Court SimonSIMON COURT (ACT): Thank you Mr Speaker. The ACT Party opposes this bill not only because it's a flawed and bad piece of legislation; we also have the unfortunate job of explaining to New Zealanders—because we always follow the Green Party in speeches in the House—why the Green Party's environmental solutions to environmental problems simply won't work and that more taxes more bans more regulations heaped on some of New Zealand's most cutting-edge high-performing businesses actually won't help improve the environment. The problem this legislation is intended to solve is that some oil and gas exploration structures may at the end of their lives be left without being remediated and there are some simple solutions—some simple regulatory solutions—proposed by the industry that they would accept in order to protect the Crown and to protect New Zealand's environment from the risk that petrochemical structures may be left behind and not cleaned up.Some of the things that the industry has said they would be happy to accept and that the ACT Party supports are that operators should take responsibility for decommissioning and avoid what happened at the Tūī field that decommissioning is a core element of good industry practice and that this obligation should be clarified for all industry operators. The industry and the ACT Party also agree that the Crown should be able to regularly assess the financial capability of organisations carrying out activities that have significant impacts on the environment like the petroleum and gas exploration and production industry but that the regulations that allow Government to look deep into their business and to fish around and request information and go on trawling expeditions must be limited to only the information that's necessary for determining whether these businesses can meet their financial obligations.The industry is an industry that actually supports thousands of jobs in Taranaki and through those jobs supports communities in a place where not everybody finishes high school. Not everybody in Taranaki goes off to university and gets an arts degree or becomes a lawyer and ends up on the backbench of the Labour Party. That's a privilege only accorded to a few people from Taranaki. What most people in Taranaki do is they leave school. If they get qualified they go to polytech they go to a local college they learn how to weld and they learn how to operate in the oil and gas industry. They learn how to participate in the manufacturing industries that support the oil and gas and energy industry that underpins New Zealand's energy security New Zealand's energy affordability. Actually these people in Taranaki whether they went to university or got a qualification in specialist welding from their local technical college are the ones who actually implement the best-practice environmental technology in the oil and gas industry in New Zealand. These are the people who put the scrubbers together. These are the people who install the waste-water systems and the oil-water separation systems because New Zealand's energy industry meets the highest environmental performance standards of any energy industry in the world. That's something that the ACT Party celebrates and that we think New Zealanders should be proud of and that's why we don't understand why the Government in seeking to solve a problem of one operator who had failed to fulfil their responsibilities to clean up the environment has essentially taken what appears to be a pick and mix why not pick them all" solution. So when trying to understand the solutions the Government came up with to hold petrochemical companies to account for their operations at the end of their lifetime they came up with a trailing or perpetual liability on directors so that anybody who's been a director of these businesses ever—even if they sold them; even if it was a decade ago—would be held liable.They came up with a post-decommissioning fund. Now in my experience as an environmental engineer carrying out actual environmental remediations on some of New Zealand's most hazardous sites sites where pesticides were manufactured where timber treatment chemicals were used and during their use at a time even before I was born when safety conditions and environmental best practice wasn't what it is now there was soil contamination and water contamination. But when you go and you clean up a site and you meet the resource consent conditions or the consent conditions for the clean-up then you get it signed off by the engineers and the scientists and local Government—and in this case of course energy is regulated by the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment—and you get signed off. At that point they say "Thank you for decommissioning and decontaminating your site. Here is the certificate to say you've met your obligations. Here's your bond back. Here's a letter to say that we're satisfied with your environmental performance."Well what this bill proposes to do and what the Government came up with is a post-decommissioning fund which essentially makes the operators pay into a fund in case one of their competitors or another business down the track fails to meet their obligations. Even though the company itself has met its obligations and been signed off by the regulator they were going to be asked to pay for other people's failures. Now that makes absolutely no sense to anyone in business and I bet it makes no sense to anyone sitting at home that having cleaned up your own site the Government's going to say "But we want you to pay into a fund to clean up other people's sites who've failed to clean up."Then they also introduced a mandatory financial security. Well most of these businesses already have insurances they have international shareholders and they have obligations and responsibilities that extend outside of New Zealand because there's very few New Zealand - only energy companies. That's because over the years it's become harder and harder to do business in this sector even without the kind of pick and mix lolly scramble approach to making legislation that this bill indicates is the Government's way of making laws.The other thing that the industry pointed out was the bill would require as a default total removal of all the infrastructure. Now a lot of this infrastructure is below ground level or where it does appear at ground level you actually want to leave something in place so that you can monitor it and be able to come back and check it later. Total removal of all infrastructure makes no technical sense even though it might make sense to people who've never actually operated in the environmental engineering environmental rehabilitation space.So ACT believes that polluters must pay. This legislation doesn't simply create a regulatory setting so that the obligation is on energy companies to clean up at the end of their operation and hand over a clean site to those who come after. It's actually the kind of regulation that will cause business owners directors and investors to say "I'm not sure whether we should be in New Zealand. We don't think it's a good place to invest and do business."What this puts at risk are jobs not just in Taranaki but in all the supporting industries the manufacturing and all of those suppliers who supply those oil rigs and who supply all of the onshore production. All of those jobs are at risk. The Gas Industry Co. has said that at some point if the Government is successful in its crusade against the gas industry and that part of the energy sector there may not be enough players to pay to maintain the network transmission infrastructure. So even though the Climate Change Commission has said "We're going to need gas up to 2050 to bridge where we are now in terms of renewable energy. To where we want to get to in real energy we're going to need gas." actually who's going to pay to maintain the pipe if the Government has essentially sterilised the industry and turned away people who would be prepared to invest in our energy security affordability and reliability and continue investing for decades to come?So what the ACT Party says is that we oppose this bill because it's not just one piece of bad regulation; they've got four elements in here which are all bad for business. They set a terrible precedent with trailing and perpetual liability piling on costs on to businesses that actually do the right thing. That's why the ACT Party cannot support this bill."