Hobbs Marian: Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Approvals and Enforcement) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Hobbs Marian: Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Approvals and Enforcement) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:628;Page:810] 
Hon MARIAN HOBBS (Labour—Wellington Central) 
: 
 I rise to support the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Approvals and Enforcement) Amendment Bill and I am delighted to do so. I found that speech that went before me to be very rich and I would like to remind the member that the first Act was passed in 1996. It was a very pure Act it was a very theoretical Act and since then we have had to amend it in order to save money for people. I am very grateful tonight that this bill will go through in urgency because it is a bill about saving money. 
At this stage I want to pass some thanks. I know I am not the Minister in charge of the actual bill but I want to thank the officials who put a lot of work into it and I also thank my good friend Brian Donnelly who took this on in the Education and Science Committee and did a whole lot of work in extra time to get this bill through. Now why? He did it because this is a bill about reducing costs. The previous speaker actually talked about the reduction in costs—maybe as much as $2 million. But there are reducing costs to Government and industry particularly through the introduction of group standards—by reducing the number of applications that a business or a farm has to make to the Environmental Risk Management Authority. 
 The 1996 legislation as I said was very pure. It was introduced I think by Simon Upton. The legislation that the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act 1996 replaced was amongst others the Toxic Substances Act. That legislation had been ignored for years. If I remember rightly in the last Parliament a huge debate took place around the fact that many people had not actually notified that they were importing or using toxic substances either on their farms or in their businesses. But when we gave the incentive under the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act to grandparent those to make it easier for businesses and farmers we found that the number of toxic substances notified suddenly increased I think by about 100000 so that we now have 110000 toxic substances to be notified. That is effective legislation. It is the second reason why this bill is good. 
The bill not only is about saving money but is about protecting our environment as well because if those toxic substances are notified and the environmental risk management process gone through boundaries will be set around the use and packaging of those substances. Does that mean anything? Use of substances? Members know the complaints that have gone through sometimes about agrichemical trespass. So we are clearly laying out how those chemicals are to be used so that they do not affect say the avocado grower’s property rights when his or her crop gets sprayed by somebody misusing the chemical in the paddock next door. That actually is good environmental practice and good fair business practice in the terms of agribusiness. 
The legislation does a second thing—and I can well remember when the Hon Nick Smith and I were on the case involving rat poisons being dropped into the sea along the Kaikoura coast. No one had done anything about legislating for the packaging and transporting of such poisons which contaminated a whole marine area. That is what this legislation is about. It is about saving money—[ 
Interruption 
] Yes it was probably and it was particularly well-named. It was also about protecting the environment. 
The other important thing about this legislation is that it involves regional councils. Again one of the holes found in that good piece of legislation of 1996 is that rather like the Building Act the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act relied on people to enforce the provisions themselves and all dangerous goods inspectors were taken out of the legislation. That left us in a very vulnerable state. It is why it is a very good scene to see regional councils being included probably with some funding from central government as we work through these issues in order to enforce decisions made about the use of chemicals and toxic substances. 
Let me make one other point about toxic substances because it is also about health. If we do not notify or register a toxic substance as would have happened in the past before this particular legislation was in place then nothing is registered in the poisons centre about how to treat someone if that substance is swallowed. So if a child who is on a farm in a factory or in a workshop out the back drinks something that no one knows was actually in this country we cannot treat that child. That is the value of this legislation. It is about people’s well-being—their well-being environmentally and their well-being in the sense that we have heard people and have said that we will find a way through grouping standards so that people do not have to go through individually and so that we reduce costs by $2 million. This is good legislation improving on theoretical legislation that was passed in 1996.