Sage EugenieHon EUGENIE SAGE (Minister of Conservation): Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. Thank you. Well it might be news to Mr Hudson but the Litter Act actually does treat the wilful breaking of bottles and glass in a different way to other types of littering and it imposes quite a severe penalty of $7500 for that.What Minister Mahuta was talking about is a much more comprehensive look at the Litter Act and where it can be strengthened because this is a very flimsy little bill; it doesn't do a great deal to help reduce litter in New Zealand. It is also a bill that Mr Simpson picked up from his former colleague Mr Naylor who drafted it I understand and put it in the ballot back in 2015.It's not exactly what local authorities want either. They at their conference last year passed a remit wanting a much more comprehensive review of the Litter Act because there is a significant problem with the enforcement provisions and I think there's been some media coverage of that recently with regard to the Wellington City Council. Councils can only use the provisions if they've actually got an officer who has seen somebody littering and observed that or has got reasonable cause to believe that someone has just committed an offence. So the difficulty is more with enforcement rather than the actual infringement fee itself.Nevertheless the Green Party will be supporting this bill to select committee because it just does this one small thing of increasing the maximum fine from $400 to $1000. But the bill on its own is not going to take us very far at all. It may also be news to Mr Hudson that we still have major education campaigns around littering and that Keep New Zealand Beautiful is the major agency that does that. It has got a Do the Right Thing project which is a coordinated approach to encouraging people to reduce litter nationwide.I think the information that the very good chair of the Environment Committee Deborah Russell referred to was drawn from quite recent research published earlier this year by Keep New Zealand Beautiful which looked at the way we behaved nationally in relation to litter. Now that research which was done last November-December found that in New Zealand about 84 percent of the time New Zealanders did do the right thing about putting litter in the bin. It also found that Wellingtonians were ahead of people in Auckland and Christchurch in doing the right thing and putting litter in the right place. So generally people do the right thing.The biggest problem they found and the biggest proportion of litter—some 78 percent—was cigarette butts. So what the researchers highlighted is that in the litter space rather than the fly-tipping waste space we need to be doing some more education on how you get rid of cigarette butts rather than just dropping them beside the bin.So this small bill will only do one thing. It won't do any action in the space around education and as others such as Minister Mahuta and Deborah Russell have noted we need more comprehensive action in terms of this 1979 legislation. But as Associate Minister for the Environment I am not prioritising a review of the Litter Act because our priority is actually improving the implementation of the Waste Minimisation Act and ensuring that the levy that applies to landfills is extended to more landfills. We can have more funding in the Waste Minimisation Fund so we can actually reduce the volumes of waste going to landfill because that is a substantive issue.The way to actually tackle litter is not just simply increasing one of the infringement fines; it's actually a much more comprehensive programme of education and building on New Zealanders' willingness to do the right thing through littering less recycling more and thinking about what people buy rather than just this punitive thing around the infringement fee. But it is worth going to select committee to consider the issue so we will be supporting it to select committee.