Parker David; Salesa JennyHAZARDOUS SUBSTANCES AND NEW ORGANISMS (HAZARDOUS SUBSTANCES ASSESSMENTS) AMENDMENT BILLFirst ReadingHon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): I move that the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Hazardous Substances Assessments) Amendment Bill be now read for a first time. I also present a legislative statement to the House.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.Hon DAVID PARKER: Madam Speaker given that I did that in the wrong order do you want me to move that name again or is it OK as I've—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): OK go on.Hon DAVID PARKER: I move That the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Hazardous Substances Assessments) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Environment Committee to consider the bill.The Government has committed to making changes where needed to improve efficiency and to better safeguard people and the environment and this bill actually advances all of those three aims in that it better protects the environment it has positive outcomes for the health and safety of our people and communities and it does both of these things by preventing or managing the effect of hazardous substances.The purpose of the bill is to amend the underlying Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act 1996 in order to improve the assessment and reassessment of hazardous substances. These substances include the chemicals that are widely used in industry and in agriculture. The main changes being made to the hazardous substances law relate to substances—chemicals—not to new organisms. Under the HSNO Act which I'm now going to shorten my reference to the Environmental Protection Authority or what we know as the EPA is the regulator responsible for making decisions on whether or not to approve new hazardous substances for use. The EPA sets the necessary controls to manage risk and to safeguard people and protect the environment. These controls set out conditions as to how a substance can be used. The EPA also reassesses hazardous substances already in use and makes decisions about whether the controls need to be updated and whether the substance should continue to be approved.Right now the assessment and reassessment of hazardous substances in New Zealand is very time consuming and very resource intensive. As a consequence since 2001 the EPA has only been able to complete 54 reassessments and in addition to that there are outstanding 43 chemicals in urgent need of reassessment. These lengthy and costly processes mean that it takes time for beneficial chemicals including safer alternatives to existing ones to be approved for use. Delayed reassessments may also mean that chemicals continue to be used when their safety and environmental controls may no longer be fit for purpose. For these reasons amendments to the HSNO Act are needed to improve the process for assessing and reassessing hazardous substances and to enable the EPA to make better use of relevant information from international regulators. The amendments include changes to enable better use of information from comparable international regulations and make other improvements to the reassessment process.It had originally been envisaged that these changes would be made both via changes to the HSNO Act and via associated changes to the related secondary legislation which is known as the Methodology Order". However in the process of the bill being drafted it was decided that it would be better to put all of these changes into the Act itself. It had originally been intended that the EPA would undertake a subsequent consultation as part of the process of amending the Methodology Order and as a result some of the details of those changes were not consulted on in the 2019 consultation. However there will still be an opportunity for public submissions on proposed changes to the Methodology Order as part of the public submissions that will occur during the select committee process.The bill also includes three technical amendments to the HSNO Act to correct omissions or ambiguous language. These are not related to the main policy changes in the bill; however the bill presents a timely opportunity to make these corrections too. These amendments overall enable the use of international regulator information. Amendments will enable the EPA to apply information from international regulators considering the New Zealand context without effectively having to redo the research from the start. An obvious example of this is some of the work that's done in Europe. They've got very thorough practices in terms of their assessments of new chemicals. Quite often there isn't a compelling economic case for those new chemicals to be registered in the New Zealand market because we're quite a small market and we want to encourage the registration of new chemicals especially where those new chemicals are more effective and less environmentally harmful and less risky for humans using them than the current chemicals being used. So we think that this will facilitate the consideration by the EPA of alternatives. The amendments will also provide a simplified process for the EPA to update hazard classifications of substances and corresponding controls based on information from international regulators.Furthermore the changes to the Act will enable the EPA to temporarily restrict certain uses of hazardous substances during a reassessment process. The bill will also make other improvements to the reassessment process to either increase efficiency or increase transparency. These improvements will enable the EPA to engage in more targeted consultation for certain reassessments. They'll require the EPA to develop a publicly available work plan for reassessment. They'll provide a simplified process for the EPA to update hazard classifications of substances when the EPA has undertaken a recent assessment of a related hazardous substance. They'll enable the delegation of some EPA decision-making. They'll also enable the EPA to align the time frames of assessment and reassessment of related hazardous substances.As I mentioned earlier there are three technical amendments to the Act which are unrelated to the policy of improving assessments but have been included to correct omissions or improve ambiguous language. Those amendments are an amendment to section 68 of the Act. This is a provision relating to ministerial call-in where an application can be called in and determined by the Minister for the Environment rather than the EPA. The bill amends the Act to make it clear that the ministerial call-in provisions apply to publicly notified reassessments. Currently there's an ambiguity regarding this. The second technical amendment is to correct an omission that occurred in 2015 when section 103A was created—that relates to powers of entry for inspection related to hazardous substances—but the references to the new section were not included in other parts of the Act. The amendment fixes that. And the third technical amendment is an amendment to create a penalty for an offence under the Act which was created in 2015 for failing to comply with any of the requirements in an EPA notice. There was an omission in the 2015 amendments in that an offence was created without a corresponding penalty. So that's fixed too.To conclude this bill will improve the efficiency and speed of assessment and reassessment of hazardous substances. It's important that we can more quickly get safer and more environmentally friendly chemicals in use in this country and better controlled use of older less safe substances. Transparency is improved particularly by the requirement of the EPA to publish a work plan for reassessments. For those reasons I commend the bill to the House.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): The question is that the motion be agreed to."