Sage Eugenie; Tisch LindsayEUGENIE SAGE (Green): E Te Māngai o Te Whare tēnā koe tuarua ki ngā mema o tō tātou Whare tēnā koutou tēnā koutou tēnā koutou katoa.[Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker and secondly my greetings salutations and acknowledgments to you all members of our House.]I must say I am very pleased to see the Hon Nikki Kaye back in the Chamber with all of the energy that she had before the time she had away to deal with some very serious health challenges. So welcome back.Many MPs have bounced back into this Chamber refreshed and invigorated by a summer break and time with family and friends beyond these walls but unlike our MPs the environment has not had a break and nature's news over the summer has been pretty dismal. We have had water theft in Northland because of the huge drought there; we have had people stealing public land in Canterbury riverbeds clearing vegetation and destroying habitat and turning it into farmland; and we have had more drought in the Hawke's Bay—these droughts are going to get more severe if we are faced with catastrophic climate change. Under this Government and its refusal to do anything much about getting emissions down it is increasingly likely that we are not helping there.At Waitangi the water in the Bay of Islands looked very inviting with the sun sparkling on it but the Ministry for Primary Industries has issued a health warning against collecting and eating any shellfish—mussels scallops oysters—throughout the Bay of Islands because of the risk of getting diarrhoeatic shellfish poisoning which is when shellfish ingest the neurotoxins that microscopic algae produce. And there is a similar warning against taking shellfish from along the Canterbury coast from Gore Bay to the mouth of the Hakatere or Ashburton River.In Canterbury you cannot swim in many local rivers because again there are health warnings about the toxic cyanobacteria algal mats. You cannot even take a dog walking in rivers like the Waikirikiri/Selwyn or the Hurunui because of the risk of them ingesting or messing around with some of these algal mats. In Canterbury in January I wanted to go for a swim yet we saw massive phytoplankton blooms off the Sumner - Taylors Mistake coast and across extensive areas in Lyttelton Harbour. They turned the water a lurid shade of green. Apparently they were not toxic but Environment Canterbury estimates that they were caused by nutrients being flushed down the Waimakirikiri River by heavy rain. So not only is nutrient pollution causing major issues in our rivers; now it seems that our coastal seas are suffering from a similar nutrient overload.So what is National doing about it? What is National doing to ensure that Kiwis can enjoy their birthright of going for a swim in their local river or gathering kai along the coast without the risk of getting sick? Very very little. It is a tired caretaker Government that is lacking in new ideas. The Prime Minister did refer to the environment in passing in his statement but he was recycling past policies that National has failed to implement. They were promises about water—doing something about water standards. That was promised last year. Nothing much happened. They were promises about marine protection. Well we have not seen that. That has been promised for the last 7 or 8 years. What we have seen with National is a total failure to strengthen the rules in the national policy statement on fresh water to provide bottom-line standards that provide for rivers that are fit for swimming not wading and that provide decent controls on nitrogen not ones that would take some rivers to the same standards as the Yangtze River in China.National continues to give handouts and subsidies to the big irrigators and to agribusiness tilting the economy towards more dairy and more destruction of our waterways. As the Green Party if we get into Government in September which is our intention we would have a suite of policies aimed at protecting water quality and improving and protecting the health of our environment on which our economy depends.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I call Catherine Delahunty—5 minutes.