Brownlee Gerry: Canterbury Earthquake Response and Recovery Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Brownlee Gerry: Canterbury Earthquake Response and Recovery Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:666;Page:13945] 
Hon GERRY BROWNLEE (Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery) 
: 
 I would like to deal with some of the questions that have been raised by speakers up to this point. I do not want to cut across anybody’s opportunity to ask questions but I do not want to lose those questions either. 
I go back to Mr Chauvel who raised a number of questions. Firstly he pointed to the Social Security Act and asked why that Act is specifically mentioned. I can give the answer very succinctly: new Social Security Act provisions come in on 27 September. The Minister for Social Development and Employment has suggested that some of those provisions may need to be suspended for the people in Canterbury. In many ways that immediately links us to the part in the bill that deals with ministerial decisions not being able to be challenged through the courts. Essentially there is a provision made for people in Canterbury around Inland Revenue Department activities around social welfare activities and around a range of other things including compliance with attendance at school and various other issues. People in other parts of New Zealand presumably could go to a judge and ask whether that is reasonable or fair. A judge may well be persuaded that it is not and go through a process of setting that provision aside. We cannot really go through that in this case. Although I accept that in other circumstances such a denial of the courts’ role in these issues would be inappropriate I do not think it is here. It would become a problem only if there was a strong view that something sinister was afoot. In this case there most certainly is not. 
Charles Chauvel also raised the issue about whether more councillors should be on the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Commission. It is worth noting that it has already been stated that the commission will be made up of the three mayors plus one Environment Canterbury commissioner plus three independent members. The idea of this is to get a very flat structure. One of the things that none of us who have been on the ground in Canterbury in the last 10 days can deny is that the districts did a brilliant job. They know what they need to reconstruct their areas. They know also that they need to corral what is business as usual—and this answers some of Brendon Burns’ questions I think—and what is reconstruction work. In that regard reconstruction work is something that those districts will have to engage with the Government on. Frankly we know that the districts do not have the money to do the work. We know that they do not have a rating base that can even spread that work over a period of time. There has to be a conduit for the councils which will each make the decisions that come through to Government. Across a district there needs to be some equity and there has to be some understanding that if we do not repair one part of the district the whole district will suffer. We need to see the commission as a very flat structure not as some new bureaucracy that is coming in to tell districts how to do things. 
I will also look at the way in which an Order in Council might be constructed. Firstly it will be on something that districts identify as a problem. Districts will then report that through the commission and the commission will engage with the Minister. We know all of this will be short-cut; we know that Ministers will talk directly to the districts. But the commission will keep an overview of all of this stuff. If there is a need to do something the commission will then request the Minister to make the decision. The Minister will need to go to a Cabinet committee. We have already said that we will make it clear to other parties in this House if there is to be an Order in Council. People will know about it. That goes also to Dr Graham’s suggested amendment about the 24-hour notice regarding any Order in Council. At the moment the Parliamentary Counsel Office is required to publish in the  
Gazette 
 any Order in Council. The fact is that if we are changing a law we want to use an Order in Council and we cannot use it if we do not tell people about it. There is no question that we are trying to hide from that process. There is a commitment to let people know before an Order in Council happens and then of course it would naturally be publicised. Any suggestion that we need Dr Graham’s amendment in order to give the public certainty would achieve nothing more than what already happens. At the moment I am told that the Parliamentary Counsel Office manages to get an Order in Council out—the office probably has a longer process—in 72 hours. But in this circumstance it will be known to members of this House before it is even taken through the process. I do not think there is any need to make that change. 
I will come to a couple of points made by Brendon Burns in a minute but I will run through the rest of Dr Graham’s proposed amendments. I have dealt with the issue concerning the High Court and I do not think that what one might say at first glance that denying rights is terrible is as relevant here as it might be in other circumstances. The second is to restrict the Order in Council process to just 21 of the Acts that are listed. That is an idea but why would we do that if all the intention here is to enable things that relate to the purpose of this bill? The purpose clause states in 10 lines “Canterbury earthquake” five times. It is very very specific about what can be done. There is no way we could do something through the provisions in this bill that affects other parts of New Zealand. I will make just one proviso. Dr Graham has also suggested that we might look at restricting it to the districts of Waimakariri Selwyn and Christchurch. The difficulty there is that the Kate Valley landfill is outside those districts. No matter which way we look at it the Kate Valley landfill will be under significant stress as a result of this disaster. The road slip that blocked the northern highway along the Kaikoura coast was the result of this activity and I do not think we should constrain ourselves when it is quite clear that something relates to the activities of the last 10 days. 
In that regard I think it is also worth noting that we are still experiencing a considerable number of aftershocks and we do not quite know when that will end. What we do know is that we are getting on with making sure that things come back together as quickly as possible. In that regard Dr Graham has suggested that we should come back to 15 March 2011 as the expiry date. I think it is fair enough that this amendment is put before us because we have to be comfortable about however long this legislation runs for. The Government is saying we should give it 18 months. We all know what it is like. We have councils that are at the moment in a state of—I have to be careful how I express this; they have done a huge amount of work over a short period of time. Someone told me the other day that in Christchurch City Care connected as many water connections in 3 days as it would normally do in a year. That is because it is focusing on that job. It does a lot of other things during a normal year. The output from organisations such as that has been extraordinary. We need to give them time to think about what will be business as usual and what infrastructure which is only patched up the moment they need to go back and repair. Anyone who has seen any roadworks done these days will know that that work takes time. 
If we look particularly at Kaiapoi that area has very deep sewers—at least 3 metres below the road. People there know that their sewers by and large under normal circumstances are below the water line. They know that they have to dig down they have to sheet-pile they have to de-water and they have to go block by block by block to get the work done. As they go along they could well discover other problems that they had not anticipated. I think we need to indicate to residents throughout the wider Canterbury region that infrastructurally it could be 18 months before it is certain that we can say that we are so far down the track that we do not need these extra provisions. During that time also if there needs to be stronger legislation for one aspect of this work or another then clearly this House will want to consider it. 
I dealt with the issue of the Christchurch City Council. We are not trying to set up another bureaucracy. We are trying to create something that is flat recognises the knowledge that exists in the districts expresses confidence in their ability to plan and achieve what we want in terms of recovery and makes a commitment to work with them. Essentially that is what the commission is. 
The other issue that comes to mind is that of the application of the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act. At this time further consideration is being given to that question. The response may come in the form of a Supplementary Order Paper later this evening but if it does not I give an absolute commitment that as the terms of reference are developed for the commission we will want a degree of openness. But I stress that decisions made by the commission will be generated from the districts. When we think about the structure being put in place we realise that the districts will be making their own determinations about what is business as usual and what is recovery. Through the auspices of the commission there might be consenting processes that relate to recovery but those questions will be dealt with by the districts. We are not setting up a new agency. The normal processes that are already in place in those districts will apply. I suspect that a large number of early decisions made by the commission will be commercially sensitive and I think we have to be very careful about the encumbrance we put upon those commissioners who are essentially the local mayors and three others in respect of that issue. 
I will now talk about Mr Burns’ concerns about some retrospective Orders in Council. The clearest and easiest one to understand is to do with discharges. Let us take the case of the sewer at Kaiapoi and the process of putting that sewer back together. If some of the infrastructure that we know must be weak in that system—so much is broken that more in the system must be pretty weak—collapses as a consequence of restoration work and there is a discharge theoretically there should be a 21-day process to get a consent to enable that discharge. 
Hon David Parker 
: Oh it would be an emergency. You’d use the emergency plans you’ve already got. 
Hon GERRY BROWNLEE 
: Well that is why we are having this bill. The fact is that under the state of emergency that would be right but the state of emergency gets lifted tomorrow. I am surprised that the Hon David Parker who is such a stickler for the letter of the law is now waving his head and saying we should not be so pedantic. We live in a pedantic world for goodness’ sake so we are making sure there is no difficulty with those problems. I think the commission is the right vehicle for councillors to engage with Government and the commitment from the Government is that the engagement will be as inclusive of this Parliament as possible.