Shaw James: Environmental Reporting Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeShaw James: Environmental Reporting Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 19 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3371. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAMES SHAW (Green): I rise to speak on the Environmental Reporting Bill. The Green Party would have liked to be able to support this bill because we do suffer in this country from a lack of information about the state of our environment. We did support the referral of the Environmental Reporting Bill to the Local Government and Environment Committee. Unfortunately we are not able to support the bill in its later stages because of the lack of independence over who is going to be determining what gets reported on.I started my career at PricewaterhouseCoopers in the UK where we were starting to look at non-financial indicators of reporting and that included environmental capital natural capital social capital intellectual capital and so on. What was critically important was that the public and investors actually understood that the criteria that were being reported against were independent and not determined by the company that was being reported on. This bill kind of fails that standard.One of the previous speakers on this bill did say that they felt that it is better to be doing something than nothing and given that we have such woeful inadequacy around our reporting at the moment that is not an unreasonable argument to make except that doing something like this and enabling Ministers to be able to determine what gets reported on is actually worse than doing something. It is a bit like the Government’s approach to climate change. You see having an emissions trading scheme enables the Government to say: “We’re doing our bit. We’ve got an emissions trading scheme.” But given that actual emissions are increasing and will increase by net 48 percent by 2020 it is actually saying: “Well it’s OK. We’re doing our bit. We’ve got in place an emissions trading scheme. We’re one of the world leaders.” But if your actual emissions are increasing then the policy has no impact and you might as well not do it. It is merely a smokescreen.Unfortunately because of clause 18 in this bill we cannot support it through to the later stages. There are a number of options to solve this. One is that the Government Statistician could simply decide what the areas to be reported on are going to be. Another option is that the areas that are going to be reported on could actually be laid down in law. I have a member’s bill in the ballot at the moment called the Public Finance (Sustainable Development Indicators) Amendment Bill which actually covers a number of different areas that would be laid down in legislation if we were interested in actually having an independent set of criteria where we said: “Well these are the things that we ought to be reporting on.”We can only have credible reporting of any kind including environmental reporting if it is independent and free from the interference of Ministers. Unfortunately this bill does not do that. The Minister here actually does have full control over what gets reported. I think that the chair of the Local Government and Environment Committee during his speech on the bill earlier said that this is exactly the same as in our financial reporting. It actually is not. What gets reported in our financial reporting is actually laid down in law.I am sorry to say that we are unable to support this bill. We did support it through to select committee. We note that there were well over 300 submitters and the vast majority of them talked about this matter of independence. I think that if this was an education report we would have to finish with the words “must try harder”. With that I am afraid that the Green Party will not be supporting this bill through to its next stage.