Hughes Gareth: Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHughes Gareth: Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 11 April 2013. Volume:689;Page:9326. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GARETH HUGHES (Green): Kia ora. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. I rise to take a call in this Committee stage of the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill. We are looking now at the title and commencement clauses of this legislation. In earlier calls I talked about how it could be called the “Petrobras Law Bill”. Perhaps we could call Supplementary Order Paper 205 which now will be included in this legislation the “Anadarko amendment”. I also suggested that we could maybe call it the “A Bridge Too Far Bill” because of the way it tramples on our constitutional and human rights and the freedom to protest which successive New Zealand Governments and generations have held up as an honourable tradition and a key part about what it isto be a New Zealander—someone who sticks up for our values and our principles on the world stage.In earlier calls the Minister directly levelled a number of questions around economic management in my direction and that is why I would contend that actually this legislation should be called the “Crown Minerals (Lazy Economic Gamble) Bill”. I say “lazy economic gamble” because this is the heart of the Government’s economic strategy. We have seen the worst economic performance in 50 years yet—Hon Ruth Dyson: 51 I think now.GARETH HUGHES: —51 years Ms Dyson says—all the Government can point to is oil and gas as its strategy. We have seen some economic benefits in Taranaki and I am the first to say that the Green Party is not opposed to shallow offshore drilling. We are not opposed to onshore drilling. We think we should have a transition strategy because look even the International Energy Agency—hardly a bastion of radical green thought—is saying that we need to leave 80 percent of the oil that we already know about not discounting the stuff we do not know about which Anadarko and Petrobras were prospecting for in the ground. We have to leave 80 percent of it in the ground if we are going to avoid runaway climate change. So the Greens are not opposed to onshore shallow drilling. We think we should have a transition strategy.But look this is not an economic strategy for the country. We have got such a high unemployment rate at the moment yet when we look at Taranaki it has got the lowest job-creating potential of any sector in that economy. When you look at its economic statistics for every $1.2 million of GDP you see only one worker employed in the oil and gas sector. In agriculture it is 15 and in retail it is 33. I am the first to acknowledge there are many high-paid jobs but if jobs is your question oil and gas is not the answer to building a large number of workers. Take the Government’s East Coast oil and gas report. The most likely scenario there said we might see 199 jobs. I would love to see 199 extra jobs on the East Coast because that region is really struggling under this Government’s economic stewardship. But this region has lost more than 900 jobs in manufacturing alone in the first 4 years of the National Government’s term. Even if the most likely scenario went ahead and we saw dozens of fracking wells up and down the East Coast the region is still going backwards under National. So if jobs is the question and it rightfully is oil and gas is not the answer.It is a lazy economic gamble because the entire premise is the hope that some foreign offshore company will come down here find something and sell it offshore. There is hardly any value-add. There is hardly any benefit for our economy. We have got the fourth-lowest royalty plus tax rate of any oil-producing nation in the world. We are going to benefit less than most other nations in the world. Simon Bridges’ predecessor Phil Heatley made it easier to bring in foreign offshore oil workers. He amended the immigration rules and made 11 oil worker positions able to be expedited through the skilled shortages list. We know there are going to be fewer New Zealanders working in the sector so this is why I think the bill should be called the “Lazy Economic Gamble Bill”. It is lazy. There is no innovation there is no plan and there is no strategic thought. There is no sense of where the global economic trends are going how New Zealand can shape its economy how we can turn this direction and how we can address some of the structural imbalances in our economy.It is lazy because clearly the trends are moving away from oil. This is what the International Energy Agency says and this is what the IMF says. In the last month we have seen reports from HSBC and others such as Standard and Poor’s saying that actually with the risks of climate change and global high energy prices we are seeing a similar occurrence to the subprime mortgages in the States. Essentially these oil assets that some of these big oil majors have are toxic because they cannot be developed atthe moment. All the trends are going in one direction. When you look at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance report from 2011 it showed that for the first time ever more money was invested in clean energy than fossil fuels—the first time ever in 2011. This is the direction we should be taking our country. So instead of the “Crown Minerals (Lazy Economic Gamble) Bill” we should have a new energy bill to focus on the current century’s economic trend.This is what PricewaterhouseCoopers says when it says we could have a $22 billion economic opportunity in clean energy. It is what the likes of Pure Advantage says in its recent report on the green economy—that we could see 3000 jobs which the energy Minister says we could see if we develop an entire new petroleum basin. Of course that is direct and indirect jobs. But we could see 50000 green jobs in New Zealand if we embraced clean energy. You see the likes of Greenpeace saying 100 percent renewable is possible. We could be saving $600 million per annum. We could be reducing that $8 billion fuel import which I contend is one of the most significant strategic threats to our economy. The Government’s deficit is of a similar order of magnitude. Making a dent in that $8 billion fuel import bill would make a huge difference to the Crown’s books instead of a lazy economic gamble that bets it all on the hope that foreign offshore oil companies find something which again is still up in the air.I understand that in our exploratory wells there is in the order of less than half the likelihood of offshore averages of striking oil. We are called a frontier region to the offshore oil zone. What we know of course is we are going to see hardly any royalties hardly any taxes and hardly any jobs for New Zealanders. All the profits are going to flow offshore but then we are going to face 100 percent of the environmental risks. This is what my motivation is because I do not want to see oil washing up on our beaches. I do not want to see our agricultural sector our tourism sector or our horticultural sector devastated by an oil spill.What we know is that the exploratory drilling phase which is what we are talking about with this Government is the riskiest phase. A month ago the European Union put out a report saying that exploratory drilling is the riskiest phase. What we are talking about with deep-sea oil drilling is operating at the frontiers of geology geography and technology. We are talking about an environment that is a kilometre deep or deeper. Just off my home town of Wellington the permit the Government has recently given to the very same company that had a 25 percent stake in the Deepwater Horizon $40 billion oil spill Anadarko is 2.7 kilometres down. There the pressure would crush a person in a second. It is pitch-black and close to freezing yet the oil they are prospecting for is coming out close to boiling. It is the frontiers of geology and technology because we just still do not know what is down there despite advances in a modern seismic 3-D survey and computer mapping tools. You can still have an accident and that is what we have seen in Azerbaijan that is what we have seen with the Montara oil spill in Australia in 2009 and that is what we have seen with Deepwater Horizon. The spill there had an oil exclusion zone almost as large as the North Island.Tragically I do not think we were well enough prepared for theRena oil spill. We struggled with 300 tonnes of oil entering our marine environment there. With the Deepwater Horizon deep-sea oil blowout we saw up to 600000 tonnes of oil entering the environment. The US Government had a thousand vessels and 40000 people working on that spill. Maritime New Zealand in New Zealand has got three vessels—well they are really dinghies. They are a similar size to the skimmers. We have got approximately 200 to 300 staff. Our oil spill response capacity is minuscule compared with the US Government.We are a frontier region far from international oil infrastructure. The only solution to the Deepwater Horizon blowout was the relief rig which drilled a relief well to take offthe pressure so it could be capped. This is possibly the most worrying factor for New Zealand because this Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill does nothing about protecting us by having a relief rig in New Zealand waters. I got the Parliamentary Library in December last year to map where relief rigs capable of drilling to the depths of where we are planning to drill exploratory wells in New Zealand were located in the southern hemisphere. I understand there were three in the entire Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean regions. We could be waiting weeks or months for a relief rig to finally travel to New Zealand if it could be found if it could be contracted to finally drill a relief well and plug a well.So until we can get a guarantee from this Government and until we can get a guarantee from the industry that we will not see oil spills—similar to shallow drilling in New Zealand which has been done on the whole pretty well—and until we can see similar safety standards the Green Party is going to say no to deep-sea oil drilling. But we are going to say yes to clean energy we are going to say yes to clean energy jobs and we are going to say yes to an accurate and fair carbon price that has a level playing field. We are not going to pick winners in oil and gas which is what the Government is doing. We are not going to throw tens of millions of dollars at seismic surveys. We are not going to literally call out the navy and change the laws when people get in the way. The Green Party is going to have a smart future-focused economy. We are not going to introduce legislation that could—