Chauvel Charles: Environmental Protection Authority Bill — First Reading 
Chauvel Charles: Environmental Protection Authority Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:669;Page:15706] 
CHARLES CHAUVEL (Labour) 
: 
 I move that all the words after the word “committee” in the motion be deleted. The Minister for the Environment rejoices publicly in good process and in collaborative processes in the environmental area yet here we have a motion presaging a reference of the Environmental Protection Authority Bill to a select committee that expresses an intention on the part of the Government to have the Local Government and Environment Committee sit all hours and to have members of the committee deprived of their ability to sit in the House when they might be required to do so because they will be needed on the Local Government and Environment Committee to look at the detail of the bill. 
Bad legislation starts with bad process and nowhere is that truer than in the environmental area. The Minister should know better having trumpeted the collaborative process started by the previous Labour Government with the Land and Water Forum. I think every member of this House hopes that that process will bear fruit but the lesson should be that bad process will lead to bad outcomes. Here we start the Environmental Protection Authority Bill with bad process and bad faith from the Minister which are hallmarks unfortunately of his tenure in the role of Minister for the Environment. 
New Zealand’s pristine natural environment is something we should protect and treat with respect. Labour knows that the preservation of our vital natural spaces is necessary not only to our economy but to preserving our very way of life. The real danger in the Environmental Protection Authority Bill at least as it has been brought to the House by the Minister is that it will be used simply as a vehicle to sidetrack the democratic process. This Government has nearly come to the end of its first term—hopefully its only term—and over the past 2 years it has developed a very bad record on environmental protection. It has excelled in circumventing and abusing the democratic process when it comes to the environment. If we are to judge this Government on its actions rather than its words then the fear must be that the Environmental Protection Authority will be used from the outset as we have just seen signalled by the Minister’s intended motion about the select committee to undermine democratic procedures. 
The House should note that in its current form the transitional Environmental Protection Authority within the Ministry for the Environment is already being used by the National Government as part of its assault on democracy and on consultation with local communities. The Minister virtually admitted in his speech—though of course he put it much more rosily than this—that the Environmental Protection Authority has been used to fast track controversial projects such as the Waterview Connection despite requests by the Eden Albert Community Board and the Auckland City Council to have the submission period extended. These requests were deliberately ignored under the existing Environmental Protection Authority process. In the case of Transmission Gully which was cited by the Minister the Environmental Protection Authority has been used to circumvent the Wellington Regional Council’s freshwater plan. It looks as if the Environmental Protection Authority will also be used to create a private prison in South Auckland despite the objections again in the media today of local residents. 
All those instances involve people being denied the opportunity to have their say on issues that affect their communities. It is not a good start for the Environmental Protection Authority despite the fair words we have heard from the Minister. Ideally the creation of an independent authority would eliminate rather than exacerbate these problems but that is unlikely to be the case. The establishment authority has been understaffed and it appears there will be no new resources allocated to the new authority. So fundamentally why would anybody expect environmental outcomes to improve? More worryingly the board of this “independent” authority will be accountable to Dr Nick Smith. The only thing worse than an entity that has problems with democratic processes because of the very way that it is set up is one that is ostensibly independent but in reality is at the whim of that Minister. 
If the Government cared at all about empowering communities it would not be stripping councils of the power to consent and regulate off-shore oil and gas operations as this bill will do. The processing of these sorts of applications needs to take the feedback of communities and iwi into account and who better to take into account that feedback than local democratically elected councils? It is far better to have that happening than to have it happen through some central body under the control of the Minister in Wellington. That violates the very spirit of the Resource Management Act and gets rid of all local input. The power should be residing locally rather than having it deposited in some body in Wellington. 
Not only have we had heard the Minister foreshadow depriving members of the Local Government and Environment Committee of being able to perform their ordinary parliamentary duties but also we have had the example of the Government’s unprecedented abuse of urgency through its term in Parliament so far. This has been accompanied by the firing of democratically elected representatives in Canterbury and that is a cause for great concern. So far the track record of this Government on the environment provides little comfort that the new Environmental Protection Authority will do much for environmental protection at all. 
There are some examples worth recording in this House tonight. The regulation of air quality is one example that I have asked the Minister about a number of times. National has effectively thrown away the reins by extending the deadline for the National Environmental Standards for Air Quality to 2018. Ironically this is a Government that is willing to implement untested untrialled national standards for schools but refuses to place any importance on national standards for air quality which are based on scientific research. The Government is willing to put at risk not only our environment but also potentially people’s lives. 
The Minister cited the emissions trading scheme in his speech. We have seen National water down the emissions trading scheme and make changes to it so that hard-working Kiwi families have to pay for big businesses’ pollution while watching climate change continue to worsen. 
Nicky Wagner 
: That’s half the cost. 
CHARLES CHAUVEL 
: Here they go repeating the mantra of balance between the economy and the environment as if that myth could somehow take hold when in fact the reality is that they are not separate criteria; it is the same one. 
Chris Tremain 
: The reality is that it took you guys 8 years to get legislation in this House to protect the environment—8 years! 
CHARLES CHAUVEL 
: Mr Tremain is talking about how long it took to get an emissions trading scheme into place. It came into place along with an energy strategy a meaningful transport strategy and a whole host of measures to actually control New Zealand’s emissions. What do we see under this Government? There is no plan at all to deal with emissions. 
As if the watering down of the emissions trading scheme was not bad enough we then saw John Key’s Government try to get its hand on New Zealand’s most precious schedule 4 land. It backed down only after the hugest public outcry. There has been a failure to adopt environmental standards for our waterways. There has been the abolition of a democratically elected council in a bid to help big corporate dairy-farming interests and the repeal of the biofuel obligation. The biofuel obligation has been replaced with a biofuels grants scheme that has had a 1 percent take-up over the past year. Meanwhile several biofuels businesses that the Labour Government helped to get off the ground have lost business and shut down because of National’s changes. National just does not have a plan for the future especially not when the environment is involved. 
It has watered down the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Strategy leaving the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority without any meaningful plan to measure itself against. It now effectively exists to make it look as if this Government cares about the environment. The Government has watered down the energy strategy—the plan to have 90 percent of our energy coming from renewable sources by 2025. National’s focus in that plan as has recently been published is all about developing coal and petroleum. They are 19th century solutions to 21st century problems. 
Labour members think it is important to have a decent authority advising the Government on matters relating to the environment but that authority has to be independent and not subject to abuse from a Minister who has no regard for process. As the bill stands this authority stands in great danger of abuse from a Government that has shown no respect for the environment or for democracy. We will have to come up with a much better bill at the select committee if Labour is going to be able to support this legislation further. Although we will support sending the bill to the select committee because of the record that I have outlined in the House tonight we will be looking at the bill very very carefully to ensure it is much more fit for purpose than it is currently.