Sage Eugenie: Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Sage Eugenie: Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 19 February 2013. Volume:687;Page:7989. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
EUGENIE SAGE (Green) 
: 
 I would like to thank Annette King for her kind comments. The Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Amendment Bill—this noxious bill—is all about trust. It is about broken promises by the Government to restore democracy in Canterbury in the elections that are due in October of this year. The Government has broken those promises and it has done that because it does not trust the people of Canterbury to elect a regional council that will be compliant and deliver the water from the aquifers and rivers of Canterbury to the farmers and irrigators. That is why we have this bill. The Official Information Act request that the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society did in 2010 exposed the Government’s agenda. It wanted commissioners and it wanted changes to the Rakaia water conservation order so that TrustPower could get water from the Rakaia River for irrigation. It wants to promote major irrigation development and we saw that yesterday with that $1.7 million grant to Central Plains Water which will result in more pollution of the aquifers and more pollution of Te Waihora Lake Ellesmere. That is to be followed by another subsidy of $4 million by the Ministry for Primary Industries. It is this massive irrigation water exploitation scheme that the Government has for Canterbury that is behind this noxious bill.  
I was in Cathedral Square along with colleagues like Mojo Mathers on a very cold and bleak day in June 2010 when thousands of Cantabrians gathered to protest and object to the 2010 principal Act. Thousands of Cantabrians have continued to demonstrate to walk the streets and to march to show that they oppose this attack on the fundamentals of our political system: the right to vote. That is at the heart of democracy and it is something that Part 1 of this bill denies by postponing elections until 2016—and how can we be certain that the Government will even implement that promise—when they should be held this year. 
 People in Canterbury are angry. They are feeling disempowered. As my colleague the Hon Lianne Dalziel has often talked about the psychological effects of disempowering people—not allowing them to vote after a natural disaster—make it all the worse in terms of their ability to recover and respond to that disaster. The Government continues to disempower Cantabrians by denying us the right to vote. This legislation builds on the autocratic powers that the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority has to not allow proper community consultation and involvement in critical decisions about the province’s recovery.  
The Government has not come clean about why this bill is needed. It continues to give spurious excuses about it being due to the earthquakes that it would get more efficient and effective governance from commissioners but we have not seen that efficient and effective governance. We have seen a stream of self-congratulatory press releases from the commissioners but we have not seen them responding to the views of Cantabrians that people want to vote except that they did recommend a mixed model of commissioners and elected members and the Government ignored that. But Cantabrians want the right to vote. They have demonstrated for that right and it is part of that strong tradition of suffrage in the region going back to Kate Sheppard and the suffragists who ensured that women had the right to vote. We want our right to vote and the bill denies that.  
In another call I will talk more about water conservation orders because there the Government has disregarded the advice of officials to restore the law in Canterbury as it applies to the rest of New Zealand. I would be very interested for the Minister in the chair the Minister of Local Government to take a call and explain why it is necessary to have a different regime for water conservation orders in Canterbury when the advice of the Ministry for Primary Industries the Ministry for the Environment and the Environment Canterbury commissioners was that there was no justification for continuing a different regime in Canterbury in regards to water conservation orders to that which applies to the rest of the country. So could the Minister explain because the regulatory impact statement makes it very clear that there is no justification for that.