Smith Murray: Wellington Regional Council (Water Board Functions) Bill — In Committee 
Smith Murray: Wellington Regional Council (Water Board Functions) Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:623;Page:18929] 
MURRAY SMITH (United Future) 
: 
 I must admit that I have been a little disappointed with the contributions made by the National Party to the debate on this part. I was going to suggest that when Mr Sowry spoke he clearly had not talked to his party’s member on the select committee about these issues; otherwise he probably would not have made the speech he did. But then I heard the National member of the select committee talking and he had seemingly forgotten what I understand was the select committee’s discussion on the issue of renewable energy. It is my recollection that when the Wellington Regional Council came to the select committee it indicated that the only purpose for which it wanted this bill was wind farming. Despite the wording of clause 4(1) which is more general nevertheless that is really all the council wanted the bill for. It was actually through the committee’s discussion with the council in which I took part that we suggested that it might want a broader purpose in terms of renewable energy. 
The problem that arises if we start extending this beyond renewable energy is that non-renewable energy almost inevitably means some intrusive use of the land and at the end of the day this is Wellington Regional Water Board land. It is a water catchment area for collecting drinking water for the use of Wellingtonians. Introducing intrusive things—coalmining say or something of that nature—will inevitably interfere with the primary purpose of the land whereas the use of the land for renewable energy does not involve the same sorts of problems. Use of the land for solar or wind energy or things of that nature—certainly this land will not be used for tidal and wave energy—is non-intrusive. 
The second thing Mr Sowry seems to be oblivious to is that the land we are talking of is some way from the sea. We are talking about the Belmont Hills and the Tararua Ranges. Even if we did discover some oil or gas offshore the chances that we would want to use the Belmont Hills or the Tararua Ranges for the purpose of collecting and transmitting some of that gas and energy are I think beyond even the realms of remoteness. 
I think that when the Wellington Regional Water Board said that it was more than happy to have this bill extended from wind to renewable energy and when the select committee unanimously decided that that was as far as we needed to go and was an adequate and good way to go without running into problems of interfering with the water catchment area we had it exactly right. We provided a liberality that the Wellington Regional Council had not initially expected and that it was grateful for without getting into some of the very clear conservation and environmental issues that would arise if we started to interfere with the collection of water for the Wellington region. 
So I think that the effectively straw argument that the National Party has advanced in questioning whether the scope of the bill is too narrow in covering only renewable energy can really be seen as something of a nonsense and in fact certainly without substance. 
The other point that I wanted to talk to—and that I was initially going to speak on—in Part 1 is the omission of the words “council-controlled organisation” and “council-controlled trading organisation”. I alluded to that in my previous speech when I talked about one of the concerns of the Hon Peter Dunne in respect of this bill and its limited scope. Members will know that our agreement with the Labour Party for confidence and supply includes the freeing-up of legislation to enable public-private partnerships in the area of land transport. The Government has been very faithful in meeting that condition and we have passed legislation in this place that has enabled public-private partnerships to be developed with regard to our roading structure. 
We faced exactly the same issue here. United Future was keen to see this bill modified so that the development of wind farms is not simply something for the Wellington Regional Council to try to do off its own bat with the myriad problems that that may create in terms of local government organisations getting into business—and particularly into areas where cost efficiency is absolutely critical—and speculating to some extent with ratepayers’ money in order to do so. We wanted to see this bill broadened to facilitate the use of outside organisations including major energy companies. These after all are the ones that have the expertise in this area to enable them to carry out the work with the assistance of if appropriate and in partnership with local government—Wellington Regional Council in particular—rather than the Wellington Regional Council doing the work itself. That is the reason why clause 5 has been replaced with a provision that enables far broader use.