Delahunty Catherine: Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 11 April 2013. Volume:689;Page:9309. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): I will take just a brief call on this quite brief section Part 3 of the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill which as my colleague Moana Mackey has ably described is basically moving these provisions into the Crown Minerals Act. But I think that this part represents a theme in the bill which is what I would call putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank. It is about shifting the management of very important places such as the oceans into a resource model rather than a respect model. It may be news to some people but the ocean is not a great place to dig up. We have very little control on land with some of our pollution issues but we have far less control under the sea. That is what we learnt by seeing some of the disasters that have taken place in other parts of the world. It may be all very well and logical to move the Continental Shelf Act provisions relating to minerals into the Crown Minerals Act but it does not solve the fundamental problem which is that this is the new frontier and this is the big expansion.We have exhausted many of our resources on land. We now want to do over what is left—the great mysterious and sacred ocean which we do not understand. But it does not matter that we do not understand it because it is a see-no-evil environment. It is like outer space. You can chuck your junk into the sky you can dump your junk into the sea but it really does not matter because we cannot see it. So it is fine. You can dig a greatbig hole in the ocean and all of those subtle effects will not really matter and that is what is so pathetic about regarding the ocean as purely a place for the extraction of minerals. A lot of the mineral extraction in the ocean is going very slowly because it is incredibly difficult to do. If you look at the coast off the Raukūmara Basin for example where the proposal was to do oil exploration these are extremely deep waters indeed on every level both metaphorically and in a real sense.Also it is very ironic that in that very place was the birth of Supplementary Order Paper 205 which was referred to earlier which affects the continental shelf and which so far has not been applied to us on land but I would not be at all surprised if Minister Bridges’ brilliant idea of locking up protesters at sea gets moved to become a brilliant idea of locking up protesters on land. I mean that is always a possibility. It is perfectly logical. If mining is the only priority why do you not lock up everybody who disagrees with you and who comes near any of your operations? That is absolutely seen as being fair enough by what is intended in that Supplementary Order Paper. So—Hon Maryan Street: Don’t give him ideas.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: I am not trying to give those members ideas. I am aware that they have very strange ideas. It is what Bruce Jesson would have said: only their purpose is mad. I think that is a very interesting way to describe this bill and also this part which should be just another logical technical administrative thing. Nothing in this bill is logical and just technical; a lot of this bill is facilitative.All I can say is that if you think we know what we are doing on land where we are still trying to clean up our waterways and where we are still trying to basically understand what goes in our rivers which we can actually access and see we have no idea what is going on in the ocean and yet we are proposing through these continental shelf provisions to open up a new frontier that should be learnt about respected and looked after. It is not as if there are no alternative things we can do to find minerals and to create green sustainable energy. Those things exist but the companies want to invest in their new frontier—assisted often by GNS Science I am horrified to say—and that is where we are going with this. That is the tragedy of this bill. It opens up a frontier that forgets about a fundamental lack of information a lack of evidence and a lack of relationship and respect for the ocean. That is why Elvis Teddy stood up for Whānau-a-Apanui in his own fishing ground and said no and that is why Simon Bridges has to try to shut him down.The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 210 in the name of the Hon Simon Bridges to Part 3 be agreed to.