Sage Eugenie: Financial Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Financial Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 04 March 2014. Volume:696;Page:16263. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green): I am pleased to take a call on the review of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. The Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment is an independent environmental watchdog for this Parliament and the public. With a total of only 20 staff and a budget of around $2.62 million it is the smallest of the Offices of Parliament. It is very cost-effective. The Green Party would like to see it better resourced so that it can undertake more investigations of the quality that it has done recently into a wide range of environmental processes issues and agencies.As Te Ururoa Flavell noted its mission is to maintain or improve the quality of New Zealand’s environment by providing robust independent advice that influences decisions. Certainly the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment is providing robust advice and quality reports; the problem is that the Government is not listening. The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment has provided quite extensive advice on the Government’s changes to the Resource Management Act and has said that that Act should not become an economic development Act which of course is what the Government is proposing with its changes to the heart of the Act—the purpose and principles in Part 2—by stripping out some of those key environmental principles. The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment’s advice was not to do that yet the Government has not taken that off the table.Then we see that in 2011 the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment did a very comprehensive investigation into the use of 1080. She confirmed how little the Department of Conservation was doing in terms of controlling animal pests on the conservation estate. The Department of Conservation last year spent only $18 million on controlling rats stoats possums and other animal pests. It controls those pests on only one-eighth of public conservation land. That shows that this Government is not serious about protecting our native plants wildlife and wild landscapes even though we have an extinction crisis in New Zealand. The Green Party values our native plants and wildlife. It would invest in doing predator control over a much larger area of conservation land.The other area where the Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment is not succeeding in its mission because the Government has blocked its ears is in water quality. Last November the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment did a very comprehensive report on land use and nutrient pollution. It wasa big report. It was underpinned by substantial research by the Motu Economic and Public Policy Research Trust and others and it showed the very strong link between land-use change and water pollution—the fact that where you are getting this extensive change from forestry and fromdryland farming to more intensive agriculture like dairying you get more water pollution. That report showed that the amount of nitrogen that was entering rivers every year in most regions would continue to increase.The Green Party wants rivers that we can swim in. Yet what has the Government done with this major report from the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment which shows that in my own region of Canterbury the burden of nutrients on Canterbury’s rivers lakes and streams would increase by 45 percent between 1996 and 2020? What has the Government done? It has not come out with strong limits on nutrients in its proposed changes to the National Policy Statement on Freshwater Management. No it has come out with very weak limits.So you have got New Zealand’s eminent freshwater scientists backing up what the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment was saying in her report—that we needed to set much tighter limits on nitrate because otherwise we would end up with rivers that had more nitrate in them than the eight worst rivers in the OECD that we would end up with more nitrate than is found in the Yangtze River in China—yet what did the Minister for the Environment say? She said that the Freshwater Sciences Society New Zealand’s leading freshwater scientists was simply wrong when it highlighted that we were going down the track of China and the Yangtze River.We in the Green Party value fresh water. We want strong rules for land-use management so that we are not seeing nutrients sliding off the land into our aquifers and into our rivers. We want a charge on the commercial use of water for irrigation. We would implement the recommendations of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. We would take seriously her report showing the burden that allowing increased expansion of dairying is putting on our rivers.The Government needs to look much more closely at the advice in the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment’s reports. It needs to avoid burdening our environment with the debt that it is creating through its stand-off land-use controls.