Sage Eugenie: Environmental Reporting Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Environmental Reporting Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 30 June 2015. Volume:707;Page:4873. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green):I would agree with the comments of the previous speaker Todd Muller that the Local Government and Environment Committee did improve clause 16. But the fact is that it highlights one of the deficiencies in this bill—that it is the Ministry for the Environment that is going to be responsible for collating the state of the environment information along with Statistics New Zealand. Of course the Ministry for the Environment is primarily a policy agency. It lacks the technical capacity to do this work on state of the environment reporting. It is going to be relying very much on the information that is collected the data that is collected by other agencies such as regional councils Crown research institutes and the like. So that is why in Supplementary Order Paper 87 which is in my name we are proposing a further change to clause 16 that would ensure the information can be withheld by the Government Statistician only if it has been collected exclusively for the purposes of state of the environment reporting and this bill.One of the problems that a lot of the submitters raised was that clause 16 potentially constrains the release of environmental information that other agencies collect. So although the clause has certainly been improved it has not been improved enough and we would encourage Government members to support the Supplementary Order Paper. Given that the Government members voted down the amendments on Part 1 I am not encouraged to think that they will do anything different this time. I think that highlights one of the problems with this Government. It is a Government of “No”. It has rejected Supplementary Order Papers previously. It has highlighted the fact that it does not want to work collaboratively with other parties.The amendments in Supplementary Order Paper 87 were put forward in the spirit of compromise. They were not the major changes that the Green Party wanted to this bill but they were put forward in the hope that across this Parliament we could get a cohesive coherent agreement on this legislation so that it is less vulnerable to changes under future Governments but the Government members have rebuffed that in the voting on Part 1. That is really disappointing when comprehensive reporting on the state of our environment is quite critical to a better understanding so that we get good policy and because the health of the environment contributes majorly to the health of the economy.Another concern that we have about this bill is in relation to clause 18. The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment said in her 2010 report on state of the environment reporting: “The need for trust and transparency in state of the environment reporting is critical if it is to be taken seriously.” and “In order [for it] to be trusted [that] reporting requires independence accountability and technical capacity.” The history of state of the environment reporting under the Ministry for the Environment has been very stop-start in terms of progress. There was work done between 1996 and 2002 on developing some environment performance indicators but that abruptly stopped in 2002. We have seen one nationwide report in 1997 and another one 10 years later in 2007 with a major chapter missing.If the Ministry for the Environment is going to have responsibility here—rather than the Environmental Protection Agency which has got much more independence and much more technical capacity—then it is going to have to substantially lift its game because the work it has done to date has had major failings in it. That change in environmental performance indicators—the lack of consistency across the country—has been a major shortcoming.One of the other areas of unease and what we have seen when we have had Ministers being involved in agencies that do environmental reporting is a failure to do that work. In Environment Canterbury under elected councillors a comprehensive region-wide state of the environment report was published in 2009. Under commissioners we have seen no region-wide state of the environment report so Cantabrians and New Zealanders generally are kept in the dark about the state of water quality and the decline there. That is one of the other reasons we are concerned by this lack of independence in clause 18—by having the Ministers set the topics for environmental reporting and regulations it lacks the independence required.