Warren-Clark AngieANGIE WARREN-CLARK (Labour): Thank you Madam Speaker. I rise and take a call on this bill—it's a long name—the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Hazardous Substances Assessments) Amendment Bill which actually amends the primary legislation of 1996 which is the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms bill. I want to acknowledge the Minister the Hon David Parker and the Hon Eugenie Sage our chair of the select committee. People have talked about this being a dull bill but nevertheless a practical one. What I would say is what sits behind it is a huge body of incredibly passionate people who really are interested and concerned about the uses of chemicals in this country and what we do with them. So while it is quite a dense piece of legislation—and lots of foibles are attached to it—I think as New Zealanders as Kiwis we're all pretty interested in this area and making sure we've got the best system we can have in the world to ensure that our country has a good reputation and we're safe. So the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) have roughly 3500 approvals and again under those approvals there's also another set of approvals which are like the group standard approvals as well. So I went and had a look—because this is quite a complex area—on how to get a chemical approved and so you basically go into the EPA website and you work your way through the system to find your chemical. It's highly complex and it's quite technical but it is actually quite a useful and workable system. I understand there's about 150000 hazardous-type substances in New Zealand so this is a really complex huge area. But also it's an area that most of us probably don't think about on a day-to-day basis. So this bill just makes some technical amendments to change the chemical assessment process for the EPA. Part of that is essentially around making it faster cheaper and more streamlined really which you will note that it is unanimous across the House that we all agree with this legislation. The member Rachel Brooking spoke to this really well and I always hate following someone who's very technically competent in the law. She spoke about 76E which is around making better use of information from overseas. There's a whole series—we discussed this in great depth and at great length in the select committee process—around who we could use which countries were appropriate which regulatory systems were appropriate for us to borrow the knowledge of and speed up the process.So we worked and crafted this really carefully to ensure that the EPA when selecting these similar jurisdictions that they need to go through a process publicly first and foremost so that is they need to publicly notify that they're considering this regulatory regime from another jurisdiction. They need to give those interested parties reasonable time to make a submission and they also have to consult actively go out and consult. So I think that's a really safe place to land in regards to finding those overseas jurisdictions.The second thing is they can't recognise those jurisdictions unless that jurisdiction's operations are comparable that the legislative regime is similar to our own and finally that the information is easily found and accessible. So that jurisdiction publishes or is publicly available or available in a readily-accessible form and that way it means that there's no secret squirrel about this stuff; it means that actually they are going to be able to find the information easily and readily. That's important for the speed and also for ensuring that there is a real transparency. So while this bill has been called dull I would disagree. It is quite an interesting area and I'm just going to stand up for the little piece of highly highly technical but somewhat fascinating legislation. I commend it to the House.