Burns Brendon: Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee 
Burns Brendon: Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee 
[Volume:661;Page:9967] 
BRENDON BURNS (Labour—Christchurch Central) 
: 
 I am pleased to take another call in the second reading of the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill. If ever there was a misnamed bill this is it. This bill is in the name of the Minister for the Environment Nick Smith who is on record time after time when he was in Opposition criticising water quality around New Zealand. It is rather like when he criticised noisy exhausts; he has done nothing about that either. Here we have a bill that rather inappropriately talks in its explanatory note about temporary commissioners and improved water management. There is nothing temporary in the fact that this bill will disestablish Environment Canterbury’s democratic rights for the next 3½ years and there is nothing in the bill in my view to improve water quality—quite the contrary. 
I also note that this bill is in effect an outrageous affront to democracy and to Canterbury voters. I suggest that it is actually giving the two-fingered salute to the voters of Canterbury. They will have to continue paying the bill for the commissioners at an undetermined rate I have to say—it is left up to the Minister’s discretion if my memory of the bill is correct—and they will have to pay the bill not just for the per diem rate that the commissioners are paid but also any transport and travel costs. So Government members should not talk about costs to ratepayers being reduced under this bill. It is absolutely the opposite. I think this bill is saying to the voters of Canterbury that they are simply not intelligent enough to make the decisions about who is best to make the choices for Canterbury on water issues. That is the subtext of this bill. It is saying that the voters of Canterbury do not have the intellect to be able to decide how their water rights and how Environment Canterbury should be run. I think that is a galling statement from National which supposedly prides itself on democratic principles. I absolutely believe that is the case. 
I note from announcements today that the Minister has decided that Dame Margaret Bazley will be the commission chair - designate. I have to ask who the other commissioners provided for in this bill will be. 
Hon George Hawkins 
: Alec Neill. 
BRENDON BURNS 
: There is a name to conjure with. I noticed on the Television One news tonight that Dame Margaret is already in place in Christchurch and has been welcomed by a beaming soon-to-be-former chair of Environment Canterbury that little known former backbench MP Alec Neill. Maybe he will be given a job and that raises questions about who else will be given a job as the Government scrambles to put together a suite of commissioners to take over the running of Environment Canterbury. 
This bill is just an outrage; it will take away a democratically elected council. It is showing contempt for the democratic process as the Government has done previously in Auckland. It is a signal victory for the Minister of Local Government. He is managing to do to Canterbury what he is has done to Auckland by completely neglecting the democratic process the wishes of the people and the chance for them to have any input. Here is a bill coming through under urgency with not a skerrick of a chance for any input from anybody be they from Canterbury or anywhere else. It is violating the fundamental principle that people should not be taxed unless they are represented. I think from memory that that was the cause of the Boston Tea Party in America in the 1700s which led to the American Revolution. 
I hear there will be pickets outside the offices of four National MPs in Canterbury tomorrow. They seem not to have noticed that there is a fifth National MP in Christchurch Aaron Gilmore. It was unkind of my colleague Clayton Cosgrove to pick on Aaron Gilmore because maybe he is not aware that Aaron is shopping around in Southland looking for a seat down there. That is maybe why the voters of Canterbury will not miss him tomorrow. 
This bill is being forced through under urgency. There is no signal in it from the Government or from the Minister as to how there will be better balanced environmental outcomes. The bill makes reference to the Canterbury Water Management Strategy. I uphold the strategy. I think it is a very very good thing. It is a round-table locally driven initiative which brought together people from the environmental movement farmers and irrigators. It is a winner. It is a once in a lifetime opportunity for Canterbury. However I think it is being put at risk because on one page this bill says it upholds the principles of the water strategy but then on another it says it wants to see the rapid allocation of water. The fundamental tenet of that strategy brought together so patiently by so many good people in Canterbury is around environmental matters. It states that sustainable management is the first primary principle that water is a public resource and that first order priority consideration has to be the environment followed by customary uses by community supplies and by stock water. What is this bill going to do? Is that the sequence that will be applied or will it meet the Prime Minister’s stated agenda that he wants to see new projects on the blocks in Canterbury next year without—and the Minister for the Environment has confirmed this—any accompanying legislation to this bill to put in place any new environmental standards? 
The Minister can throw the borax back to this side of the House and say we did not put in place proper standards but he has been the Minister for nigh on 18 months and he has had the opportunity to take to Cabinet a whole range of proposals around water quality. He is waiting for the Land and Water Forum to deliver. I think that the forum will in effect emulate what has happened with the Canterbury Water Management Strategy. I think it will try to bring together a round-table consensus such as we had with the Canterbury Water Management Strategy. But if the Canterbury Water Management Strategy is effectively abrogated by the rapid allocation of water then the people who put that strategy together will walk from it and that will send the signal to the Land and Water Forum that it is going to have exactly the same issues. The forum will not hold those parties to it because it will see that the Government has an agenda on one side for rapid allocation. It is talking the talk about environmental balance but what party in Government does not talk the talk about environmental balance? It has to be delivered on and we are at the point with the Canterbury Water Management Strategy that it could start to be implemented given real support. It needs real support. The Government cannot undermine that by having a strategy or an agenda alongside it that says it wants quick runs on the board and that it wants to see new water in place next year. 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: We didn’t say that. 
BRENDON BURNS 
: The Prime Minister is on the record on that as Dr Smith well knows. I think the Minister has lost the battle in Cabinet over this. Those who want to see quick runs on the board to make it look good in next year’s election will be ahead in terms of the decisions. 
That is the result of today and that is why I say that Dr Smith has lost out and Rodney Hide has effectively had a second victory in terms of local government at the expense of ratepayers first in Auckland and now in Canterbury. The people of Canterbury have lost their rights they have lost their democratic say and they have lost their chance for input. They have not been given a single chance to be heard other than through the Creech review which simply went to Canterbury talked to 20 different groups in 3 weeks and came back and wrote a rushed report which is now followed by rushed legislation. That is not the way to get it right for my province of Canterbury. 
The water strategy is in place it is a fundamentally good document and it has broad buy-in. It is a Canterbury document put together by Cantabrians. It was driven by Environment Canterbury—and that is part of the irony of all of this—and Environment Canterbury in fact was starting to deliver. It was meeting 90 percent of its resource consents in the approved time frames and that is as good as any other local authority. I should note of course that the person who was the chair of the resource consents committee for Environment Canterbury for most of the time that the Government identified as problematic is now the departing chair of Environment Canterbury. However that is putting a rather blunt point on things. The fact is that Environment Canterbury was starting to get its act together it was the driver of the Canterbury Water Management Strategy and it deserves to have support. It deserves to have more than a ritual bow which this legislation attaches to it by putting it as schedule 1 to the Act and making a couple of references to it. It deserves to be enshrined in legislation and given a lot more support than is envisaged in this bill. This bill is doing away with the democratic right of Cantabrians to decide who is in charge of the big economic driver of their province. 
We on this side of the House want to see sustainable growth and we want to see new jobs but we do not want to see another generation of water quality going backwards. This is the first time we have had to get it right and this Government is ripping that asunder with this bill. It will put that water strategy under intense pressure and my belief is that we will see it fly apart in a very short time frame as the Government implements its agenda for the rapid allocation of water. That is a tragedy in the making because we will not have this opportunity again. We will not get that number of people in a round-table consensus fashion putting aside their own separate interests to try to do something for the benefit of our province. We will not get that again. If it falls apart in Canterbury it will not be able to fly on a national basis.