Parker DavidHon DAVID PARKER (Labour): Can I begin by thanking all parties of the House for cooperating at the Business Committee to allow this to have a first reading before James Shaw leaves. In this increasingly polarised fractured world it is fantastic to see our Parliament cooperating around a process step like this so that an important issue like this can be heard even though the bill's going to go down it appears. So I just think that we can congratulate ourselves for maintaining some sort of civility in this place in order to govern our country. So can I thank the Government members for their support of that.There is no doubt that the world has serious environmental problems. This graph comes from The Guardian today: it shows that for the last 10 months consecutively we have the highest temperatures ever recorded—ever—beyond the projections. Now it may well come right because of the end of El Niño and we might come back to some projections that aren't quite so scary but by the end of the year we will know whether we are off the chart forever. So we have serious climate problems.We know that in New Zealand we have declining water quality in our rivers and lakes. And we know that despite that the current Government is going backwards on climate. You know we need to decarbonise transport and industrial heat. In order to do that we need to build a lot more electricity renewable electricity. In order for that to be affordable we need to be able to allow those investors to hedge against intermittency. And yet the Government cancelled even finishing the cost-benefit analysis on project Onslow that the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment had already said stacked up as a good idea. We already had fast track to address the issues that Simon Court addressed to speed up the process because it does take too long and cost too much and we had fixed that. But the current Government allows them to override the protections in the Conservation Act and the Wildlife Act and in the Resource Management Act and we already know that in respect of the water space. We heard today that the Government is not only delaying the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management to be required to be implemented; they're actually talking I stopping regional councils implementing it even if they want to which is a terrible thing. We also know that they're going to downgrade farm plans which are a replacement for regulation but they're going to be softer plans without certification and order. So we need stricter rules in New Zealand environmentally to make it less easy to do that sort of thing.That said if this goes to select committee we have to look at whether it should sit in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act or not because the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act really protects personal freedoms: the right not to be tortured—I'll read out a list of them in Part 2 of the Act where they're listed—the right not to be deprived of life or subjected to torture or cruel treatment to be subjected to medical or scientific experimentation; the right to refuse medical treatment electoral rights freedom of thought conscience and religion freedom of expression manifestation of religion and belief freedom of peaceful assembly freedom of association and freedom of movement. Those are the core rights that are protected by the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and they are individual freedoms and liberties that we are protecting. We have to be very careful to decide whether this sort of thing should sit in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act—which I'm a bit doubtful about myself even though we're supporting it to select committee—or whether it should sit in separate legislation.If we invite the courts into this space we are at risk of undermining the clarity which should apply to the freedoms that are protected by the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act by bringing in things that are more contentious as to resource allocation as to what is the appropriate remedy within the purview of the senior courts to make declarations of inconsistency—which could bring the court system into conflict with this place Parliament and I'm not sure that's the right way to go.So the Labour Party will be supporting this to select committee and we hope other parties will too. But the issue as to whether this sort of provision should sit in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act or some higher environmental legislation is a very proper issue to discuss as a country. Because those rights that I referred to those basic human rights including the right to freedom from discrimination they are of a different nature to some of the things that you need to do to protect the environment and I'm not personally convinced that either they or social rights should sit in this legislation particularly given that we have created this obligation for the Parliament through the amendment that we made to the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act in the last Parliament to respond to declarations of inconsistency.I congratulate the member for bringing this bill to the House.