Mackey Moana: Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMackey Moana: Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 16 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10247. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MOANA MACKEY (Labour): I want to continue on from where my colleague Grant Robertson left off on Part 1 of this Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill because there are some serious questions that do need to be answered. My colleague was talking about proposed new section 29B in clause 5. I want to talk about proposed new section 20A in clause 4 which amends the clause of the legislation that we passed a mere few weeks ago that amends section 24 of the Crown Minerals Act. What this new section 20A says is “that each tender must include an application that complies with section 29A(1) and be accompanied by sufficient information in relation to the permit offered for the Minister to satisfy himself or herself of the matters set out in section 29A(2) or the matters required under section 29B as the case may be;”.This raises the very serious question of where the accountability lies for ensuring that the very very highest standards are met when issuing permits during the tender process particularly for tier 1 applications. I question very much on two levels the ability of this Minister of Energy and Resources to carry out that function to the satisfaction of the people of New Zealand. This is the law that governs some very risky activity in some very sensitive areas of both the marine environment and onshore. So we need to make sure that we get this right.I have two concerns about the test being that the Minister must satisfy himself. The first is that we have seen from this Minister and from the previous Minister that really they are just so desperate for this to go ahead that I do not think they are going to be applying the kinds of stringent standards the public would expect when determining whether or not they have satisfied themselves. We saw it with Minister Heatley who during the course of the passage of the legislation that preceded this—which we haveonly just passed into law and are now amending here—was in the process of giving himself immense powers under the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill at that time immense powers to take half the decision-making power on Department of Conservation land away from the Minister of Conservation. He came into this Chamber and he was publicly naming specific projects that he thought absolutely should go ahead criticising the Green Party for saying that certain projects should not go ahead and really opening the Government up to serious danger of judicial review and excessive litigation.There is a reason why the Minister of Energy and Resources should not have the decision-making power in that area and that is that he does have a conflict of interest—he does. So when we see here again that this is merely coming down to a Minister to apply standards that are crucial for the protection of our environment and crucial for the health and safety of our workforce in this area the same conflict of interest applies. I would like to know how the Minister is going to manage that conflict of interest how he is going to manage the fact that his Government is so desperate for this stuff to succeed that it is prepared to do anything to get this stuff going regardless of the risk.How is he going to manage that conflict of interest with now being the Minister who determines whether or not he is satisfied that conditions have been met? I do not think he can—I do not think he can. We have discussed already that this is it for the Government. This pokie machines and asset sales are it. If it does not work we are kind of in trouble—kind of in trouble. That is why I question the ability of the Minister—I question the ability of the Minister—to manage that conflict of interest in proposed new section 20A when he is determining whether or not he is satisfied that the conditions have been met to ensure the safety of the environment and the health and safety of our workforce. I really do question it.There is nothing in the legislation that indicates how that conflict of interest is to be managed. It would have been nice Minister to have a regulatory impact statement on this bill because that is exactly the kind of thing that I would have been interested to know. I would be interested to know whether or not the officials had indicated that that was a risk. But we did not have a regulatory impact statement on this piece of legislation at all. Why was that Minister? That is my second question.We are here where you are basically introducing a test that you apply Minister—that the Minister himself applies. How is that conflict of interest going to be managed? That is exactly the kind of thing that a regulatory impact statement would have addressed. This kind of document is what we get with regulatory impact statements from the Government so maybe it would not have been that helpful to us after all. It would have been interesting to see how much of it was redacted—it is a great word “redacted” is it not? It is one that will for ever be associated with the National Party the party of redaction. The reality is that we need the Minister to answer that question because he has not provided the information to allow us to determine that for ourselves. He has not allowed this to go to a select committee so that we could ask those questions. He has not allowed any analysis of this at all.My other concern about the fact that this section relies on the Minister satisfying himself that certain conditions have been met and the test for that is up to him is that this is a Minister who is so incompetent that here we are weeks after we passed the last amendment bill into law having to fix the amendment bill with another amendment bill to the amendment bill. It has not even been enacted yet. Jonathan Young said earlier that we had learnt from the experience since the bill had been passed. Well it has not been enacted yet. I mean it has not even come into force so I do not know what we have learnt except that a company possibly came to the Minister and asked him to make certain changes or suggested that perhaps the legislation had not gone far enough.I would like to know whether anyone asked for these particular changes. You know what it might just be simpler if instead of having an amendment bill to the amendment bill to the amendment bill we just passed a new bill every time a permit is put up that the Government wants to pass. We could just be honest about it and each new permit that the Government wanted to fast track would just get its own legislation which could go through all stages under urgency. That would be easier and simpler. That is effectively what we are doing in Part 1 constantly amending legislation to fit in with what industry is demanding from the Government when instead what we should be doing is putting in place legislation that ensures the highest environmental and health and safety standards are upheld regardless of where the permit is regardless of what it is for and regardless of who is asking for it. But that is not what we have got.So here we have the Minister being required to satisfy himself and we do not have confidence in this Minister that he is going to be able to handle that conflict of interest given that he could not even pass a piece of legislation that lasted more than a few weeks before it had to be fixed up. Maybe we could just take out the word “Minister” and put in the words “Steven Joyce” because that is the reality. Wherever the word “Minister” appears we will just replace it with the words “Steven Joyce” because—Chris Hipkins: Or Gerry Brownlee.MOANA MACKEY: Or Gerry Brownlee because they are the ones who make all the decisions in the Government. That might be more honest as well.The real problem with this Part 1 is that we were sold the original legislation on the basis that tier 1 applications were meant to be tough. This was going to be a tough rigorous process that was gone through. And here we are in Part 1 already before the legislation the last amendment bill has even come into force undermining those tier 1 application processes—already already. It was passed only a few weeks ago. It has not even come into law yet and already we are undermining what the public were told were going to be very very stringent and very very tough conditions for those tier 1 projects. Well the Government could not wait even a few weeks until the law had come into force to pass these amendments. It is so desperate for this stuff to go ahead that these changes in Part 1 to tier 1 application processes are already being put into place.You know the Minister is trying to say: “Oh well we just missed this in the original process.” Well that was a process that actually went to a select committee. Can you imagine what he has missed in this bill given it has not gone to a select committee at all given how rushed it has been? I cannot even begin to imagine what other mistakes he has made in this legislation that we have not had time to pick up since it was tabled yesterday late afternoon. Certainly again a select committee process would have allowed us to see whether what we are doing in Part 1 is actually what the Minister claims or whether in fact this is a quite deliberate undermining of those strict tier 1 conditions. This is an area where you do not want to have loopholes.This is an area where internationally there is enormous litigation—enormous litigation. So when we start talking about arbitrary tests like the Minister satisfying himself that this is being met or that is being met with no information about how the very real conflicts of interest are going to be managed that makes me very very worried. I would hope that the Minister will take a call on this to tell us how he is going to manage those conflicts of interest to protect the New Zealand taxpayers—