Sage Eugenie: Environmental Reporting Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Environmental Reporting Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 07 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3349. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green):Tēnā koe and congratulations Mr Wilson on being appointed as the incoming Clerk. The Green Party supported the referral of the Environmental Reporting Bill to the Local Government and Environment Committee. We did that but we made it very clear at the time in the first reading debate that we had significant concerns about the bill because although it is good to have regular consolidated and accurate national-level environmental reporting guaranteed by law—and we would be catching up with the rest of the OECD—we need to have independent reporting. This bill will certainly bring a measure of consistency and coherence to our very devolved system of environmental decision-making and management but it is not the real deal on state of the environment reporting because it fails to provide for independent reporting.We are dealing with a Government that has repeatedly increased the powers of Ministers and the executive at the expense of a strong and independent public sector at the expense of local government and at the expense of democratic accountability. It has increased the powers of Ministers to direct councils. It has increased ministerial regulation-making powers. It has replaced elected councillors with appointed commissioners. It has abused the provisions of the Official Information Act by manipulating the release of official information and blocking and delaying release for as long as possible.So where we have something like clause 18 where the Minister for the Environment and the Minister of Statistics get to decide the topics on which environmental reporting is to occur we see that as the latest chapter in National’s undermining of local democracy and it sets the scene for quite Orwellian manipulation of public information and of what the public understands as the state of our environment and what “clean green” New Zealand is really all about. It is certainly not crude oppositional politics as the Minister has claimed to oppose this provision in the bill.The Green Party made quite constructive contributions we think to the debate at the select committee which did result in some improvements to the bill in terms of clause 16 and some of the other clauses but this clause clause 18 is the heart of the bill. We need to know what state our environment is in the severity of our biodiversity crisis how water quality is continuing to decline and what sorts of land uses are contributing to that decline.If state of the environment reporting is to be credible if it is to be robust it needs to be independent. It is not independent because in clause 18 we have got those regulation-making powers for the Minister for the Environment and the Minister of Statistics. Those powers include prescribing the topics that are to be covered in the domain reports which are going to be published on a rotating basis every 6 months. Those powers also prescribe topics that are to be in the 3-yearly synthesis reports—the pressures that are changing the state of the environment and the impacts that those changes are having.So that gives quite sweeping powers to Ministers. They can interfere in and restrict the scope of the matters to be reported on and the types of information that will be relevant. So it is another example of the very centralised decision-making that we are seeing under this National administration. The Environmental Defence Society in its submission opposed these significant powers being given to Ministers as did about half of the submissions on this bill. The Environmental Defence Society said that this would politicise what should be an independent process. The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment highlighted that clause 18 created the opportunity for political interference.If you have got Ministers having control over topics to be reported on then you have got that risk of environmental reporting becoming another exercise in spin. Recent history has highlighted that our concerns are real. In 2008 the Green Party showed that the Labour Government had suppressed the final chapter of the 2007 state of the environment report Environment New Zealand 2007. That suppressed chapter showed that increased car use dairy intensification and over-consumption were driving environmental decline and that chapter concluded that regulation was needed to protect the environment and our clean green reputation. Why was it suppressed? Presumably it was an attempt to play down the need for both policy and legislative change.So it has happened in the past where the Government has intervened and with clause 18 it could happen in the future. Clause 18 could be amended and we pushed for amendments at the select committee so that the topics to be reported on could be set out in a schedule to the bill. The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment could set the topics on her own or in consultation with the Government Statistician and the Secretary for the Environment. Another suggestion that came through in submissions was that a panel of scientists could set the topics. We will be promoting Supplementary Order Papers in the Committee stage to make some changes to clause 18 to give that independence and to make the bill much more robust.The Minister has sought to justify this ministerial power by saying that because environmental reporting can be expensive in terms of collecting information it has budgetary implications and therefore it should be within the Minister’s domain to set those topics. Well of course Ministers have a perfect right to set budgets through the whole Budget process so they can take care of those concerns there. National members have also sought to discount the need for independence here by claiming that it is a parallel with the way financial reporting is done. But the Ministers under the Public Finance Act where you have got GDP and those traditional indicators of economic progress are way out of step with what is happening overseas. If we had the Government Statistician herself setting the indicators then there is a potential for those indicators to follow what is happening overseas with a much broader suite of sustainability indicators which shows us how the economy is in real terms in terms of the health of the environment the health of our society.The Green Party’s Dr Kennedy Graham has drafted a Public Finance (Sustainable Development Indicators) Amendment Bill which has a much wider suite of sustainable indicators which would be a much better indication of the health of our economy and society. That bill is in the name of my colleague James Shaw. The indicators in that bill are set out in the bill rather than requiring Ministers to set them. So we have got that problem of very narrow indicators—Hon Simon Bridges: We know who she’s voting for. She’s standing by him.EUGENIE SAGE: —because they are being set by the Minister.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order!EUGENIE SAGE: Thank you Mr Bridges.Another problem with this bill is that there is no regulatory impact statement that analyses the implication of the bill’s implementation and what is going to be needed at the local government level to align the reporting that councils do with national environmental reporting. The bill puts a lot more work on councils but once again there is no funding being provided by central government to support that. Even the Government’s own appointed commissioners at Environment Canterbury complained about this. They said that the new reporting system would require quite considerable input from councils in terms of the practicalities of data gathering staff time analysis and interpretation of raw data if you were going to get that consistency. So that is going to have an impact on councils’ work programmes and there should be funding provided to assist.In concluding I would like to thank the over 320 submitters on the bill. Their submissions and their analyses have helped the select committee to improve the bill particularly the submissions from the Officers of Parliament. One useful change that the select committee has made is to clause 16 which was quite a major concern of the Green Party and submitters because in the bill as introduced it cut across the statutory responsibilities of the Officers of Parliament such as the Ombudsmen and their ability to do their work and to undertake their investigations. The changes to clause 16 also constrain the non-disclosure provisions which were in the bill as introduced and ensure that the Government Statistician is only able to decide to withhold access to untested and unpublished information.We are opposing this bill because you cannot have credible and robust state of the environment reporting unless that is independent of Ministers and free from the potential for political interference. This bill does not do that because of the problems in clause 18. Thank you.