Street Maryan: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Street Maryan: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 12 March 2013. Volume:688;Page:8459. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour) 
: 
 The financial review of the Ministry for the Environment for the 2011-12 year contains in the report of the Local Government and Environment Committee a reference to work that the ministry was doing at the time. I have to say to begin with that I think this ministry is both under-resourced and undervalued. But it seems to me that it is just as appropriate to talk about the work that it was doing that has come to light in the last 10 days or so because it is apparent that when it comes to the environment the only thing that National is protecting is its own agenda. There is this complete failure to recognise and understand that the economy and the environment are not two rival forces to be balanced against each other but are in fact two sides of the same coin and are interdependent. 
But National’s development agenda has seen us weaken air-quality standards rush through some flawed exclusive economic zone legislation and fail to sign up to a second commitment of the Kyoto Protocol among a host of other failures. Most recently we have seen the release of a discussion document on the Resource Management Act. There is going to be a lot more that needs to be said about the proposals and the discussion document before that matter is over. Then most recently we saw the National Government release proposals on freshwater quality and management. These proposals were meant to reflect some of the 4 years of work that the Ministry for the Environment has been doing in conjunction with the Land and Water Forum. Well that forum in particular and now the Ministry for the Environment has to become involved in the Minister’s application of those reports. 
What I am concerned about is that we are getting contradictory messages from the Government and I do not know how the Ministry for the Environment is to implement contradictory policies. First of all in the Resource Management Act discussion paper the Minister for the Environment Amy Adams is pushing for more ministerial control—less power vested in the Environment Court—over local decisions which are more likely to affect individual people who want to build a deck on their house than anything else. But in the latest proposals for the quality and management of our waterways the Minister is pushing for local councils to make the decisions over waterways that are in fact national treasures. They are not simply the province of the people who live beside them but they are in fact taonga they are treasures they are facilities that all New Zealanders hold dear. So on the one hand the Minister has got the reach of Government wrong in the Resource Management Act proposals and wants to override local councils and in the second proposal she has got it wrong again by wanting to leave decisions on quality and management of waterways to local councils without any cognisance of the nationwide significance and the need for national environmental standards applying in respect of these waterways. 
So we are really pressed to understand how it is possible for the Ministry for the Environment to enact two contradictory directions from the Minister for the Environment. The only conclusion we are left to draw is that the Minister’s agenda is simply a narrowly focused development agenda—beyond all else a narrowly focused development agenda—that does not take into account the larger significance of the environment. For all of the blue-green protestations it is entirely clear from this contradiction that there is only a small number of people who are going to benefit from these proposals and they are the ones this Government traditionally supports.