Court Simon; Parker DavidSIMON COURT (ACT): Thank you Madam Chair. Minister I want to come now to clause 118 Rules about discharges". Now there are already existing provisions in the Resource Management Act around discharges. For those listening on 882 AM or watching on Parliament TV what we're talking about is when a business or undertaking whether it be a manufacturing operation say turning tomatoes from the tomato orchard into canned goods or whether it's a business that is manufacturing say concrete products from cement and aggregate—a discharge from that activity to land or into water is already regulated and already requires consents.The last thing we want in New Zealand is for businesses or people using their land to use it in a way that pollutes the natural environment the commons—the common resource that our Government and that our local authorities should be protecting for all of our benefits. Discharges to land private land and to waterways actually have an impact on people downstream.But Minister I'm interested in some of the text here and particularly on page 161 clause 118(2). It talks about none of these effects should arise when a plan includes provision for discharges. We must accept that every business or undertaking that makes something has some kind of output that either comes out the factory gate as a finished good or that goes out of a pipe or into a pond to treat any contaminants that come out at the back end of the process. That's normal manufacturing process in New Zealand. But if we look at clause 118(2)(b) "a conspicuous change in the colour or visual clarity:" then the requirement is that none of these effects are likely to arise—and that's really interesting.I want to give an example Minister. Maybe if we can contrast what happens naturally with what happens as a result of human activity and how is it that a council or a planner is supposed to evaluate which one is OK and which one is isn't?Now if you travel through the Waikato which I regularly do you will see the great Waipā River. The Waipā River drains a catchment of highly erodible soils which means that the Waipā River naturally has a much higher sediment load than the Waikato River which it discharges to. What that means is where you see the Waikato River and the Waipā River meet—I think that's at Ngāruawāhia nearby—you see a very turbid sediment-laden water body entering the Waikato River and mixing and downstream of that the natural colour is significantly changed. There is a "conspicuous change in colour" and a "conspicuous change in visual clarity" of the Waikato River downstream of where the Waipā River enters it.Minister again we saw during the floods and storms of earlier this year in January and February 2023 enormous volumes of sediment eroded from all types of land uses whether it was forestry or farming or of course if you drive up the Napier-Taupo Highway you will see even in areas of what looked like untouched indigenous forest very large slips—very very large slips—because the underlying geology of those soils and of those rock types is very unstable. Enormous quantities of sediment being discharged to waterways and then to the coastal area. Of course it reached all the way up to the continental shelf where those sediments build up as a layer—a thick thick thick layer—that in the future maybe tens or hundreds of millions of years from now will be hard rock and uplifted.So Minister I want to know how a plan is supposed to account for rules about discharges where many of the things that they propose to regulate are already happening at a much greater scale in the natural environment. If all of these things are decided in a plan and you can't bring your evidence to court and say "Hey actually our discharge is not too different from a natural discharge." how on earth are businesses supposed to get ahead and prove they can operate?Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): As I think the member well knows that's not what this rule is about. It's about discharges to water not the mixing of existing waters which as the member records is a common occurrence whether it's the rivers he talks about or the Clutha River or the Kawarau River down south. This is about contaminants being discharged by human activity or practices and after a reasonable mixing zone is there conspicuous oil or grease and is there a conspicuous change in colour caused by those discharges?"