Sage Eugenie: Offices of Parliament — Address to Governor-GeneralText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Offices of Parliament — Address to Governor-General[Sitting date: 14 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:9848. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green):The Green Party supports Government motion No. 1 for alterations to the appropriations for the Offices of Parliament—the Office of the Auditor-General the Office of the Ombudsmen and the Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment—and the appropriations for 2013-14. In my short call I would like to focus just on the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. The mission of the parliamentary commissioner as the office has interpreted it under the Environment Act is “To maintain or improve the quality of the environment by providing robust independent advice that influences decisions.” As Maryan Street has noted the offices are reporting to this Parliament but nevertheless they make a number of recommendations to Ministers.I think the recommendation of the Officers of Parliament Committee to increase the funding for the parliamentary commissioner by $100000 is something that we would certainly support. It is a very modest increase. The office has a staff of only 17. It works very thoroughly in doing its reports and it does quite a lot of analysis yet its budget with this modest increase of $100000 has been brought up to only $2.726 million. So it is a very cost-effective office and it has as others have said had to absorb quite numerous cost increases over the last 6 years when its budget has remained the same.I would like to place on record the Green Party’s thanks for a lot of the work that the staff in the parliamentary commissioner’s office do. They have made some landmark reports. There was one on 1080 in 2011 which very carefully analysed the evidence and evaluated the use of 1080 and recommended that it should continue. In fact the report there recommended that the use should be expanded because as the parliamentary commissioner noted there is more Crown funding provided to the Animal Health Board to control TB and to kill possums to achieve that than there is provided to the Department of Conservation for it to spend on controlling possums rats and stoats over the entire conservation estate. That is why this Parliament and the executive need to listen more carefully to the recommendations of the parliamentary commissioner. It is robust and independent advice and yet we have not seen an increase in Department of Conservation funding to enable it to do better pest control. Instead that funding has been cut.There have been a number of other landmark reports by the office. One of those was Hydroelectricity or wild rivers? which was released in May last year. In it the office recommended that there should be much more proactive work done to protect rivers for their wild and scenic values and that water conservation orders should be strengthened yet we have not seen that. In the Government’s proposals for water reform we have seen the opposite—a weakening of water conservation orders.Again with the long-finned eels report the value of the work that the parliamentary commissioner has done there is to take a species that is not cute like the kiwi or comical like the kea to use the parliamentary commissioner’s own words and to very closely look at the threats to long-finned eels and to come out with a reasoned recommendation that commercial fishing be suspended until it can be shown that the long-finned eel population has recovered. The Government needs to take that recommendation seriously.The recommendations of the office are sometimes not popular because as its mission statement notes it is about providing robust and independent advice. As a member of the Local Government and Environment Committee I would like to record my thanks when the office makes submissions on legislation as it has done on changes to the Resource Management Act and as it has done on the Government’s discussion document on the Act. The parliamentary commissioner said then that these changes to the Resource Management Act which would strip out some of the criteria in Part 2 would erode the environmental protections in the Resource Management Act and tilt it towards promoting economic development. When you have the parliamentary commissioner saying that it needs to be taken seriously.The office also has quite an important educative function. It produced a very useful report on water quality and on understanding the science of water quality to help inform public debate. I hope that Ministers have read that report because there are a number of issues in terms of nitrate and nitrogen pollution and sediment pollution which it explains. In that regard the current push towards expanding irrigation just seems not to have recognised that the more you expand irrigation and the more you intensify agriculture the more nitrogen you have in waterways.One of the key issues to which my colleague Gareth Hughes alluded was state-of-the-environment reporting. It has been a promise of the Government since 2008 that there would be an environmental reporting Act to require independent and 5-yearly state-of-the-environment reporting and yet we have seen scant progress here. Last year the Government decided to stop producing consolidated nationwide state-of-the-environment reports. We are one of the few countries in the OECD that do not have a legislative basis for national reporting on the state of the environment. The parliamentary commissioner has got a potential responsibility for this role but her office needs to be resourced by an extra $1.3 million annually to carry out that role because she has estimated that it would take nine additional staff to do that reporting. If the work is to be done and a report were to be produced that would have to start now.So the recommendations in these reports need to be taken more seriously. The Government needs to listen especially where there are recommendations to Ministers. But we thank all of the Officers of Parliament and congratulate them on their work. We appreciate the robust and independent advice that they provide. Thank you.