Hipkins Chris: Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 16 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10249. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): I am very happy to take a brief call on the Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill. Actually hang on—let me just get this right: this is the Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill so if I am correct this is a bill amending an Act that has not yet come into force. How did we get to this state of being where we are here under urgency amending a piece of legislation that has not even yet come into force? Could it be—Hon Maryan Street: We could pass this one first.CHRIS HIPKINS: Well that is right. This one could be passed before the other one even comes into force. Could it be that the Government made a critical mistake when it introduced that last piece of legislation? It made the critical mistake of putting Simon Bridges as Minister of Energy and Resources in charge of it. It put Simon Bridges in charge of it and he decided that he was going to make some changes and that he was not going to allow anyone to have a say on those changes that he was going to make. He was going to introduce them by way of a Supplementary Order Paper after the bill had been through the select committee process without any chance to give those changes adequate scrutiny. But that is OK because according to the National Government that is all a bit of an option these days—asking people whether they actually agree with anything or whether maybe they could improve legislation.That is all just optional these days with the National Government. So it did not bother with that. And what do you know? Before the legislation is even in force the Government is back here amending it because it stuffed it up. It completely stuffed it up. The Government left Simon Bridges in charge. It was his first piece of legislation in the House I think and he managed to completely stuff it up. I bet he is popular with his Cabinet colleagues. The very first thing he did was to introduce a piece of legislation take it through the House with amendments and then within weeks he is taking up more House time to fix his stuff-ups. I bet that makes him really really popular. Urgency on a Friday night—I bet that makes him really popular.Oil and gas exploration is something that people do talk about in New Zealand. The first question that the people who come up to me in my electorate to talk about oil and gas exploration will ask—even those who are in favour of it—is whether it is safe. Even if they are in favour of it and they say: “Yes we should go out there and if we have got oil there we should drill it.”—even people who are in favour of it—the first question they will ask is whether it is safe. They look at some of the experiences offshore things like the Gulf of Mexico which focused everybody’s minds on the risks involved in deep-sea oil drilling so they want to know whether if we are going to be doing it here we have safeguards in place to ensure that that sort of thing would not happen in New Zealand.I think New Zealanders’ minds were focused on that even more when a separate issue occurred with theRena and with the clean-up that was required from the fraction of oil that came off theRena compared with the amount that might come out of a deep-sea oil well if something went wrong. The amount of oil from theRena was a fraction. We could have a lot more than that if something went wrong with deep-sea oil drilling. So people simply want to know whether if we are going to do it it is safe and that if despite all of the safety precautions that might be put in place something were to go wrong we could remedy it quickly.New Zealand’s worst nightmare—the worst nightmare of all New Zealanders—would be a Gulf of Mexico - like disaster with oil continually gushing for weeks and weeks and weeks without the ability to stop it. Think of the damage that would do to New Zealand. Our tourism industry would be down the drain overnight—one of the biggest industries in New Zealand and one that we rely on. It is our bread and butter. We rely on it to make our living as a country and yet a massive oil spill would wipe out our tourism industry overnight because of the damage it would do to our clean green economy. A lot of our primary exporting industries also rely on our clean green image for their access to overseas markets.So when people ask whether it is safe they have got really really good reasons for doing so because of the considerable damage it would do to New Zealanders the New Zealand environment the New Zealand economy and New Zealanders’ way of life ifsomething went wrong should deep-sea oil drilling happen in New Zealand in the future. So that is the first question that people ask and it is the right question to ask.Consider that now in the context of this particular piece of legislation and in the context in which it is brought into the House. The bill that we are now debating is fixing up mistakes that were made in the original piece of legislation that is yet to come into force because it was rushed through and because it did not get appropriate scrutiny. I have said this once already in the House in this urgency debate because this is not the first bill we are debating under urgency. This is not the first bill we are debating in this particular urgency motion that has not been referred to a select committee.I said in the debate on the earlier bill the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2) that I have not participated in any select committee hearing around a bill where the bill has not been improved in some way by comments made by counsel by advisers and often by the public who pick things up that those who are dealing with the matter all day every day perhaps lose sight of. That is one of the reasons why we have a select committee process. This Parliament is made up of people who are lay people I guess in Parliament. We are not all subject matter experts in absolutely everything that goes on here. So we allow the people who are experts the chance to scrutinise what it is that we are doing in the House. It is a really critical part of our democratic process and a part of our constitutional arrangements.I do not know a heck of a lot about oil and gas exploration. I did work in the oil and gas industry for about a year and a half. I was not actually doing the practical hands-on stuff; I was coordinating training for the people who were. It was a huge eye-opener for me. I learnt a lot about the oil and gas industry but I would never for one second purport to be an expert on the matters that are covered by this bill and by this legislation. Therefore as a parliamentarian to do my job effectively I need the chance to hear from the people who are experts.The other way we do that in this House is we have a thing called a regulatory impact statement and that is where again independent experts check over legislation to make sure that the legislation before the House does what it says it is supposed to do and that the Government in deciding what legislation to bring before members has chosen the best of the options available to achieve the desired outcome. What is the regulatory impact statement for this bill? We do not have one. The regulatory impact statement that the Government is relying on for this piece of legislation is the same regulatory impact statement that it had for the first lot of legislation which it completely stuffed up. So the advice the best advice that we have here under urgency is the advice we got when the House stuffed it up in the first place because Simon Bridges is too lazy to make sure that we actually get better advice and that we are not going to be back here again in a few weeks because he has stuffed it up a second time.It is vitally important that we work through these processes carefully because there is a heck of a lot at stake. And every New Zealander is entitled to know that if we are going to be doing deep-sea drilling in New Zealand it is going to be safe there are appropriate checks and balances in place and yes there are contingencies there so that should something go dramatically wrong steps can be taken to address the damage minimise the damage before it gets completely out of hand. We have seen the Gulf of Mexico. We have seen what happens when things go wrong.The Labour Party does in fact support exploration in New Zealand. We do see the value of the minerals we have here. I can see Gareth Hughes. I am sure Gareth has got something to say about that and I am sure he will be speaking very shortly in the debate. We do see value but we want to know that there are appropriate safety measures in place and we want to know that decisions are being made judiciously and following appropriate processes. It may sound a bit bureaucratic to say “followingappropriate processes” but in a country like ours a small country like ours with a simple governing structure like ours where there are not a huge number of checks and balances in our legislative processes at least if we make sure that we are following a democratic process we minimise the risk of things going wrong.We do not have an Upper House. In many other countries if a bill like this were introduced through Parliament and passed under urgency it would then be subject to scrutiny by another legislative body. We do not have that in New Zealand. Once it gets passed by Parliament it then gets the Royal assent normally within a few days and it is the law—that is it. It cannot be struck down via the court because we do not have a written constitution that gives the court the powers to strike down laws in New Zealand as many other countries do. Therefore it is incumbent on all of us as parliamentarians to make sure that the decisions we make in the House are robust. And in order to do that we have got a series of processes that this Government time and time again has proven that it is willing to completely ignore and ride roughshod over. This I am sad to say is a return to the sort of practice we saw so much of in the last Parliament when urgency was used to circumvent—