Delahunty Catherine: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
Delahunty Catherine: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:661;Page:9482] 
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) 
: 
 I welcome this opportunity to speak to the Appropriation (2008/09 Financial Review) Bill on the financial review of the Ministry for the Environment. I was not a member of the Local Government and Environment Committee. That committee is incredibly important to the Green Party and my colleague Sue Kedgley was a member of it. 
Hon Member 
: And still is. 
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY 
: She still is a member. As I said there was an issue discussed that I want to describe today. Instead of having a broad-brush approach to a range of issues I will talk about the serious nature of cutting funding for what may seem to be an obscure issue. Last year the Ministry for the Environment suffered a number of cuts because we were in a recession and because the Government did not seem to have the same commitment to the Ministry for the Environment that we would like to have seen. One of the cuts that was discussed at that select committee that has had a serious effect was the cut to the Contaminated Sites Remediation Fund. The Contaminated Sites Remediation Fund is administered by the Ministry for the Environment to assist regional councils to investigate plan and remediate contaminated sites in their regions. It is an incredibly important fund because it seeks to assist communities and councils to clean up the mess concerning contaminated sites that has not been addressed for many many years. The Ministry for the Environment fund was cut from its 2008 level of $5 million to $1.78 million in 2009. That might seem like very small beer but in reality we need a lot more than $5 million to deal with the legacy of toxic sites across this country. 
Only this week the Mapua community had a very serious report into the ongoing health effects of the failure of the Ministry for the Environment to properly clean up a site at Mapua. It was very unfortunate that the Government decided to cut the fund from $5 million which barely covers several major contaminated site clean-ups—if indeed it would cover those—to $1.78 million for 2009 and 2010. The Green Party is very concerned about that for a number of reasons. One of the reasons is that it is in the context of councils having just been forced to create registers of contaminated sites thanks to a proactive journalist who went to the Ombudsman. We are hearing that it is not a matter of each region having just a few sites. Many regions have hundreds of sites that need the assistance of the Ministry for the Environment to help clean them up. We could argue that the polluters should pay and in fact I will be arguing that point through a liability bill. But right now it is the responsibility of the Ministry for the Environment to make sure that there is sufficient funding to assist communities to clean up contaminated sites. So we see it as a very retrograde step that in the last financial year that funding was cut. 
Another reason why it is a bad time to cut that funding is that the Government has not yet even finalised the soil standards for toxic sites. Those standards have not been set and they will set the real cost of clean-up. Until we know what the standards are we do not know what those costs will be. We can guarantee that the clean-up of toxic sites is not getting cheaper. 
What is the history of this issue in terms of the Ministry for the Environment? It is important to recognise why I am concerned about that cut in 2009 and why I am talking about it during a financial review. It is because the Ministry for the Environment has serious responsibilities for a number of toxic sites around the country. There are hundreds of them. We have some information about the real cost of cleaning up contaminated sites. For example the Waipa sawmill at Rotorua was contaminated by pentachlorophenol and $28 million will still be spent over the next 35 years to try to treat the water that comes out of the sawmill. The water goes through the Puarenga Stream into Whakarewarewa—where children dived for money—and into Lake Rotorua. That is an ongoing cost of $28 million over 35 years. So clearly that is the kind of money we are talking about for one contaminated site. Another example is the Kopeopeo Canal in Whakatane. It is estimated by the local people who have been very active in looking at a positive way of dealing with the issue that $3 million to $6 million will be needed to clean up that one canal. That is only one of 28 orphan sites around Whakatane that will need a clean-up even if the trialling of the bio-remediation model which is being worked on at the moment is successful. 
The last one I want to refer to is of course Mapua. The Ministry for the Environment estimated that it would cost $7 million to clean it up. The costs have since doubled and it is still a mess. Some clean-up took place but the off-site impact of the experimental mechanism used to clean up Mapua has created more risks and thus more costs. The people of Mapua found out yesterday that there were many chemicals that they were exposed to at that site that were not monitored for such as polychlorinated biphenyls and dioxin etc.