Brooking RachelHon RACHEL BROOKING (Labour—Dunedin): Thank you Madam Speaker. I want to start of course by acknowledging the member who—Chlöe Swarbrick: Speak for the fish.Hon RACHEL BROOKING: —is bringing this bill and that is the Hon James Shaw who has done such a magnificent job in this place speaking for the fish and the snails and I'm sure he's had something to say about Freddy the frog as well and a little about climate emissions in there too. He did say when announcing that he was stepping down from the Greens' leadership that he wanted to progress this bill before he left Parliament. So that is of course why Labour is voting for it because I know I at least want him to stay here and see this bill all the way through the select committee process. So I am disappointed about the National Party position but hopefully those other parties on the other side of the House will see the sense of sending this bill to select committee.As the member knows I'm not a huge fan of rights and rights legislation—that sounds terrible doesn't it? I do like the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act but there are some in my party and on this side of the House that are more about rights than I am. We have the great—one of my colleagues in my 2020 class was of course Vanushi Walters who's very much all about rights and doing better with our rights legislation in New Zealand. I was trained at Otago Law School—I think it's something about what law school you go to and I'm in a slightly different camp in that regard.You know I have real questions about the flood gates opening with any extension to our New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. Do we include housing?Chlöe Swarbrick: Yes.Hon RACHEL BROOKING: Housing seems like a sensible thing to include—I knew I'd get that response. But then do we include property rights? And I say Absolutely not" to property rights. Maybe housing and of course we've got this environmental question in front us today. So it would be very good for the Environment Committee or the Justice Committee to consider this bill and to really flesh out those arguments. Is this the right place for such a right to be—in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act—should it be in its own separate piece of legislation? Those are the questions that it would be right for a select committee to interrogate. So we are supporting this bill and other speakers will speak to some of those points.But I really want to speak to why I really want to support this bill and it goes to what the member said in his speech and I agree with all of that. We are in a dire dire environmental place at the moment. We know we have a biodiversity crisis as well as our climate crisis. The last Government did work really hard to address some of these issues with the very broken Resource Management Act. Everybody in the House agrees that the Resource Management Act was broken. It was both not doing what it needed to do for the environment and also not doing what it needed to do for an efficient economy.So we had the Natural and Built Environment Act with some very clear limits and targets and bottom lines. What happened to that? Oh it got repealed in December. What else has happened? Well today in question time we heard that farm plans might be paused and that they need to be flexible and robust. That makes no sense. We don't know what that means despite a whole lot of patsy questions.Today 130 people at the Department of Conservation might be losing their jobs. We see that in the media. How many jobs at the Department of Conservation are backroom? That department is all about the front line: pest eradication looking after a third of our country.Yesterday the Prime Minister suggested that genetic modification was going to somehow sort out decarbonisation. That is head-in-the-sand thinking. It is not addressing the problem that we have in front of us. Of course genetic modification—it may have a role to play. I'm not saying that it doesn't but it is not the silver bullet. It is not the be-all and end-all. It is not a reason to stop doing every single piece of work that was being done to decarbonise like the electric vehicle discount like public transport subsidisation—all that stuff out the window.Then we have the full-on assault on the environment with that fast-track bill. We hear over and over again from Shane Jones that he is not interested in saving Freddy the frog he is OK with extinction. That is not OK. We need everything that we can possibly do every tool in the tool box to remind people I how important our environment is to us to the economy and to future generations. Well done Minister Shaw."