Tirikatene Rino: Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) (Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTirikatene Rino: Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) (Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 26 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:2015. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]RINO TIRIKATENE (Labour—Te Tai Tonga): Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. I am pleased to speak at the first reading of this bill and as my colleagues have mentioned in their contributions we are supporting this bill. We do not want to see come 28 June the Māui gas platform being switched off and in the middle of winter the families and businesses around the country who are reliant on our energy supply being shut out. So of course we are supporting this bill.However yet again unfortunately we are dealing with cleaning up the sloppy shoddy workmanship of this National Government in terms of passing legislation that is absolutely full of problems. This is just another patch-up job that this House is now having to do—patching up shoddy workmanship by this Government. Who have been the architects? I know that Mr Doocey referred to the great leadership from the Ministers who have been ushering in this bill and its preceding primary pieces of legislation. Obviously we had Dr Nick Smith who was the promoter of the principal Act that we are amending through this bill. We know that Dr Smith introduced that legislation but he was not able to usher it through because unfortunately he had to go into self-imposed exile for the unfortunate Bronwyn Puller fiasco. But I do not want to go there. I just want to ask how many hands this piece of legislation has actually passed through. They are numerous. We had Dr Smith and then it was passed on to the Hon Amy Adams. Mrs Adams rushed the primary piece of legislation through. The Local Government and Environment Committee—good work that it did—made substantial amendments to the primary piece of legislation and then in the Committee stage Mrs Adams dumped a 14-page Supplementary Order Paper with further amendments. So that is not very good lawmaking.And then what happened? One month after the passage of the primary piece of legislation which we are amending yet again through this bill we had another amendment that was put through the House and that was the Marine Legislation Bill. Who was the sloppy tradesman from the National Government leading that piece of legislation? Well it was none other than the Hon Gerry Brownlee. So it had been passed on to Minister after Minister with shoddy workmanship all the way through. But further amendments to this piece of legislation were passed through the Marine Legislation Bill which was passed only not so long ago. Here we are in the 51st Parliament and now we are having to deal yet again with another amendment to this piece of legislation through what could arguably be a stitch up with Shell Todd Oil Services to ensure that it has enough time to run through the decision-making processes so that it can be issued with a marine consent and therefore be able to carry on operating in the exclusive economic zone under the primary legislation. So this is shoddy workmanship from this National Government. It has been going on and it has been passed through the hands of Minister after Minister.Mr Doocey talked about this legislation being a maturing of the environmental legislation but it just highlights how shambolic and rushed the process was in terms of the passage of this bill. That is evidenced by the amendments after amendments after amendments that we are having to do. And it has been signalled that there are more amendments in the pipeline—no pun intended there—so we can expect more of the important time of this House to be spent on corrective pieces of legislation in order to correct what should have been picked up right at the start. Unfortunately that is the so-called leadership that we are getting from this Government through a range of Ministers. I think that when you do that you are actually creating a Frankenstein’s monster of a piece of legislation. You are having to chop change insert things do deals over here or maybe try to do something to appease another mining company or another sector or industrial interest. That is not good lawmaking and it is definitely not good government.I want to now pass on to look at what this legislation does. This legislation allows Shell Todd Oil Services which is a significant supplier of gas to our households in energy the ability to see to the completion of its marine consent application in order for it to continue its operations. The company has applied to the Environmental Protection Authority for this consent. As a major corporation of this country it must have an army of lawyers and the best law firms advising it. It really strikes me how incompetent it must be by not actually applying to the Environmental Protection Authority much earlier for its marine consent application. It alarmed me when I was listening to Mr Hughes that apparently Cabinet signed off on this special piece of legislation exclusively for petroleum exploration companies. Evidently Cabinet gave the approval 3 days prior to Shell Todd Oil Services even applying to the Environmental Protection Authority for its marine consent. It is poor governance but it is also poor of this Government to be trying to do special deals with what are significant infrastructure companies and energy suppliers for our country. It is not the way we should be running our country. That is of great concern.If we get back to what has not been said before I believe in this debate what we are missing here is that this legislation as a whole does fall short in protecting our environment. Ultimately that is what we want to achieve and what this legislation was meant to achieve. However following the successive amendments that we have had to put through this House it behoves me to say again that this piece of legislation is unfortunate. We want to see the gas continue to flow but we recognise that our environment is important. Our country has the fourth- or fifth-largest exclusive economic zone yet there is still a lot that we do not understand about our marine environment and our marine jurisdiction.I believe that largely a lot of the issues around the problems we are having arise from the fact that significant applications for seabed mining and the like are coming in from companies like Chatham Rock Phosphate. It is jumping through the regulatory hoops that have been put in front of it and yet it comes to a situation where the Environmental Protection Authority has made a decision and now we are having to so we understand—we have heard that another amendment to this legislation is now being proposed that will accommodate and maybe allow Chatham Rock Phosphate to continue with its activities. We are now seeing this knee-jerk reaction from the Government to respond to the cries from the commercial sector. This is to the detriment of the people who are actually involved in these processes. I think of the iwi of the West Coast who have valid objections to the activities of Todd Energy. All of the other objectives are not being respected in terms of the Environmental Protection Authority process. It is a rubber stamp but we need to make sure that we put good law in place. Kia ora.