Court Simon; Parker DavidSIMON COURT (ACT): So in light of the Minister's assertion that the reforms to the Resource Management Act will be brought to select committee with all of their attendant problems to be solved before new regulation is passed the Minister is surely aware that one of his previous reforms or attempts at regulation of water quality the National Environmental Standards for Freshwater has included a series of prohibitions and bans on activities that mean that certain activities like earthworks and quarries and clean fill disposal sites which rely on being able to get an earthworks permit in order to clear vegetation carry out their physical works and then reinstate that land to a much higher standard with planting with constructed wetlands and with indigenous biodiversity that flourishes as a result—that Minister must be aware that the National Environmental Standards for Freshwater included the term prohibited" when it comes to describing activities that disturb a wetland.So for that very reason there are a number of existing quarries which this construction season have not been able to develop their land to access the hard rock that's absolutely vital to deliver roading and infrastructure for housing and a number of affected businesses and industry organisations—the Aggregate & Quarry Association and others—have written to the Minister we understand asking "Please Minister will you consider changing the wording in this flawed regulation so that we can access the land that we own the land that is already well understood will be used for quarrying and other intensive activities and where yes there may well be some type of grasses or some kind of area where water ponds but that it was always envisaged that that land be modified as part of their development activities?"So will the Minister care to tell us when his ministry and his office will respond to all of those submitters who have been afraid to bring their concerns out in public but who have sent him letters and who have asked me "Would the ACT Party follow this up?" Would he explain to the committee exactly when his ministry and his office will come back and explain when they will remove the word "prohibited" from the National Environmental Standards for Freshwater that stops legitimate activities like quarries and like resource extraction from going ahead? It is affecting infrastructure delivery. It is introducing massive additional cost variations on to public and private infrastructure and construction projects and these organisations have been promised for months and months and months that his office and his ministry the Ministry for the Environment will address it and they have not had an answer. So Minister will you please explain it?Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): Thank you for that contribution. The member does raise a fair point. The background to this issue is that quite sadly New Zealand's wetlands have largely been lost even including wetlands that are within national parks. New Zealand lost 90 percent of our wetlands quite a while ago. That's sad but even sadder still is that in the last decade of the remaining 10 percent we lost about a 20th. So we as a Government decided that we needed to introduce strict rules to stop the further loss of wetlands and our intention was to stop the major loss around agricultural areas which is probably where most of the loss has been. We wanted to make it harder to lose wetlands to subdivisional activities and we came up with a rule that as the member has quite rightly said included a prohibited activity from nixing other wetlands generally.It's fair of the quarry industry and the landfill industry to say we might have gone a bit far. They've come to Government—Hon Paul Goldsmith: That's why it's expensive to build houses and get concrete and everything like that.Hon DAVID PARKER: Well I'm not actually accepting that there's a current problem but if we don't fix the problem we will cause a future problem because they do need to consent more areas for expansion of their existing quarries. Many of the quarries already have consents to expand into areas that they need to go next but I think they are correct that we've gone too far in the prohibited activity status in respect of some of those activities and we've said that to them. We've said it in public meetings and they're not scared to express their viewpoints. They've said it in meetings to me personally and I've said that we will address that matter this year. If the member wants to know why it is that some of these regulations we made are imperfect in my opinion it's partly because we in respect of environmental regulation make it far too hard to both make and change environmental regulation. If there were easy ways to fix mistakes both in terms of environmental degradation and environmental—and fixing imperfections in regulation we would already have done it. But it's an unfortunate reality that it's much harder to make environmental regulation than it is virtually any other area of regulation across Government. Whether it's health and safety rules or public health regulations or animal welfare regulations those regulations are all less process-bound than the making of—CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jacqui Dean): Getting a bit wide.Hon DAVID PARKER: Well this is actually the reason why we've got a problem here and the longer-term fix to actually being able to with more alacrity fix these problems actually lies in the Resource Management Act reform that the Hon Scott Simpson referred to because through that process we should I think be setting up something like a standing committee in order to more quickly remedy issues such as the one the member has raised."