Lees-Galloway Iain: Environmental Reporting Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLees-Galloway Iain: Environmental Reporting Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 23 June 2015. Volume:706;Page:4685. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North):I am not a member of the Local Government and Environment Committee so in preparing for this Committee stage I was new to the legislation. In looking at Part 2 it did seem clear to me as someone who is looking at this with fresh eyes that there is quite a significant internal inconsistency if you read through from clause to clause.I would like to start off with clause 15 which is titled “Reports to be fair and accurate”. I can certainly understand why this clause is included. It is important that the reports that are compiled by the Secretary for the Environment and the Government Statistician are indeed fair and provide a fair representation of the topics that they have been asked to consider and of course that they are accurate in their use of the data.But I do wonder exactly—and perhaps the Minister for the Environment may be able to give us some clarity on this—what “fair” means exactly because sometimes especially in environmental issues when you are dealing with the question of what is fair reporting there is an expectation that all points of view will be expressed even if some of those points of view are in the extreme minority. I think particularly in respect of the climate change debate—and I think of an outfit in the United States that promotes itself as being fair and balanced—that that will amplify the minority view on climate change: that it is either not occurring or it is not human-induced even though the overwhelming body of evidence says that climate change is both happening and is induced by human activity.So I would wonder whether in requiring reports to be fair consideration has been given as to what is a fair representation of the variety of views and the variety of evidence that will be provided to the Secretary for the Environment and the Government Statistician in pulling together those reports and what requirements will be placed on them to provide a balanced representation of those different points of view. Will they be able to say: “Look the overwhelming bulk of evidence says this one thing and that’s where we’re going to focus our report.” or will they be required to bring in information that is perhaps expressed by a minority view and include that in their report? That is a genuine question. I can absolutely understand why that word “fair” is in there but there can be perhaps some unintended consequences of having it there.Obviously clauses 14 and 15 combined are designed to ensure that the reporting is independent and that it is accurate and that it does provide a fair picture of the environment from the point of view of the topics that have been chosen. This is I think where we begin to get the internal inconsistency in these clauses in Part 2 because clause 14 does require the Secretary for the Environment and the Government Statistician to act independently of any Minister of the Crown. That is what we would expect. If we are going to expect the public to rely on these reports to give a fair and accurate representation of environmental issues then the public will absolutely expect these reports to be free from political interference. That is clearly what the point of clause 14 is—to ensure that this reporting is done in a manner that is free from political interference. That is all well and good until we look at section 18 and its impact on section 12 section 13 and others.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Clauses I think the member means.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: Clauses—certainly.Clause 12 says that the process for producing an environmental report involves two steps. The topics to be reported on are prescribed by regulations made under clause 18 and of course we have had some discussion about the impact of clause 18 which is that the very topics that are chosen are chosen by the Minister. So immediately clauses 14 and 15 are undermined by that requirement in clause 12 for the topics to be prescribed under the regulations as it says here in clause 18. So that drive for political independence and for it to be a fair and accurate representation is immediately undermined by the fact that the whole report when it is initiated is initiated by the Minister and the fact that the topics that the report will address are chosen by the Minister.Paul Foster-Bell said it is important that the decision to undertake a report be made by elected representatives. He suggested that there would be a considerable amount of expenditure involved in compiling these reports and that it would be inappropriate for unelected officials to initiate a process that requires significant public expenditure. But in fact what initiates the reports is this legislation. It says in this legislation that those reports must be produced every 3 years. So the decision to spend public funds on providing the reports is actually made by us the members of Parliament who are voting on this legislation. So that meets Mr Foster-Bell’s test of whether or not that expenditure should be initiated by elected members of Parliament. I see the Minister shaking his head and I would be interested to hear his view on why my interpretation of that is incorrect.I say to Mr Foster-Bell that although I understand the view he has expressed I think it is satisfactorily dealt with by the fact that the initiation of the report itself comes out of this legislation passed by Parliament. The question is what issues and topics those reports should address. Indeed they should be the important issues of the day. They should be the issues that the data tells us are the issues of the day. They should to a certain extent be the issues that the public tell us are the issues of the day that should be important for the Government’s long-term planning around the state of the environment. But the problem with introducing ministerial responsibility for choosing those topics is that there may be a reason why a particular Government led by any party may wish to focus more attention on some topics and may wish in fact to focus attention away from certain topics. That undermines the faith that the public can have in the quality of these reports and the usefulness of these reports for long-term planning not only by the Government but by other agencies as well.I note that a lot of these issues were raised by a variety of submitters some of whom are Officers of Parliament who have absolutely every reason to encourage us to pass legislation that is robust and will result in reports that are robust and that the public can have a lot of faith in.Although clause 12 clause 13 clause 14 and clause 15 all drive this idea that there should be independence accuracy and freedom from ministerial influence that is all pulled down by clause 18 and the fact that it is the Minister by Order in Council who gets to choose the topics. I see that as a massive internal inconsistency within this legislation and that is the principal reason why the members who represented us at the select committee and heard all those submissions came to the view that Labour is not able to support Part 2 of this legislation. Much as we support the idea of environmental reporting and had high hopes for this legislation it is with great sadness that because of some of those inconsistencies we are not able to continue to support this bill.