Sage Eugenie: Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Sage Eugenie: Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 16 August 2012. Volume:682;Page:4505. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
EUGENIE SAGE (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party also believes that this Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Bill should be referred back to the Local Government and Environment Committee because this 16-page Supplementary Order Paper includes quite sweeping changes. It includes inspection powers from the Search and Surveillance Act and changes to the Biosecurity Act in relation to the eradication of unwanted organisms and to the whole consenting regime for existing petroleum mining activities which are licensed under the Continental Shelf Act. 
It is good lawmaking when the select committee has an opportunity to consider changes of this scope in more detail because we like other members of the Opposition want this bill to be robust law we want it to be enduring but the way in which the process has occurred the fact that we have tried constructively to make amendments through giving the Minister for the Environment a number of Supplementary Order Papers last month only to have Supplementary Order Paper 100 dropped on us last Friday is not good lawmaking—putting these quite major changes that are in this Supplementary Order Paper in the legislation without it going back to select committee and without the select committee having had the benefit of seeing how the package as a whole works. 
Certainly this legislation is overdue. We do need to fill this major gap in our environmental management regime. The fact is that we do not have a consenting regime to regulate activities in the exclusive economic zone and in the extended continental shelf when this is the fifth-largest exclusive economic zone in the world so we certainly support the need for the legislation but it still has a number of flaws. The Minister with her announcement in the Supplementary Order Paper that we were getting rid of the balanced criteria that were in the last purpose clause and the proposed referral to the sustainable management provisions of the Resource Management Act has created the impression that there has been a move away from the pro-development bias of the bill as introduced. It certainly is more consistent with the Resource Management Act and it is certainly desirable to have that consistency of purpose between what is inside the 12-nautical-mile territorial sea and what is outside it. But I think there are a number of fish hooks and the bill is not as consistent with the Resource Management Act as the Minister and others on the Government side have implied. 
There is a fundamental difference between this bill and the Resource Management Act and that is that in the Resource Management Act there is a hierarchy of matters to be taken into account when decisions are made. There are matters of national importance that decision makers have to recognise and provide for whereas under the bill the matters that the decision makers take into account are all to be given equal weight with no emphasis on environmental protection and sustainability. So the priorities then conflict and there is no guidance for decision makers about the relative weight to be given to each of the matters. That will mean that there is much more likely to be a focus on short-term economic considerations because the financial benefits are so much easier to quantify than damage to a species or damage to a habitat. So it is this lack of a hierarchy to guide decision makers that is the critical difference between the bill and the Resource Management Act and the fact that there are no environmental bottom lines as there are in the Resource Management Act through section 6 and section 7. 
There is a real risk when you do not have those environmental bottom lines that decisions are quite subjective because it is just like a big washing machine where all these criteria come into play and there is no prioritisation of the most important factors. There is also a major difference here and a real risk that the sustainable management purpose will not have the weight that it has in the Resource Management Act because there is no equivalent in this bill to section 104 of the Resource Management Act which requires decision makers to have regard to various considerations subject to Part 2 of the Act. I would invite the Minister to comment when she next takes a call on whether this is a deliberate omission so that the bill means that she as Minister and the Environmental Protection Authority will not be required to make their decisions subject to the bill’s purpose in clause 10 or whether that was just a slip because the Supplementary Order Paper has come into play relatively late. 
There is Supplementary Order Paper 89 in my name which seeks to address some of these issues. It addresses the lack of environmental principles. It seeks to better implement the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea—the convention requirement to preserve and protect the ocean environment before exploiting it commercially by including a set of environmental principles to help guide decision makers to help them prioritise. That would mean that they would be required to recognise and provide for a series of matters rather than just take them into account. So they put the emphasis on those matters. That would help us implement our responsibilities under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea to preserve and protect the marine environment because the matters that are listed in this Supplementary Order Paper include maintaining the integrity of marine ecosystems protecting and preserving rare or fragile habitats and preserving and protecting threatened species—that those get given greater weight than they are given in the bill at the moment. We think that would then take a step forward to making the Act much more consistent with the Resource Management Act and the prioritisation and the hierarchy that you get in Part 2 of the Resource Management Act and giving that a similar prioritisation in this bill. Thank you.