 
The Government has been dilatory in terms of bringing this bill to the House and I must say that I was deeply concerned to hear the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee—an excellent chairman and an excellent committee—suggest that any concern should be levelled at his committee for the dilatory way that this bill has been introduced to the House. That is not the case; it has been entirely the fault of the Government. This Government says it is interested in the environment but has taken over 1½ years to bring this absolutely appropriate legislation to the House. 
But we have a bill that has an absolutely befuddling restriction in its name. I again challenge the Minister to ask anyone in New Zealand whether this title in any way suggests that the bill has anything to do with persistent organic pollutants. I hope the Minister will take a call to explain the reason that the title is so narrow and is clearly not reflective of what the bill is supposed to achieve. It is important to realise that the Stockholm convention is very much an international convention and unless a large number of countries throughout the world do sign up to it that convention will naturally fail in its use. For instance the United States has tended to comply with but not to officially ratify that sort of convention because of the difficulties it has within the different states. The US was very keen on a technically science-based convention to act as a reference to the conventions that are associated with this bill.