Simpson ScottHon SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): Thank you Mr Chair. It's good to take a call in this Estimates debate on Vote Environment. I particularly want to refer to pages 91 and 92 of the report back from the Environment Committee because the committee had an opportunity at Estimates to hear from the Minister. He's a busy Minister. He's got a very large and complicated range of portfolios. So the committee was disappointed that the committee's invitation extended to the two Associate Ministers the Hon Nanaia Mahuta and the Hon Eugenie Sage to attend the committee hearings was declined. That was disappointing because these are Associate Ministers that actually have quite large delegations.The principal Minister David Parker has chosen to delegate very significant parts of the environment portfolio to his Associate Ministers. There's nothing wrong with that but what is wrong with that is that the Associate Ministers should have adopted the process that occurred in years past when Associate Ministers did attend Estimates hearings and answer questions about their delegated financial responsibilities—the areas for which they have financial accountability in this Budget—and they were missing in action. What was particularly odd was that one of them the Hon Eugenie Sage appeared only a few minutes after the hearing at the conservation hearing. So she was clearly very busy prepping for her conservation role rather than putting emphasis on the environment role.That's really what I want to concentrate on because this is a Government that—and we noticed it with the last speaker—seem to have lost their enthusiasm for the environment. They've lost their direction they've lost their focus and they've lost their passion. They didn't have any. Their speakers in this debate—in fact they don't even talk about the environment any more because they've found that it's harder than they thought. These were Ministers who in Opposition had all the answers. I well remember the Hon Eugenie Sage used to come to select committees and she would just lay down the law and say All you need to do is this this this and this and everything will be perfect everything will be simple." What do we have now? A Minister who is probably the most inefficient in terms of producing any results of the entire Government administration. A Minister who had all the answers in Opposition is now stuck like a possum in headlights—like a possum in headlights—who has been bereft of ideas and bereft of policy and suddenly all her good ideas seem to have evaporated before her very eyes.Frankly it's an embarrassment. It's an embarrassment to her party which nobody hears about these days and it's a deeper embarrassment to the coalition Government because clearly there are frictions afoot that abound between the coalition partners. We saw it when we asked questions at Estimates about the proposed levy on bottled water for instance. There were very few answers. In fact the Minister confessed to the committee that actually he's no longer prioritising a tax on bottled water and he told the committee that he was prioritising emissions pricing over water pricing. So that's a concession of defeat because he understands that to do what was suggested in the Speech from the Throne actually amounts to foreshore and seabed mark 2. He knows that and the coalition Government knows that and it's an utter humiliation for them in terms of their policy initiatives.But it's in the area of waste and plastics that they have been particularly slow. China made a decision more than a year ago to cease taking the world's rubbish for recycling and this Government has done absolutely nothing. In an electorate like mine plastic is stockpiling at the old Carter Holt Harvey site at Kōpū just out of Thames. The Minister has said on a number of occasions she wants to introduce a ban on single-use plastic bags—nothing is happening. She was on the television over the weekend and no comments were made—nothing's forthcoming. In fact she wants to have another consultation. So the Minister had all the answers in Opposition and now suddenly is stuck like a possum in headlights.This is a Government that came to office with what New Zealand voters and the public could have expected was some kind of passion some kind of zeal for the environment. They now seem to have been really just completely sidetracked on it. They don't have any vision. They haven't got any plan. They just seem to be bereft of ideas and nothing was clearer in the Estimates hearings."