Parker David; Simmonds Penny; Kuriger BarbaraHon DAVID PARKER (Labour): Thank you Madam Chair. I actually understand the genesis of this bill because the best parts of it are Labour Party policy. There are problems with the Waste Minimisation Fund in the limits to which it can be put. The two main problems are that you can't use the fund for the development of product stewardship schemes that we need as a country to bring forward in order to manage solid waste. The waste minimisation levy is collected from New Zealanders and municipalities in respect of solid waste going into landfills and it is appropriate that that money be able to be put towards the efforts that reduce that waste in order to move towards a circular economy. It is a public policy failure that this bill fixes that you should be able to use this money to produce product stewardship schemes. So all well and good. It's also good and proper that legacy landfills old landfills generally owned by councils should be able to be fixed up through money from the waste management levy and this bill also allows that—although not in a careful enough manner—and that's good.But those legacy landfills aren't just a central government problem they're a local government problem and this bill doesn't fix that because it doesn't allow the local government to put their share of the waste minimisation money into their share of cleaning up these old landfills. And that's one of the problems you have when you try and do these things through urgency. Although Rachel Brooking's amendments fix that problem the National Party is going to vote against them—I know this because the Hon Rachel Brooking came to me and said How do you manage these things?" And we said "Well we actually talk to the Minister." So she talked to the Minister and the Minister could see the merit but the Minister doesn't seem to be in a position because of the lack of some Cabinet authority or something like that to agree to the amendments. And that's the problem of doing this sort of thing through urgency.What's the other problem with this? The poor definition of what this money can now be spent on is so broad that it goes beyond remediating problems arising from solid waste. The Government having stripped out in this Budget all of the money from the Freshwater Improvement Fund and other funds like that that can address fresh water have now turned this into a slush fund that could be if they wanted used to go things other than remediation of solid waste. And that is wrong. That's why on this side of the House despite the fact that there are some good things in this bill we're forced to oppose it to drag this out to prove that this shouldn't be being done during urgency.It's not central to the Budget. There's no reason this couldn't have been done—you know for the next seven weeks Parliament is sitting one week—one week. So no question time—[Interruption] Two weeks is it? Sorry two weeks—Hon Member: But one's a scrutiny week.Hon DAVID PARKER: So one's a scrutiny week. Yeah there's only one week of question time in the next seven weeks. So we can't scrutinise this we can't hold the Government to account for this for other aspects of the Budget—you know this Madam Chair is all arising from this part of the bill. I ask the committee—there are senior members on the other side of the Chamber; they should be looking at Rachel Brooking's amendments on this which are very very simple and do what I have described. They should be backing them. They should be backing them notwithstanding this urgency. Show some leadership. Do the right thing here. This is essentially reasonable legislation for the reasons that I've described but it's being mucked up by the Government by doing it under urgency because no one on the front bench there is willing to actually look at the amendments and say as we used to do with Simon Power across the House in the old days "Just have a look at them." Have a look at those things ask the officials from the Ministry for the Environment as to whether these are sensible amendments that have been put up and if they are vote in favour of them. Vote in favour of them and make this legislation better and sort out the issues that this needs to sort out including limiting this to being solid waste rather than other forms of waste and making sure that you're fixing it for councils as well as for central government.Hon PENNY SIMMONDS (Minister for the Environment): Thank you Madam Chair and I thank the member the Hon David Parker who has just sat down for his impassioned comments on this. I also thank the member for the work that was done under his time in terms of the container deposit scheme and other stewardship schemes. I'm sure he was delighted to see the tyre scheme starting on 1 March. Certainly there is work in the pipeline there that will be progressed.If I could just assure him there is some support for the local government. Not only are they getting of course a greater amount of money—their 50 percent proportion remains the same but it's of a greater amount—but also the ability to apply to have the levy waived for the remediation work. As I have said earlier I was talking to a small local authority in the South Island where they had two quite significant contaminated sites that were going to cost about $15 million to remediate. They were encouraged of course to apply for assistance from central government for that but now they also with the passing of this bill would have the opportunity to apply to have the levy waived for that work which they told me was somewhere between 8 and 10 percent of the cost of that remediation and quite a barrier to those smaller councils. So I believe this bill is addressing some of the issues for local authorities.But can I just assure the member and also the Hon Rachel Brooking that in the legislative programme for this year I also have a wider reform of waste legislation in there that can address some other matters and give us time to consider whether there might be merit in expanding the scope of what the local authority can use their proportion for. So all is not lost!CHAIRPERSON (Barbara Kuriger): I'm going to call Steve Abel. I just want to say at this point I was listening to the debate before I came in and the Hon David Parker just gave a very good summary of the concerns from the Labour Party as did Rachel Brooking. What I've been hearing is concern about where the money comes from and who's receiving it. So I'm actually looking for new questions for the Minister now because I think a lot of it's been summed up pretty well."