Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:661;Page:10044] 
Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill 
In Committee 
Debate resumed. 
Part 3 Additional functions and powers of ECan after commencement day ( 
continued 
) 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East) 
: 
 I have been very keen to get back to the regulatory impact statement which was not included with the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill. Under the leadership of Rodney Hide as the Minister for Regulatory Reform this Government has decided to take all the regulatory impact statements out of bills and to hide them away on the individual websites of the relevant ministry and of Treasury. This regulatory impact statement would have to qualify as one of the most damning indictments of any Government’s process or of any bill that I have ever seen in this Parliament in the 20 years since I was elected to represent people in Christchurch. I think I have some justification for feeling pretty aggrieved about how the people in our area have been treated by this Government. 
I direct the Committee’s attention to the regulatory impact analysis which is unpaged. Let me read out a quote under the heading “General discussion of options”. It states: “Options that rely on introducing legislation in a very short timeframe increase the risk of poor or misdirected intervention resulting in unintended consequences and the need for subsequent intervention to remedy these consequences. Ad hoc intervention also potentially undermines the integrity and credibility of existing legislative provisions. However in this instance because any national level decisions on water management (particularly WCOs)”—which are included in this part of the bill—“have the potential to undermine the government’s New Start for Freshwater policy programme and the work of the Land and Water Forum it is considered preferable for any intervention to have a narrow Canterbury-specific focus in the first instance.” 
So this is the beginning. It is the beginning of a new approach that this Government will have. This is the end of water conservation orders. That is why I have an amendment on the Table of this House to ask that the sections relating to water conservation orders be removed from the bill. I hope that I get the support of other members of this Committee. I do not think that Government members or the parties that are supporting the Government particularly the Maori Party fully appreciate the extent of what is happening to water conservation orders under this legislation. I honestly do not believe that that has been fully explained but it all becomes very clear when the regulatory impact analysis is analysed. 
The regulatory impact analysis goes on to say “The results of any intervention” in Canterbury—and that is what Part 3 of this bill implements—“could provide useful information for decision-makers on the outcomes of the New Start for Freshwater policy programme and potentially an opportunity to trial alternative policy settings in a confined context.” So Canterbury is now to be the scene of an experiment in terms of the Government’s wider policy objectives with the New Start for Fresh Water policy programme. I am deeply alarmed to find that stated in the regulatory impact analysis. No commentary on this agenda is contained within the explanatory note of the bill. We have to go to the regulatory impact analysis which is no longer contained with bills to find that this is the Government’s objective. 
Another point in the regulatory impact analysis says—and I think it is relevant that the Minister has not commented on this; I think perhaps the Minister in the chair Chris Finlayson could take up this particular issue because it is within his broader portfolio—that “Any intervention that alters the nature of the relationship between Ngai Tahu and the body responsible for governance and decision-making on natural resources particularly water will need to be designed in light of the Crown’s Treaty responsibilities. In particular commissioners will individually and/or collectively need to have a strong understanding of the Ngai Tahu perspective rights and interests.” Not once have we heard the Minister talk about how that will be addressed in the context of implementing Part 3 of the bill. 
Part 3 creates a whole new paradigm for water conservation orders. If we go through the regulatory impact statement we find that the Government is a little concerned about the nature of the requirements for assessing water conservation orders. That is why my amendment becomes all the more important. The regulatory impact analysis states that one of the options was to put together the whole question of water conservation orders. The concern was expressed that “This would displace the statutory purpose of WCOs as an instrument for protecting outstanding amenity or intrinsic values of water bodies and would allow decisions on the allocation of water from these water bodies to be made in the context of sustainable management of resources.” I think the Minister should talk to us about this issue because there seems to be a very deliberate decision by the Government to shift from the conservation values that are behind our water conservation orders in one part of the Resource Management Act to another part of that Act which talks about the sustainable management of resources. I think that if the Minister is doing that as part of a long-term objective to shift over time in that way throughout New Zealand this is not the way to do it. To have an experiment in Canterbury to see whether we can trial a different way of doing things there is actually quite untenable. 
The regulatory impact analysis contains 3½ pages on option one. A regulatory impact statement requires the Government to set out what the objectives are to set out the range of options and then to analyse each of those options: do a bit of risk analysis opportunity costing and various other tests when looking at the risks and benefits of a particular approach. In this regulatory impact statement there are three pages on option one which is the legislation to replace Environment Canterbury councillors with commissioners. There is half a page each on the other four options. We have option two “Legislation appointing commissioners to take over resource management functions only”; option three “Legislation replacing council with commission tasked with transitioning to Canterbury Regional Water Authority” which I believe is still on the agenda; and option four “Implement Canterbury Water Management Strategy”. 
It is interesting that when one looks under option four one sees that it states that “The visions and principles of the CWMS seek balance between environmental economic social and cultural outcomes but this balance is to be achieved under the over-arching presumption of more reliable water and more intensive land use - an outcome that has not been subject to assessment against the purpose of sustainable management set down in the RMA.” So even the regulatory impact analysis in ruling out one of the options that is actually being implemented by this bill is inconsistent with the provisions that the Minister really ought to be operating under in respect of the Resource Management Act. 
The regulatory impact analysis also goes on to say that “The potential inconsistency between the overarching presumption behind the vision and principles of the CWMS and the purpose of the RMA has implications for the planning framework in Canterbury post-intervention.” That would have to be the understatement of the year; of course it has implications post intervention. But I would really like the Minister to talk about that because not once have any of those issues been raised in the debate so far. We are passing legislation under urgency where we have not had an opportunity to have a rigorous debate about those things which really matter in Canterbury and around the country. 
Option five is “Use existing RMA intervention powers”; and option six is “Targeted assistance to Environment Canterbury” which was based on the proposal that Environment Canterbury put back to the Minister. To be honest that did not get even a fair hearing in my view because the Government had already decided that it would go with option one. So option six which was proposed by Environment Canterbury was ruled out beforehand. 
I will now talk about how other Government departments responded to the consultation after the review of Environment Canterbury. I am really quite shocked to find all of this detail in a document that was not even tabled with the bill. As a result of the consultation with a number of Government departments a whole lot of concerns were raised. First of all on “proposals to replace the elected Councillors for all of ECan’s functions suspend local body elections or remove the right of appeal on the NRRP or Water conservation orders except on points of law” the concern was that “These proposals appear [sic] present a prima facie access to justice issue and some departments were concerned that this may not be consistent with the Government’s statement on regulation: ‘better regulation less regulation’ which requires ‘a particularly strong case [to be] made for any regulatory proposals that are likely to override fundamental common law principles”. 
Which of the Government departments that were consulted said that? Was it the Department of Internal Affairs the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry Treasury the State Services Commission the Ministry of Justice the Ministry of Transport Te Puni Kokiri or the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet? Which one of them or which group of them said there were serious concerns about the likelihood that this would “override fundamental common law principles”? Which one said that? That is what it says here: “These proposals appear [sic] present a prima facie access to justice issue and some departments were concerned …”. Well I am more than concerned after reading that. 
The regulatory impact statement goes on to say there was concern about “the potential for the proposal to mean that parties with a stake in Canterbury’s natural resources will have less ability to protect their rights and interests via appeals on resource management decisions than elsewhere in the country.” So Canterbury misses out again by being alone in the application of this change to the rules. 
The regulatory impact statement also refers to concern about “the proposal to transfer the entire range of ECan’s roles and responsibilities to commissioners despite the finding that ECan was performing adequately outside of its water-related functions”. That entire part is focused on water-related functions yet the research the report and the review—everything that has been done—says that Environment Canterbury was performing adequately outside of those functions. So we are to deal with the whole of Environment Canterbury we are to just wipe the whole lot of those functions and we are not to mind the fact that there is the issue of whether “the gains of such a move outweigh the costs of removing democratically elected representatives.” I am quoting from the Minister’s own department’s report on the regulatory impact analysis. This is not something that I am just making up. The Minister’s own department has reported this to him as having been expressed as a concern by a range of other Government agencies. Goodness knows why the Ministry for the Environment does not think these issues are important either. 
Proposals to change the water conservation order processes have the potential to be highly controversial particularly given that the Government has not signalled such a move in its New Start for Fresh Water policy programme. Because of those concerns three minor changes were made to the proposal but that is it and there is nothing of substance in terms of the seriousness of the issues that have been raised. 
I am deeply concerned that this kind of information this quality information is withheld from members of Parliament who are standing up to debate this bill in the Chamber. 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: It was tabled. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: It was not tabled with the bill. The Minister can interject as much as he likes but the Government made a decision to no longer include regulatory impact statements with bills. They are now available separately on websites and members have to go back to the House and get a copy of those statements in order to ensure that they have the information in front of them. I think that is a poor process in terms of our ability as a Parliament to monitor anything of substance in a way that enables us to speak for our constituents. They expect us to be able to debate authoritatively on subjects on the basis of all of the information being made available to us when it is required. 
Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister for the Environment) 
: 
 The comments from the Opposition on this bill come down basically to two features: misinformation and personal denigration. I will address both of those in this short contribution. 
The first concerns the regulatory impact statement which the member has claimed was not tabled in the House. I tell members that it was tabled in the House right in front of me at exactly the same time as the bill was tabled. It was also provided to the Bills Office at exactly the same time. 
I will also address the issues that have been raised by Russel Norman. I note that Jeanette Fitzsimons who was a passionate leader of environmental issues in all the years that I spent in the House religiously focused on playing the ball and not the man. But I have seen from Russel Norman—and I think this will be terminal for the Green Party—that he is choosing to attack the integrity of Wyatt Creech and the others who did the review and today he started on David Carter. There is a very important point that I will put on the record: on Monday when Cabinet made its decisions on Environment Canterbury and on this bill David Carter was not even present. For members in this Chamber to attack a Minister when that Minister is offshore doing the work of New Zealand I think is below the standards that the Green Party itself would set for its members. 
I will address quite specifically the three major parts in this portion of the bill. In my view they are critical to the step change in water management that the Government wants to deliver. Let me go through those three parts. 
The first is that the Government is providing the commissioners with the power to put in place a targeted moratorium on water takes. Some members who are also farmers are concerned about that provision and they would prefer that it was not there. But it is time we were honest with water in Canterbury and say that in some areas there is not more water to allocate. For us to spend large sums of money on lawyers and on process when there simply is not more water is not wise which is why that measure is in this bill. Interestingly I have the correspondence that I tabled earlier in the Chamber when Environment Canterbury made submissions to members such as Ruth Dyson Lianne Dalziel and many others. Environment Canterbury asked for that power during the course of the previous Government but the council was ignored. I think that the provision for that power to be available is overdue if we are to properly manage water in Canterbury. 
The second part of this bill is concerned with getting a plan. I am advised that on the current programme it will be at least 2 or 3 years before we finally get a plan on water. Members on the Government benches are saying that that is too long that we need progress and we need a plan. That is why there are quite specific provisions in this part to fast track the provisions of establishing a water plan in Canterbury. 
The third issue is one of integrated management. It does not make sense for either the Environment Court or a special tribunal appointed by myself to make decisions on water conservation orders in Canterbury separate from the commissioners. If we are really serious about getting a group of people to get hold of this issue of water in Canterbury and to make integrated decisions it is absolutely right that those decisions are made by the commissioners. 
The last point I will make is that decisions on water conservation orders in the current law are—and in the amended law will be—made by the Minister for the Environment. That remains the case. To the accusations that somehow decisions on water conservation are being politicised I say “Well hang on.” The decisions are made by the Minister for the Environment by whoever is privileged to hold that office at the time. But the provisions in this part are the vital extra powers that are required for the commissioners to be able to get on top of water management issues in Canterbury and that is why the Government has included them in the bill. 
Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills) 
: 
 I am quite pleased with the Minister for the Environment’s contribution. I hope that he will say a little more because he might then understand that as well as being frustrated and very angry at having our votes stolen from us we are even more angry about the idea of having our water stolen from us. Taking away our vote is frustrating enough but taking our water will make us really upset. If the Minister continues to engage as he just did in what I think is a considered way then we may eventually get to the point where he will understand our concerns. Instead of just riding roughshod over them instead of just wiping them aside and making smart alec contributions to the debate he might start thinking about some of our amendments and the contributions we are making because a lot of them are being made in good faith. 
In this contribution on Part 3 I will focus mainly on the water conservation order issue. A lot of people understandably do not understand what a water conservation order is. They do not have a particular interest in the environment or they do not live in Canterbury where water is a very hot topic for us. We are very keen on water and on improving its quality. A water conservation order has been described as being like a national park for rivers. That might not be such a great comparison to bring at the moment given what the National Government wants to do with our national parks listed on schedule 4. I am not accusing the Minister of wanting to mine in our water conservation order areas but we never know. Down the track he might decide that these are not very important either. 
Hon Member 
: They want to mine water! 
Hon RUTH DYSON 
: Mining under the riverbed would be a more logical place than mining the water. 
My understanding of the changes—and it has been quite difficult to fully absorb the content of the legislation given how late we received it and given that we have been debating it continuously with the exception of question time without any select committee consideration or the benefit of any public input through a select committee process—is that we now have a water conservation orders regime whereby the appeal process to special tribunals and the Environment Court has been entirely axed. The Minister for the Environment has nodded. 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: Replaced. 
Hon RUTH DYSON 
: That is pretty sad. We do not have recourse to special tribunals or the Environment Court now in terms of water conservation orders. 
My second understanding—and I will be pleased if the Minister wants to confirm this by nodding by sign language or by taking a further call—is that the criteria for a water conservation order established under the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill is different from the current criteria for water conservation orders. I am not quite sure why that would be. Why would we have two different regimes running parallel? It would be sensible if the Government decided that one set of criteria was not robust enough or that the threshold was not high enough was too high or whatever and that it wanted to change it. That should be a ministerial prerogative. But in my view a Government would not sensibly have one regime for some rivers around the country and another regime for others. If the criteria are now different under the Environment Canterbury area—the Canterbury Regional Council catchment area—then I would really like to know why that is the case. 
I mentioned in a contribution to an earlier debate but it is more relevant to Part 3 the fact that despite the Minister going on and on about the lack of a water management strategy the strategy is in schedule 1 of this bill. That is the first confusion I have. The Minister has also been very clear that he wants to make sure that the water management strategy is implemented that it moves on and that it has some legislative grunt yet this bill which is going through under urgency is all about Canterbury water management but the implementation of the water management strategy is not in it. It is about as shallow as a puddle after a brief bit of rain out on Lambton Quay. One could not get shallower than the attention paid to the Canterbury Water Management Strategy in this document. 
I tell the Minister in the chair the Hon Nick Smith that he has lost a huge opportunity. I agree with him that the Canterbury Water Management Strategy should have legislative grunt and should be put in the part but where is it? It is outlined in schedule 1; it tells us all about it. It tells us that we believe in motherhood and apple pie and access. It tells us that we want our water to be of a high quality and drinkable. We want it to be wet and we want to be able to use water for recreational activities. Wow that is gobsmacking news! I ask where in this bill it tells us how we will set up the committees and how we will ensure that all those different groups that have worked together on the Canterbury Water Management Strategy stay working together and improve what is happening to our water in Canterbury. It is nowhere. There is a big hole in this legislation in that regard and it should be fixed. 
The commissioners will be required—this is very tough—to have regard to the vision and principles of the Canterbury Water Management Strategy. Well that will sort it out will it not I ask the Minister. By goodness let us get Dame Margaret Bazley to have due regard to the vision and principles of the Canterbury Water Management Strategy. It is a bit like national standards. That will fix everything will it not; after that it will all be all right. Once Dame Margaret has had a quick browse through the Canterbury Water Management Strategy and has had due regard for it then we should be all right. There should not be any problems with water management in Canterbury! It is really frustrating that with legislation like this being abused though it is through being rammed through under urgency with no select committee process we still have an opportunity to put in the law what needs to be in the law and the Minister has missed the chance. 
In relation to the regard that is being required to be paid to the water management strategy the final point I make in this contribution is that I do not understand the different levels of regard that are required in this legislation. The commissioners are required to have “particular regard” to the Canterbury Water Management Strategy but with regard to statutory planning documents such as regional policy statements national policy statements and the regional plan—plans documents and policy statements that have been through a really rigorous public process—they have only to “have regard”. Why are there two tests? Why is there one test for “have regard” and another one to have “particular regard”? 
I am happy that the Minister is getting some advice. I can understand that when a bill is thrown together in such a shoddy way with very little consideration of any cross-Parliament support on such an important issue and then totally bypasses the select committee process and when the House goes through under urgency on the bill from I think 5.30 last evening until 10 resumes again at 9 this morning and then goes through until 1 p.m. with a brief adjournment from the debate for question time from 2 until 3.15 and here we are at 25 minutes to 4 still debating it the Minister would not even know that there are two thresholds for consideration. The first is for the Canterbury Water Management Strategy which commissioners have to have “particular regard” to and the second is for the statutory planning documents which they just have to “have regard” to. 
This is a really shonky way of trying to improve a serious situation in Canterbury. People across the political divide agree that we have a problem with the amount of water that people need for their lives for their business and for their development and the amount of water that we have to give. There is a further debate about what if we even had more water that water should be used for—whether it is best to use it in the way possible. Nothing in this bill helps us to address those fundamental issues. 
It is a really good opportunity in respect of which the Minister must have slept in. The bill came knocking at his door one morning and said: “Here I am. Here is the legislative vehicle available for you to drive a way in to help sort out the water management issues in Canterbury.” The Minister just rolled over and went back to sleep and completely missed that vehicle. The only bus that he got on was the “Let us sack the Environment Canterbury councillors” bus. That is all he did. Although sacking a whole council might make the Minister feel better and might make him feel like he has a bit of power it is a disgraceful thing to do. It is disgraceful when the so-called independent report of a group chaired by Wyatt Creech—who we cannot say is about as independent from National as one can get—came back with the view that despite all the anecdotes despite all the stories and despite all the political scaremongering that had been generated by self-interested people in Canterbury and South Canterbury there was no basis for doing this. 
Dr RUSSEL NORMAN (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 We are dealing with this bill under urgency with no select committee process as we strip away the way for Cantabrians to have the vote. Subpart 3 deals with water conservation orders. Water conservation orders are a tremendously important part of the environmental regulation of New Zealand. To be fair most people probably are completely unaware of water conservation orders which is why the Government is quietly moving on them in this bill. Water conservation orders are national parks for our rivers; they set standards. For example the water conservation order on the Ahuriri River sets a minimum flow rate of 10 cubic metres per second of water that has to flow through it and if the rate falls below that then water takes have to drop out. So water conservation orders are a way for us to protect our rivers and they have a whole bunch of conditions attached to them. 
This bill fundamentally changes water conservation orders for Canterbury—both the process for dealing with water conservation orders particularly the Hurunui one and what could happen to the existing water conservation orders. So the first issue is the Hurunui River order. It is not correct to say that currently there is a water conservation order on the Hurunui River. In fact the process is under way. It was due to go to the Environment Court in May or June and that has been an issue of contention. This bill cuts that process off at the knees. After the applicants have spent many hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to get this process through going through a special tribunal to the Environment Court and then to the Minister this bill intervenes in the middle of that process and sends it to the Government’s hand-picked commissioners to make the decision about whether the Hurunui water conservation order will be decided. Then it goes to the Minister for the Environment. So this bill cuts through the existing process. 
From my point of view and the point of view of those who care about rivers this is a totally unacceptable cutting off of the normal process for water conservation orders. That would be worrying enough in a bill that ostensibly is supposed to be about Environment Canterbury but at the back of this bill there is the process for cutting off the application for the Hurunui water conservation order—that is the attempt to put a national park on the Hurunui River. 
The Hurunui River for those who do not know is the last remaining wild river that runs from the mountains to the sea via a natural lake on the east coast of the South Island and is subject to an irrigation scheme. They want to put a 70-metre dam on the south branch and a weir on the north branch. This bill intervenes in the process of trying to protect the Hurunui through a water conservation order and the danger is that we will open it up to the irrigation project that has been so talked about. 
If it was just about the Hurunui it would be worrying enough but the other problem is that this bill now makes it possible for any irrigator in the country to apply to the Minister for the Environment to open up any of the existing water conservation orders without going through the normal process. Normally if we want to amend or revoke a water conservation order we have to go through a very elaborate process because they are like national parks. This bill suddenly opens up the existing Canterbury water conservation orders so that they can be contested by the irrigators. Graeme Sutton from Irrigation New Zealand is jubilant about this bill because he knows what it means for the existing water conservation orders. For example people may remember that the cubicle farm application on Killermont Station relied on taking water out of the Ahuriri River in order to irrigate the station. There is no way that project could have gone ahead under the current law but this bill allows those who were putting forward the cubicle farm application to go to the Minister for the Environment without any of the normal due process to get a variation on the water conservation order on the Ahuriri River so that they can get access to water to irrigate Killermont Station even though it would take the river below the minimum flow that is currently outlined in that water conservation order. This bill is setting up a situation whereby we can revoke and amend existing water conservation orders on the Ahuriri River the Rakaia River the Rangitata River and Te Waihora. All of them can be amended through basically a stroke of the pen of the Minister for the Environment. 
We thought we had national parks for our rivers. The environment movement has fought battle after battle and spent literally millions of dollars to get water conservation orders in place across New Zealand including in Canterbury and now because of the votes of National ACT and the Maori Party we will see water conservation orders upended at the whim of the Minister for the Environment at the stroke of a pen. Water conservation orders protecting some of our most important rivers in Canterbury can now be overturned. 
On the one hand we have the special situation tucked away in the schedules that relate to this part which deal with the Hurunui to give special consideration to the Hurunui so that the irrigation scheme can go ahead and Mr Carter can get access to water for his farm. Aside from the Hurunui situation we have a more general problem whereby all of the water conservation orders in Canterbury are now under the gun. The environment movement fought long and hard and worked with tangata whenua over many years in order to get in place water conservation orders to protect our wonderful rivers. 
I was on the Hurunui on Sunday. I met with Mark Solomon from Ngai Tahu. We spoke at great length about what a precious river that was and how important it was that there be a water conservation order to protect that river from irrigators yet here we have the Maori Party voting today for a bill that threatens the Hurunui River. It seems to me totally unacceptable that anybody who cares about the wild rivers of this country could vote for a bill that threatens the water conservation order on the Hurunui and opens up every existing water conservation order in the Canterbury region so that it can now be overturned at the stroke of a pen by the Minister. 
What kind of a national park do we have then? We have a national park that is a bit like—oh the schedule 4 national parks which can be mined. We have that kind of national park the national park that we thought was for good but in fact the water in these water conservation orders can now be mined for irrigation schemes because of the changes that the Government is forcing through all through the day and all through the night without a select committee process and under urgency. 
I will respond to some of the Minister’s comments and his attacks on me and the Green Party. The Minister has made various comments at which personally I take offence. He said that we are doing an ad hominem attack on Mr Creech. That is the allegation essentially. I dispute that. I say that the issue with Mr Creech is not Mr Creech himself. The issue is that he was the director of a dairy company that was doing a review of the regulator of the dairy industry in Canterbury. That was the issue with the appointment of Mr Creech. It was not that Mr Creech was a bad person. It was that Mr Creech was at that time a director of a dairy company that had multiple convictions for pollution of water and who was at that stage doing a review of the regulator of the dairy industry. That is not an ad hominem attack. It is a problem with setting up a structure whereby we appoint someone who should never have had that role. It is that review that has provided the basis for this bill. 
The extraordinary thing about the water conservation order provisions in Subpart 3 is that there is no way we can take the changes to water conservation orders out of the fact that Environment Canterbury may have been too slow on its resource consents or it may not have processed enough resource consents to suit some irrigators. We cannot blame water conservation orders for that. It is not the fault of water conservation orders which have been fought for in good faith by the environment movement and tangata whenua over many years. We cannot blame water conservation orders for that yet in Subpart 3 and hidden away in schedule 2 there is a whole series of changes to the way that water conservation orders currently work. These are the orders that protect our nationally significant rivers. 
It is also important to look at the way the test will be changed. There is quite a lack of clarity in the test of what will now be a water conservation order in the Canterbury region. This bill introduces a whole series of conflicting things that must be taken into account in any consideration of a water conservation order in the Canterbury region. It is unclear where all of this will end up. It is almost certainly the case that it no longer prioritises water bodies of national significance which was always meant to be the whole purpose of a water conservation order. It was to protect water bodies of national significance in perpetuity. The whole idea was that it was like a national park for rivers and that is what is being overturned in this bill. The test for getting something even into being considered for a water conservation order has now been muddied and made very unclear because there are now multiple and competing demands on any decision maker when it has to be decided whether a body of water qualifies for a water conservation order—what used to be called a water body of national significance. These changes are fundamental to the way we manage water in New Zealand and to water conservation orders and we will be opposing them. 
GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central) 
: 
 I will take up where the member who has just resumed his seat left off and ask the Minister in the chair the Hon Dr Nick Smith to take a call specifically on the Hurunui water conservation order. We have to think seriously about what this bill is doing in terms of a process that is well and truly under way. For the benefit of the Committee I point out that hearings are set down for the Hurunui water conservation orders to start on 31 May. They are set down to begin. A process is in train whereby people have begun and are now part of a process yet this bill walks in during the middle of that process and states that the process is all over and completely discarded as a result of this legislation. Government members need to stand up in the Chamber and acknowledge that that is what they are doing. A hearing is set down to begin on 31 May for 6 weeks to resolve once and for all issues to do with the Hurunui water conservation order and this bill will totally remove the ability of the Environment Court to hear that. It will weaken the legal test as Russel Norman has just said. The water conservation order will be re-notified. 
At the end of this it will be the commissioners who will have a massive job on their hands anyway as a result of what is being done in this legislation who will have to hear it and issue a decision. That decision will be able to be appealed only on a point of law so in fact in this bill we are completely changing the way in which this very important water conservation order is being dealt with. No one from the Government has been prepared yet to say that they are taking away the legal rights of a number of people and a number of groups who have been involved in a process for some considerable time on this water conservation order. Nobody from the Government seems prepared to stand up and say that that is what they are doing. They are taking away legal rights and the announcement has already been made today— 
Simon Bridges 
: That’s what you did on the foreshore and seabed. 
GRANT ROBERTSON 
: That is right I say to Mr Bridges we have heard announcements today on the Foreshore and Seabed Act on which people have campaigned in the past on the issue of people’s rights to due legal process. What is happening about due legal process here? What is happening about the water conservation orders that are already being discussed for which a process is already in place? I would ask respectfully for the Minister in the chair to take a call to clear this up and ensure that we have an understanding here. But for the Hurunui water conservation order—that process—where hearings are already set down to begin on 31 May has that opportunity gone? Is that the situation we have? If it is we will be putting people who have been in this process in a very difficult position. 
I will also pick up the point that Russel Norman made about the question of what the test now is. The ability to impose the national park equivalent on rivers has gone. That seems to have gone for Canterbury but not for the rest of New Zealand. So now for Canterbury we have a different set of rules from the rest of New Zealand in terms of conservation orders. I do not think this bill will lead to any streamlining of the process around the water conservation orders. In fact I think it will make it more difficult because the role now falls to the commissioners who have an extremely busy process in front of them in terms of taking on the responsibilities of Environment Canterbury and now they have this particular water conservation order put in front of them. 
The process was meant to be completed by mid-July. The hearings would have been over and the court would have reported by mid-July. Now we have a bill in which the Environment Court has been totally taken out of the process and the commissioners will take over. First they will give the conservation applicants 30 days to amend their applications then the amended application will be followed by an additional public submission period even though there has already been a complete public submission period anyway. The commissioners will hold a hearing during which they will be required to take no account whatsoever of the special tribunal that the Minister for the Environment has already set up for the Hurunui water conservation order. Then the decision of the commissioners after they have heard this evidence can be appealed only on a point of law. 
So we are reducing the rights of a number of people who have already been heavily involved in this process who have already made submissions and who thought they were part of a process. This legislation is pulling that away. There are overall concerns about water conservation orders and what this will mean for them across the Canterbury region; but I would like a response specifically around the Hurunui case from the Minister for the Environment because there is a great deal of concern out there from a number of people involved in that. 
Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister for the Environment) 
: 
 I will respond to some of the points that have been made by Opposition members so that people can be clear about the intent of the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill and so that we can be helped to have a constructive and robust debate. 
The first point is that Ruth Dyson made the argument that the Prime Minister today was incorrect in saying that we do not have a plan for water in Canterbury. She said: “Yes we do. We have the Canterbury Water Management Strategy.” That to me spoke volumes about why we have the mess about water management in Canterbury. If that is the understanding of the law about water of a senior Minister from the previous Government it is no wonder we have a problem. The reality is that the Canterbury Water Management Strategy— 
Hon Ruth Dyson 
: Smart alec. That’s not what I said and you know it. 
Hon Dr NICK SMITH 
: No it is actually Ruth Dyson who is being smart here. She probably does know that the Canterbury Water Management Strategy has absolutely no legal status as a plan. Under the Resource Management Act— 
Hon Ruth Dyson 
: Why isn’t it in the bill? 
Hon Dr NICK SMITH 
: When the Prime Minister says there is no plan for water management in Canterbury that is because the natural resources plan is still being heard 18 years after the passage of the Resource Management Act. That is why the provisions in Part 3 of this bill enable us to both fast track that plan and for the very first time give some legal status to the Canterbury Water Management Strategy. 
A second question has been asked about water conservation orders. Again I am not sure that Opposition members understand the process as it is right now; I ask members to let me explain it. At the moment a person who wants a new water conservation order or a variation lodges an application with the Minister. The Minister appoints a special tribunal. There is all this rhetoric about my having my National Party mates on the tribunal—I can do that right now; I have absolute discretion about whom I appoint to the tribunal. The reason why I want water conservation orders to go to the commissioners is very simple and straightforward: if we are to properly manage water in Canterbury we need an integrated approach. Having one bunch of people over here making a decision about a water conservation order and a different bunch of people over there making a decision about the plan is to me a nonsense. There is one catchment and if there is anything I have learnt in my professional experience as an engineer with water it is that catchments have to be managed in an integrated way. So to have one group of people making decisions in the lower part of the river and saying “Here is what we are going to do.” and to have a different group of people making decisions in the upper part of the catchment makes absolutely no sense. I challenge members: I say that if they want an integrated approach to water management—and it is essential that that is managed competently—then it makes great sense for water conservation orders to be considered by the commission that is making the other decisions in respect of water in Canterbury. 
The next point I will make is that of course whether the decision goes to the commission or to the tribunal the decision on water conservation orders rests quite properly with a politician the Minister for the Environment. So in relation to all the stuff about a political agenda I remind members that the decisions on whether or not those orders proceed come back to me in both the current process and the amended process. 
The final point I will make is in respect of the Hurunui River application and I accept that what we are doing in this process does cut across its current legal aspect. But the real choice for the Government was whether if we had a particular view about water conservation orders in Canterbury and how they were to be integrated in the bigger picture it was better to allow all the money to be spent on lawyers before the Environment Court arguing a particular case when we already— 
Hon Member 
: It’s already happened. 
Hon Dr NICK SMITH 
: No; it has gone to a tribunal. It has not gone to court yet. It has gone to the tribunal; it has not gone to court—righto? So does it make sense for the Government if it has a particular view about the orders to pre-empt the process because I as Minister finally get to make the decision or is it more honest and upfront to say both to the applicant and to those who have a say that the Government wants an integrated approach to water management in Canterbury? Is it not more honest to say through this bill that that Hurunui application will go to the commissioners in Canterbury—who will be making the decisions about the regional policy statement as well—so they can make a decision in an integrated way? Let us open up the process as we do in this bill to all those parties including the applicants and anybody who has made submissions to the tribunal in order for them to have a new opportunity to be able to present that view. I suggest to members on the Opposition benches that that is a more straightforward and open way to do it rather than to have me as Minister for the Environment sit back and allow all that money to be spent on lawyers and process and then come to a different decision at the end. 
Dr KENNEDY GRAHAM (Green) 
: 
 I will pick up on what the Minister has just said and will refer back to clause 34 of Part 3 of the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill which I commented on earlier. I will pick up where I left off on that. I have a couple of comments I would like to make. Before I do I will clear away one thing so that we do not have to revisit it because I think it is rather unedifying for this House. There are various forms of ad hominem attacks and I took some exception to the Minister in the chair casting a slight—an aspersion—on the Green Party’s co-leader Russel Norman who asked a question in the House in good faith today. That question pertained to a conflict of interest and I would like the Minister and his colleagues to accept the fact that any Opposition member in this House does have the right to ask a question pertaining to conflict of interest which is a constitutional precept embedded in this democracy. 
To conclude on that point I find it somewhat gratuitous of the Minister to offer his view of what the Green Party’s previous co-leader might have to think about the standards of this party. Our co-leaders both previous and present aspire to the highest standards. I know them very well all three whom I do know: the two current co-leaders and Jeanette Fitzsimons. I do not think this party needs to take advice from this Minister about the standards that the Green Party is aspiring to attain. If he continues to do it then he would invite me and others but particularly me to rank this Minister in terms of integrity and dignity in the context of some of his predecessors some of whom I know very well indeed. 
On a more positive note I would like the Minister to address one thing that has not come out in the debate to date. That is the following: I presume that the Creech report and the Minister’s judgment about the Environment Canterbury regional council are not based in any way on a judgment pertaining to the individual capabilities competence or integrity of those councillors. It is to do with something else. I think it would clear the air a little bit if we could invite the Minister to make a statement to that effect. Correct me if I am wrong but I have not seen it made before. I know at least half of the councillors and I have a high regard for each of them as individuals. They have done good work and if they are to be disbanded for whatever reason—and we can debate the reasons here—then I think it is incumbent on the Minister and the rest of us to acknowledge the individual competence and good work they have each done. 
The Minister was wont just a moment ago to refer to the Canterbury Water Management Strategy and he complained that the Labour members had misunderstood the point. As he put it the natural resources management strategy has been in place for the better part of 18 years and there is no water management plan coming out; therefore that is the principal reason the criterion for disbanding the council. I remind the Minister that the National Government back in 1991 introduced the Resource Management Act. Exactly 18 years later another National Government its successor amended the Act. Clearly the Act was not perfect at the very beginning. Does that require that we disband this Government? It is the same period of time. 
I spoke earlier about the deadlines that Environment Canterbury was meant to meet and failed to meet in producing the water management plan. That appears to be the principal reason that Environment Canterbury is being disbanded. I identified the fact that out of 15 regional and unitary councils six of them did not have complete water management plans established. Three have not done any one has made a statement and two others have simply introduced water management plans in part only. So where does that leave us in terms of time frame? One of the issues we have to look at is the various sizes of the irrigation responsibilities regional council by regional council. 
I can offer statistics for the Minister and he is free to correct them if he thinks they are different. These are the statistics we have gathered and they are the following. Of the irrigation undertaken in New Zealand 62 percent comes from Canterbury 17 percent comes from Otago and the rest account for 5 percent or less. So there is this huge differentiation. If we put Canterbury and Otago together it is 79 percent of irrigation which is huge. So it is important to regard those two regions more or less as separate and unique compared with the others. But as I say some of the others have not achieved the stated goal the criterion by which the Minister is disbanding Environment Canterbury. Let us look at them and have regard to what fate may lie in store for them. 
We find that Marlborough has 3 percent of irrigation. It has a plan in part only. We have Tasman which has 2 percent of irrigation. It has not yet introduced Part 5 of its plan. When run together those two councils represent 5 percent of New Zealand’s irrigation. I ask the Minister what we are to do with those. Let us put a deadline on those two regional councils to complete their work let us say by 30 June this year the failure of which would require that they be disbanded and we can introduce an unelected commission. We find Gisborne which has 0.4 percent of irrigation. Let us give it a deadline of 30 June. It has made a statement only. Let it translate that statement into a water management plan by 30 June failing which it will be disbanded. Auckland is responsible for 0.2 percent of the country’s irrigation. It is tiny. But we know what is happening to Auckland so let us give the super-city an extension. Let us give it to 1 April 2011 to introduce a water management plan failing which we will have to disband the super-city and return to the status quo ante. 
My favourite is the West Coast. The West Coast is responsible for 0.37 percent of the nation’s irrigation. Members may think that is trifling but I suggest that it is an onerous responsibility on the West Coast to draw up a water management plan. I think we should give it only 5 months—until 31 August 2010. Failure to have a complete integrated water management plan in place by 31 August requires that it be disbanded. It should not be beyond our competence collectively watching this Government in action to ensure that in addition to Canterbury the other five regional councils will go under the guillotine no later than 1 April 2011. Thank you. 
CHRIS TREMAIN (Senior Whip—National) 
: 
 I move  
That the question be now put 
. 
CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South) 
: 
 I rise to speak on Part 3 of the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill. I think there is a very important question to be asked: who is next? I know that a number of my colleagues have asked that question. The provisions in Part 3 are around the moratoria and water conservation orders and I want to touch on water conservation orders in my speech. 
Before I do that I want to refer to a written question that Dr Russel Norman asked of the Prime Minister on 9 February this year in which he asked: “In what regions of the South Island does he expect to see new water storage schemes built next year?”. The answer from the Prime Minister was: “Canterbury and potentially Otago.” I think that gives me the right to stand here today and ask who is next. Are the people of Otago about to have a local authority shake-up as well; and if so will they be consulted? 
Last year on 13 May I spoke in this House on an amendment to Part 3 of the Local Government (Auckland Reorganisation) Bill and I said to this House that I take democracy seriously. I said that what this Government was doing was not democratic and that many of the people of New Zealand who were watching and listening were thinking the same thing. They are thinking that as we speak today. In May last year I gave the Auckland super-city bill the title “Local Government (We’ll do whatever we like because we can and we’ll be doing it to the rest of the country) Bill”. 
Colin King 
: That’s a long title. 
CLARE CURRAN 
: It is a long title but I think it is a correct title and it seems that I was right about the Auckland bill and I am about this bill. I ask the Minister to reassure the people of Otago that they will not be next. I stand here as the member for Dunedin South representing 59442 constituents of whom I am very proud. I welcome the fact that in my electorate there is a strong and active local authority the Dunedin City Council with 14 elected councillors. The Otago Regional Council has 11 councillors and it is a strong council. Dunedin South is a long way from Auckland but we are not so far from Christchurch. 
I believe that my constituents are united on this issue in what they want and expect from their elected representatives. They want to be listened to consulted and to have a voice. The people of Canterbury do not have a voice in this process. The question is whether the abolition of more councils is on the agenda. Will there be a merger of councils with no consultation with the people of New Zealand to create super-councils that remove people’s rights to local representation? Is the Otago Regional Council for the chop? 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: No. 
CLARE CURRAN 
: I am pleased to hear that that is on the record. 
I want to repeat what I said 10 months ago in this Chamber when I painted a picture in the minds of members and in the minds of all the good New Zealanders who were listening and watching Parliament with a sense of increasing horror. Those people are contacting me in my electorate office and in my office in Parliament about the trampling of the rights of all New Zealanders. That picture is of a bulldozer—a big bulldozer—because this Government is bulldozing the rights of Aucklanders and ultimately the rights of all New Zealanders. If the Minister has given the answer “No” to Otago will the Minister given the answer “No” to Wellington and to other regions around New Zealand? 
From time to time central government may be required to step in and remove recalcitrant councillors and I think that members on this side of the Chamber would agree with that but no one would expect that the people of Canterbury would not have the opportunity to re-elect their representatives at the earliest available opportunity. One would think that the local body elections that are scheduled in 6 months’ time would be a fair and reasonable time for the people of Canterbury to elect representatives. 
COLIN KING (National—Kaikoura) 
: 
 I move  
That the question be now put 
. 
Hon SHANE JONES (Labour) 
: 
 Thank you Mr Chairperson for that very sensible call on your part. This is the first time as a consequence of being dragged away on other business that I have had a chance to reflect on this very ugly example of the denial of the democratic rights of our people in the Canterbury region. At the pith of resource management in New Zealand has been a marriage between participatory democracy and resource management and this bill especially Part 3 fits a broader story. The story is to strip step by step decisions made by democratically elected representatives delegated down to officers and move it more into a corporate style of resource management. 
I need look no further than clause 36 “Power to end moratorium” and no doubt a moratorium will be in place as the burgeoning number of farmer-based applications come to the fore. This is actually a day where the current Government is rewarding its power base—that is those members of that particular economic cluster otherwise known as the farming community who have continued to treat water as a free unlimited resource. Obviously once this moratorium comes off—and it will come off; I see that the Minister has the power to direct the commissioners to end the moratorium—the Minister will be under enormous pressure enormous incentive to open up that valuable source of wealth to the investors in that area. But that is judging the moratorium decision only in a very narrow way. It fits a broader picture—that is to move more decisions away from local and regional government and put them in the Environmental Protection Authority; to move more decisions away from the area of Tamaki-makau-rau and give them to shadowy non-accountable corporate directors. 
Underlying this change is not really a concern about the environment; underlying this change is a loss of confidence by the current Government in that system of governance—that is in relying on those members of the public who step up and undertake democratic obligations only to have the ground cut from beneath them. It might be said that they have been an abject failure and they have to go. In actual fact the failure here is the existence of unelected and non-accountable commissioners who will actually end up doing the bidding of central government. So the failure is that there is no more confidence on the part of these Ministers in that tenet of local government—democracy where people in a certain region are entitled to elect their members and make resource management decisions that reflect the preferences of the region. 
That idea is deeply embedded in our system of governance in New Zealand so it would be fantastic to hear from the Minister in the chair the Hon Dr Nick Smith as to why when and how that power will be used when he or she overrides the commissioners. The narrative as outlined by Gerry Brownlee by the Prime Minister and by Mr David Carter—I have nothing to add other than what the Greens have said about Mr Carter—informs us that water is to be unblocked and used exclusively for an economic purpose that is the provision of goods and services from the application of water. No sensible participant in this debate wants to see the economy shrivel but the fear is that the unmitigated arrival of new applications over time will see a further degradation of quality. 
We cannot rely on those advocates from the farming community who influence and drive the decision makers in this Government. They have demonstrated through the Dairying and Clean Streams Accord that the modest progress that has been made is actually undermined by a deeper attitude. That attitude has been seen today in Manawatu and in other parts of the country. It seems to me that the overarching sense of their entitlement in this area—to treat water as a free good but have no obligations to the rest of society—will be exposed. 
CHRIS TREMAIN (Senior Whip—National) 
: 
 I move  
That the question be now put 
. 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That the question be now put. 
Ayes 68 
New Zealand National 58; ACT New Zealand 5; Maori Party 4; United Future 1. 
Noes 53 
New Zealand Labour 43; Green Party 9; Progressive 1. 
Motion agreed to. 
The question was put that the following amendment in the name of the Hon Ruth Dyson to Part 3 be agreed to: 
to insert the following new cross heading and clause: 
Canterbury Water Management Strategy zone committees 
45AZone committees to be elected 
(1)This section provides that the zone committees in the Canterbury Water Management Strategy must be elected by a poll of electors. 
(2)Elections for the zone committee positions must be held on the third Saturday in October 2010 as if the zone committees are community boards within the meaning of the Local Government Act 2002. 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That the amendment be agreed to. 
Ayes 53 
New Zealand Labour 43; Green Party 9; Progressive 1. 
Noes 68 
New Zealand National 58; ACT New Zealand 5; Maori Party 4; United Future 1. 
Amendment not agreed to. 
The question was put that the following amendment in the name of the Hon Lianne Dalziel to Part 3 be agreed to: 
to omit Subpart 3. 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That the amendment be agreed to. 
Ayes 53 
New Zealand Labour 43; Green Party 9; Progressive 1. 
Noes 68 
New Zealand National 58; ACT New Zealand 5; Maori Party 4; United Future 1. 
Amendment not agreed to. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch) 
: The amendment in the name of Dr Russel Norman to omit Subpart 3 has been ruled out of order because it is the same in substance as the earlier amendment. 
The question was put that the following amendments in the name of the Hon Ruth Dyson to Part 3 be agreed to: 
to omit clause 46(4); and 
to omit clause 47(2). 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That the amendments be agreed to. 
Ayes 53 
New Zealand Labour 43; Green Party 9; Progressive 1. 
Noes 68 
New Zealand National 58; ACT New Zealand 5; Maori Party 4; United Future 1. 
Amendments not agreed to. 
The question was put that the following amendment in the name of the Hon Ruth Dyson to clause 50 be agreed to: 
to insert after subclause (3)(b) the following paragraphs: 
“(c)the ecological recreational scientific cultural or spiritual value of waters; or 
“(d)the value of waters as a fishery or as habitat for terrestrial or aquatic organisms; or 
“(e)characteristics which any water body has or contributes to and which are considered to be of outstanding significance in accordance with tikanga Maori.” 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That the amendment be agreed to. 
Ayes 53 
New Zealand Labour 43; Green Party 9; Progressive 1. 
Noes 68 
New Zealand National 58; ACT New Zealand 5; Maori Party 4; United Future 1. 
Amendment not agreed to. 
The question was put that the following amendment in the name of the Hon Ruth Dyson to clause 52 be agreed to: 
to omit this clause. 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That the amendment be agreed to. 
Ayes 53 
New Zealand Labour 43; Green Party 9; Progressive 1. 
Noes 68 
New Zealand National 58; ACT New Zealand 5; Maori Party 4; United Future 1. 
Amendment not agreed to. 
The question was put that the following amendment in the name of the Hon Ruth Dyson to clause 58 be agreed to: 
to omit this clause. 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That the amendment be agreed to. 
Ayes 53 
New Zealand Labour 43; Green Party 9; Progressive 1. 
Noes 68 
New Zealand National 58; ACT New Zealand 5; Maori Party 4; United Future 1. 
Amendment not agreed to. 
The question was put that the following amendment in the name of the Hon Ruth Dyson to Part 3 be agreed to: 
to omit clauses 64 to 68. 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That the amendment be agreed to. 
Ayes 53 
New Zealand Labour 43; Green Party 9; Progressive 1. 
Noes 68 
New Zealand National 58; ACT New Zealand 5; Maori Party 4; United Future 1. 
Amendment not agreed to. 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That Part 3 be agreed to. 
Ayes 68 
New Zealand National 58; ACT New Zealand 5; Maori Party 4; United Future 1. 
Noes 53 
New Zealand Labour 43; Green Party 9; Progressive 1. 
Part 3 agreed to. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch) 
: New Part 4 proposed by the Hon Ruth Dyson is ruled out of order because the subject matter it contains relates to Part 2 and should have been proposed at the time the Committee was considering Part 2. 
Schedule 1 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That schedule 1 be agreed to. 
Ayes 68 
New Zealand National 58; ACT New Zealand 5; Maori Party 4; United Future 1. 
Noes 53 
New Zealand Labour 43; Green Party 9; Progressive 1. 
Schedule 1 agreed to. 
Schedule 2 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That schedule 2 be agreed to. 
Ayes 68 
New Zealand National 58; ACT New Zealand 5; Maori Party 4; United Future 1. 
Noes 53 
New Zealand Labour 43; Green Party 9; Progressive 1. 
Schedule 2 agreed to. 
Clauses 1 and 2 
BRENDON BURNS (Labour—Christchurch Central) 
: 
 I shall talk about the title of the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill. It is an oxymoron at the very least because it is not “temporary”; commissioners are being put in place for the next 3½ years. That is a very very long stretch of time. It is longer than the term of a Parliament. It is longer than the term of a local body in office. It is not temporary at all; the bill is totally misnamed in referring to temporary commissioners. 
The second thing relates to the improved water management. I ask how it will deliver that promise when it bases itself on and includes in schedule 1 the excellent visions and principles of the Canterbury Water Management Strategy. That strategy was patiently negotiated in a roundtable consensus by good people in Canterbury giving every commitment to a sustainable management outcome. That in fact is the primary principle enshrined in that schedule. It talks about water being a public resource not one there for private gain without recourse to environmental outcomes. It enshrines as its first priority the environment. Only in second order does it come to uses such as irrigation and electricity. I note from that that schedule 2 refers to a cautious approach. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch) 
: I remind the member that we are not debating the schedules; we have voted on those. We are on the title. 
BRENDON BURNS 
: The title includes reference to the water management strategy. The document is embodied within the title. 
The point I want to particularly make is that this bill is entitled the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioner and Improved Water Management) Bill. There is no legal body entitled Environment Canterbury. Environment Canterbury is actually the trading name of the Canterbury Regional Council. It is the name that the public knows it by but it is not the name of the organisation. In fact the name of the regional council is the Canterbury Regional Council. That is its legal status that is its legal name and I suggest that at the very least this bill has been shoddily drafted. I ask the Minister in the chair the Hon Nathan Guy to tell me how we can have a bill named after a trading name when in fact it is not the legal name of the entity involved. Environment Canterbury is not the entity involved; it is simply the name the public knows the Canterbury Regional Council by. It is not its legal name so how can we as this bill does do away with the functions of elected councillors of Environment Canterbury as it is named in the title of this bill when in fact the name of the entity is the Canterbury Regional Council? The Minister needs to address this issue urgently because— 
Paul Quinn 
: Why? 
BRENDON BURNS 
: I am raising the question. I am no lawyer but I think this is a very relevant question for the Minister to urgently address. 
Paul Quinn 
: He’s allowed to rename it. 
BRENDON BURNS 
: He can rename it if he wants to. It will be another indication of the shoddy and rushed nature of this bill if the Minister is forced to do that at the 11th hour and 59th minute under urgency because he is not competent enough to see through a bill using the proper name and title. If that is the case it is a further black mark for this Minister. It is absolutely a further black mark because it is reprehensible legislation whatever its title is; it does away with the right of people in Canterbury to elect their regional councillors for the Canterbury Regional Council. 
The bill is now named as the Environment Canterbury bill. It is inappropriately named because that is the trading name of the organisation; it is not the legal name of the organisation. It is another example of the Government’s shoddy rapid-fire approach signalling its desire simply to get in place rapid new water management. It does not care what it does it does not care what democratic principle it steps over; it will do anything it can to deliver fast new water so that it can have quick runs on the board in the run-up to the next election. The architect of that strategy is entering the Chamber. There will be quick runs except when it comes to superannuation card changes then there is quick reverse—but that is another issue. This bill is inappropriately titled. Environment Canterbury is not the organisation that should be in the title of this bill; it is the Canterbury Regional Council. 
Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister for the Environment) 
: 
 Here we have it. The big king-hit from the Labour Opposition is that the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill should actually be called the “Canterbury Regional Council (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill”. That is what the previous speaker Brendon Burns is arguing. I refer the member to the definition in clause 4 which has a very bold statement that will come as an enormous surprise to members of the Chamber. It states: “Environment Canterbury or ECan means the Canterbury Regional Council constituted by the Local Government (Canterbury Regional) Reorganisations Order 1989”. Is it not extraordinary that the one big objection that Labour has to this bill is its name? 
I simply say that we are a common-sense Government. What do people in Canterbury refer to this agency as? They refer to it as Environment Canterbury. 
Brendon Burns 
: They refer to you as a lot of things. 
Hon Dr NICK SMITH 
: I say to Mr Burns that we have other legislation in respect of accident compensation. Do members know what Labour members called that? They called it the Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Act even though during Labour’s time in Government injury prevention and rehabilitation got worse. But we have a very common sense approach and we give bills names that our constituents know. Environment Canterbury is what this agency is known as and it is perfectly proper and absolutely sensible that this bill refers to the name that the vast majority of the people of Canterbury would recognise as what we are dealing with in this bill. 
Dr KENNEDY GRAHAM (Green) 
: 
 I appreciate the Minister for the Environment’s attempt to give an explanation of the title of the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill. I know that this is not a massive issue but it should not be underrated because it has to do with normal drafting principles. Given that we have been strong on logic and illogicality today I do think there is a problem because the definition in the interpretation clause that the Minister has read out does not come into effect until the moment that the legislation is adopted. So we have a catch 22 in logic; we have a problem. We cannot disband Environment Canterbury until we have renamed it. We have to change the name first to Canterbury Regional Council—[ 
Interruption 
] Let us just clear this up then we can move on to more important things. In fact there have been more than a few king-hits on other issues today but let us just clear this one up. We actually need to pass two separate pieces of legislation. We have to have one piece in which the interpretation clause states that henceforth Canterbury Regional Council is to be called Environment Canterbury for the purposes of future legislation before we can adopt the legislation with that name in its title. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East) 
: 
 I apologise for my late call; I had not realised that the previous speaker Dr Kennedy Graham was going resume his seat so quickly. I want to make a preliminary comment on the title of the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill because when I referred earlier in the Committee stage to the regulatory impact statement—which is relevant to all aspects of this bill including the title clause and commencement provisions—I said that statement had not been tabled in the House. I apologise to members for saying that because of course it was tabled in the House as a result of a new procedure that has been in place only this year. I have discovered that although the Government made the very stupid decision to take regulatory impact statements out of bills it has decided that when a bill is being debated under urgency the regulatory impact statement will be tabled in the House. But the Government did not tell anyone about that; nobody was informed that this was a new process. So I apologise for saying the regulatory impact statement had not been tabled but I do not apologise for my reference to the utter stupidity of the Government’s saying it is interested in regulatory reform when a regulatory impact statement is now no longer published with the bill itself. 
It is absolutely vital that people acknowledge— 
The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch) 
: The debate is on the title. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: The regulatory impact statement is entirely relevant to both the title and the commencement date which is— 
The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch) 
: Clause 1—the title. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: We are only up to clause 1. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch) 
: Clause 1 only. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: Clause 1 is the title. What I have a problem with—and this is mentioned in the regulatory impact statement—is that the title “Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Act 2010” has a problem in it. It says “Temporary Commissioners”. That may be a misnomer or it may not be— 
The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch) 
: My apologies. I said we are on clause 1; we are actually on clauses 1 and 2. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: That is what I had thought. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch) 
: My apologies. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: I was referring to the commencement date as well as to the title. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch) 
: I will take that into account. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: I am sorry. I was referring to the regulatory impact statement having an impact on both the title and the commencement of the bill which is what I said earlier on. I withdraw my apologies for getting that wrong but the point I want to make is that the title refers to “Temporary Commissioners” so there is the whole question of what this legislation is intended to lead to. The use of the words “Temporary Commissioners” makes it sound as though the only purpose of the legislation is to fill a temporary period of time between the sacking of Environment Canterbury as we know it today and the appointment of these commissioners on a temporary basis in order to improve water management. That is the way I read the title of the legislation. 
But when we read the regulatory impact analysis—and the Minister in the chair the Hon Dr Nick Smith still has not addressed this issue—we discover that in fact a bit of an experiment is going on in Canterbury. The analysis states: “However … because any national level decisions … have the potential to undermine the government’s New Start for Freshwater policy programme and the work of the Land and Water Forum it is considered preferable for any intervention to have a narrow Canterbury-specific focus”—which it does in the title of this bill; it refers to Environment Canterbury—“in the first instance.” The language “in the first instance” suggests that this measure is not temporary in the sense that we would normally take into account. This is temporary in the sense that it is the forerunner of something else that is to come and that is not a return to Environment Canterbury. I bet anything one likes that when we get all of the background documentation behind this set of decisions we will find out that there is more to this than meets the eye. 
Here is the big whammy as far as the regulator impact statement goes: this report states that “The results of any intervention”—that is here in Canterbury—“could provide useful information for decision-makers on the outcomes of the New Start for Freshwater policy programme and potentially an opportunity to trial alternative policy settings in a confined context.” We are being trialled here; we are trialling alternative policy settings. We have called this bill the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill but we do not know what that will mean in the long term because it is quite clear that we are trialling alternative policy settings in the confined context of Canterbury. I ask what that will mean for the rest of the country. What will it mean for other regions? What will it mean in terms of all the other issues that were raised in the report of Wyatt Creech but that we have not had the opportunity to fully debate in this Chamber as we have gone through this part by part debate? 
I think these are extremely serious issues that the Minister ought to address even in the context at this late stage of the debate on the title and the commencement date of this legislation. 
Hon SHANE JONES (Labour) 
: 
 I am grateful for the opportunity to add to the great speeches from this side of the Chamber and to isolate yet another egregious example of the errors that riddle the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill. I draw members’ attention to the misnamed proposed bill in front of us. It unwisely uses the word “Improved”. I wonder whether it is a spelling mistake or whether we ought to be dealing with improvidence. The notion that the bill will ameliorate minimise or reduce the negative externalities surrounding the wholesale slaughter of that valuable water resource by the friends of the National Government shows that the word “Improved” cannot stand— 
Paul Quinn 
: Shane I can’t understand you. One syllable words mate. 
Hon SHANE JONES 
: I know that self-improvement is needed by that member over there but for fear of inviting an unnecessary level of criticism by the Chair I will overlook his many failings in other places. 
I will come back to why the Minister is so insistent on selling a series of broken dreams to the people who will suffer the burden and pay the costs for this misnamed legislation. When we think of an improvement we are dwelling upon the way in which society can derive maximum benefit in terms of the water resource through this legislation with its ill-fitting name. It cannot stand that the bill ought to be seen as an example of improvement because there will be no improvement in the standards of local democracy. There will be no improvement in relation to the efficiency or the transparency of how a valuable resource will be used in that area so the word “Improved” cannot be applied to that part of the agenda. It will not remind the people from that part of the country how valuable the multi-faceted nature of the rivers— 
Paul Quinn 
: Oh what does that mean? 
Hon SHANE JONES 
: I cannot be held responsible for the absence of an education for the rowdiest member on the Government side of the Chamber; that lies with Anne Tolley. If she could apply her standards to Paul Quinn a few of us might start to take her a bit more seriously. 
However I come back to the name of this legislation. I warn the Minister and in the gentlest of terms I remind the backers of the current Government—who have driven Ministers to take this very dangerous step so that the backers can maximise the exploitation of water for their narrow self-centred purposes—that improvement relates to better stewardship of water. Management is too narrow a term; we are talking about stewardship. I will come to management shortly because there are outstanding issues on which the Committee is required to give due consideration. Unless the values associated with aesthetic ecological and cultural interests are considered and not just the narrow commercial bank-driven pressures that so many of our folk in the farming sector are facing in that part of the country the word “Improved” cannot be allowed to stand. Through this legislation it represents absolutely no positive impact in terms of those other types of interests and values which cannot be monetised. In that sense this legislation is grossly ill-named. 
Let me come to commencement. The Minister needs to acknowledge that the commencement of this legislation foul though the legislation is—we will hold the architects responsible next year; we will ensure that the voters who have been completely stripped of any opportunity to participate unless they are well-heeled supporters of the current Government will have participation opportunities—will not come to pass until the Minister uses his regulatory power. When the Minister starts to use that level of regulatory power there will be only the flimsiest of opportunities for full democratic oversight to be visited upon the Minister’s decisions. So it is not correct for us to allow this commencement section to stand as it is because there is no way of assuaging the deep anxieties there in Canterbury in Te Wai Pounamu as to when this ill-conceived and mean-spirited strike at the heart of our citizens’ rights in that part of the country will commence. There is no way whereby people can be informed through either the mass media or this House about when they will feel the fangs of the friends of the National Government sucking as much water as possible for their narrow dangerous and exclusive purposes. 
This commencement section needs to isolate the time when the Minister imagines himself or herself enacting the necessary regulations to bring these odious provisions into law. I ask when the provisions will be operationalised because the point at which they are operationalised is the time when there will be a call to step up to the plate and protect the resources of this area. We will not know when that regulatory power will be exercised. The families communities and all varieties of stakeholders in that part of the country will not be given as they are in this Chamber an opportunity through their proxies to debate the issue of commencement. It will happen in a very surreptitious and sneaky way in some concealed room near the offices of the current Minister so the commencement provision for these new rules to be imposed on the community is a very sad example of what should have been a transparent and candid display in this Committee. It might be said that that is a very trivial matter and it might be said that that is a minute part of the legislation but people need the certainty to know when they will see their water handed over to the very narrow ill-defined shadowy group of supporters of the current Government that has forced it to overthrow democracy. As a standard of parliamentary democracy it is important that this piece of information is inserted into the legislation; although the addition of the Royal assent in the legislative route is very important the most important thing is actually the time when the Minister through the Order in Council will enact the regulations. 
Although it does not bring any great honour to us as parliamentarians it falls upon us to point out yet another error in this legislation. That lies in the fact that once we focus on the legislation as being hopelessly misnamed we also focus on the fact that the point at which it will become operational is now hidden from the public. This is all about hiding things. This is all about concealing an allocation debate and concealing private property rights away from the democratic glare. Anyone using water ought to be required to face the full glare of a transparent resource management process. Given that improvement will not take place when water is at stake the management will be furtive. The process will be undertaken by clandestine forces that fear democracy. These new commissioners—we do not entirely know who they are other than knowing about Dame Margaret Bazley—will be asked to undertake something in this legislation that will not lead to broad environmental improvement. 
Adding the notion of environment and improvement together I say that we will not get the right result through this piece of legislation. This bill is designed to manage an improvement for a very narrow range of specific stakeholders. It concerns a very narrow range of interest not the common interest. For those reasons I tell members that both of these provisions should not stand. Kia ora tatou. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East) 
: 
 I wanted to take the opportunity for a further call on the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill due to Rodney Hide now being the Minister in the chair. As he is the other Minister responsible for this area of the legislation I felt it was important that I ask him to take the opportunity to respond to whether he now thinks it is a good idea to have the regulatory impact statement separate from the bill itself. This regulatory impact statement is totally relevant to both the title and the commencement date—both of these issues are touched on in the regulatory impact statement—and this is a very very clear example of why we need to have the regulatory impact statement included with the bill itself. 
On this particular occasion as I discovered subsequently regulatory impact statements are required to be tabled by the Bills Office essentially because we are in urgency and some MPs will not have time to go back to their offices and download them from the Treasury website before a bill is debated in the House. This is entirely unsatisfactory and would not have arisen as an issue if the Minister had not demanded to have the regulatory impact statements removed from the bills themselves. I have never heard the Minister explain why he took this decision to Cabinet. It is such a detrimental approach. I do not know whether the Minister has read the regulatory impact statement for this bill but the following statements “proposals to replace the elected Councillors for all of ECan’s functions” which is what the title of the bill is about and “suspend local body elections or remove the right of appeal on the NRRP or Water conservation orders except on points of law” really concerned me and I thought would have concerned him too. The departments themselves said: “These proposals appear to present a prima facie access to justice issue and some departments were concerned that this may not be consistent with the Government’s statement on regulation: ‘better regulation less regulation’ which requires a particularly strong case [to be] made for any regulatory proposals that are likely to override fundamental common law principles.” This bill overrides fundamental common law principles. The Minister is silent on that point and the title Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill does not indicate that many people had concerns that there was an overriding of fundamental common law principles. I raise a point of order Mr Chairman. The Minister whose name the bill is in is back in the Chamber and I thought it was a requirement that he sit in the chair when he is in the Chamber. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch) 
: The Minister can decide who sits in the chair at the time but I understand the Minister has come back to retrieve some papers. If he intends to stay then he needs to be sitting in the chair. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: I wanted the Minister in the chair to respond to this question of the impact of the kind of decision making that has led to this bill being called the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill and of course its commencement date. The commencement date bothers me a lot. The bill states: “The Act comes into force on the day after the date on which it receives the Royal assent.” But we heard from the Minister yesterday that this bill is expected to be done and dusted by 1 May. 
Do members know what the implementation date was in the regulatory impact statement? It was 1 April—April Fool’s Day. That was the original date on which the Government had planned to have this bill come into effect not 1 May. So we are an entire month out from the original plan. In fact this bill was supposed to have been passed on 15 March. What is the date today? It is 30 March. No it is actually 31 March everywhere else in New Zealand except here in Parliament because of the irony or— 
Colin King 
: Process. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: The process of urgency somehow makes the parliamentary clock stop and it has stopped on 30 March. But according to the regulatory impact statement 15 March was the date on which the Government was supposed to progress this legislation through Parliament. This is what bothers me. The regulatory impact statement should be an integral part of the debate on this legislation; it is absolutely fundamental. None of the stuff that we have discovered by reading the regulatory impact statement was mentioned in either of the Ministers’ speeches or any of the Government members’ speeches on this bill. We have not had a proper debate on the elements of the bill that actually matter. 
The other point perhaps the Hon Rodney Hide might like to hear from the regulatory impact statement is this: “Options that rely on introducing legislation in a very short timeframe increase the risk of poor or misdirected intervention resulting in unintended consequences and the need for subsequent intervention to remedy these consequences.” That is exactly what is wrong with this process. It is not a robust process and there will be a price to pay. 
Hon RODNEY HIDE (Minister of Local Government) 
: 
 I am very happy to reply to the points made by the Hon Lianne Dalziel on the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill particularly about the regulatory impact statement process. I am sorry I had thought I had explained that to the member but I will explain it for the Committee. I have huge respect for Lianne Dalziel and the regulatory impact work that she did as the previous Minister of Commerce. Indeed the bill that I have later on under the urgency motion is virtually entirely her work which I am carrying on. 
Let me explain to members the separation of the regulatory impact statement process from the bill. This was not done lightly or for capricious reasons. It was because we have a harder hitting regulatory impact statement process as a result which is able to be commented on and actually gets what the departments think. The difficulty that I discovered when I became the Minister for Regulatory Reform was that because regulatory impact statements are attached to the bill they were seen by the department as belonging to the Minister. The view was that the regulatory impact statement was the Minister’s and the department would write a regulatory impact statement reflecting what the Minister wanted. I was very keen that we have a regulatory impact statement process that is a step removed away from the Minister so that Ministers have to get up and explain their reasoning for their bill and the regulatory impact statement is a technical analysis of the impacts of the bill. 
I wanted the departments to sign off on the regulatory impact statements. They were quite resistant to doing that and I discovered that it was because they felt a divided loyalty. On the one hand they were working for the Minister to promote what the Minister wanted then on the other hand I wanted them to write an independent report about what they thought of the bill. The matter was resolved with the chief executives and the policy advisers by separating the two out so that the regulatory impact statement would belong to the department and the bill itself would belong to the Minister. Then the departments could write an independent impact statement which the Ministers would have to get up to defend. I fully accept the Hon Lianne Dalziel’s point that the difficulty then is the availability to members of Parliament. I think we need to figure out a way around that. But I ask members to bear with me and consider the importance of having a harder hitting impact statement that Ministers have to get up to defend and an impact statement that clearly Ministers cannot direct on. So that was the logic of it; I hope it makes sense. 
JOHN BOSCAWEN (ACT) 
: 
 We are debating the name of this bill the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill. The Hon Shane Jones said that we are talking about water and about how valuable water is. He went on to say that the people of Canterbury will not be aware of just how valuable this resource is. I will suggest some alternative names for this bill that might reinforce to the people of Canterbury and indeed reinforce to the people of New Zealand just how valuable water is. We know that water is absolutely valuable for our agricultural industries. It is absolutely valuable for creating wealth for New Zealand. If we are to improve living conditions in New Zealand we need to take every opportunity to allow our industry to grow and develop. 
So let us look at alternative names for this bill. Rather than the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill let us call it the “Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Valuable Valuable Water Management) Bill.” Why not call it the “Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Windfall Profits from Water Management) Bill”? The reason I ask that is that water is a very integral part of electricity generation. We have water passing through the Waitaki River scheme through a number of dams generating renewable energy. 
From 1 July this year the emissions trading scheme comes into force. That will create windfall profits for Meridian Energy and a number of other generators. It will create windfall profits and the value of the water that flows through the Waitaki River scheme will be so much more. It will be very valuable. We saw evidence of that today when Meridian Energy announced that it was paying a $98.5 million dividend to the Government. That is right just this very day Meridian Energy announced a $98.5 million dividend substantially from the water that flows through the Waitaki River scheme. From 1 July both sides of this House are very happy for all New Zealanders to have to pay an extra 5 percent for their electricity. 
Brendon Burns 
: I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. I am struggling to connect the relevance of the issues of the Waitaki and Meridian Energy’s power price rise or profit announcement to the short title of this bill. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy) 
: I am going to uphold the point of order. The member should return to the subject material: clauses 1 and 2. 
JOHN BOSCAWEN 
: I would be very happy to do that but I thought I was speaking on the subject of this bill because this bill is called the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill. We heard earlier from Mr Shane Jones that it did not highlight to the people just how valuable this resource was. I was suggesting an alternative name for this bill: the “Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Windfall Profits from Water Management) Bill”. I say that simply because from 1 July companies such as Genesis will add a 5 percent increase to their power prices because they produce power from coal and gas. They will have to pay an emissions trading scheme tax. As a consequence of that Meridian Energy will also get the benefit of that extra 5 percent increase without paying the tax and it will have windfall profits. We saw evidence of that in the dividend announcement today. Those dividends will no doubt grow even greater as years go on. 
So I suggest that this bill should be renamed the “Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Windfall Profits from Water Management) Bill”. 
Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills) 
: 
 Quite often in debates in the Chamber when we are talking about a bill’s title a number of innovative members get to their feet and give well-considered or poorly-considered alternative names. I commend the previous speaker John Boscawen—although frankly I think he spoke entire nonsense. He said some alternative names very eloquently but I did not agree with a single word of his speech. 
John Boscawen 
: I learnt a lot from Labour. 
Hon RUTH DYSON 
: That is excellent and to be honest Labour learns a lot from Mr Boscawen. 
The title of a bill is meant to represent the purpose of the bill so that members of the public can read it and say: “Now I know what that is about.” I think they would have quite a lot of confusion if they read the title of the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill. The first problem with it is the one that was identified briefly in the contribution of my colleague Brendon Burns the member of Parliament for Christchurch Central which is where the head office of Environment Canterbury is based. He alerted the Chamber to the fact that Environment Canterbury which is the name that is in the bill is actually the trading name of the organisation rather than the legal title. 
I will diverse momentarily from the strict debate on the title having been given that leadership from Mr Boscawen. The bill explains later on in Part 1 clause 4 “Interpretation” that “Environment Canterbury or ECan means the Canterbury Regional Council …”. However if we look strictly at the title we see that it looks quite sloppy. I think that of all Ministers Mr Hide is probably not very tolerant of sloppiness. I am sure not all Ministers are as lacking in tolerance of sloppiness as he may be. I think that had he been responsible for this legislation rather than the Hon Dr Nick Smith he would have preferred to say that we are talking about a legal entity. We are talking about taking away the elected representatives of the legal entity that is responsible for the statutory management of air natural resources water quality water management passenger transport and biodiversity in Canterbury. That is a huge range of statutory functions that the Canterbury Regional Council has so why do we not use its proper name in the title? 
It seems to be such a basic point that if we talk about gutting an organisation taking away the democratic right to vote of every single citizen of Canterbury and taking away our democratic right to vote for our regional councillors the least the Minister could have done was to give that organisation the respect of referring to it in the title of this legislation by its proper legal name. It is not Environment Canterbury; it is the Canterbury Regional Council. We all call it “ECan”. The Minister could just have sloppily referred to it as “ECan.” That is the first message that I would like to give to the Chamber. I think it is disrespectful I think it shows a sign of sloppiness in the preparation of the legislation and I think it shows a lack of attention to detail and rigour on the part of the Minister none of which are attributes that I think this Committee would want to commend. 
The second point that I want to make refers to the words that are in brackets. I want to refer to just the first two words to start with and those are “Temporary Commissioners”. It has been very clear during this debate that there is nothing temporary about the commissioners taking up the responsibility of an alternative to our elected representatives. My colleague Lianne Dalziel referred to the regulatory impact statement which gave a strong indication that this is just the first step. It is the first step towards the total abolition of Environment Canterbury and the total abolition of our regional council. The council will be replaced by either the maintenance of commissioners performing those statutory roles which would be a total disaster for us or—and for the Minister who is in the chair Rodney Hide this is his dream come true—the abolition of the regional council and the amalgamation of its functions into the city councils and district councils in the area. I think that it is quite misrepresentative of the actual facts behind this debate to use the term “Temporary Commissioners”. 
The legislation states that the commissioners will go until the job is finished. It is really hard to work out from the rest of the legislation what one would define as “the job”. They are temporary because there is a provision in the law that states that we should have elections by 2013 but there is nothing at all to stop the Minister coming into this House after those elections in the same way he did yesterday and saying: “I have had enough. I will get rid of all the elected councillors. I will appoint seven commissioners one of whom I will give the House the courtesy of naming.” We know the name of only one of the seven temporary commissioners of the controlling body of our new organisation. We know the name of only one of them yet this bill is about to pass into law. Then Nick Smith said that in 3½ years time he will be generous enough to let Cantabrians have a vote again. “Thanks for nothing.” I say to Minister Smith. We want our vote this year. We want the right to vote for our regional authority this year. Implying that the commissioners are temporary positions gives us no confidence because we do not have any faith or trust in the Minister that this is not the start of the demise of the regional council. We have no that the assurances that are alluded to in this legislation—that we will get a vote in 3 years’ time—will come true. Even if they do there is no justification at all for this law being put into place. 
My final point is in relation to the last part of the words in brackets in the title which is “Improved Water Management”. Dr Smith and I had an interchange earlier in this debate about whether we had a water management strategy. To make it technically correct we could go as far as to say that we have two because there is a plan that was notified in 2005 and the fact that it has not yet been endorsed under all the Resource Management Act procedures does not make any difference to the way that water is managed in Canterbury. If the Minister had bothered to get any advice from his officials on that particular point rather than trying to find an excuse for his ideological push on this issue then he would have known that. But we also have the particular strategy that is alluded to in the title and that is the Canterbury Water Management Strategy. 
I would be interested in hearing from the Minister at some stage of the debate about how this bill was designed because it has quite an unusual layout and structure. In a very unusual move schedule 1 of the two schedules in the bill is the vision and principle of the  
Canterbury Water Management Strategy: Strategic Framework 
 in its entirety. Page 31 through to page 35 is concerned with just the Canterbury Water Management Strategy. The legislation outlines the principles of the Canterbury Water Management Strategy. The Minister said that it is so terrible that we do not have a water management strategy he has to sack all the democratically elected regional councillors and appoint seven commissioners. The Minister then went on to say they would be paid $2000 a day. I am really interested to know what Minister Hide thinks of the value of commissioners who are replacing elected regional councillors who will be paid $2000 a day and who will only perform the statutory functions of the Canterbury Regional Council. There will be no connection with the city and no connection with the community. The commissioners will do the minimum amount of work that is possible and they will receive $2000 a day compared with the $50000 a year that the elected councillors currently receive. 
The worst part of all this is not only that the Minister said he was sacking our councillors but also that he was appointing commissioners to do the job and putting in place a whole lot of avoidance of natural scrutiny and public input. He is doing it all under urgency with no select committee process no scrutiny at select committee and no right for the public to have their say. At the end the Minister said that on top of all this the ratepayers of Canterbury will pay the bill. We get to pay the $2000 a day consultancy fee for Dame Margaret Bazley et al when we did not even ask for them. We asked for our elected representatives to be maintained in those positions. We said there were many options for an extension of the work. We could have a commissioner coming in and working alongside them if that was the Minister’s desire. This is expensive undemocratic and wrong. 
JACQUI DEAN (National—Waitaki) 
: 
 I move  
That the question be now put 
. 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That the question be now put. 
Ayes 68 
New Zealand National 58; ACT New Zealand 5; Maori Party 4; United Future 1. 
Noes 53 
New Zealand Labour 43; Green Party 9; Progressive 1. 
Motion agreed to. 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That clause 1 be agreed to. 
Ayes 68 
New Zealand National 58; ACT New Zealand 5; Maori Party 4; United Future 1. 
Noes 53 
New Zealand Labour 43; Green Party 9; Progressive 1. 
Clause 1 agreed to. 
The question was put that the following amendment in the name of Phil Twyford to clause 2 be agreed to: 
to omit this clause and substitute the following new clause: 
2Commencement 
(1)Part 1 of this Act comes into force on 1 March 2011. 
(2)Parts 2 and 3 and Schedules 1 and 2 of this Act come into force on a date appointed by the Minister of Local Government by Order in Council in accordance with section 6A(4). 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That the amendment be agreed to. 
Ayes 53 
New Zealand Labour 43; Green Party 9; Progressive 1. 
Noes 68 
New Zealand National 58; ACT New Zealand 5; Maori Party 4; United Future 1. 
Amendment not agreed to. 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That clause 2 be agreed to. 
Ayes 68 
New Zealand National 58; ACT New Zealand 5; Maori Party 4; United Future 1. 
Noes 53 
New Zealand Labour 43; Green Party 9; Progressive 1. 
Clause 2 agreed to. 
House resumed. 
Bill reported without amendment. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy) 
: I move  
That the report be adopted 
. 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That the report be adopted. 
Ayes 68 
New Zealand National 58; ACT New Zealand 5; Maori Party 4; United Future 1. 
Noes 53 
New Zealand Labour 43; Green Party 9; Progressive 1. 
Report adopted. 
Third Reading 
Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister for the Environment) 
: 
 I move  
That the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill be now read a third time 
. I would like to begin by acknowledging the officials parliamentary counsel and particularly Rodney Hide the Minister of Local Government who has worked with me on this difficult issue. I also want to acknowledge the councillors and staff of Environment Canterbury and acknowledge that this has been a difficult period for them. It is my view that sometimes in politics we need to make difficult decisions and on this occasion it is my view that these are the right decisions. 
This bill is about delivering a step change in the management of water in Canterbury. In the last 18 years since the Resource Management Act provided the framework for managing our resources we have reached a point in Canterbury where there still is no plan for in my view New Zealand’s most important strategic resource and that is fresh water. Environment Canterbury has been unable to deliver a robust and effective framework for the management of natural resources and in my view that is holding back the region of Canterbury and New Zealand both economically and environmentally. I also note that Environment Canterbury’s relationship with the 10 territorial councils is at such a low— 
Hon Lianne Dalziel 
: The mayors not the council. 
Hon Dr NICK SMITH 
: I tell Lianne Dalziel that all 10 councils that I have personally visited have indicated support for the replacement of the regional council or Environment Canterbury with commissioners. There was also very broad consensus amongst the key stakeholders in Canterbury that action is needed. 
I acknowledge and I think my colleague Rodney Hide would acknowledge that when last October we sought a formal review of Environment Canterbury it was not our expectation that this would be the outcome. I expected that a lesser intervention might have been necessary but having received such a comprehensive report with very clear recommendations it would not— 
Hon Lianne Dalziel 
: It’s not comprehensive; it’s outrageous. 
Hon Dr NICK SMITH 
: I draw the member’s attention to the fact that Wyatt Creech Doug Martin Greg Hill and Doug Low are very respected individuals who were used by the previous Labour Government as well as by this Government in the review. What that review concluded was that there was an unprecedented gap between the issues that Environment Canterbury faced particularly in respect of water management and its capacity to act in that regard. I also note its very clear conclusion that failure to act would lead only to continued malaise around water management in Canterbury. The Government’s intervention is warranted; our response is measured it is reasonable and it is appropriate for the circumstances. 
To turn round Environment Canterbury does require a response from the Government. As I have said this is not a step we wanted to take but this decision represents the best chance to move water management in Canterbury forward. This intervention is not only in the interests of Canterbury’s environment economy but quite frankly it is also in the interests of all New Zealanders. The appointment of commissioners is an interim measure. Commissioners will be in place for only as long as they are needed to do the job. The legislation makes plain that the period at the very longest will extend to the 2013 local body election. This provides sufficient time to place Environment Canterbury on a firmer footing. 
The bill provides an obligation on the commissioners to seek the advice of and consult the mayors of Canterbury. That is an appropriate link back to those persons who will be democratically elected across the region of Canterbury in the local body elections this October. The terms of reference will also bind the commissioners so that they are required to consult Ngai Tahu and other key stakeholders on the issue of water resource management in Canterbury. I also note that all of the requirements of the Local Government Act and the Resource Management Act about the inclusion of and consultation with the people of Canterbury have been carried over in these decisions. 
A challenge was set down by the Labour environment spokesperson Shane Jones to be clear about what the provisions are in this bill that will improve the management of water in Canterbury and I want to go through the three of those quite explicitly. Firstly this bill provides for a targeted moratorium to be able to be placed in Canterbury where frankly there is no more water. I challenge members opposite to say whether they support that view or are opposed. 
Brendon Burns 
: We support it. 
Hon Dr NICK SMITH 
: It is clear that they support that measure. That is welcomed. It was asked of the previous Government by Environment Canterbury many years ago. I think we should at least accept that that is an improvement but Brendon Burns’ acknowledgment that that is a step forward is contradicted by his colleague Shane Jones who says there is nothing in this bill to improve water management in Canterbury. 
The second key provision in this bill is that we need to have a plan as quickly as possible for water management in Canterbury. That is why this bill enables the commissioners to fast track the completion of the natural resources plan and the regional policy statement for Canterbury. Again I say that that is a step forward; again I challenge both the Greens and Labour as to whether they support the measures in this bill to ensure that we have a plan in Canterbury for the management of water. 
The third key provisions in this bill that also improve water management are those in respect of integrating decisions on water conservation orders with those of the regional plan and having those decisions made by commissioners. Again I challenge members opposite to say how it makes sense for decisions around water conservation orders to be made by a separate group of people from those who are developing the regional plans. We are of a view that if we are to properly manage water in Canterbury it needs to be done in an integrated way and that is what this bill provides for. 
I have been disappointed in the debate on this bill that the major contribution from members opposite has been one of misinformation and personal denigration. For instance the latest is the claim made by Ruth Dyson that Margaret Bazley will be paid $2000 a day. I challenge the member: where has she got that information from? Why would she want to denigrate a person like Dame Margaret Bazley— 
Hon Ruth Dyson 
: How is that a personal denigration? 
Hon Dr NICK SMITH 
: I challenge Ruth Dyson to say where she got that information from. She just enjoys making things up. Let me give that member an assurance that the amount that Dame Margaret Bazley will be paid for her work will be exactly the same amount as was agreed by the previous Government to pay Dame Margaret Bazley for her work on the royal commission in respect of the work in Auckland. I would not find any member who reasonably objects to that approach. I note that Brendon Burns has had a track record on this issue of making all sorts of claims in the newspapers about things going to Cabinet on particular days and about particular members of the commission. He has been grandstanding all the time and not making any sort of constructive contribution. I can name six times when he has made claims about his sources who tell him things that have subsequently been proved to be incorrect. I am surprised that Mr Burns wants to continue in the name of grandstanding to compromise his own integrity with those false claims. 
It is hugely important for New Zealand that we improve water management and nowhere is that more important than in Canterbury. I commend this bill to the House because I think that all members of this House know in their heart of hearts that the Government had no choice but to act. I think the comments from the previous Minister for the Environment Trevor Mallard were particularly revealing when he said that everyone knew the problems in Environment Canterbury. He had taken a proposal to Helen Clark and she had said that for political reasons they did not act. This Government will rise above politics. This Government is determined to deliver improved water management for New Zealand. That is what this bill delivers and I commend it to this Parliament. 
BRENDON BURNS (Labour—Christchurch Central) 
: 
 What a conclusion to a shameful day for this Parliament. That Minister who has talked about people’s integrity being questioned used his last speech on the bill to question the integrity of other people including myself. This bill is an absolute travesty from beginning to end. It is based on a specious review which interviewed fewer than 20 stakeholders in 1 short month with a conflicted chairperson of Environment Canterbury’s performance which had improved immeasurably in the time between the review’s taking place and the end of the time frame it was looking at. 
I thought the Minister was on record as saying he wanted better water quality in New Zealand. This bill does absolutely nothing to deliver on the promise that he made repeatedly when in Opposition and in the early stages in Government. Earlier today I asked a question of the Prime Minister on the issue of what he wants to see and what he is on record as seeing. I have now tabled that reference. I quote from written question No. 291 from Dr Russel Norman in which the Prime Minister stated that when earlier this year he spoke of looking forward to seeing water schemes built in the South Island this year he was referring to the Rangitata South scheme as well as to some of the specific water storage schemes identified in the Canterbury Water Management Strategy. 
So there we have it. There is the agenda of this Government on paper. The Government wants to see new projects next year. That is what this bill is about: enabling those projects to happen rapidly and in a context where there are no new environmental frameworks or safeguards being put in place by this Government. During the course of question time too my question was rejected on the basis that it could not be authenticated by reference to Dr Smith’s comments in today’s  
Timaru Herald 
. Let me quote the  
Timaru Herald 
 of today: “Dr Smith said part of the reason he replaced the council with commissioners—rather than appointing a commissioner adviser to oversee water management issues as ECan suggested—was he was wary of the outcome of the October elections. ‘ECan put forward a negotiated solution but one of the downsides is that there was no guarantee the commissioner-adviser would have the same powers come October’ ”. 
What he is saying is that he did not want to trust the voters of Canterbury to have their say about who should decide on the functions of their regional council on the allocation of water in their region. He wanted to have control of that via commissioners. That is what this bill is about. It is the replacement of a democratic council function by executive fiat—the Fiji solution as it has been referred to in the House. There is no requirement across this bill for consultation with the public of Canterbury. What we have is the requirement for commissioners to issue public notices from time to time. Where will we see these commissioners replacing the functions of elected councillors? Where will they go out and meet with people who have issues about their rates the need to replace their fireplaces and the need to improve the city’s bus service scheduling or timetables? 
I ask the Minister where those commissioners will be. They will be cloistered in Kilmore Street in the headquarters of Environment Canterbury. They will be paid I wager the thick end of $1000 or more a day. A commissioner will be getting five times what an elected councillor would be getting. Will we get five times the value? Will they go out to talk to their constituents or will they sit there and implement the Government’s agenda? What they will do is become isolated in that castle in Kilmore Street and “ECan” will become “ECan’t” in terms of any connection with voters. That is what they will do. There will be nobody there to look after the interests of Canterbury voters. There is nothing in the bill on the question of commissioners having to meet the public hold public meetings or establish consultation groups so that they can get some window of view on what the people in Canterbury want from them. We are talking about these people being in place for up to 3½ years without any reference to the community they are supposedly serving at five times the pay rate of the people whom they have replaced. That is what this bill is about. There is no consultation mechanism whatsoever. 
It is disgraceful for a Government to put in place an enduring replacement for 3½ years whereby people will sit in splendid isolation in an ivory tower and have no contact with the voters or reference to them. There will be no requirement to consult to gauge or to go and see them. All the power rests with the Minister for the Environment and he says “Trust me. You can be assured that I’ll look after the interests of Canterbury.” Well I do not trust him and I do not believe he has the power anyway. This is another victory for Rodney Hide. This is doing to Canterbury what he has done to the super-city in Auckland. It is a two-fingered salute to the people of Canterbury as he has done to the people of Auckland. Talk about democratic process. At least in Auckland there was a select committee hearing. We have not had even a flicker of democratic process here. This bill has been rammed through under urgency without any consultation whatsoever other than the 20 groups talked to by the review group and the Ministers trotting round and having a brief conversation with some of the councils. That is what it has come down to: Rodney Hide has won the day. I suppose we can congratulate him on that but it is at the expense of the voters of Canterbury. We have to ask who will be next. Will it be Wellington Waikato or the Bay of Plenty? There will be an agenda that follows on from this. Mark my words! 
I want to comment on the Maori Party which after opposing the bill’s introduction has supported it on the specious belief I believe that it will improve the representation of Maori in whatever replaces Environment Canterbury. On the experience of Auckland that is a fond fond hope. Members of the Maori Party held out for Maori representation on the Auckland super-city and it was not delivered. Rodney Hide made it an issue basically that he was going to win or walk and so much for mana enhancement for the Maori Party. Its nose was dusted on that one and I suspect we will see the same outcomes in Canterbury. There will I think be a Maori commissioner appointed. That is implicit in the bill I suppose. I suspect that we will see somebody from the Canterbury Water Management Strategy. I think we will probably see Alec Neill appointed. 
H V Ross Robertson 
: What? Not Alec. It can’t be Alec. 
BRENDON BURNS 
: Oh yeah they will give him a job I would have thought. But that still does not address the issues because the power will still rest with the Minister. There will still be conflict in the fact that the Canterbury Water Management Strategy embodies a whole range of principles that will not be upheld by this bill. I noted the chairperson of the Water Rights Trust said last night that there would be war if the Canterbury Water Management Strategy was not implemented and held to. Well we will see. There have certainly been plenty of protests around Christchurch already today. There were 300 people at a rally on Monday before last on this issue at short notice. People in Canterbury are very one-eyed. They are feisty and they believe in their institutions and they hold to them dearly. This Government takes that on at its peril. 
The Canterbury Water Management Strategy states that it will uphold principles concerning the environment. This bill is going in absolutely the opposite direction. I note the Minister’s crocodile tears for the staff and councillors at Environment Canterbury. He brings in a bill to dismember them and then says oh he is sorry and he really feels for them. Talk about shallow! As for his references to a step change—we keep hearing that phrase “step change”—I ask where the step change is in terms of the delivery of the improvements we want to see in environmental outcomes in Canterbury. Nothing is happening to do that. There is nothing in this bill and nothing signalled. The Minister has put a lot of faith and hope in the Land and Water Forum which will report at the end of July and it was based on the same sorts of principles that the Canterbury Water Management Strategy tried to uphold and patiently negotiated. Those principles are being put at extraordinary risk by this bill and we will see the outcomes of that in short order. 
As for the idea that water management has been holding back Canterbury members have to acknowledge that Canterbury has been leading the charge in terms of economic growth across the country for quite some considerable time. It has produced nearly half the national growth in the dairy industry over the last 10 years. So we are not being held back. We are at risk of seeing opportunities thwarted because the costs of water management will be stitched back to the people of Canterbury. They have lost their vote. Shame on this Government I say. 
JO GOODHEW (National—Rangitata) 
: 
 I rise to make a brief contribution to this debate on the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill. I do so because since well before being elected to Parliament I have been well aware of a high degree of frustration amongst the regional authority’s ratepayers who form part of my constituency. Despite significant changes in my electorate boundaries at the last election the level of disenchantment has remained and perhaps has even increased. 
All levels of Government bear the brunt of the disaffection of those who feel their level of taxation might not be matched by services or outcomes. It happens to central government politicians as well as to those at the territorial local authority level. In my time as an MP I have worked with one regional council and five district councils. I have received complaints about ineptitude whether perceived or real about all of those entities but the complaints about Environment Canterbury have been remarkable in the extreme. Most of the time regional ratepayers have felt a sense of disquiet in that they also feel vulnerable in complaining. There is no doubt that when someone has already battled for some 5 years to get a water consent for a small dry-land holding—5 long years—the last thing he or she wants to do is to annoy the powers that be when maybe just maybe there might be some progress tomorrow. I have heard stories about environmental enhancement being slowed up then costing far more than was advised—that is environmental enhancement I am talking about. I have heard stories about economic enhancement through the obtaining of a water consent having the same problems. In the dozens of examples that I have been approached about there has been a consistency of message in terms of distrust of Environment Canterbury’s procedures. Time and time again I have heard of council officers changing and the new case manager wanting to start again and wanting more information. Time and time again I have heard about the rules changing mid-process. 
In all of the time I have spent over the years discussing issues that relate to Environment Canterbury it has been comprehensively proven to me that there is validity in the view that the institutional failure of Environment Canterbury requires comprehensive and rapid intervention on the part of central government to protect and enhance both regional and national well-being and that failure to intervene would lead to continued lack of progress in water management in Canterbury. How the regional council has managed our water has been critical for our economic success or lack of it and for our environmental well-being or lack of it. All stakeholders agree on the importance of sound management of that resource yet we do not have after all those years a proper water plan we have growing problems of water quality and we are not making progress on the opportunities for water storage and economic progress. 
The principles of the Canterbury Water Management Strategy begin with environmental protection so there will not be a takeover by dairying or irrigation interests and in order to underline that I will read members the vision of the Canterbury Water Management Strategy: “To enable present and future generations to gain the greatest social economic recreational and cultural benefits from our water resources within an environmentally sustainable framework.” That is in schedule 1 of the bill. There have been some 10 years of work on exactly that there is huge buy-in and the people who feel passionately about that water strategy say it is not going anywhere under the current Environment Canterbury and therefore something should be done. This Government has done something. 
So too the rhetoric of coup d’état and the abolition of democracy from the Opposition parties would suggest to me that they have been watching far too much drama on TV. Democracy has been merely interrupted to be resumed as soon as practicable and certainly by 2013 and the interruption absolutely is because Environment Canterbury has demonstrated that it has no ability to manage the precious resource that is gold culturally gold to our environment gold to our recreationalists and gold to our economic future. That resource is water. 
I finish by wishing commissioner Dame Margaret Bazley all the very best because her work is of vital importance to my constituents and to New Zealand as well. Thank you. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East) 
: 
 I have to say that the third reading of the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill represents a very very sorry day for democracy in New Zealand. A very strong view has been expressed in Christchurch that this has been a set up from start to finish. I suggested a sequence of events during the Committee stage of this bill that started with the Ministers getting a National MP to ask her local mayor to approach the mayoral forum in order to write a letter of complaint. This was not denied by the member concerned nor was it denied by the Minister. That has added fuel to the belief that this is exactly how this matter has been brought to a head. 
Let us look at the process. A letter was written to Ministers by the mayors on 18 September 2009 despite the Canterbury triennial agreement which includes an undertaking by signatories with regard to the early notification of policy and proposals opportunities for involvement a no-surprises policy and joint and collaborative engagement with communities. Who would sign up to a Canterbury triennial agreement and then send a letter like that? Every single one of the councils in the region has committed to that triennial agreement—it is a requirement under the law—but that letter totally compromised the basis of that agreement. 
What is worse is that the mayors behaved as if they were the local authorities because not a single one of those mayors went to their local authority to get the authority to sign off on that letter. Not one single mayor within Environment Canterbury’s jurisdiction went to his or her councillors and asked them what they thought about the behaviour of Environment Canterbury because he or she was about to sign a letter with other mayors to the Ministers—which was completely in breach of the obligations under the triennial agreement—in which he or she would demand that the Government take action against Environment Canterbury. Not one single councillor was engaged in that conversation at the council level which is the governance level for councils. 
The mayoral forum has operated completely independently of its statutory obligations to get council backing for this kind of breach of the triennial agreement. Not one mayor has subsequently consulted with his or her council. They have taken the opportunity to put the boot into Environment Canterbury without bothering to even reflect on what they have agreed to. What on earth makes any one of those mayors think that this Government would not step in to undermine the democratic processes without wide consultation and a good deal of consensus about the way forward. 
I say to members that they should look at what has happened in Auckland because that could be coming to a region near them. The people of Canterbury should be thinking about that because this Government may well be thinking about imposing a super-Canterbury structure over the top of the structure that we have at the moment. I know from some elements of this report that individuals within Christchurch City will certainly want to see that happen as long as they are the ones left running the show. 
This is essentially what happened in Rodney. In Rodney there was wide consultation and a good deal of consensus about the way forward. I want to put on record the true sequence of events rather than the hysterical nonsense that we have had from the Minister. The Rodney District Council approached the Minister of Local Government to ask for a review of the council under section 692M of the Local Government Act. Who was in Government when the Rodney District Council approached the Government? 
Hon Ruth Dyson 
: Labour. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: No it was National. National was in Government when the council originally made the approach. A National Minister set up that review. During the course of the review there was a change in Government. That was when the new Minister of Local Government the Hon Sandra Lee was asked to extend the period within which the reviewers could report to the Government. She said that was fair enough as they wanted to do a good job. They called for public submissions by having public notices go out in the media and they held a 6-day hearing before reporting to the Minister. It was an extremely open process; not so in this case. 
When Sandra Lee appointed a commission to act in the place of the Rodney District Council on 11 April 2000 she did so with a great sense of reluctance but she felt that she had no choice because in the wake of the review’s findings the mayor and five councillors had resigned leaving three wards completely unrepresented. She could not ignore that. She ensured that fresh elections were held in March 2001 instead of October 2001 which would have been the normal run of events. There could not be a greater difference in process between what has happened today and what occurred in the early part of the decade. 
In the Rodney case the local National Party member welcomed the intervention. In this case Labour MPs have been completely left in the dark although it is obvious that National MPs have been consulted in this regard. So there has been no transparency at all with regard to this process. 
This report was commissioned in November 2009 and was released publicly in February 2010. It ran for about a month—or maybe 6 weeks at the most if we include the Christmas period—and no public input was invited. The report contains a list of stakeholders and we have heard people refer to who was consulted: “Forest and Bird Fish and Game White Water New Zealand Christchurch City Council Anderson Lloyd Brent Cowie Simpson Grierson Pattle Delamore Partners Central Plains Water Ashburton—Valletta Groundwater Applicants Canterbury Chamber of Commerce”—I think members will find that it is the Canterbury Employers Chamber of Commerce—“Federated Farmers Malvern Hills Protection Society Irrigation New Zealand Meridian Energy Ltd Robert Johnston Selwyn District Council Red Bus Company Staff representatives of Te Runanga o Ngai Tahu A joint meeting of all territorial authority mayors and chief executives (except Waitaki District) or their designated representatives.” That is who was consulted. It does not sound like a comprehensive list of stakeholders. In fact I would describe some of them as having a vested interest. 
Vested interest is something that was debated throughout the Committee stage of this bill. No one despite the Minister for the Environment’s nasty little asides from time to time has challenged the competence or the integrity of any of the individuals or organisations involved in the review. We have talked about conflict of interest and there is a difference because conflict of interest is either real or perceived. It does not actually matter whether it is real or perceived conflict of interest must be avoided at all costs when we are talking about protecting the resources of our environment. If the Government had wanted the process to look disinterested in that regard it would have appointed someone outside the dairy industry to chair the review. That is not a reflection on Wyatt Creech it is just a reflection on the Government’s incapacity to work out who should appropriately do that job. 
Let us talk about the other elements of process here. The review is riddled with anecdote. After stating that it had no evidence to back up certain claims made by interest groups the review panel still used these as evidence against the council. 
There is not enough time to highlight every aspect of it but I will return to one point that I made during the Committee stage which is on page 65 of the Creech report: “Christchurch City’s desire to become a unitary authority and ‘master of its own (expanded) destiny’ continues to detract from the relationship.” Christchurch City Council does not have on record any resolution supporting turning itself into a unitary authority. That is the mayor’s view about what it should be in the future and it may have been the view of a previous mayor but it has never ever been the decision of the Christchurch City Council. 
I for one am completely and utterly opposed to one of the polluters being the same authority that has to determine resource consents. The city council would be continuing to discharge into the estuary on the boundary of my electorate and the Hon Ruth Dyson’s electorate if the city council had been responsible for its own supervision in that regard. We need to have regulation of our environmental protection and that is what the primary role of Environment Canterbury has to be. 
Dr RUSSEL NORMAN (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 I stand to speak on the third and final reading of the “Environment Canterbury (Democracy Abolition) Bill” which removes water conservation orders from Canterbury. The bill is all about what the Prime Minister told us in the statement he tabled at the beginning of this parliamentary year. He said to us: “The Government will also take action this year to remove particular regulatory roadblocks to water storage and irrigation in Canterbury.” The Government has decided that the elected regional councillors in Canterbury are part of the regulatory roadblocks and it has decided to remove them which is what the bill does. 
The Government has also decided that water conservation orders—the national parks for rivers and lakes—are also a regulatory roadblock to more irrigation and water storage in Canterbury so it will remove those as well. That very significant part of the bill has had some attention but probably should have even more because Subpart 3 of Part 3 which basically guts water conservation orders is a very significant change to the way in which we regulate the environment in our country. 
The bill at its foundation is all about the fact that water is a finite resource. Water has become incredibly valuable all over the world because it is a finite resource and humankind keeps expanding its consumption of finite resources. Canterbury has access to quite a lot of this finite resource and it has become an incredibly valuable resource. I would say “commodity” but of course the irrigation and dairy companies get it for free so to call it a commodity is perhaps stretching things a little bit. Having access to free fantastic water has been an enormous economic boon to the dairy corporations and to the irrigation companies and that is what is really driving the bill. The bill is being set up in order to allow more access as if there has not been enough to more of the water resources of Canterbury so that more rivers can be dammed like the Hurunui River which is at the top of the list at the moment but there will be others; so that more rivers can be drained of their water—part of the reason why the Ashley River is in such terrible shape and why it keeps killing dogs every year is that so much water is drained from it for irrigation—and so that more water can be polluted. Anyone who has tried to go on Lake Ellesmere Te Waihora recently would have come across the high level of pollution of that lake; the same applies to many other rivers and lakes right across Canterbury. 
Canterbury has been the victim of malign neglect for so long but it looked like the regional council was going to get on top of it. It looked like there was potential for the regional council to finally take some action. However the regional council upset some very powerful vested interests. It upset some very powerful vested interests with some very close connections to the National Party and for that reason it is now paying the price. 
The Prime Minister said that he was going to take action to remove these regulatory roadblocks; the next step was of course to get the Creech report. The problem with the Creech report is twofold. First the person who headed the review had a clear conflict of interest being the director of a dirty dairy company but more than that the review had some fundamental flaws. It was a very short review; only a handful of stakeholders were interviewed. It was anti-science; the report said that the regional council should be punished for being too science-led. It was very anti-environment. It said that the regional council was not sufficiently pro economic growth. The reviewers had no idea I guess because they had not looked at the Resource Management Act that in fact that was part of the job of Environment Canterbury and that was what the “E” in ECan—or Environment Canterbury—stood for. If the reviewers did not know what the “E” stood for then maybe they were not the right people to review the regional council. Maybe they wanted to call it “Exploitation Canterbury”. Maybe that is what they thought the “E” stood for—that its purpose was to exploit the water resources of Canterbury. So the report was very critical of Environment Canterbury because it spent too much time protecting the environment and not enough time exploiting it. 
The bill removes democratic rights from the people of Canterbury—about 400000 people—for about 3½ years or possibly more. I thought Jo Goodhew hit it on the head. She said democracy has been interrupted and will be resumed as soon as practicable. Is that what democracy is? Is that the kind of value National puts on democracy? Does it think democracy is the kind of thing we can interrupt for awhile and when the powers that be who are smarter than all of us obviously—Jo Goodhew knows better than the rest of us—decide that it is possible and practicable then the people of Canterbury can have democracy again? The people of Canterbury are children; that is what National thinks and it has had to interrupt their democracy and it will resume it as soon as practicable. That is what Jo Goodhew said. 
Jo Goodhew also inadvertently hit the nail on the head when she said that the problem is that it takes ages to get a water consent. No kidding! There are red zones in Canterbury where water is over-allocated and Environment Canterbury has tried to restrict the taking of more water in the red zone and boy it has made the irrigators mad. 
Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. 
Dr RUSSEL NORMAN 
: This is the third reading of the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill which National and ACT are introducing to abolish democracy in Canterbury. It is also the third reading of the bill that National and ACT are supporting to undermine water conservation orders in the Canterbury region. I think it is important to realise what that means. We can think for example of the water conservation order on the Ahuriri River. The application for cubicle farms on Killermont Station has been much discussed. The farms are reliant on accessing water from the Ahuriri River. It would have been very difficult for those farms to proceed with the water conservation order in place because of the minimum flow regime that it imposed. The passage of this bill tonight which National and ACT will vote for will mean that the Minister for the Environment can vary the water conservation order on the Ahuriri River without going through the proper process so that the developers—in this case Williamson Holdings—can have access to the water in the Ahuriri River so that they can destroy Killermont Station. 
As people may well be aware the Mackenzie has been destroyed recently by massive dairy conversions. There has been the loss of tussock country and a massive increase in pollution of the Ahuriri arm of the Waitaki River and of the whole Waitaki River system. Part of that problem will be made worse by the fact that the water conservation order on the Ahuriri River will now be in danger as a result of National and ACT pushing this bill through the House in the middle of the night. 
It is important to realise as well that there is a great paradox here. The House is passing a bill to abolish democracy in Canterbury and at the same time it is doing it in such a way that there is no democratic input. It is quite extraordinary. There was no select committee process. The public have had no right to submit. Members of Parliament had not even seen the bill until yesterday afternoon and then after we got the bill and a very short briefing from the Minister for the Environment we were given a very short amount of time to look over the bill and try to figure out what it is on about. The other thing about the bill is that when we look at the regulatory impact statement we see that the Ministry for the Environment states that it “has not been able to fully quantify the risks/costs of the proposal.” Well I am not surprised. Who could fully quantify the risks and costs of a proposal that is being forced through at such short notice? 
The other issue that has arisen with regard to this bill is the conflicts of interest. The Minister of Agriculture David Carter saw fit to put out a release in response to some of the claims that have been made in which he confirmed all the key facts. He confirmed that he has a farm on the Hurunui. He confirmed that currently very little of it is irrigated—so much of it is open for irrigation—but he said that at this stage he has no intention to irrigate. Well I am afraid that having no intention is not good enough because he still has the potential to irrigate which is the whole point. That is why there could be a potential conflict of interest and it should be declared. The other thing he confirmed is that he approached those who were applying to the Environment Court for a water conservation order in order to get them to stop doing it. This very interestingly is exactly what he denied doing in an answer to a written question. When I asked him in a written question to this House whether he had approached the applicants for the water conservation order he said no. I think it is very clear that the conflict of interest claims that have been raised with regard to the bill have been vindicated by the facts that Mr Carter has put on the table for our convenience and I am sure we will go into that further. 
This bill is a bill to get rid of democracy. It is a bill to get rid of water conservation orders. It will disenfranchise 400000 to 500000 people for the next 3 years. It is an unacceptable bill to the Green Party. We will not be supporting it. It is shameful that National and ACT are ramming it through under urgency without proper democratic consultation. 
JOHN BOSCAWEN (ACT) 
: 
 It is pleasing to rise to an ovation from the Labour Party. It seems to me that three issues have been discussed over and over again in the debate on the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill and we have just heard about them. We have heard about democracy we have heard about water and we have heard about regulatory impact statements and reports on bills. As Dr Norman reminded us this is a third reading debate a debate in which to go back and reflect on the whole of the issues that have been raised over the last 24 hours with regard to this bill. Time and time again we have heard from members on the other side of the House that this bill is about democracy: the suspension of democracy and the outlawing of democracy. 
When the House resumed at 7 p.m. this evening Dr Russel Norman talked about ACT and National introducing a bill to abolish democracy in Canterbury. That is what he said ACT and National were doing: they were abolishing democracy in Canterbury. As the member sat down he said this is a bill to get rid of democracy and to strip 400000 to 500000 people of their rights. Well Dr Norman and his colleagues are the last people who should be speaking about democracy in this House. 
Phil Twyford 
: You’re the only one. 
JOHN BOSCAWEN 
: No I am not the only one but Mr Twyford’s party certainly cannot speak about democracy. However I suspect that Mr Twyford could speak about democracy because he was not part of the sordid sorry parliamentary Labour Party that governed this country from 2005 to 2008. That Labour Government saw the introduction of the Electoral Finance Bill. 
If members are to criticise the ACT Party and National with regard to this bill on the issue of democracy then I think we need to go back and reflect on the record of the previous Labour Government over the preceding 3 years. That Labour Government introduced a bill that told all New Zealanders that if they wanted to spend so much as a single dollar—a single dollar—on speaking out either in support or against the Government then they must as a minimum sign a piece of paper in front of a justice of the peace stating for instance: “I Phil Twyford promise not to spend more than $5000.” 
Phil Twyford 
: So how do you feel about this bill John? 
JOHN BOSCAWEN 
: I say to Mr Twyford that if one could not sign that piece of paper one was required to register as a third party. 
The Labour Government and the Green Party which was in cahoots with Labour told the people of New Zealand that if they wanted to speak out or to criticise their Government and wanted to spend more than a single dollar on doing so at the very minimum they had to sign a piece of paper in front of a justice of the peace. They said to New Zealanders that if they did not like that they should rise up and protest. That Government said if people did not like that they could make a submission to the Justice and Electoral Committee to tell the Government what they thought because that was its plan. I cannot think of a more despicable action for any political party to bring into this Parliament. 
We heard from Lianne Dalziel this afternoon. She got up and said she had been in Parliament for some 20 years and had never seen anything as dramatic as a bill such as this one. Well I cannot think of anything worse than saying to New Zealanders that if they wanted to rise up and speak out against the Government and if they wanted to put as little as a single piece of paper through a xerox machine in order to make that statement they had to sign a piece of paper in front of a justice of the peace. 
I will move on to the issue of water. Water is very valuable and we know how important it is to conserve water. But this country of ours has much potential. It has much potential and we wonder why we are not as wealthy as our neighbours across the Tasman in Australia are. The reason is that we have not governed this country properly. We have not realised its potential. We have not put in place the policies to create the prosperity that this country can create. This Environment Canterbury bill goes part of the way towards that because we have a rural economy. We depend for our exports our livelihoods to a large part on the farming sector. The Prime Minister the Hon John Key said recently that Australia might have its minerals but that once they have been dug up they are gone. What we have is water. Water comes from the skies and long after Australia has dug up the last of its mineral wealth the rain will continue to fall on New Zealand. 
We can do a lot to harness the power and the value that is in that water. Currently we harness only some 1.5 percent of the rainwater that falls on New Zealand. Can members imagine the prosperity that would come to this country if we could just double that—just double that from 1.5 percent to 3 percent? If we could catch and utilise just 3 percent of the water that falls on this country we could put that water to great use. We could put it to use in agriculture. We heard the allegations this afternoon from the Green Party about the fact that the Minister of Agriculture is a farmer. Well I say farmers work very hard and they are the backbone of this economy. But we can do something else with water: we can generate electricity with it. 
The water in the Canterbury basin and the Canterbury region will become a lot more valuable on 1 July. 
Hon Shane Jones 
: It makes you wet. 
JOHN BOSCAWEN 
: I find it fascinating to stand and speak while being shouted at and abused. I will go silent so that I can hear what Mr Jones has to say. 
Hon Shane Jones 
: I described you as being wet—a drip. 
JOHN BOSCAWEN 
: It is more than a drip I tell Mr Jones; it is a flow and the water that flows down the Waitaki River generates wealth. It generates wealth for our farmers. It allows our farmers to irrigate our farms and it allows us to generate electricity. 
But the tragedy with regard to harnessing water is that from 1 July this country will go where no other country has gone before. We are introducing an emissions trading scheme and its effect will be to raise the price of electricity by 5 percent. Treasury told the Finance and Expenditure Committee— 
Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER 
: The emissions trading scheme has nothing to do with this bill and I ask the member to focus in please on the third reading. This debate is about what has been discussed earlier and the emissions trading scheme is not part of that. 
JOHN BOSCAWEN 
: Thank you Mr Deputy Speaker. My understanding is that what is being discussed in this bill is the introduction of commissioners in the Canterbury region to administer among other things a water plan—a plan to manage the resources of the Canterbury region. Water is a very valuable resource. It results in power generation and I was trying to explain to the House that come 1 July when electricity prices are forecast to go up the companies that generate electricity with water—and in particular I am referring to Meridian Energy and the dams it has in the South Island—by virtue of the way that the electricity market works will be able to push through a 5 percent increase in the price of electricity without paying for any emissions which their competitors like Genesis Power will have to do with regard to thermal energy. 
We will see windfall profits. We know the profits that Meridian is currently making but we have seen nothing yet like the profits that it will make because from 1 July we are essentially introducing a 5 percent surcharge on water. That will see massive windfall profits being taken and a massive value being put on water. Every single New Zealander will pay for that. I am very proud but sad to think that I am one of only five MPs who are standing up and opposing a 5 percent surcharge being imposed on the cost of electricity from 1 July—a surcharge that will go on every single New Zealander young or old poor or well off. The elderly particularly in the winter will have to pay more for their electricity simply so that companies like Meridian can earn more for its water that valuable water. 
Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER 
: I have mentioned to the member that this is a debate about what is happening with regard to Environment Canterbury and it is not a debate about Meridian electricity price increases or whatever might be affected from 1 July. I ask the member who has 40 seconds remaining to focus in on the bill. 
JOHN BOSCAWEN 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. The reason I am conducting the debate in the way that I am is that as you say this bill is about Environment Canterbury—the regional council—the appointment of commissioners and water. 
Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER 
: Well if the member had mentioned that that would have been fine. But I say to the member we have had about 8 minutes of other things and I did warn the member earlier on. I ask the member to come back to the bill; he now has 39 seconds remaining. 
JOHN BOSCAWEN 
: Thank you Mr Deputy Speaker. This is I repeat about Environment Canterbury. It is about the appointment of commissioners including Dame Margaret Bazley who will be taking a lead role. She and her fellow commissioners will have the job of putting in place a water management plan for the Canterbury region which is something that Environment Canterbury has not been able to do in the last 18 years—18 years. This Government has been required to make these changes in order to put in place that plan to provide for the better use and conservation of our water resources so that we can use more water wisely. As I have said from 1 July that water will become even more valuable. Thank you. 
RAHUI KATENE (Maori Party—Te Tai Tonga) 
: 
 A statement was made by Anake Goodall the chief executive of Te Runanga o Ngai Tahu which I will quote in full as it sets the scene for the way in which I have seen this bill: “Ngai Tahu regretfully recognises the need for intervention in ECan and reluctantly supports installing commissioners as a temporary measure that while not optimal for the important principle of democracy is a necessary practical solution in the circumstances.” The words “regretfully” “reluctantly” and “not optimal” do not indicate wholesale complete and utter satisfaction with this bill rushed through under urgency. The Maori Party is also regretful—regretful that urgency prevents people from having a voice. For any legislation to be authentic it should reflect the processes of negotiation and discussion that would emerge from the process of consultation. 
Ngai Tahu used that word again in a letter to Ministers Hide and Smith advising that “Ngai Tahu regretfully support the recommended transitional arrangements to install commissioners in place of the council.” The interesting issue for us as the Maori Party is how the Government can overturn the democratic process in one region—by dismissing the councillors of Environment Canterbury—while in another region Tamaki Makaurau it is passionately fighting on an argument to uphold democracy by refusing to invest in Maori representation through the establishment of Maori seats. I want to be really clear. This bill is not just an issue about water although that is vitally important; this is an issue about power sharing or indeed about not power sharing in this case. 
As a local MP I have taken a close look at Environment Canterbury not just because of its significance across Te Tai Tonga but also because the way in which we work through these issues is likely to be nationally significant in terms of the place of local government and approaches to the management of fresh water. The Maori Party has consistently stated that issues about water management must include mana whenua including water rights and privatisation. We believe also that Treaty claims in relation to water ownership and interests in fresh water must be resolved in the review of the Resource Management Act. It has been a matter of some pride to the party that we were able to overturn the commitments made pre-election by National to remove any Treaty references or references about the capacity for Maori to object on cultural grounds from the Resource Management Act. These sections include section 6: that “all persons exercising … powers … in relation to managing the use development and protection of natural and physical resources shall recognise and provide for … (e) the relationship of Maori and their culture and traditions with their ancestral lands water sites waahi tapu and other taonga:”. Section 7 states: “all persons … shall have particular regard to—(a) kaitiakitanga:” and section 8 “Treaty of Waitangi” states: “In achieving the purpose of this Act all persons exercising functions and powers … in relation to … natural and physical resources shall take into account the principles of … (Te Tiriti o Waitangi).” 
I repeat these key legislative provisions because they are critical in guiding councils and communities about the way in which we protect our streams lakes rivers and waterways from agricultural industrial and domestic waste. There are many vital issues around freshwater management which the Maori Party signals will need to benefit from nationwide discussion and input and these three sections in particular provide us with a strong starting point for those discussions. 
Turning then to the specific legislation we accept that this bill is a temporary measure designed to respond to the longstanding concerns about the performance of Environment Canterbury. Our decision to support the legislation was made both regretfully and reluctantly but made also in response to the guidance of mana whenua. We did so also knowing that the existing situation regarding Environment Canterbury was untenable. This after all was a council that came 84th out of a possible 84 councils in the 2007-08 biennial survey of resource consent processing. This was a council that frequently appeared in the Environment Court as a result of criticisms having been highlighted about the management of fresh water in Canterbury. The proposed response to the review of Environment Canterbury therefore could have no stronger basis in my mind than that provided by Te Runanga o Ngai Tahu and I quote: “ECan even within its current statutory framework has demonstrably failed to reach the standard of best endeavours to give effect to its broader responsibilities to Ngai Tahu.” So there is no suggestion that there was not a dramatic need to do something. 
The question is however what exactly is the something that will be done? We have been concerned that the Canterbury Water Management Strategy is being given legal effect in the empowering legislation. It is the view of key stakeholders that this strategy is not well developed that it has real policy holes and that there is risk that it erodes the Treaty rights of Ngai Tahu. Although we appreciate that there is support from many key stakeholders including Ngai Tahu and the region’s territorial authorities we want to ensure that the rights and interests of Ngai Tahu under both Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the Ngai Tahu Claims Settlement Act 1998 are given full cognisance in further development of that paper. In this context we acknowledge the move made by the Minister to ensure that in the appointment process of commissioners there will be explicit recognition of the collective knowledge and expertise of commissioners in relation to tikanga Maori as it applies in the Canterbury region. We welcome the opportunity for Ngai Tahu to be represented in the temporary commission that is likely to replace the council of Environment Canterbury. But we would also recommend that Ngai Tahu be represented in the new statutory entity that will be created separate from Environment Canterbury to manage water in the region and to be known as the Canterbury Regional Water Authority. As we consider the ongoing tension between kawanatanga and rangatiratanga we also raise the question that one person on a commission of seven is for ever relegated to the minority seats. 
Finally I remind the House that the report of the review of Environment Canterbury revealed that there are significant issues in relation to water management in terms of meeting the Treaty obligations of the Crown and it also recommended that iwi liaison should be elevated in importance within Environment Canterbury. We fully support the approach proposed by Ngai Tahu which seeks a commitment from the Government to a structured joint work programme so that the various governance arrangements can be structured in a Treaty-consistent manner. They would also expect that any existing undertakings by Environment Canterbury to Ngai Tahu such as the iwi management plan should be honoured. 
We have supported this bill in order to respond to the urgent need of the situation outlined in Canterbury and in line with our respect for the guidance of mana whenua but as the debate proceeded we have become more troubled about the new powers of the commission to determine water conservation orders in the Canterbury region under new criteria. The bill clearly states that they will hear appeals against points of law only. Therefore it is not an Environment Court substitute. We are absolutely committed to effective compliance with the Treaty requirements of the Resource Management Act and the requirement to look nationally at water management issues across the nation are a key priority of our party. Ultimately tangata whenua Maori perceive natural and physical resources such as water as a taonga an invaluable treasure gifted by their tupuna for the benefit and use of their descendants. It is our responsibility as tangata whenua as kaitiaki to ensure that the resource is conserved and handed on to future generations in a similar condition. It is my duty to advise the House that in light of the concerns we have raised during the course of this debate we have reconsidered our position and regretfully we conclude our struggle with this bill by voting against it at this final reading. 
JACQUI DEAN (National—Waitaki) 
: 
 The Waimate mayor John Coles said: “Good on the Government for having the guts to come out and do something like this.” The Mackenzie District mayor John O’Neill said that it was a bold move that would have the full support of the district’s ratepayers. The Waitaki mayor Alex Familton believed that it was the right decision and that the commissioners would have his strong support. I suggest to the House that these are the people who know. Members opposite may not understand how rural local authorities work but the 10 mayors particularly the rural mayors understand only too well the deficiencies of Environment Canterbury after the past few years. 
I am proud to stand in support of the third reading of the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill. The debate over the last 24 hours or so has been characterised by arguments from the Opposition promoted by Christchurch-based Labour MPs. I acknowledge that they cannot help but promote the Christchurch City view because they do not represent the provinces and have little and limited understanding of the issues that have been faced by rural constituencies in their dealings with Environment Canterbury. Interestingly though the Christchurch Central member did acknowledge that Labour had failed to act on water management issues while Labour was in Government and I congratulate him on that acknowledgment. Trevor Mallard when he was the Minister for the Environment said: “Everyone knows there was a problem here.” 
The city Labour MPs have no idea what has been happening in the provinces in the area of Environment Canterbury. Labour members have no courage to deal with this hard issue. Their Sustainable Water Plan of Action—or should I say their water plan of inaction—went nowhere. So I say to the House that Environment Canterbury’s failure is also Labour’s failure. It hard for them to face up to but it is true. All the Canterbury district mayors themselves democratically elected have had enough of Environment Canterbury which they characterise as dysfunctional. All 10 mayors and councils were consulted during the course of the development of this bill. I was at meetings represented by four of those local authorities which is nearly half of those involved and all of those democratically elected mayors and councils have welcomed the introduction of this bill. 
The regional council has after 19 years failed to produce a regional water plan while other regional councils are on their second-generation water plans. Environment Canterbury has been making consent decisions in a policy vacuum which has resulted in policy making on the hoof and that has been hugely costly in terms of time and expense to the applicants. They have made applications to Environment Canterbury in a policy vacuum. What is needed for the management of an area that has 70 percent of New Zealand’s fresh water is clearly beyond the capabilities of Environment Canterbury. Environment Canterbury has let down its constituents and proved to be a handbrake to both the development and the protection of natural water resources in Canterbury. 
The Government wants to consider carefully the Canterbury Strategic Water Study the Land and Water Forum and the work from the Environmental Protection Authority and will take on further advice from the commissioners. This legislation gives the Canterbury Water Management Strategy recognition and provides commissioners with a sorely needed and clear framework for managing Canterbury’s water. This bill looks to fix the problems we have now and set a good policy framework for water management in the future. 
The explicit intent of this legislation is for the commissioners to withdraw and be replaced by elected representatives as soon as their task of addressing the institutional and planning problems is achieved. The Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill empowers commissioners to do what is required to turn round Environment Canterbury to the benefit of the people and the environment of Canterbury. I commend the bill to the House. 
Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills) 
: 
 I will begin my final contribution to this debate by going back to the very beginning and asking “How did all this start?”. Well we have heard during the course of this debate that one of the National members of Parliament approached her local mayor and said that there were major concerns with Environment Canterbury within central government and that that mayor could start the ball rolling by writing to the mayoral forum. Jo Goodhew approached Janie Annear to write to the mayoral forum saying there were major concerns about the operation of Environment Canterbury. The mayors then decided on the assumption that they were not just mayors but also the local authorities to take the matter further. That is how this sorry saga began. 
My message to the public as a result of this debate and of what has happened in the last 24 hours is not just to look at Auckland any more and say “Be very afraid of your democratic rights.” the public can look now at Canterbury as well and be very wary because it could be coming to a city near them soon. We have lost all our democratic rights in terms of voting for our regional council. 
The Minister for the Environment has introduced a shoddy little bill. I say that with the greatest respect to officials who I guess had no other option but to write it. But if the officials had been given a decent amount of time and guidance perhaps the bill could have been a bit tidier. The shoddy little bill was given to us in draft form half an hour before it was publicly announced as being introduced. It was introduced into the House yesterday afternoon at 5.30 p.m. It was debated until 10 p.m. with just an hour and a half for the dinner break and then begun again at 9 o’clock this morning. Soon the debate will be concluded. 
Well what is urgent about this legislation? What is not only urgent but so urgent that this Parliament considers that it is OK that not a single submission can be called for and not a single submission can be heard? People in Canterbury are really outraged. Some people would have actually come along to a select committee and said “Good move Minister. Get rid of ECan.” But they cannot. Others would have come along and said with a more considered opinion in my view that they did not agree that this measure was the way forward for our regional management in Canterbury. But neither of those perspectives nor any in between have had an opportunity to be heard because the Minister unilaterally decided that the legislation had such a high priority it had to be passed under urgency and not a single submission would be called for. I think that that is an outrage. 
We have done our best through the first and second readings through the Committee stage and now through the third reading to try to put the facts of the situation on the table. I mentioned in the dying stages of the Committee stage the water plan excuse that the Minister has constantly raised. He has been going on and on about the fact that there is no water plan. I said then that not only did we have the Canterbury Water Management Strategy—and asked whether he had noticed it because it is actually in the bill—but we also had the Canterbury Natural Resources Regional Plan which members of Parliament like Amy Adams Jacqui Dean Jo Goodhew and Nicky Wagner would do well to familiarise themselves with. They are attacking the council on the basis of misinformation and that is not a good basis for debate. It is OK when trying to score cheap political points I guess to make things up and not tell the complete truth but when the action is about disestablishing a regional council then it should be done on the basis of facts truth and honesty and open debate. 
Environment Canterbury notified its proposed Canterbury Natural Resources Regional Plan in 2004. The plan was notified in 2004 and it is operating. It does not have full legal force under the Resource Management Act because of various things such as submissions hearings decisions and appeals which all have to go through a process before the plan can become operative. But the objectives policies methods and rules of the natural resources regional plan have continued from 2004 to guide decisions on resource consent applications. So the Minister said something that is completely and factually untrue because we have two plans: the first the Canterbury Water Management Strategy was specifically developed because of the huge amount of tension around Canterbury and water and the second is the Canterbury Natural Resources Regional Plan. So the Minister is just wrong and I hope that he takes the opportunity to say he is sorry to the people of Canterbury and particularly to the staff and the councillors who have been working on those plans for many years. 
The other issue that I will shine again and take a brief opportunity to have some factual input on is the comparison that National was making—I noticed it stopped yesterday—between the process that this bill is going through and the process that the Labour-Alliance coalition Government went through in May 2000 in relation to the Rodney District Council. The first difference is that the Rodney District Council voted unanimously to ask the then Minister of Local Government the Hon Sandra Lee to intervene and appoint a commissioner. That was a unanimous decision of the council whereas there has been no such decision from Environment Canterbury. The Rodney District Council agreed that it should write to the Minister and ask for her intervention; no such request was made by Environment Canterbury. The Rodney District Council said that a commissioner should be appointed; no such recommendation came from Environment Canterbury. 
So the processes started from a completely different basis and the Minister made sure that the people in Rodney were involved in looking at the options and deciding what the problem was. She said for them to agree on the problem and then look at some solutions. They agreed on the solution. The Minister made sure that the role of the commissioner was not to take over the council as it is in this case but to ensure that relationships were mended and that systems and infrastructure were in place to deliver efficiently so that the commissioner could walk away and leave an elected council once again to take over. That happened in about a year. The Minister even ensured that the Rodney District had its elections early rather than having to wait until October. There is no such commitment to a return to democracy in this legislation. In fact one of my colleagues said that we should have a bet on who will get the vote back first: Fiji or Canterbury. Who will get a democratic vote again first? Will it be entitlement in Fiji or will it be democracy in Canterbury for our regional council? It could be Fiji. 
The other factual point that I will make is in relation to what the Creech review actually said. That has been the cause of some frustration for members on this side of the House because National has insisted on misrepresenting Wyatt Creech and the recommendations. I will put on the record what the Creech report said in relation to the negative perception of Environment Canterbury—and there is no debate that there is a negative perception. The report said: “Almost all external parties interviewed had a negative perception of ECan’s governance.” But the reviewers interviewed only 20 parties in the whole of Canterbury and it was a very narrow list. The reviewers said that they had heard that the councillors were “polarised” and “dysfunctional” that there was “insufficient leadership” and that the council was “too busy protecting individual/Party perspectives” and failing to pay enough attention to the region. But the Creech report said “Our investigation did not bear this out.” The reviewers had heard the stories. They had heard the rumours. They heard them repeated by National members but the repetition of stuff about Environment Canterbury is just not true. This is what the Hon Wyatt Creech said in his report: “Our investigation did not bear this out. … The Review found that while the process for debating strongly opposing views has been marred by poor behaviour and reflects past grievances in some cases”—well that is not good but it is not unusual—“the governance of ECan is functional and enables it to meet its statutory obligations.” 
There is no need for this disembowelling of Environment Canterbury. There is no need for us in Canterbury to have our democratic right to vote taken away from us and there is no need for this legislation to proceed. 
AMY ADAMS (National—Selwyn) 
: 
 We come to the third reading of the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill and it is my final opportunity to contribute to this debate. I am very happy to stand in support of this bill because unlike members opposite I reflect the concern that has come through my office every day since I have become an MP about the way in which Environment Canterbury is operating. Despite the rhetoric and despite the scaremongering this concern is coming not just from one side of the debate; it is coming from people who deal with Environment Canterbury in many ways and who express constant frustration about delay and excessive cost and about being absolutely powerless in dealing with an organisation that has got into a mind-set of thinking that it does not have to listen to its people. 
In the first reading debate I started talking about the importance of Canterbury as a region. I am quite happy to stand here as one of the Canterbury MPs and say that Canterbury is one of the most important regions in this country. It has a spectacular environment and it is one of the most important regions economically. Water is crucial in Canterbury. There is no bigger issue I think we can safely say—certainly facing the people of Selwyn—than the proper management of our water. Every single person I have come across in this debate—and I ask members opposite who disagree to let me know—would agree that water has not been managed well in Canterbury. If anyone has a different view I ask that person to let me know. I have not heard anyone who is prepared to stand in this House to say that water has been well run in Canterbury—[ 
Interruption 
] Mr Jones thinks that it has been. He thinks that everything is fine in Canterbury. 
Frankly anyone in this House who is not prepared to back this bill is saying that everything is fine with Environment Canterbury that we should not do anything—let it keep going as it is let us just bumble along with our heads in the sand for another 10 years it will all be OK mate and it will all come out in the wash. It will not. I can tell members that I have lost faith in Environment Canterbury’s ability to fix this crucial crucial issue. I have lost any confidence that it can turn this round. I am not saying that members of Environment Canterbury are not good people—they absolutely are. I am not saying that they have not done some good work—they have. But I am saying that I do not believe that Environment Canterbury can deal with the problem of water in Canterbury. The Government needs to step in. The Government in my view has an obligation to step in when the job is not being done properly. 
Regional councils operate under legislation from this House. We have the authority as a Parliament to step in if that job is not being carried out. It has not been done properly and there is a need for urgent action. Let us be quite clear about this: those problems have been around for a long long time. Trevor Mallard was quite honest in saying that his Government knew that there was a problem. He wanted to see action on Environment Canterbury but the Labour Government did not act because there was an election coming up. 
At the very first briefing Minister Smith received as the new incoming Minister for the Environment he was told about the pressing issues in Environment Canterbury and this Government is going to deal with them. It is not an easy decision to make it is a courageous decision to make but it has to be done. We recognise our obligations to get this right; water is simply too important for us to bumble along and pretend nothing is wrong. There is a problem it needs urgent action and we have to put in place commissioners to get this right so that we can return to normal operations in our regional councils. They will not do it on their own; they have shown that over a long period of time. This bill is necessary and I am very pleased to see it happening. I commend it to the House. 
PHIL TWYFORD (Labour) 
: 
 The tension between private and public interests and the tension between the many and the few lies beneath hundreds of years of struggle in our political tradition. I take members back to the 14th century to the Peasants’ Revolt to the Levellers in the 17th century and to the English Civil War between the parliamentarians and the royalists which raged across Britain for nearly a century. I remind members about the Chartists in the 19th century who campaigned for popular sovereignty and universal franchise. I remind them of the fight to give women the vote of those who gave their lives in the Second World War to defend democracy and of the spread of parliamentary democracy around the world in the 21st century. 
Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER 
: I am sorry to interrupt the member. There is far too much noise coming from the Government benches. I am having difficulty hearing the member. If members want to discuss matters then that is what the lobbies are for. 
PHIL TWYFORD 
: I know that members opposite do not want a history lesson but in my humble opinion they need one. We should not take the history of our democratic traditions lightly. This House is a shrine to that tradition and tonight the members on that side of the House are desecrating that shrine. 
I know that the members on the National benches think that this issue is not about democracy. I know that they think it is just a technical thing a pragmatic solution. They think that we are just twiddling with the knobs so that we can get the outcomes we want on water management in Canterbury and that it is not about democracy. Jo Goodhew said that it is just a temporary interruption of our democratic traditions and that they will be resumed in 3½ years. I know that is what National members think but I urge them to stop to think about what they are doing to our democratic process. 
The problem is that the constant companion of this National Government is the temptation to undermine the public interest and the common good in favour of stacking the deck in the interests of its business mates. It has done that in Auckland over the last 12 months where we have seen Rodney Hide John Key and Steven Joyce kicking away the safeguards against the privatisation of our public assets. We have seen it in the corporatisation of local government. In Canterbury with the thirst for irrigation and the insatiable hunger for more dairy farming on the Canterbury Plains it is so tempting for powerful business interests to say that the process of democracy is too slow too messy and too inefficient and that they could run local government so much better if the Government could just get the people out of the show and let them make the decisions. 
Subsidiarity is a principle that is much spoken of. It is allegedly the founding principle of our system of local government. I say “allegedly” because there are very few checks and balances on executive power in our system even with the advent of MMP. We have a unicameral Parliament and a system that allows very little challenge to the power of the executive. Local government in our system is one way that power can be shared between the powerful and the powerless and between the centre and the periphery. What this Government is doing tonight in this House with this bill is the opposite of subsidiarity. It is showing an absolute contempt and disregard for local government as part of our constitution in this country. It paid lip service to subsidiarity in the Auckland super-city reforms while stripping out the decision making in the powers of local communities and centralising it. 
What is the Government doing with this bill? It is abrogating the democratic rights of up to half a million people in Canterbury so that it can more efficiently allocate rights to water. I say that that is dangerous. It is dangerous to our political system it is dangerous to our democracy. Why is that? It is because to shut the people out of decision making even for a 3½-year interregnum sends a powerful message. And what is that message? The message is that the people are not capable of governing themselves. That is the message. The message is that even if people pay the rates even if they pay the taxes and even if they have to live with the consequences of the decisions of their elected representatives they are not capable. But there is a superior class of person that the Government knows it can shoulder-tap that can make those decisions. In that superior class are the hand-picked mates of the National Government whom this Government trusts to make decisions on behalf of the people of Canterbury. 
You see it turns out that for this National Government not everyone is equal. Not every person is equal in value or in importance. The people are not trusted to make the tough decisions. They are not trusted to govern themselves not in Auckland and not in Canterbury and I ask where it will be next. This bill strikes at the heart of our democracy and at the idea that in the political sphere no matter whether one is rich or poor no matter whether one is brown white or yellow no matter which side of the tracks one grew up on and no matter which political party one supports we are all equal and that each of us can have a political voice. 
One of the two Ministers who are responsible for this disgraceful bill is Rodney Hide the Minister of Local Government. He is fond of quoting the sacred principle of one person one vote. Rodney Hide talks about democracy out of one side of his mouth but out of the other side he is busy handing over the assets of Auckland to his mates and at the same time he is abrogating the democratic institution of regional government in Canterbury by suspending elections for 3½ years. Suspending elections has a ring to it that we are familiar with. 
Hon Darren Hughes 
: Mugabe. 
PHIL TWYFORD 
: Yes and from other places closer to home. Why is that? It is because the 14 democratically elected councillors in Environment Canterbury could not resolve a system for allocating water rights—that is why. So I ask whether if the Auckland super-city cannot agree on a plan for regional public transport next year we will just sack the new Auckland Council. What if some provincial council cannot agree on whether Rio Tinto should be allowed to build a mine in its area? Well let us sack them. What about if other regional councils cannot agree on a merger plan? Well let us just do away with them because they obviously cannot be trusted to govern themselves. They cannot be trusted to make decisions in the interests of the people who elected them. 
I will quote from the regulatory impact statement which makes a very powerful case for the kind of decision that these Ministers have made with this bill. The paper sets out a number of options that were open to the Government in considering a response to the problem of water rights in Canterbury. The Government could have done a number of things. It could have installed a commissioner/adviser it could have used the existing powers in the Resource Management Act it could have put in commissioners only for the business of allocating water rights it could have invested energy and resources into the Canterbury Water Management Strategy specifically and it could have provided targeted assistance. What did the Government do? It chose the most intrusive most undemocratic and most authoritarian solution by sacking 14 democratically elected councillors. 
In a few weeks members of this House will be turning out on Anzac Day at cenotaphs and memorials up and down this country. We will pay homage to those who gave their lives in the Second World War and other conflicts to defend democracy. I hope that the members on that side of the House will hang their heads not in reverence but in shame. 
COLIN KING (National—Kaikoura) 
: 
 It is a pleasure to speak in the third reading of the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill. I thank the officials and I also thank the 10 mayors of Canterbury. Sadly the Opposition does not understand the potential of water for Canterbury and for New Zealand. It is common sense to store water and to use it during the dry periods of summer. This conversation has been going on for 20 years. This bill is the first step on a journey to ensuring that we have a good regional water plan in Canterbury. 
The Hurunui River features in this bill because it is part of the Canterbury Water Management Strategy. It is not some conspiracy as the Opposition tries to lead members to believe. It is no secret that farmers within this region would like to be able to store water and to meet the needs of all the other stakeholders and the environment. I say to Opposition members that if they can do that then why should they not be able to? 
We have heard a lot of statements from members on the other side such as “Stop stealing our water.” I think it was Ruth Dyson who made that statement. Sadly it is that dog-in-the-manger attitude that has brought us to this impasse and we have to get past it. This bill is the light at the end of the tunnel. This Government is taking brave steps to be able to manage water and we will certainly make things work in a very positive way. 
The Minister in the chair the Minister for the Environment spoke about a step change. When we look at what has not happened over the last 20 years we see that there needed to be a Government that had great confidence. Gone are the days when we saw crocodile tears from the other side—rhetoric and no action. It is an indictment an absolute indictment on the Opposition that during its 9 years in Government it did nothing. So when we listen to the Greens talking about how the Government is running roughshod over the water conservation orders we can understand that in actual fact the Greens do not understand the importance of them. It has been mentioned many many times on this side of the House that Government members recognise the value of water so I make the point that this is not the end but the beginning. I extend the hand of collegiality to the Opposition and ask to put our differences aside. Let us manage water in a sustainable way and on a positive note. A vote for this bill is a vote for the Canterbury Water Management Strategy. A vote for this bill is a vote for better environmental management in Canterbury. A vote for this bill is a vote for the future prosperity of New Zealanders and a brighter future not only for Canterbury but for all New Zealanders. 
It gives me great pleasure to recommend the bill to the House in the sense that we have to work hard for the distant future. There is so much to be said and very important it comes from the point of view of being positive. When we talk about the vision that this Government has—we extend from the Waitaki to the Clarence River—and when we stop and think about the disregard for installations like wharves and harbour installations such as in Kaikoura we think of some of the sad things that occurred before the introduction of this bill. One of the very sad things that we witnessed was in the coastal management plan. Environment Canterbury had not recognised any of the installations of wharves or harbour in its coastal plan. On that basis it has shown its dysfunctionality and it is a real shameful situation to be in. But this Government has moved to introduce this bill and I must commend the Ministers for having the courage to do so. This is the light at the end of the tunnel for water storage in New Zealand. It is the start of a journey and I extend my hand of collegiality to the Ministers. I commend the bill to the House. 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill be now read a third time. 
Ayes 64 
New Zealand National 58; ACT New Zealand 5; United Future 1. 
Noes 58 
New Zealand Labour 43; Green Party 9; Maori Party 5; Progressive 1. 
Bill read a third time.