Dyson Ruth: Environmental Reporting Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDyson Ruth: Environmental Reporting Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 05 March 2014. Volume:696;Page:16363. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): I am pleased to be able to follow that member the Hon Phil Heatley and hopefully I will be able to fill in the blanks that he has left in some of the conversation about the Environmental Reporting Bill. The purpose of the bill if I can quote out of the general policy statement is to “create a national-level environmental reporting system to ensure that reporting on our environment occurs on a regular basis and can be trusted by the public as independent fair and accurate.” I have no doubt that the Minister for the Environment’s intention is to deliver on that policy statement. I understand that she thinks that this bill will deliver on it. I think that is her intention. I do not think that she would have signed off a general policy statement that set such a clear vision about public reporting if she did not believe that it would happen through this legislation.I know that some of my colleagues will say that that is not what other people say about her. I know that is true. Guy Salmon who is a strong contributor to the Bluegreen space in the National Party was quoted on television saying that Amy Adams is the first Minister for the Environment who has taken environmental standards backwards—the first ever Minister for the Environment to do that. That was a pretty hard line actually from a strong National Party person. Leaving that aside I do not believe that that is the intention of either the Minister or the legislation.I support the purpose of the bill. The difficulty that I have and the reason Labour is voting against this legislation at this stage is that reading through the details of the legislation I do not believe that it delivers on that purpose. This is occasionally the case. Generally the purpose is what determines the voting of a party on an issue. But in this case if you read through the specifics of this legislation it is weak it leaves itself quite open to political manipulation and it does not have the robustness or the clarity that we would expect to deliver the vision—which is a good one. Independent fair and accurate reporting on the state of the environment is hardly an objective that anybody could argue against. If the targets are not in the primary legislation how can we as a Parliament have confidence in the independence of those targets? Well actually we cannot. The Minister has said that we will deal with that in regulation. We have been tricked before actually by that approach. If you are talking about a state of the environment report that the whole of Parliament should support there is no reason at all to not have the targets in the primary legislation. It would make sense.It is very interesting that there are some targets in the primary legislation including the economic benefits. Why in an environmental reporting bill would the economic benefits be determined as a target in the primary legislation but the actual environmental standards be left up to regulation? That is a real puzzle and I hope that the deliberations at the Local Government and Environment Committee enlighten us as to how the Minister came to the conclusion that economic benefits in environmental reporting are so important as to warrant inclusion in the primary legislation whereas other targets do not warrant being included in the primary legislation.Hon Amy Adams: Oh you mean like ecological integrity is not in there?Hon RUTH DYSON: The Minister should speak up. She has already apologised to me once today. There are very few things that have given me such pleasure.Hon Amy Adams: I have not.Hon RUTH DYSON: It is on the public record. I heard her. I have even tweeted it.Hon Amy Adams: It was on behalf of the Minister.Hon RUTH DYSON: Oh of course—it was on behalf of Minister Gerry Brownlee who suddenly had urgent public business to attend to somewhere else. He announced a winter heating programme for Christchurch. That was very good. He left it up to his poor hapless Associate Minister to apologise on his behalf.The problem with this legislation is that it is not clear that it can deliver on the vision. There is certainly some confusion about why there would be targets like economic benefits in the primary legislation but there would not be environmental targets. There are other confusions which are made even more puzzling by the lack of clarity in the legislation. For example if we are going to have independence and accountability to the public as mentioned when we are talking about water quality is the standard that is going to be reported to the public on a regular basis—as was mentioned by the Minister and by the Hon Phil Heatley in his contribution—going to be on individual waterways or is it going to be on an average across the whole country? That actually makes a huge difference to whether it means a toss or not—whether it means anything at all—or whether it is just a spin document to make the Minister of the time look good.Frankly regardless of which party is leading the Government I do not have any time for that sort of approach. We should have a whole-of-Parliament consensus about what the targets are and how they are measured and then get agreement so that the trends the accountability and our progress on the environment—because I am sure everyone wants to make progress on environmental standards—can be very clear. It has long been a practice of this Parliament—and I am a little surprised that the Minister who was a pretty well-regarded lawyer has not seen the tradition of this Parliament as appropriate for this legislation—to have as much as possible in the primary legislation and as little as needed in regulations. Again why would that approach be taken in something that requires targets to be independent and consistent?Our side will be proposing strongly at the select committee—and I have no doubt there will be a large number of submissions along the same lines—that the targets are debated agreed and included in the primary legislation. If a Minister in the future then says: “That target’s not looking too good; I think we’re getting into a bit of bother here.” the Minister would have to come back to Parliament to have that target changed not quietly change it in regulation so that when some less than favourable reporting was due it would not come to the public’s attention. So that will be one of the things that we are looking at having changed in this.As I said at the beginning nobody could argue with the approach that I think the Minister is committed to and that is for the first time to have in legislation a national-level environmental reporting system that is independent fair and accurate. Theprinciple of this legislation the vision of it is well supported by Labour. What we do not have confidence in is whether this legislation in its current drafting is able to deliver on that vision. It leaves us very vulnerable to political manipulation. It leaves us vulnerable to the Minister of the time—and I am not accusing the current Minister of having this as an intent at all; I do not think that she has. But it leaves a vulnerability that we could use this opportunity to remove and to ensure that the targets are in the primary legislation that they are agreed to by the whole of Parliament and that they are the things that we as representatives of our communities think are important. If we are going to have independent reporting then it should be reporting to Parliament and it should be on the targets that are agreed to by Parliament.There is a tendency of Ministers to set targets that they know in the future will not be problematic politically and I can understand individual politicians’ vulnerabilities on those points but it is not a robust process for independent reporting. It is not an accountability that would be to Parliament; it would be an accountability to the political party that is leading the Government of the time. This is long-term stuff that we are talking about here. We are not talking about short-term measures. When you are talking about environmental standards it often takes a long time to change a particular standard and consistency in the standards that are being measured the monitoring and then the reporting is the most critical thing so that we as a whole Parliament can look at the trend and say: “Well clearly we are doing the right thing. We are heading in the right direction.” or if we are not we would as a Parliament determine action that was appropriate to address that.I think this is an issue where the debate is something that New Zealand is up to. New Zealanders care passionately about their environment. I know that New Zealanders will want to see the independence the robustness and the accountability that this legislation could deliver. It is actually something that has been missing on our legislative frame for some time and I want to commend the Minister for picking it up. She has done a good job on that. I agree with the vision. I do not think that this legislation will deliver it but hopefully changes at the select committee will allow us to support it in the future.