O'Rourke Denis: Environmental Reporting Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeO'Rourke Denis: Environmental Reporting Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 23 September 2015. Volume:709;Page:7050. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENIS O’ROURKE (NZ First): This Government has a talent for turning a silk purse into a sow’s ear. It has done it with the flag referendums bill and now it is doing it with this legislation. This legislation should be something that all parties in this House would like to support but the Government has made such a mess of the bill that it is actually not possible to do so. This is something that New Zealand First wants—a good environmental reporting bill—but this is not that bill. The defects in it are so fundamental that we cannot support it.There are three main issues. The first one relates to the fact that Ministers are given the power to choose topics for reporting and that is unacceptable to us. There are—and many other parties have said so in the House—better alternatives. One of those that has been mentioned already in the debate today is that the Secretary for the Environment and the Government Statistician could jointly make those decisions and in doing so the public could see genuine transparency and genuinely independent decision-making. But there is another alternative and it is one I quite like. It is that there could actually be a schedule to the Act that could be changed every 3 years and would state what those topics should be. Three years is not so short a period that it would be impracticable. It would be good for Parliament to actually take part in such a process. It would be good for MPs to think about those issues and get their minds around them and then we together could decide what the topics should be.As it is clause 18 is just another example of creeping increases of power to the executive under this Government. I have stood here in this House over the last few years complaining time after time about the creeping expansion of power to the executive by this Government and this is just another example of it. This is especially bad and unnecessary when it comes to environmental reporting because environmental reporting must demonstrate integrity and must generate full public trust.The second main issue is this: clause 18 itself is not a robust process. I am looking at clause 18 and it says in subclause (2)(a) that the Minister must be satisfied that significant areas resources or numbers of people are involved for a pressure topic to be chosen and in subclause (2)(b) that topics must be measureable with robust statistical methods. That comes down to the personal opinion of the Ministers under this particular bill and that is most unsatisfactory. How do we know what matters are going to be looked at and whether they are going to be looked at objectively in making those decisions? Minister Smith commented during the Committee process saying: “Look don’t worry about that. It’s OK because we have in clause 18(3) a provision for consultation.” Saying that means that he believes somehow that consultation is actually a substitute for an independent decision-making process which of course it is not. It is simply an obligation to hear and to take into account the views of other people. That is not part of the decision-making process. It may well inform the decision-making process but it is not itself independent decision-making.This is very important in that people must see that that process is free of political interference. Like Megan Woods I do not actually think that there would be many Ministers—no matter what party would be in Government—who would actually do that but the point is that this bill makes it possible and it could happen in the future that Ministers do interfere inappropriately in that way. What the public expects is that the decisions will be made objectively on their merits. Clause 14 of the bill does not save the situation. That is the one that says that the Secretary for the Environment and the Government Statistician are required to act independently. But how can they do that under this bill when the Ministers actually have all the power? It is just not possible and clause 14 is valueless as a result.In addition there is clause 15 under which the Secretary for the Environment and the Government Statistician are required to assure in their reports “a fair and accurate representation of the state of New Zealand’s environment or the state of the domain being reported on.” but only “so far as it is reasonably practicable”. The words “so far as it is reasonably practicable” completely compromise the assurance of fair and accurate reporting that ought to be at the core of this bill. That is a great problem for us in New Zealand First.The third issue for us is the issue of transparency. Ministers must have regard to pressures on the environment that could cause adverse impacts and other environmental changes.Again I look at clause 18(2) where the Ministers must be satisfied that the pressure topics chosen have an impact on significant areas resources or numbers of people measurability and relationships between topics and impacts. But in the end these requirements actually place very little limitation on ministerial discretion. It is actually a very important issue and a very big problem for New Zealand First when we are being asked to support a bill on which there is such little limitation on ministerial discretion. What that means in practice is that Ministers could actually decide not to report on some topics at all and nobody would know that they had taken such a decision. That is actually a very severe defect because Ministers could decide not to report on a topic simply because it was inconvenient for the Government or might embarrass the Government. That is a very very serious issue for us.So why are we not seeing much more transparency when it comes to the regulations that will prescribe the topics to be covered in synthesis reports and domain reports? Without transparency you do not get integrity and you do not get the trust of the public. That is what is at the core of this bill. That is the fundamental reason why New Zealand First cannot support it.So what does transparency really require then? First of all it requires I think the background information upon which the decision is made to be made clear. Secondly it must show what the decision is in detail why the topics were selected why they were the highest priority and so on. The bill will not only fail the transparency test but also prevent the Official Information Act from operating as intended in relation to what is called untested information. Officials will be able to withhold that without genuine reasons for doing so. That again is putting far too much power in the hands of officials and that should not be the case. The public are entitled to access that information. It is their information. There is no reason for the secrecy surrounding that. This is after all about decisions on what to report on the environment. It is not a major State secret. What is the reason for all this secrecy? The members opposite have not said.For all of those reasons there is no way that New Zealand First can support such a badly drafted and defective bill even though we like other parties would like to see a good environmental reporting bill brought forward to the House.