Dalziel Lianne: Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill — In Committee 
Dalziel Lianne: Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:661;Page:9983] 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East) 
: 
 I want to speak on Part 1 because I am very concerned about comments that the Minister has made in response to some of the matters that have been raised. One of the things that is so frustrating about the process we are going through is that we were to get a briefing at 11 a.m.—the Minister was late so it was about 11.45 I think by the time he arrived—on a draft bill. Then the bill was introduced yesterday afternoon and of course today’s debate will show in  
Hansard 
 as being 30 March because of the rather quaint rules that we have around urgency even though everywhere else in the country it is 31 March. This bill will go through all of its stages on 30 March; that is how it will be recorded in  
Hansard 
. 
The problem I have with this process is that there has not been an opportunity for the broader engagement that one would expect. Even in the Rodney District Council case 80 submissions were heard. There were hearings there was public input and actually there was a good deal of consensus. We have already heard about that from my colleague the Hon Ruth Dyson in respect of both sides of the Chamber recognising what was in the best interests of the council and knowing that the council was only 18 months away from a local body election. In this case 6 months before an election we are told that another 3½ years have to go by where the democratic deficit is applied to the people of Canterbury. All I am saying to the Minister is that if he had actually met with the other parties in the House—and I know that he has preferred to meet with those that might have a support agreement with the Government—and if he had talked right across the board we could have worked through what was the best way to resolve this issue. 
The thing that will not get enough consideration and debate in this Committee unless we really go through it with a fine-tooth comb is the Wyatt Creech report. I was attacked by the Minister for the Environment for daring to suggest that the former Minister Wyatt Creech had a conflict of interest. He did have a conflict of interest. It is a conflict of interest. Whether or not the conflict of interest is perceived or real it is still a conflict of interest. The Minister well knows that a conflict of interest whether or not it is perceived or real has to be notified. It has to be. A Minister even with a perceived conflict of interest has to withdraw from decision making to be on the safe side as the Minister well knows. 
What I want to say about the quality of this report is that it is not a robust report and I certainly would not want to have anyone in this country think for one minute that this is a sufficient quality of reporting for the kind of decision that this Parliament is being forced to make today. The reason that it is poor quality is that it is based so much on anecdote. There are several aspects of this report that I want to go through. The first is in relation to the complaints around the dysfunction of Environment Canterbury’s governance. 
Let me just read into the record the actual statement from the report: “Almost all external parties interviewed had a negative perception of ECan’s governance. There is a widely held view that the councillors are so polarised at times that they are dysfunctional as a group. There is insufficient leadership and the council was too busy protecting individual / Party perspectives and fails to pay sufficient attention to leading the Region. Our investigation did not bear this out.” Did anyone miss that? It stated: “Our investigation did not bear this out.” 
The report further states: “ECan is meeting its legal obligations under the LGA but has been unable to establish a firm planning environment which flows through to poor relationships and decisions under the RMA.” So it is the planning function. Who is responsible for the planning function—for employing the people who work in planning and consent? Let us go through that because that is the chief executive’s job not the job of the council. 
I will look at the section on the question of capability within Environment Canterbury itself in respect of staff. It is an entire section titled 3.1.3 “Staffing and use of resources. Leadership/Direction.” It states: “There is a lack of overall resource management content leadership within the Consenting Section. Senior management are not RMA experts and have backgrounds from outside the sector. Senior management are not able to provide leadership and direction on the RMA and the consenting functions—other than process components. This understanding of the RMA has been left to the third tier managers and team leaders some of whom have been in ECan for a long time and ‘do it how they have always done it’ (according to some internal staff and external people interviewed). This issue of leadership of the consenting function is significant and has had implications in terms of timeframe management as well as the quality of the consenting process.” 
Then the report goes on to talk about the nature of the consenting process as it was over 2 years ago. It completely fails to look at the rates of consenting that have been adopted since the time this report was referring to. Over and over again within this report it states “(according to some internal staff and external people interviewed)”. Those people are unnamed. Then there is a statement that in fact the comments are anecdotal and there is no evidence to back them up. Here is a really good one on “Relationships with applicants and submitters”. It states: “There is clearly a major perception gap between internal and external views of ECan. All external applicants spoken to raise concerns around perceived intransigence of staff to accept that decisions made by Hearings Commissioners/the Environment Court have set precedent. Concern was also expressed that processes are extremely slow and that if ECan ‘lose’ a case staff actively slow processes down and impose unworkable or impractical conditions (NB: this is anecdotal and we have not been provided any evidence to substantiate this assertion).” 
Then the report goes on to list common themes raised by external parties and what do we have? The report refers to “Intransigence when confronted with challenging situations ‘ECan not getting its own way and deliberately slowing processes down or reacting publicly’. Science led rather than science informed … Large numbers of staff are ‘green’ in orientation … A vacuum of economic social or cultural consideration …”. 
This report is outrageous. It would never ever withstand judicial review because the quality of the advice it gives is based almost entirely on anecdote. Let us go through a scenario. Let us say a National Party member of Parliament who is living in Timaru approaches the local Timaru mayor and says that the Government’s two Ministers would quite like to get stuck into Environment Canterbury and asks whether the mayor could arrange for the mayors to write a letter. So a letter is written to the Ministers but what is interesting about the letter that is written to the Ministers is that it completely breaches the process that has been agreed to between the mayoral forum and Environment Canterbury which is a heads-up no-surprises approach. Even that is mentioned in the report. The mayors did not bother to even consult with their own councils—not one. Environment Canterbury councillor Jo Kane did an Official Information Act request to all of the mayors and councils in the region and what did she find out? Not one of them had had it debated in their local councils. 
So we have the mayors making these decisions on their own behalf and not consulting with other elected people and what happens? The entire elected democratic function of our environmental regulator goes completely out the window. A lot of concerns have been raised about this. Jo Kane was interesting in the  
Timaru Herald 
 this morning. She said: “I feel like I have been on The Apprentice and Donald Trump has told me that I’m fired. Except this time it’s not Donald Trump it’s Rodney Hide and Nick Smith—or Jekyll and Hide as I like to call them.” 
The problem is that we saw this report coming to this Parliament by way of a letter from the Minister for the Environment just a couple of months ago. There was no engagement with the broader stakeholders. I think that 20 groups were consulted in the development of the Creech report. We certainly have not been consulted about our way forward. I do not know how long the Minister has spent with each individual council. I know that he visited the individual councils but it was not sufficient to be doing this.