Turei MetiriaMETIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green): Tēnā koutou katoa e Te Whare. I just want to lend the Green Party's support to the second reading of this bill. I am pleased to have the opportunity to do so. I want to follow on from what Nanaia was talking about. This is another bill that gives the environment legal status a legal identity and it is—in New Zealand at least—a new and very innovative way of considering how the environment needs to be protected and restored that it is entitled to its own integrity and what the role of the community is in protecting that environment. I think it is a really exciting development in New Zealand law.It is the right thing to do for a start but what it does is it clearly puts humans in our rightful place in terms of the environment. We are not the masters of our environment; we are its servants. We are a hundred percent dependent on the health and the nurturing that the natural environment gives us for our lives and for our futures. So there really is no alternative. It simply is not negotiable to protect our natural environment for ourselves and for our kids and for our grandkids.The legislation that we see here today and the previous legislation we have had in the House has given us an opportunity to think about how to give the environment legal status a set of legal rights and the obligation and responsibility on the people around that environment to then work for its protection and restoration. It accepts that the environment—whether we are talking about a river or a forest or a lake or something bigger—is entitled to its own integrity for its own sake. That is at the core of iwi Māori of tikanga Māori and it is at the core of the environmental movement and these things are finding their way together.It is a lesson though that has been taught to the dominant culture—Pākehā culture—by indigenous people. We are seeing all across the world indigenous communities that are standing up for the protection and restoration of the environment using all the tools they have—their bodies their words the law and the systems—to demonstrate that value. It is kaitiakitanga in our case; other values described in other ways in other indigenous people's cases. We are using all of the tools we have to put that value into our structures so that there is a sense of legitimacy particularly to Pākehā communities—dominant cultures—around the world.Bolivia is a very interesting example. In 2010 it passed a law for the rights of mother Earth and that law from that cultural point of view put the Earth—the planet and all its resources—at the forefront of its law. Those rights include the right of the Earth and its resources to life the rights of water the rights of the air the rights of restoration and the right of the environment to be free from contamination. So it was a huge commitment to the protection of the environment in a legal way—in a constitutional way in Bolivia. It gave the country a framework on which it would make all the decisions—its social decisions its economic decisions its resource use decisions—and it put right at the heart of all those decisions the right of the environment to be protected and restored.We have been seeing over the last few months another fight around water: Water is Life" and the Standing Rock protests that we have been seeing in North Dakota in the US. Again that is the indigenous people of that country actually putting their lives their bodies and their lives on the line for the water resources that are their life. From their point of view water is not just a resource to be used to be exploited to be bottled and sold off; water is life water is us. I think there is a real connection between iwi Māori and Whanganui the iwi of this legislation and the Standing Rock conception about water because both treat water as the protection of our whakapapa as the carrier of our whakapapa into the future. So there is this huge network of indigenous communities around the world of which iwi Māori are a part that recognises how critical water is not just to us but to the future of the planet and to the future of our communities.The iwi here have worked with the Government to put that principle into this legislation and I think that is enormously empowering. It is really exciting for all of us who believe that our natural resources deserve protection and restoration in their own right. So I want to congratulate and thank the iwi of Whanganui for taking this approach to the protection of this awa. As I said I think in the first reading my grandma is from there—she was born and raised in Jerusalem; she is buried at Pūtiki—Piupiu Turei so I have spent especially as a kid lots and lots of time up around there with my dad Richard. So there is that real sense of pride at how the Whanganui iwi have used the law to put this core tikanga Māori value at the forefront of the work that they are doing.I am not going to belabour the second reading. It will be good for us to get on and be able to complete this legislation as soon as we can but I think it is a very very exciting development in law. I think the next step though—I would just say this—is that this concept moves away from just being in Treaty settlements that it moves away from just being part of iwi Māori / hapū Māori approach to the protection of natural resources and becomes a much more dominant tool in the protection of our environment. There is no reason why we cannot use this principle of giving our environment legal protection legal status as a way of giving us the structure in which we make decisions about water use for example which will continue to be a major issue for iwi Māori but also for New Zealanders in general.Giving legal protection to our atmosphere would be one way that we could have a structure a framework for thinking about the pollution particularly the climate pollution that this country engages in and the increasing climate pollution that we engage in. This is not a tool that should be isolated only to Treaty settlements or isolated only to the work of iwi Māori. It is actually a tool that we should be using much more broadly to protect our environment. These are lessons that Pākehā Governments all around the world should be taking from indigenous people all around the world. Thank you."