Sage Eugenie: Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 16 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10243. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe. It feels very strange to be here at this time on a Friday night which is actually Thursday in the parliamentary world. But it is more strange to be here speaking on a second reading without the benefit of having read submissions on the bill the Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill without having had an opportunity to question and engage with submitters and without having had an opportunity to ask questions of the officials to tease out some of the rationale for the bill. So it feels very strange indeed to be passing legislation like this without having had any public input which always makes a bill better when Government members are prepared to take account of the concerns raised in submissions.But it also feels very strange to be here because of the damage that this Government is continuing to do to New Zealand’s international reputation. It has done that through its dismissive attitude to climate change and to the Kyoto Protocol and now in this bill we are seeing similar disdain for international law. That is because of the way in which the bill purports to interfere with freedom of navigation on the high seas by applying this 500-metre exclusion zone around vessels when the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea enables such zones only around oil well installations and expressly preserves the rights of navigation.This bill potentially breaches international human rights by disallowing protests at sea and purporting to prohibit that. I would just like to quote Duncan Currie in his legal opinion on the Anadarko amendment. There he went to some lengths to show how New Zealand had stood up through the International Whaling Commission and at other forums in advocating for resolutions to uphold the right to legitimate and peaceful forms of protest and demonstration at sea. As he says: “… New Zealand took an important and active role in preserving the right to peaceful protest in the resolutions.” at the International Whaling Commission.It is worth noting that so many of our important environmental initiatives have come from protests at sea: the Mururoa protest the boats going to sea against that; protests against commercial whaling which achieved that moratorium; protests that ended the dumping of waste at sea; and the ban on the use of driftnets. Peaceful protest at sea is legitimate and this bill by the noxious clause 14 and its controls over the continental shelf on such protests is interfering with that and with the freedom of navigation. It is cutting across the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The Government does not care about that such is its disdain for due process in pushing this bill through under urgency and such is its disdain for international law.This bill is also about a “Drill baby drill!” approach to exploration because of this whole regime around conditional permits so that means that in areas like the Great South Basin where we have got extremely challenging marine environments we would have operators without experience without expertise being encouraged to proceed with drilling. That sounds to me like the Government is encouraging cowboy operators to apply for and to be granted exploration permits. Do we really want operators learning on the job how to drill? The Deepwater Horizon was an exploration well and it highlighted just how wrong things can go.This bill is really problematic because of that—this whole notion of inexperienced operators being pushed to drill or to sell off their permits. It is also going to make things very complicated legally in terms of defining responsibility when things go wrong as they will. The whole issue of sorting out liability issues around theRena disaster will seem like a cakewalk when you have got operators having to onsell part of their permit or the whole of their permit for somebody else to actually go and do the drilling. Who then is responsible when an accident happens? That is this Government’s attitude—do the drilling as fast as you can do not care about the environment but have a regime that just weakens the protections for the environment and encourages exploitation as fast as possible.