Hughes Gareth: Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) (Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is subject to correctionHughes Gareth: Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) (Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 17 June 2015. Volume:706;Page:4535. Text is subject to correction.]GARETH HUGHES (Green):Ha! No pressure—that is right. I rise to support the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) (Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill and I agree with the member David Cunliffe: it is a fix-up job but it is a fix-up job for Shell Todd Oil Services. Let us be clear: the fact is this company did not get its time lines despite years of knowing how the legislation worked. As I said in an earlier contribution it was involved in the select committee process on the original legislation. It had decades of warning of when its permit was going to expire but before it even put in its application the company ran off to Cabinet and got it to draft this retrospective legislation to give the company a retrospective consent for its marine application for the Māui gas field. That is why I lay the blame at Shell Todd Oil Services. It should have got its house in order. It should have got its time lines in order. This is a substantial company after all and here is Parliament using its awesome power to pass legislation fixing it for the company.Crucially nowhere in the documentation nowhere in the select committee process—no one from Shell Todd Oil Services remember even fronted to the Local Government and Environment Committee—could actually tell us what the impacts of not passing this legislation were. The Green Party was opposed in the first reading because there were not any arguments for the necessity of passing this legislation. Sure the platform could have shut down for a short while. It subsequently received its marine consent from the Environmental Protection Authority. We have got substantial gas storage facilities in New Zealand. The spectre of stoves not working lights not turning on was raised but no one can actually explain how that possibly could be and whether in fact the only penalty would be that this company would itself face some financial penalties for not delivering its gas supply contracts. So those are two myths that we would like to challenge.I would like to turn to why we are supporting this legislation which is that it was improved substantially in the select committee. The two key areas that were improved were the specified time frames and the completeness of applications. What this bill effectively does under the transitional provisions of the original exclusive economic zone legislation is allow a company that has an existing permit that expires to continue for the period for which any appeals might take. One of the crucial problems with the way this amendment bill was originally drafted was that a company could put in an application the day before its permit expired even if that permit had gone for 30 or 35 years knowing full well that under this new amended version of the exclusive economic zone legislation it could continue for as long as the process took as long as any future appeals took. That is why Eugenie Sage and I and other members on the committee thought it was important that there were some specified time frames around it. There were various choices: 6 9 12 months. Six months would have aligned with the Resource Management Act but the committee in its wisdom thought it was good to go to 9 months which is consistent with the Environmental Protection Authority process around the exclusive economic zone legislation and the implementation of it. We think 9 months is a huge amount of time for a company to get its ducks in a row and make sure it has applied.Secondly it was important that the completeness of the application was resolved and clarified in this. What we do not want to see is companies put in incomplete applications right before the deadline. We have seen previous applications—and there has been only a handful in front of the Environmental Protection Authority under this new legislation but I know that the Trans-Tasman Resources case had three or more full pages of further additional questions requested by the authority’s independent decision-making committee because the application was not complete. In fact an impact assessment statement for Anadarko’s drilling off the Raglan coast under the transitional provisions of the original legislation was not even provided to the authority before it gave it the tick of approval to drill what was our deepest-ever well close to the Māui’s dolphin sanctuary as a previous member has raised. So we thought it was important that a complete application had to be mentioned to clarify it—it is crystal clear for everyone involved.We were opposed to this legislation in the first reading because of the inadequate information provided because it simply looked like this company was running to the Government before even putting in its application—well that is what it did; it looked like the company did not get its time lines in order—but since then the bill has been improved. I would like to once again acknowledge the committee members for the constructive positive relationship on the committee. The legislation has been improved. It is now roughly analogous to similar provisions in the Resource Management Act. There are around three other companies that face this but we are not talking for decades so let us hope they do learn the lessons of Shell Todd Oil Services.