Roche Denise: Maritime Transport Amendment Bill Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Amendment Bill — Third ReadingsText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: Maritime Transport Amendment Bill Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Amendment Bill — Third Readings[Sitting date: 15 October 2013. Volume:694;Page:13875. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green): I rise to take a call for the Greens on these two pieces of legislation the Maritime Transport Amendment Bill and the Exclusive Economic Zoneand Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Amendment Bill. Our position is that we will be supporting this legislation. We do have some concerns particularly about the amendments to the exclusive economic zone legislation; however I will talk about that in a minute.Our position is that we believe that this legislation does not really go far enough in protecting the waters in our economic zone or actually protecting New Zealand taxpayers from paying the full costs of potential spills. Other speakers have already talked about theRena and how this legislation should have been in place earlier in order to protect the taxpayer from paying the full cost of that clean-up.We do support legislation outlining the responsibilities of regulating maritime safety as a function of regional councils. Actually it is heartening to see this Government finally supporting some type of powers for local authorities given that it has not been terribly supportive around things like the Land Transport Management Act the Auckland Housing Accord the Local Government Act or in fact the changes to the Resource Management Act where local authorities have been shut out of decision making time and time again. However it was very nice to read Minister Collins’ quote when she introduced the second reading of this bill. She said that “The bill enables regional councils to continue to regulate maritime safety and maritime-related activities in their regions and provides for a stronger regime for the management of port harbour and navigation safety.”Certainly where I live in the Hauraki Gulf the local authorities have been active in negotiating around maritime safety. In fact the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park forum the Ports of Auckland the shipping industry and theEnvironmental Defence Society got together to develop protocols for the shipping industry around protecting theBryde’s whales that live in the Hauraki Gulf and that frequently sleep very close to the surface of the water particularly around the shipping lanes. Part of those protocols is that the ships will be slowing down to about 10 knots which is a major step forward. I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the work of advocate Dr Rochelle Constantine who has been ceaselessly advocating for these mammals in the Hauraki Gulf for many years. We have finally managed to get some success there.The Greens do of course agree with the provisions in respect of the drink-driving of ships and the limits there for ship captains and we do also acknowledge the anomaly that we see with drink-driving on land which has not actually come through at all. We support the penalties and prescriptions around the overloading of ships bringing us into line with some of the international conventions. And of course we agree with acceding to the other international maritime conventions.What we are not happy with are the amendments around our exclusive economic zone that allow for exploratory drilling as a non-notified discretionary activity because we see that once more as another lack of democracy. That has been a common theme that this Government has pushed through in piece of legislation after piece of legislation. We note that that provision came through as an amendment through the Committee of the whole House so it was not actually open to submission during the democratic process that we have that enables legislation in the first place. That really does mar some of the better provisions that have been pushed forward like the restrictions around waste dumping. That was an amendment that came through from the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. We will be supporting this bill but we do have some reservations.