Mackey Moana: Environmental Reporting Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMackey Moana: Environmental Reporting Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 05 March 2014. Volume:696;Page:16359. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MOANA MACKEY (Labour): It is with great disappointment that Labour will not be supporting the Environmental Reporting Bill at the first reading but I do want to thank the Minister for the Environment Amy Adams for providing a copy of the bill beforehand. I reiterate to her that we are very committed at the Local Government and Environment Committee to doing whatever we can to allay the concerns that we have. Minister Adams and I actually had a conversation about it where we talked about some of the issues I was having. I said to her that the purpose of the bill looked great and I did not think there would be any issues. Unfortunately when we went through the detail of the bill there were a number of fish-hooks that popped up which meant that on balance—and I am not going to pretend it was not a line call because it was—our concerns about independence and particularly the role of Government Ministers in choosing what the topics are meant that we felt we could not support it at the first reading. But we are very committed to working constructively on this bill at the select committee to address some of those concerns.We also ran it by some outside stakeholders who agreed with us that these fish-hooks were very real. But this is not at all a slagging of this bill because I am very pleased to see an environmental reporting bill before the House. Hopefully we can end up with a credible robust independent environmental reporting system that will inform generations to come of the state of the New Zealand environment.I just want to go into a few of the issues that I think we are going to need to deal with at the select committee. The first is the issue the Minister referred to about the release of information. I understand that with the use of tier 1 statistical reporting there are certain rules around how some of that information can be used which is absolutely appropriate. We are going to need to do the kind of pointy-headed stuff that select committees are good at. We are going to need to do some work around that tier 1 reporting to make sure that tier 1 statistical reporting is compatible with the way we do environmental reporting. There may be some areas where it is not but I think those of us who are geeks and like doing that sort of stuff look forward to getting into the detail of that at the select committee.I am sure we can find a way through to ensure that the information that is currently in the public domain—and I think that is where some of the concern has come in—stays in the public domain. A lot of this environmental information from the National Instituteof Water and Atmospheric Research and other such organisations is already in the public domain and we would hate to see it being taken out of the public domain. I accept the Minister’s assurance that that is not the intention of the bill and that there may be instances where that information is sensitive but I was very pleased to have the assurance of the Minister that there is no intention to remove from the public domain information that is currently there. We will just work through the details of how that appears in the legislation to make sure that that is the effect of the bill.I want to come to the substantive area of our concern. As I said when I read the purpose of the bill which is to create a national-level environmental reporting system to ensure that reporting on our environment occurs on a regular basis and can be trusted by the public as independent fair and accurate I agreed 100 percent. I agreed 1 million percent. That is absolutely what we want. My fear is that the way it is being implemented does not meet the purpose of the bill—in particular around clause 18 “Regulations” which states: “The Governor-General may on the joint recommendation of the Minister for the Environment and the Minister of Statistics by Order in Council make regulations prescribing—(a) topics to be covered in synthesis reports relating to—” a range of measures and topics to be covered in the domain reports.My concern is with the level of ministerial involvement in choosing what the topics are. I understand from the Minister’s comments in her speech that we will get more information at the select committee about what those topics are and therefore what the risks are in having Ministers so heavily involved. But with the greatest of respect I get very nervous when I see things like this being put into regulation particularly in a bill where independence really is kind of at the core of what it is about—ensuring that these statistics are not seen to be being swayed in any way by the Government of the day whatever political stripe that Government happens to be. I have always felt that it is much better if we can get as much as we can in primary legislation so that it is Parliament’s decision and Parliament’s bill not simply topics decided by a National Government or a Labour Government that a National-led or Labour-led Government would then have to go back to Parliament to get permission to alter in any way. They should be topics decided by the New Zealand Parliament. That is not to say that you cannot have regulation to ensure flexibility around some of the finer detail of that but to have the topics set entirely by regulation and by Government Ministers could I think undermine the credibility of the system.As I said when we get to the select committee we will see how real that danger is but it was something that jumped out at me right away. If you are going to have any kind of credible environmental reporting system then the topics are going to have to be consistent over time. You cannot be constantly changing the topics that are to be reported on because then you are not going to have the trend data that you need. The very basis of a system like this is that you are going to be measuring the same things over a long period of time and that there is going to be very little change in the way you measure things over a very long period of time. If having this done by regulation is an indication that we expect to see a lot of churn and a lot of flux in the things that we are measuring then I do not think that is going to lend itself to a particularly credible environmental reporting scheme or system. If we know now what the topics are—if the counterfactual is true and we actually know what these topics are that are going to be put into regulation they are not going to change a lot over time and there is not going to be a lot of churn and flux around those topics—then why not have them in the primary legislation?So it seems to me that the worry is that this is indicating that those topics are going to change and we are not going to have consistent reporting or we are going to be reporting on different things because if not then why would we not put it in theprimary legislation? Why would we not make that stuff as clear as possible? These are the long-term things that we are going to be reporting on and these are the topics and they are not going to change over time because if they did that actually undermines the integrity of trend data. So that is where my nervousness over clause 18 comes in.Again with the greatest of respect I also have to say that I appreciate the assurances from the Minister that these regulations are going to be used for the good of the environment. We were given those assurances on the exclusive economic zone legislation as well. We were told that things would not be done in regulation that would take away a community’s right to have a say on offshore exploratory oil drilling for example. And then what happened in fact was that—it is interesting that Minister Adams is sitting next to Mr Phil Heatley; I would love to hear that conversation—Minister Heatley actually promised that communities would be able to have a say through the marine consent process but that was taken away under regulation.So I guess this is a case of not looking just at the bill but looking at it in the context of the kinds of behaviour we have seen from this Government around regulation. We have been burnt. We were very burnt over the exclusive economic zone regulations where promises were made we were told that these regulations were minor and technical and would only ever be used to ensure the easy running of that regulatory framework and in fact the regulation was used to seriously undermine the regulatory framework. That is another reason why we would like to see as much of this as possible locked down in primary legislation and as little as possible left to regulation which I actually think is good parliamentary practice as well—as little left to regulation as possible.There is just one other interesting thing which again jumped out at us that I am sure we will look at in the select committee. Clause 7 covers the introduction of economic benefits in a bill that is about environmental reporting. One of the things that will be reported on—and I note that this actually is in primary legislation so this is not being left to regulation; we have been quite up front and clear that the Government wants this to be reported on—is the economic benefits derived from utilising natural resources. I would question how appropriate it is to have that in this environmental reporting legislation.Those are our concerns with the bill as it stands. As I said we will work very constructively in the select committee to address those concerns. Hopefully we will end up with a bill that we can support because environmental reporting is something that the Labour Party has supported for a long time. But those issues of ministerial guidance over what topics should be covered is an area of deep concern because again with the greatest of respect to the Minister I think this has been one of the worst Governments for the environment in living memory quite frankly—one of the worst. I can completely understand concerns that the general public have that when the data comes out the Government will use its influence to sway what is actually being reported on. That is why this must be seen to be completely independent.Maggie Barry: Think back to your own administration—36 wells dug without any kind of permits. Disgraceful Moana.MOANA MACKEY: Let us go through it shall we. The exclusive economic zone legislation you want to gut the Resource Management Act not listening to the Land and Water Forum mining on conservation land giving the Minister of Energy and Resources the right to have a say on mining on conservation land the introduction of economic benefits tests for mining on conservation land that no one else gets—the list could go on and on and on and on. This Government has been an appalling Government for the environment—absolutely appalling. So it is really really important that an environmental reporting scheme is seen to be completely independent. I do not see howa scheme that has Governments deciding what topics are going to be reported on can be seen to be completely independent.We will work very very hard at the select committee to make this better and we will work constructively as we always do. Environmental reporting is important. But let us not do it in a half-hearted kind of way. Let us do it properly. Let us get this absolutely right—absolutely right—so that our communities individuals NGOs Governments and MPs of all political stripes can have confidence that there is no Government influence on what is being reported on and they can have absolute confidence in the credibility of the statistics provided.