Parker DavidHon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): Thank you Mr Speaker. Can I begin by saying that I think Mark Cameron and all the members of this place are good people but I fundamentally disagree with what is proposed in this legislation and I'm going to try in the 10 minutes that I have available to explain how we've got to the position that we've got to in New Zealand and why I think what's being proposed is not the solution. When you go back to the early 1990s just about all of New Zealand's waterways were clean. We had the occasional municipal discharge into our waterways and we had the occasional factory discharge—what we call point-source discharges—that were causing local pollution. But by far the great length of our rivers and we're blessed with some of the most beautiful rivers in New Zealand—they were clean. We live in a country that's a steep country that is a young country and that has a lot of rain. Therefore we have great flushing flows that bring gravels down from our Alps and we have these sparkling rivers that are cleaned every minute of every day by the rejuvenating flows that come from the mountains and yet somehow in the three decades since the early 1990s we've gone from that position to a point where the majority of the places that we monitor in New Zealand for swimming are not safe to put your head under in summer because the risk of microbial infection puts you beyond safe swimming levels according to the World Health Organization and also our turbidity levels have grown to be high. What's—Hon Member: Nor are beaches in Auckland. Hon DAVID PARKER: And there are problems with beaches in Auckland—that's a fair point. They need to be cleaned up too. In fairness to the council they've brought through close to $3 billion of expenditure to largely remedy that problem south of the bridge through the Central Interceptor project and other works that are going on in Auckland as we speak and they should be congratulated for doing their part even though they've got further to go. In respect of what's happened since in 1993 the Uruguay round of the GATT concluded. That capped agricultural countries in their domestic settings. That had an effect on how much subsidy could be given by those countries to their agricultural producers and what that effectively did was cap the amount of subsidised dairy products that was being sold into Asia because there were rules that prohibited increases in those subsidies and indeed they wound those subsidies back. In the decades that followed New Zealand was the lower-cost producer of increased dairy output. There were also increased improvements in farming technology. Much better electrical pumps were invented and became affordable; spray irrigation or K-Line was invented; irrigation trucks—fertiliser trucks rather that airplanes that were more expensive—became economic and this rapid changing in technology meant that there was a rapid economic push towards New Zealand taking the economic opportunity of filling those growing demands for protein that came out of Asia and sadly despite the fact that the Resource Management Act (RMA) said that we should be managing the environmental effects of the increased intensity of farming that flowed from those economic drivers we dropped the ball as a country. Not only have we got to the point that most swimming spots aren't safe to swim in in summer; our estuaries—and this is a recent picture of the Ōreti estuary. It's just out of Invercargill. It's called the New River Estuary. That picture if you can see it has about a foot deep of recent sediments. I've got other photos here that show that the cockles are all dead. The cockles have gone. These are recent sediments. Now we've always had a lot of sediment in New Zealand since deforestation following colonisation and that's been a problem. But we have reached tipping points in New Zealand because of this recent intensification of land use and we've all seen photos of intensive winter grazing carried out inappropriately. Mr Cameron said the point that things are different in different parts of the country and that's quite so. The problems in the Kaipara are different. But central government and local government are between themselves with some help from landowners spending over the next 10 years $200 million to stop the build-up of sediments in the Kaipara which is the nursery of snapper for the West Coast of the North Island. It's a juvenile white pointer - raising area and there are recent mudbanks in the Kaipara that are 2 metres deep—2-metre deep recent mudbanks—and I've seen them. It's terribly sad. Every tide there's another film of additional sediment. Some of it's coming from inappropriate management of fill coming from subdivisions into the north of Auckland. Some of it's coming from agricultural sectors and that needs to be improved too. So we set as an objective basically that we think that rivers should be clean enough to swim in. That's a proxy for environmental health—you know pop down to your local river put your head under in summer without the risk of getting crook—and most New Zealanders believe that that's an appropriate ambition and they know that in order to get there we've actually got to change the status quo because the status quo is that you can't. Even the latest data that came out a year or two ago from the data sets that are collected nationally showed that just about twice as many—a lot more rivers—are still degrading compared with improving according to the macroinvertebrate index. These are little critters that live under rocks and if the water's too polluted from sediment or from excessive nutrient they die. We've got rivers in New Zealand that have lost more than 90 percent of their macroinvertebrates. They're just about functionally dead in respect of those ecosystems and that affects not just the macroinvertebrates but the eels—the tuna—which are the fish that feed on them and again it's another indicator of problems. So what we've done to remedy this is we've actually said that look it's no individual's fault. Responsibility for getting it this bad is shared between regional councils who should have done better to stop it getting this bad—they've had full delegated authority to do this ever since the RMA was passed. But it's not all their fault because it's very hard and some of it is technical and they needed help from central government that they didn't get enough of. Farmers are partly responsible—you know the polluter pays" principle should apply here. These rivers don't pollute themselves and it is the increased intensity of farming that is actually the largest cause of these problems. So how do you wind it back and how do you work with the local communities to do it? Well you actually do need a combination of local regulation national guidance for that regulation farmer input and investment by farmers but also investment by central government and we're investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the clean-up from taxpayers' money and those taxpayers weren't the people who caused the mess. So we're coming to the party and we're planting out riparian strips we're subsidising catchment management groups and we're employing facilitators so that groups of farmers can come together and share best practice and put a bit of peer pressure on the ones that are the laggards. We're doing all of that but you do need some national direction. You need to have some standards about what are appropriate microbial levels. E. coli is the thing that's monitored as a proxy for other pathogens that cause illness so you need limits on E.coli. You need limits as to sediment and turbidity. How fast you get to those limits is for locals to decide and under the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management it is regional councils that decide on those time frames. We set some objectives to get back to healthy river states that are driven by science but we leave it to communities as to how they get back there over a generation. There are some interim steps in the national environment standard that kick in straight away but that's to stop things getting worse. We know that if you have an increase in intensive winter grazing you increase pressure—you increase the degradation of your waterways—and so we've said that it's no longer a permitted activity to do that. If you want to increase substantially your intensive winter grazing area you've got to get a resource consent to do it. That's the purpose of the RMA and if environmentally damaging practices like that are not controlled by the RMA they're not controlled as evidenced by the degradation that we've already suffered in our waterways. So I reject the idea that we don't need national direction. I do think that this is a very radical bill given the experience that we have had in New Zealand that I have explained because it would effectively say that notwithstanding the problems that are three decades old that haven't fixed themselves and that haven't been properly managed by regional councils or by farmers themselves we should just stand back and say "It's somebody else's problem." We don't have that viewpoint in the Labour Party. We think that this is appropriate use of these tools. We are working with local communities and with local councils. We've got overwhelming support within society for that. I think this is an illustration of the sort of radicalism that the National Party would be driven to if they were in a coalition with the ACT Party because I suspect that they're going to vote for this bill as well flawed though it is."