Little Andrew: Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLittle Andrew: Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 16 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10240. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]ANDREW LITTLE (Labour): Again I rise to take a call on this very important Crown Minerals—it has got so many different names and amendments to it that it is confusing. I take a call on this Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill. As my learned colleague Moana Mackey has pointed out we are amending a piece of legislation that we passed barely 2 months ago such is the nature of the management of legislation by this Government in this House. But what we have heard so far in this second reading debate are the trite old National Party platforms that are vacuous rhetoric ill-informed with no evidential basis at all. Of course it is compounded by the fact that we have a Government that is so terrified so scared of the citizens of this country that it is now routinely ramming important legislation through this House without any proper oversight from select committees and without the ability of members of the New Zealand public to have their say. We should not be passing legislation on the oil and gas industry on Crown minerals and on the extractive industries without the assistance and the input of the industry and of those people affected by it.Jonathan Young talks long and large about the good people of Taranaki. There are people in Taranaki who are starting to express concern—grave concern—about some of the oversight of the industry and the way it operates in Taranaki. The people ofTikorangi are expressing concern. Jonathan Young knows what the issue is with theKōwhai C well and he knows what the residents’ concerns are but they do not get a fair hearing. Well they do get a fair hearing from one person—the list MP who works in Taranaki and that is me. At least Taranaki has the benefit of one MP who spends his time up there listening to the citizens and what the people have to say. I spend a lot more time in Taranaki than the Minister of Finance spends down in Dipton I can tell you that much. I do not have multiple houses to show for it either. The people in New Plymouth are lining up at my constituency office there in New Plymouth ready to meet me and talk to me and tell me their concerns.Most of those concerns are their anxieties about a Government they perceive as failing them—failing to provide them with the assurances and the oversight that they as responsible citizens are entitled to expect of a Government that is truly acting in their best interests. They have now realised—many New Plymouth residents many Taranakians—that that is not the sort of Government that we have. If it was a Government that was genuinely interested in the public interest we would not be having important legislation on important industries rammed through this House in a matter of hours and without the benefit of the input of the citizens and indeed of the industry. I would want to hear from Schlumberger and from Shell and from Halliburton and from Todd Energy. I would want to hear from them about the impact of this legislation whether it is in fact any use to them to have a two-stage approval process for their permits as they go from prospecting to exploration. Let us hear from them because we certainly do not have a regulatory impact statement we can refer to apart from Moana Mackey’s very helpful one. It is certainly more helpful than the one we saw earlier today.I myself went looking for a regulatory impact statement on this bill earlier today and I could not find one but what I did find—and I cannot find it now; look at that. One comes to this House so well prepared! I went looking for a regulatory impact statementand I found this blank document. Then I realised of course that it is not the regulatory impact statement; it is the list of achievements of this Government over the last 4 years. That is what we are dealing with because this Government does not care and we have seen it so often. We saw it at the beginning of last week we saw it last night and we are seeing it again now. This Government does not care about due process.We should not take lightly the issues that are in this bill. They are issues firstly of health and safety and that is a matter that is very dear to my heart. I know that there are members in this Government there are former members of Cabinet in this Government who took the issue of health and safety very seriously. We are yet to see whether the present Cabinet and whether other members of this Government take health and safety seriously. But this bill and the roughshod manner in which it is being rammed through this House does not give me any comfort and will not give comfort to the many workers in the oil and gas industry the many men—they are men—who work on the rigs and do the dangerous work at the top of the derricks and out on the high seas. They will not be reassured by the way this Government is handling this piece of legislation.The best that Sam Lotu-Iiga could come up with by way of comparison was the wine industry—that somehow the oil and gas industry is comparable to the wine industry. Well there is a big difference. When they talk about strings in the wine industry they are talking about the things that prop up the grapes. In the oil and gas industry the strings are the lines—the pipes that go down into the well as part of the drilling system. That is the difference. You know we are not talking about winemaking here. This is tough work. It is hard work. It is complex technology. It is dangerous work and the workers in that industry are entitled to know that the oversight of it and the oversight of health and safety in the industry are the best available as world’s best practice. The Government has set a standard an ambition for itself or at least the committees reporting to it have—the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy and the recent health and safety advisory group that reported which was chaired by Rob Jager the head of Shell New Zealand who himself understood that health and safety in this country is not good. The industry is entitled to know that this Government genuinely wants world’s best practice when it comes to health and safety oversight. This bill does the opposite. This bill treats it shabbily. This bill treats health and safety cheaply. It is not a good sign. So we do not take comfort that this Government and this neophyte Minister of Labour parading as a Minister of Energy and Resources tonight understand the fundamentals of health and safety either.Of course the other aspect of this bill is its extraordinary extension of jurisdiction across the continental shelf as it relates to its previous anti-protest anti-dissent law that now extends its coverage as well. And it just illustrates what this Government is all about. This is a Government that sadly has taken us back to 1951. It hates dissent hates anybody with an alternative view and cannot bring itself to collaborate with any other interests because it thinks it knows best. So it comes up with laws that are badly drafted. It comes up with laws that are so badly drafted that 6 weeks later we have to amend them—yet again—before the original law has even been enacted and it is so contemptuous of dissent that it does not want to hear alternative voices. Well Mr Bridges and members of the National Government—that party over there—the modern world now depends on collaboration. We live in a world of modern relationships. There is a sense of mutual respect where it is OK to talk to others with whom we disagree and to share ideas and to find the common ground. It is on that basis and only on that basis that we will come up with good quality legislation—not the roughshod stuff that we are being fed day in day out under this Government. It is hastily managed and shabbily done as it is all the time.This bill gives us no comfort. It will give the industry no comfort and it will do our international reputation no good in an industry upon which this Government is staking so much and banking so much for our economic future. For those members opposite who talk about the economic management of this country I say that we know that this is just a small part of the economic management of this country. The real challenge is building our economic base for the next 20 the next 50 years and this will not be it. This will not be it. We should get this right but this is not the economic panacea that it has been played up to be by members opposite. We need an economic strategy that is about broadening our economic base and that is playing to our innovation advantages—our strategic advantages in manufacturing high-tech goods and supplying the rest of the world. That is where the future will lie. But if we have to rely for the medium term on the extractive industries we want the best oversight and the best regimes governing those industries that we can possibly get. This bill could do a lot better. It does not. We will not have the chance to give it a proper debate in the select committee and have the benefit of the wisdom and insights of those in the industry and that is why we will remain opposed to this bill.