Hutchison Paul: Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Stockholm Convention) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Hutchison Paul: Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Stockholm Convention) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:609;Page:6941] 
Dr PAUL HUTCHISON (NZ National—Port Waikato) 
: National supports this bill as do all the other parties in the House—and quite rightly. But I note that it has been on the Order Paper since 21 May 2002; although the Government purports to have some interest in the environment the bill has languished for quite some time under this somewhat dilatory Labour Government. It concerns me that this bill comes under the very Minister who was responsible for not using her call-in powers—I may be wrong; the Hon Chris Carter is looking at me closely but I understood that the bill was under the Hon Marian Hobbs. 
Hon Chris Carter 
: The member is correct. 
Dr PAUL HUTCHISON 
: She did not use her call-in powers to exercise some degree of balance in the consents that led to New Zealand’s largest landfill at Hampton Downs being given the go-ahead. That will be a very big blight in the future on the Labour Government because there was an opportunity to have some form of balance in terms of ensuring that rigour was applied to the argument and it was lost by a Government that purports to be interested in environmental matters but unfortunately and as exemplified by this bill is clearly somewhat dilatory since the bill has been left to lie on the Order Paper for a very long time. 
Nevertheless the main purpose of this bill is to provide for the absolute prohibition on the manufacture import or use of persistent organic pollutants otherwise known as “POPs”—not to be confused with elderly people. As I noted in  
Hansard 
 considerable doubt was cast upon that at one stage of events. Persistent organic pollutants are chemicals that have the quality of being incredibly environmentally persistent and as the Hon Ken Shirley pointed out they can lie around for over 20000 years and their half-lives may still not have been diminished. They are toxic bioaccumulative and able to be transported by the movement of air water and migratory species to places far from their original point of release. There is no doubt that having a United Nations - sponsored bill such as this where a convention is put into place and signed up to by as many countries as possible is absolutely appropriate. In fact I understand that the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants enjoys an almost unparalleled level of support among United Nations countries. 
Submissions on this bill came from three important sources. One was from Geocycle Ltd a subsidiary of Holcim. The Holcim group of companies is perhaps the world’s leading supplier of cement. The other ones came from Transpower New Zealand Ltd and the National Council of Women. It is worth spending a little time on the Geocycle submission because it pointed out that Geocycle’s focus is at present on the collection of used oil nationwide. Again it supports the intent of the bill but states: “However the bill does not implement Article 5 or Annex C of the Stockholm convention which concerns the unintentional production of dioxins and furans.” It submitted that the Government should provide for those in the bill or at least in additional legislation. “Geocycle’s view is that national environmental standards and extended producer responsibility policies need to be implemented to give effect to the Stockholm convention.” It certainly requested that the Government develop those so I am hoping that the Government will take note of that. It also stated that the bill should “provide for the use of waste and hazardous waste in the manufacture of cement and lime where appropriate environmental standards can be achieved and recognise the positive environmental benefits of co-processing. That will obviously assist the New Zealand cement industry to remain competitive with other countries.” 
Geocycle maintains that there are no national guidelines for dioxin emissions and that they need to be enforced. At present they are enforced variably. Again I agree with the co-leader of the Greens that it is important to have robust national guidelines for the treatment of dioxins in New Zealand. Hopefully that is something the Government will get on with. The commentary on the bill makes the point that “Dioxin is a by-product of some combustion processes and is not a substance that is used in a process. Therefore dioxin is outside the jurisdiction of the Act and is not addressed in the bill.” 
I put it to the Government that this is something to which it should give some attention. Geocycle’s submission states: “It is unfortunate that the cement industry is labelled as a potentially high dioxin producer by the Stockholm convention. The cement industry in general has been proactive in measuring dioxin emissions and operating in a manner to control emissions.” It goes on to say that there is a need for national environmental standards to be developed to cover all industry not specific industry sectors; and that they should be based on discharge standards applying to all discharges not to specific industries. 
The next important submission came from Transpower and indeed the committee dealt with its requests which were basically to phase out the current usage of polychlorinated biphenyls which are a form of persistent organic pollutants that are very much used in the power industry. Transpower operates high-voltage electrical protection equipment that contains small hand-sized sealed capacitors known or suspected to contain polychlorinated biphenyls. Transpower states that there are approximately 2000 of those items in use but they are labelled and contained within 
inside cabinets in controlled substation environments. 
Hon Harry Duynhoven 
: Transformers? 
Dr PAUL HUTCHISON 
: I understand that that is where they can be found and there are many of them around the country. The point Transpower made is that the removal of polychlorinated biphenyls is subject to a replacement plan that reflects shareholder requirements on Transpower to manage the transmission system economically under the requirements for a State-owned enterprise. When Transpower obtained an exemption for continued use in 2000 premature replacement of the equipment was expected to involve a cost in the range of $20 million to $30 million. So its request was that an extension programme up to 2016 was accommodated in the bill and that has been possible provided those provisions are agreed to in the Committee stage. So this is a very important aspect of gradual sensible disposal of persistent organic pollutants or polychlorinated biphenyl in a practical sense that affects the New Zealand economy. 
The third and somewhat interesting submission came from the National Council of Women of New Zealand Inc. They also supported the intention of the bill but were concerned about some of the aspects that unfortunately have been addressed during the briefing processes. So this is a bill that is supported by National and supported by the House and I commend its progress.