Mark RonRON MARK (Deputy Leader—NZ First): I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to say that New Zealand First has major issues with Mr Upton being appointed as the next Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. We made our views well known early on in the piece. I think from our perspective he fails at the first test which is that the appointee should be politically neutral and we do not share the confidence of other parties in the House that he is so. For our part we see Mr Upton as being a retread. He was a National Party member of Parliament for 19 years and a Cabinet Minister who in the pantheon of Cabinet Ministers is right up there with Dr Nick Smith. We see this actually as a bit of victory for Dr Nick Smith in what will be the final conversion of the Bluegreens into the Greenblues" as the greenies within the National Party cement their hold on rural policy and rural environmental laws which are slowly being rolled out upon them through such things as the Resource Management Act (RMA).What we do not believe we need in this Parliament is a Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment who is a previous Young Nationals chairman. We fail to see why Mr Upton a Rhodes scholar with degrees in English literature music law and a Master's degree in political philosophy is suddenly qualified for this important role. The three previous commissioners have all been highly qualified scientists devoid of any political entanglements unlike Mr Upton who is donkey deep inside of the National Party's old boys' beltway network. We look at past commissioners such as Dr Helen Hughes a Fulbright scholar and an expert in botany; Dr Morgan Williams a hugely respected ecologist with a Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries background; and then there was Dr Jan Wright a physicist with a doctorate from the John F. Kennedy School of Government. To be fair we have not always agreed with the commissioners but these were all experts with no agenda. They shared two things: legitimacy and integrity.Then you come to Mr Upton who is regarded as the Dr Nick Smith of his day—an ideologue with little political nous who was ever so accident-prone in whatever portfolio he touched. Mr Upton entered Parliament in 1981 as the MP for Waikato aged 23. He left it 19 years later and did what red-blooded Kiwis all do: he went to France. At the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development nothing he authored was very convincing because he swapped one beltway for another cosmopolitan-type beltway. So what is Mr Upton's track record? It is shameful. All other parties rolled over and allowed their tummies to be tickled and we have the "Pepsi-Coke coalition" between National and Labour. Nothing is new here.Mr Upton was responsible for messing up the Resource Management Act at the outset including the removal of private property rights from the original 1989 Resource Management Bill. The RMA is unloved by many as being a bureaucratic Hydra and Mr Upton was its midwife. Mr Upton not content with stuffing up our planning system set the groundwork for the Kyoto Protocol which sees taxpayers paying close to a quarter of a billion dollars to achieve absolutely nothing.He also broke up the legendary Department of Scientific and Industrial Research into competing Crown research institutes and what an absolute disaster that has proven to be. Now we scrap over smaller and smaller pieces of research with this Government actually then handing that funding over to the private sector and we end up with the myrtle rust disaster that is now 1000 kilometres off our shore and who knows it might even be here because we have not put in place any sort of protocols about people moving on and off Raoul Island. We forget that he was one of the most useless Ministers of Health. He showed a cold heart over compensation for bad blood transfusions and even was the person who introduced cash registers into hospitals.New Zealand First has a serious problem with this propensity to employ old boys from the parliamentary beltway back into State appointments with their political backgrounds. We need a commissioner whom we can have confidence in and we have not got confidence in Mr Upton."