Court SimonSIMON COURT (ACT): Thank you Madam Speaker. The ACT Party agrees there's a problem with the state of the Hauraki Gulf and that's why we will be supporting this bill to select committee so that we can hear from submitters and the committee can carry out a full inquiry as to the nature of the problem and whether this bill will solve it.So the nature of the problem as described in the supporting documents for this bill is that the gulf has declined significantly. Since the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park was established over 20 years ago conditions have got worse. I attended a launch of the State of our Gulf report at the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron a few weeks ago and we heard that in addition to overfishing and to reefs being damaged some stocks like crayfish and snapper in many areas are becoming functionally extinct. There is also a problem of around 4000 tonnes of additional nutrients entering the gulf from various sources such as rivers that discharge from agricultural land and pollution from urban environments. Even though more and more money is being spent on wastewater infrastructure and cleaning up discharges there is still an unacceptable number of wastewater overflows and raw sewage being discharged to the inner gulf on a regular basis.So what does this bill propose in order to solve those problems? Well it establishes some additional marine-protected areas and extends marine reserves such as Federal Cove and you have to say that OK that's a good place to start. But when you actually look into the information in the bill what does it do and how does it propose to do it? Well it says there's a problem to solve with the degradation of the gulf: habitat loss overfishing pollution sedimentation and poor urban development. Well when you look at the justification for this legislation it says actually a lot of those problems can be solved with existing legislation such as the Fisheries Act which has provisions to make sure that fishing is managed in a sustainable way.But what it says the Fisheries Act and the other legislation can't solve is this issue of discharges to the marine environment of marine sediments mining and other activities like sand extraction. Well all of those activities are covered by resource consents. They're deemed to be necessary. They've passed—say for example dredging the Port of Auckland and dumping its sediments offshore essentially on the very very furthest edge of the Hauraki Gulf is deemed acceptable because it balances the need to maintain an operating port against the impacts on the receiving environment and those impacts have been accepted as less than minor. But this bill potentially would make it difficult or almost impossible to continue with dredging the North Island's largest port—most important port—which receives somewhere around 40 percent of all container traffic imported to New Zealand every year. It may very well make it impossible to get consent to do that in the future.There are also places around the Hauraki Gulf where specialist sand products are extracted by dredging because—take the City Rail Link tunnel for example. The concrete used in that project is made from sand extracted from off the north-east coast of Auckland at Pakiri. Now people might say Oh well why do you need to get sand from the sea floor?" Well it's a specific hard sharp sand that is excellent in making concrete—highly durable concrete. Unfortunately because there is no other place where this sand is able to be recovered from—that's the only place it exists—that is where consents have been issued to carry out that activity. Now many people might say you shouldn't carry out that activity; it's bad for the environment. And yet the Environment Court consenting authorities have accepted that the balance of environmental effects against economic and social benefits—actually the environmental effects are less than minor. This legislation may well make it more difficult to get permits to do things that are absolutely vital for our economy.And then I want to come to the supposed benefits that the bill intends to deliver which is to restore parts of the Hauraki Gulf to a healthier state. There is nothing in the supporting information here which says how long this will take. When will we get these benefits? Because if more areas are excluded from recreational and commercial fishing if reefs around the Hauraki Gulf are protected—and it may well be that that is the method to achieve a restoration of the Hauraki Gulf's ecosystem—then as an environmental scientist I would want to know: what species are we looking to see recover? In what numbers? What biomass of fish? Where are the outcomes the outputs the measurements of when we will know whether this protection approach has been successful? Because otherwise in the future someone might say "Well you protected all these areas but the gulf hasn't improved." That's one of the problems with this piece of legislation: it doesn't say what the key performance indicators (KPIs) are what the measurements are—how will we know?Chlöe Swarbrick: Ecosystem protection.SIMON COURT: Apparently according to the member Chlöe Swarbrick simply protecting the ecosystem is enough. Well as far as the ACT Party and most New Zealanders are concerned passing laws simply so you can say you've done something or protected or banned something is insufficient. We must know that the laws that are passed and the regulations that are implemented will actually result in the benefits that are simply assumed by this legislation.So that is why ACT believes this bill should go to select committee and should be subject to further interrogation. Not only is it unclear when the benefits of a recovered ecosystem might occur how they're being measured there's also something else that has really greatly concerned a lot of New Zealanders—that the biodiversity and ecological outcomes actually won't be negotiated with scientists. But in the supporting information for this bill it says that while customary rights to fish—which are due to iwi because of Treaty settlements—will be upheld the ecological objectives and outcomes for these marine protected areas won't be negotiated with scientists; won't be negotiated with Auckland Council for example which controls land use in a lot of areas around the gulf. They will only be negotiated with Māori and many New Zealanders would have some concern that if we're going to focus on scientific and ecological objectives why is it that only one group in New Zealand will be given the opportunity to say whether they agree with it or not rather than scientists ecologists or marine biologists for example? It doesn't seem to be on the face of it a sensible way to approach marine protection to improve the environment.The bill also references the Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Act 2011 and that it's important that the bill navigates around the rights and interests of iwi and hapū with respect to the foreshore and seabed. Well that is important. However the ACT Party would want to point out that while that Act restores rights and interests to Māori that were denied by the Labour Government at the time—in fact denied in such a way that led to Tariana Turia leaving Labour to form the Māori Party—there are some problems with the way the Takutai Moana Act has been implemented and decisions resulting from it which are making it harder to build wharves coastal protection seawalls because of the need to obtain cultural reports and permissions.So while this bill proposes to improve the state of the Hauraki Gulf actually it now opens up for discussion through referral to select committee the opportunity to examine a whole lot of other matters that impact on the Hauraki Gulf and on Aucklanders' and the other provinces' like the Waikato and Northland's ability to actually grow our economies and deliver better outcomes for people in those regions. So the ACT Party will support this bill with reservations."