Sage Eugenie: Environmental Reporting Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Environmental Reporting Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 30 June 2015. Volume:707;Page:4887. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green):I think the title for the bill could certainly be the “Opportunity Lost Bill” when you have all the other parties in the House supporting a Supplementary Order Paper that will make some constructive changes and the Government rejects it. But I think another potential title is the “Environmental Reporting (Maintaining the Clean Green Myth) Bill” because of the provisions in clause 18 for regulation-making powers. The only reason these regulation-making powers exist in the bill is to enable Ministers to set the topics for environmental reporting. When you have a Government that is promoting agricultural intensification and more irrigation that means that it will be interested in ensuring that our brand the “100% Pure” brand is maintained overseas. The reality of what a lot of the expansion in agriculture and the expansion in irrigation is doing to our waterways in terms of declining water quality real stress on native species that depend on our braided rivers loss of riparian wetlands and loss of tussock grasslands and shrub lands in the Mackenzie as those areas are converted to pasture—the Government will not want that reality to be made known. So that is why the substantial flaw in this bill in clause 18 with the loss of independence I think would justify the title of the “Environmental Reporting (Maintaining the Clean Green Myth) Bill”.Another of the reasons for that title is in clause 18(2). The thresholds that the Ministers have to consider before establishing topics are very high and they will potentially constrain the topics that can be reported on. Just looking at clause 18(2) it says that “the Ministers must be satisfied that any—(a) pressure topic or impact topic affects significant areas resources or numbers of people:”. So it has got to be established that the topic actually has that impact on significant areas. That means that if there is an issue that might affect only a rare species that is found in only a small part of New Zealand then that aspect of biodiversity cannot be reported on.These thresholds also mean that issues that might potentially affect a large area cannot be reported on. That is a major flaw in the bill because we need comprehensive and robust state of the environment reporting so that we understand the health of the whole of our environment so that we can identify the causes of environmental problems and so that we can look at whether the policies that are being put in place are actually working. This quite strong constraint around the topics and the fact that it is a political decision rather than an independent decision by senior public servants will I think constrain the environmental reporting and will mean that it is dominated by work to actually ensure that New Zealanders have an impression that we are a clean green country when the reality is very different particularly in terms of the declining water quality with agricultural intensification. We have already seen that with the limited reporting that is done at the moment—things like the monitoring of recreational swimming sites and the fact that two-thirds of monitored sites are unfit for safe swimming.So there is a major opportunity lost in the bill and my concern is that it is a bill that just encourages complacency in terms of environmental reporting. It does not actually get to the nub of where the harm is occurring and that is particularly in terms of water quality and our biodiversity crisis. We have a large number of threatened species—over 2000—and I am not confident with the Ministers setting the topics that we will get a comprehensive suite of indicators. That is partly because of the stop-start nature of the work by the Ministry for the Environment in developing environmental performance indicators and we do not have good performance indicators for the state of biodiversity in our country.This bill would have been a good opportunity to get cross-party support. The Government has rejected that and there are major flaws in the bill. Thank you.