O'Rourke Denis: Environmental Reporting Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeO'Rourke Denis: Environmental Reporting Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 30 June 2015. Volume:706;Page:4878. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENIS O’ROURKE (NZ First): In my last contribution I said that there were five questions that I felt the public should ask themselves about clause 18 of the Environmental Reporting Bill and the regime that that sets out. The fifth one that I wanted to ask was about transparency. The first four had been first why it should be just two Ministers who make the decision; second how robust this regime really is in terms of providing a comprehensive way of reporting on our environment; third whether consultation can really amount to independent decision-making—which it obviously cannot—and fourth about the difficult issue of decisions not to report at all and whether anyone would ever know that. I think those are four very important questions that the public of New Zealand should ask about this section and about the Government’s motives in pushing it forward. What could they possibly be? What has the Government got to hide? What is it that it wants to do other than just make sure that Ministers can secure even more executive power for themselves?We have seen this Government year after year bill after bill issue after issue coming down on the side of giving more executive responsibility to Ministers and having less democracy less transparency and less independent decision-making where it is appropriate in New Zealand. I have not heard any rebuttal of those arguments from the members opposite.But I did want to just finish off with that fifth question that I said the public should ask themselves and that is why we are not seeing much more transparency when it comes to regulations that will prescribe the topics to be covered in synthesis reports and the topics to be covered in domain reports. Of course that is very important because without transparency you do not get public trust and you do not get the public feeling that we have a system with integrity. So it goes right to the root of this particular bill and why we need an environmental reporting system. It has to be one that the public can trust. It has to be one that has integrity. This bill does not deliver it and has not a hope in hell of doing so quite frankly.And what does transparency really mean? I will have to give the members opposite a little bit of a lesson in this because they do not seem to understand. In particular Mr Doocey when I heard his speech did not seem to understand it. They use the word but obviously do not know what they are talking about when they use it. So first of all it means that the background information upon which the decision is made must be clear. It must relate to the decision made. That should be set out and understood by everyone and of course it has to show what the decision is in detail and it has to say why the topics selected were the highest in priority and why others were not. And indeed it has to say which topics that could have been reported on are in fact not going to be reported on. Finally it has to set out what the discussion is and what the reasoning is that led to the decision being made.Those are the sorts of considerations that add up to transparency. Those are the sorts of considerations that people want to know about when they look at what the Ministers are doing in their regulations to decide whether they are the correct decisions or not. That is what transparency means. That is what this bill does not do. It gives executive power to just two Ministers to pass regulations just giving the conclusion just saying: “Here is what we have decided—full stop.” And OK there is consultation and that is a step in the right direction but it is a very very tiny step compared with what is really required for independent decision-making and a transparent regime of decision making. This is not what the public is going to see as a result of this bill.The bill is going to be a failure simply for those reasons. That is a shame because we all want a good regime of environmental reporting. So I could compliment the Government for bringing legislation forward that actually creates a system of environmental reporting but at the same time I would have to say this bill is so defective that there is no way that any responsible party in Opposition could possibly support it.