Fitzsimons Jeanette: Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Stockholm Convention) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Stockholm Convention) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:606;Page:3662] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 Unlike some other members of the House the Green Party believes that these two bills do deal with serious and important issues and that we ought to be debating the content rather than the trivia. Obviously the Green Party supports these two pieces of legislation which are needed to ratify the Stockholm convention the Rotterdam convention and to enforce the Basel convention and the Waigani convention which New Zealand has already ratified. 
The 10 persistent organic pollutants outlawed by the Stockholm convention are extremely hazardous and extremely persistent. Despite not having been used in pastoral farming since the 1970s DDT still contaminates soil in Canterbury to the extent that it is unacceptable in some of the produce that is grown there. Environmentalists have been agitating for many years for those materials to be outlawed and it is good to see it happen. Of course it will make no immediate difference in practice because they are not currently used. But until there is a law that actually prevents them from being used the convention is not being implemented and cannot be ratified. These two bills provide mechanisms and I want to deal with the two bills together. The House is dealing with them side by side and the select committee is dealing with them side by side so I am not going to confine myself totally to the second of the two bills.  
The bills provide mechanisms to control the movement of hazardous substances as specified by those international conventions but they still allow the export of hazardous and other wastes if approved by the Minister of Customs under certain conditions in accord with the Basel convention. The problem is that the Basel convention itself is an inadequate tool for ensuring the environmentally sound management of wastes which is the supposed objective of the convention because it actually regulates and legitimises trade rather than stopping it. It allows the trans-boundary movement of wastes from industrially developed to industrially less developed nations. Yet the latter countries generally have neither the technical capacity nor the regulatory provisions to ensure environmentally sound management of those wastes.  
The Basel convention was adopted in 1989 although New Zealand did not ratify it until 1994. It was seen as a means of legitimising the waste trade rather than restricting it. As a result many European and developing countries negotiated and passed in 1994 under the convention the Basel ban despite opposition from the USA Canada Australia and international chambers of commerce and industry organisations. That ban prohibited all exports of hazardous waste from OECD countries to non-OECD countries. To come into force of law the Basel ban requires 62 parties to ratify it. As of last month only 35 parties had done so. New Zealand has not ratified the Basel ban but instead we are one of the countries that has supported a study that is actually a vehicle for continuing the questioning of the efficacy and the viability of the ban. New Zealand is actually trying to undermine the ban so that non-OECD countries will continue to be recipients of wastes from the industrially developed world—basically to continue to be our hole in the ground.  
In reply to an oral question last December the Minister stated that some non-OECD countries have perfectly sound disposal facilities. When I further asked what monitoring we do of the hazardous wastes we export the ways they are treated and the environmental and health effects the Hon Pete Hodgson answering on behalf of the Minister for the Environment was not able to say. Let me tell the House what I found when I followed up with some written questions.  
New Zealand exports hazardous wastes to the Philippines as well as to several OECD countries. The receiving facility in the Philippines has been assessed for its capacity to manage the materials in an environmentally sound manner and tracking documents confirm that it has been received there. So that looks very good on the face of it. The Philippines obtains all of its lead for car batteries from recycling imported used lead acid batteries. However the official licence facility contracts most of the work out to unlicensed unregulated backyard and home-kitchen operators which leads to massive exposure of people and the environment to highly toxic lead. Children of battery workers have been tested at five times the blood lead level that is associated with reduced intelligence. Sulphuric acid from batteries is dumped into streams. Backyard smelters do not filter emissions. Soil lead has been measured in the Philippines at 26000 parts per million which compares with 140 parts per million around smelters in Europe. We have moved past the time when such environmentally unsound waste management is acceptable in our own countries and we should be supporting measures to protect non-OECD countries from pressure to be our dumping ground by ratifying the Basel ban.  
Instead New Zealand continues to support only the convention—a legacy from the right-wing extremism of the 1980s and 1990s which legitimised the waste trade. It is time to reassess this position. But once again the World Trade Organization trade rules have caused some concern that if we stopped sending hazardous waste to the Philippines they might succeed with a complaint to the World Trade Organization. The bigger picture is that we should be arguing for a clear rule that international environmental treaties take precedence over trade rules under the World Trade Organization.  
These two bills are a good step forward but I urge the Government to consider the wider issues involved under the Basel convention and to consider seriously ratifying the ban in order to protect the people and the environment of countries like the Philippines from the appalling practices that are happening there at the moment with our wastes.