Peters Jim: Resource Management (Waitaki Catchment) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Peters Jim: Resource Management (Waitaki Catchment) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:619;Page:15290] 
JIM PETERS (NZ First) 
: 
 I thought the Rakaia River and recently the Rangitata River were subject to river conservation orders. The issues raised by the Hon Dr Nick Smith— 
Brian Connell 
: You think that’s a management plan do you? 
JIM PETERS 
: No they are not. What they do is to limit the allocation of water that can be taken by setting minimum flow regimes. That would be part of the work done by the council— 
Brian Connell 
: Very arbitrary line. 
JIM PETERS 
: It may be an arbitrary line but I understand that it cost the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society and the Fish and Game Council a quarter of a million dollars to get there. So it certainly was a very costly arbitrary line. But the issue is that the river conservation order process will not be needed for this river because the board that will be set up will have the ability under Supplementary Order Paper 244 in the name of the Hon Marian Hobbs to develop and approve a water plan that will overcome the issues that there may be with regard to the Rakaia River the Rangitata River or any other river in the Canterbury region. That board will go through what would have been done by the regional council if there had been a water plan. I do not see the local body elections on 9 October as being of particularly great interest. As I said earlier just to go through the steps that the Canterbury Regional Council is going through apart from the work that this bill will hasten would take an inordinately long time. Instead when the board is selected it will be able to go through those steps. 
I will just quickly run over the issues that traditionally make up a regional plan: the minimum flows and the takes or extractions that can take place the restrictions on the rates of use of water other than that which is required essentially by farmers and for human takes the blocks of water that can be shared above or below the regulated minimum flows and restrictions on damming. All the issues that normally form part of a regional plan will be the work of the board. New Zealand First supports that essential core function which the board will pick up and do in an orderly manner. Previously I said that we had talked to farmers and to high-country people and we have done so. The work of the board will take care of the other issues that are very very important with regard to people who feel that the Waitaki River is theirs—the recreational users and the down-valley users of water. They will have their concerns and their issues resolved in the orderly and a transparent process that is a regional water plan. The bill hastens that process. 
Again New Zealand First stands to say that we support this provision because it will bring a quick benefit to the community. We could go back in history and look at what the regional council did not do or was not supposed to have done—the strategic things that were mentioned by two previous members. But for my part I believe that Environment Canterbury has done a sound job in recent years and I believe it is still doing a sound job. 
Last of all we understand that this bill would not be before the House in this form unless there had been consultation with Environment Canterbury about the core issues. I expect that Ministry for the Environment and Environment Canterbury staff have met on several occasions and have come to the point where if this bill is passed and is passed speedily they will be able to make progress. Probably they have already worked on some of the core components of a regional water plan. 
New Zealand First supports Part 2 and hopes that the bill will hasten the benefit that the board will bring more quickly and more transparently to the wider community and not just to the people of the Waitaki Valley. 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 Supplementary Order Paper 244 in the name of the Hon Marian Hobbs contains one sensible amendment to Part 2. Having said that this legislation comprises a comprehensively bad Supplementary Order Paper and a comprehensively unnecessary bill I do give credit for the fact that it contains one sensible amendment. The bill takes away the silly requirement for the board to apply for an extension of time if it cannot do the job in 9 months. It was absolutely clear all the way through the Local Government and Environment Committee hearings that the board could not do the job in that length of time. All the submissions we had stated that the job was too big for that and the bill now gives the board 12 months to do its job without wasting its time by going through special applications and special  
Gazette 
 notices. So that I guess is an improvement. 
However new clause 10A on that Supplementary Order Paper is not in any way as benign as that amendment. The select committee was quite appalled at the extent to which the bill as introduced created the board to act as a sort of puppet for the Minister and the ministry which clearly knew the outcome they wanted. It gave the Minister all kinds of powers to direct the board and it gave the ministry the power to give the board all the information on which it had to base its decision. The select committee got rid of both those provisions. What clause 10A does is to reinsert with exactly the same wording as before the old clause 10(1) which stated: “The Minister may … (a) arrange for work to be done for the Board: (b) supply any information to the Board.”—as though the board was not capable of doing that for itself. So the Minister—and for that we should read “the Ministry for the Environment”—will do that for the board and in doing so will insert itself back into control of the process. What has not been reinserted however is clause 10(2) which had stated that any such work and any information supplied to the board must be made available for public inspection. That bit has not gone back in. It seems that one will have to use clause 13 “Official Information Act 1982 amended” in order to find out just what information the Ministry for the Environment has given the board and what work the ministry has arranged to have done for the board. 
I have been wondering just how the Government was going to get a majority for those arrangements and I was quite astonished to hear a few minutes ago that United Future supports this legislation. Larry Baldock was a member of the committee yet he will now vote to have a lot of the work of the committee removed from the bill. I wonder why he is doing that because he seemed to support that work at the time. United Future also says that it supports the outdoor recreation people. The trout and salmon fishers do not want all that water to be allocated for hydro and irrigation purposes. The people who want to take water out of the river will thank United Future for its support of that but the fishers—whom United Future says it supports—want the water to be left in the river and they will remember that. The fishers told the select committee that the river needs to keep the water that it has now. We cannot simply reduce it to a minimum flow—a bit of a trickle—and allocate a whole lot of it to other economic purposes and still have a good trout and salmon fishery. So I am surprised that the member supports a bill to allocate water rather than a bill to plan for the best management of the catchment.