Russell Deborah; Mallard TrevorDr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour—New Lynn): Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare. I wish to begin by thanking the members of the Environment Committee for their work on this bill. It was one on which we enjoyed hearing the submissions and I think all my colleagues on the committee worked together well on this bill. I'd also like to thank the officials who did the work on this bill particularly the newish policy analyst for whom this was the first bill that she had worked on and presented to a select committee so she did very well.There was a story on the Titirangi Facebook page a few days ago. It was actually posted by a neighbour of mine—literally a neighbour the next house over outside the bus stop. She had found a fish crate full of rotting fish heads dumped outside their place. I think someone must've come up from—it would have been from French Bay or from Titirangi Beach and discarded the fish heads right outside her place. It stunk. She did the hard work and got rid of the rotten fish heads. She said they were crawling with maggots. I think it was a fairly revolting process for her possibly almost as revolting as the picture which Mr Simpson just introduced into the House. So littering is a problem. I want to continue with some stories on this. I go for a regular Monday walk in the mornings. Sometimes it's leafleting as one does when one is involved in politics but mostly it's down to French Bay and some of the beautiful waterways around in my electorate. But just this Monday morning when I went off walking down by the French Bay yacht club [shows photos] I came across this bag stuffed full of—I think it was old clothes just dumped there by the French Bay public lands down there and just a few metres from it these two rubbish sacks again stuffed full of clothes. I mean what puzzled me is that someone had clearly gone to the effort of putting these clothes into bags but then they couldn't find the proper place to dispose of them so they just dumped them in my neighbourhood.A final story and this one comes from the Taranaki Daily News where it was published the other day is talking about why one Taranaki woman is collecting 10000 cigarette butts. She raises the point that actually cigarette butts are the biggest cause of litter. They're the biggest source of litter and she says they're worse than plastic in many ways because they are so incredibly toxic. So she's collecting 10000 of them to make a point and to ask people to do better.What all these stories show is that littering is a problem and it's something that people actually mind about that we actually want to do something about hence this bill which has come back from the Environment Committee with a number of tidy-up changes in it. The department took the opportunity to just introduce some minor changes and to suggest them to us so we did that. But the substantive change is the one that would increase the infringement fee for littering from $400 dollars to $1000. That's a substantial change in the fee. So the question is: is it appropriate? We need to think about that quite carefully.There's something quite important in the Litter Act—because this bill amends the Litter Act and in particular in the Litter Act one of the issues there is exactly how one gets caught in the act of littering and therefore might attract a fine. As it turns out local authorities can appoint enforcement officers and enforcement officers can issue fines up to that level at the moment of $400 based on the local authority's own rules. They can do it summarily to prevent the deposit or attempted deposit of litter in any public place. What that means is that the enforcement officer needs to see the act of littering actually taking place. They need to be there right there and then. So all those cigarette butts tossed aside idly—no fine can be issued unless the enforcement officer is right there then and there to impose the fine. That's probably the case with cigarette butts because it's very hard to identify them. But they can also impose a fine if they've got good reason to believe that the deposit or attempted deposit of litter has been made by a particular person. In that case an officer would need to have some way of identifying the person who had actually dumped the litter. In other words it's a fairly immediate sort of activity. The enforcement officer really needs to be there or to have some pretty good evidence and of course that's simply not the case with a lot of litter. Those McDonald's wrappers—they don't actually have names on them. The cigarette butts don't have names on them and generally that kind of littering doesn't get reported—unruly tourists aside or Mr Simpson's friends in the Coromandel.So there's a real problem with littering. It's not the level of the fine necessarily. The problem is having enough enforcement officers. The problem is actually enforcing the fine. I think this is a point that was brought up in some of the submissions against the bill. Mr Speaker as I think you might know I'm an habitué of Twitter. I rather enjoy engaging on Twitter with various people and of course I know various people through Twitter. Last night there was a bit of a discussion about the law going on and a friend of mine Liam Hehir who I think is probably known to various members on the opposite side of the House had an interesting tweet. He said—because it was a conversation which Graeme Edgeler had entered—If you mention the law in a tweet then it summons Graeme. Now you have to try to trick him into saying his name backwards."—that would be to get rid of him.Well we mentioned something about the law and fines and the like in this House and public law and then Graeme came along. Graeme Edgeler was one of the submitters who came and talked to us in the select committee about this particular bill and he raised some real concerns. He said that one of the reasons that he was opposed to this bill was that the fine was out of all proportion. He identified the problem with actually catching someone in the act of littering and then he said that the fine proposed—up to $1000—was out of all proportion to the maximum fines suggested for other offences. He said that actually the maximum infringement fee of $400 was already in line with other infringement fees for things like speeding or drink-driving and substantially higher than the fines imposed for parking infringements. So there's a real issue of parity floating through this bill. Is it reasonable to have a fine of $1000 for littering?Interestingly the department was unhappy with that as well and did a bit of analysis and they said that really if we were going to keep this fine in reasonable proportion then based on inflation rates the fine level might be lifted up to say $500 but not $1000—but not $1000. It's too much. On this side of the House we are persuaded by that view and that is the reason as to why we will be opposing this bill.Now we have been told that this particular bill is a test of the Government's commitment to a clean environment. I'll tell you what's a sign of our commitment to a clean environment and that will be the climate change legislation that comes in front of us. Our commitment to conservation is shown in the $76 million we've just added to the Department of Conservation's funding. Our commitment to conservation is showing we want to do the real work not the trivia of increasing fines. We are not interested in punishing people we are not interested in making people subject to the silliest of infringement offences and we are not interested in whacking huge fines on just for the sake of it. We are interested in proportionality and fairness. That's what we're about on this side of the House. So I invite the opposite side of the House I invite the Opposition to have a little think about that number—to have a little think and perhaps a little discussion with us. But when the number remains at $1000 we cannot in good conscience support this bill. I oppose this bill.SPEAKER: Before I call Todd Muller I am going to ask Mr Simpson not to wave that picture around again. Thank you."