Sage Eugenie: Environmental Reporting Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Environmental Reporting Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 23 September 2015. Volume:709;Page:7049. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green): I am pleased to take a call on the Environmental Reporting Bill. Government members can claim that this is a reforming Government in terms of environmental management and the concept of comprehensive state of the environment reporting certainly is a key part of improving environmental management in New Zealand but it is the way you deliver reform that is important. This bill will potentially do more to disguise the state of our air water biodiversity and coast than it will do to provide New Zealanders with a fair accurate picture of New Zealand’s environment why it is like that and what that means.We have had a very stop-start history to state of the environment reporting in New Zealand both in developing indicators and in producing reports. We have had only two nationwide state of the environment reports in 1997 and 2007 and absolutely nothing since then. That was why the Green Party supported this bill’s introduction. We hoped for and worked to try to achieve a genuine consensus across the House but the Government has persisted in rejecting the efforts of Opposition members to try to improve the bill both in the Local Government and Environment Committee and in the Committee stage with a number of quite detailed Supplementary Order Papers.Because of the way in which it undermines independence we do not want to have the environment Ministers and the Minister of Statistics selecting the topics that are to be reported on in both the domain and the synthesis reports. That was something many submitters opposed yet the Government persisted in politicising what should be an objective and independent process by giving the regulation-making powers to Ministers solely to enable them to choose the topics to be reported on. It is really disappointing that all of the changes in relation to clause 18 that we put forward in the select committee were rejected.Another reason that we are opposing this bill is the poor quality of environmental information that the Government is prepared to accept as valid in terms of state of the environment reporting. In July the Taranaki Regional Council released its state of the environment report for the region. It really highlights the shortcomings of this regime because the Government Minister Nick Smith went up to Taranaki to launch the report and that report did not even follow the Ministry for the Environment’s own rules in terms of collecting water quality data. The regional council followed the ministry’s guidelines for measuring at only two out of 18 swimming spots in the region. The Ministry for the Environment requires weekly surveillance during the 5-month summer recreational period. It requires samples to be collected from a minimum of 20 data points regardless of weather conditions. But what did the Taranaki Regional Council do? It collected only 13 samples in good weather conditions at 16 of the spots. By collecting data in only good weather conditions it did not look at the variation that you get when you have got heavy rain and then much increased faecal coliform and nutrient runoff. That completely skewed the information and it failed to tell families about the risks related to swimming at their favourite swimming spots.When you have the Minister endorsing a state of the environment report from a regional council that did not even meet the Ministry for the Environment’s own guidelines for state of the environment information how can we trust the information that is going to be produced under this bill? When the Government has given us a very bland report on air qualityso far and when we are not seeing the sort of information that New Zealanders need in order to actually understand what is happening in terms of environmental quality we do not think that this bill is actually going to deliver what New Zealanders had expected.One of the other flaws in the bill is its focus on providing “best available data”. That means that when reports are done there is no provision to include any requirement to generate information that is not currently collected or to include any requirement to identify gaps in the data. We have seen regional and district councils collect a lot of environmental information that is often for their own purposes and for their own priorities; it is not for pulling together a national data set. So their methods of analysis and their methods of collection as we have seen in the Taranaki example are often very different.The bill in relying on local authorities to collect that information will simply fail to provide a good mechanism for collecting comprehensive accurate data from across New Zealand when there is no requirement that they do this in a consistent way. Also in the Budget this year the Government failed to provide any additional funding to local authorities or the Ministry for the Environment to ensure that there is good quality reporting. So it has been yet another example of the Government loading responsibilities on to local authorities but not providing funding to assist with the implementation of the laws that Parliament is passing.When the disclosure statement on the bill says “Direct costs associated with this new environmental reporting framework will be managed within existing departmental baselines.” we know that the same sums of money are being spread more and more thinly over a wider variety of priorities. When the Ministry for the Environment in 2007 took 28 staff and 200 other people to produce the 2007 report and when there has been no additional funding that I can find in the vote for the ministry to assist with state of the environment reporting other than the allocation to the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment how is the ministry going to ensure that the information is good quality and accurate? What other priority work is going to be sacrificed in order to respond to its responsibilities under this legislation?The Green Party had wanted to support this bill. We need to have a good consensus on the law around state of the environment reporting but because the Government has repeatedly rebuffed attempts to improve the bill and has rebuffed efforts to ensure that state of the environment reporting is independent is not a politicised process and does not have the Ministers choosing the topics to be reported on in both the domain and synthesis reports we cannot support this bill because although we need robust information about the health of our environment to ensure that we make good decisions we are not convinced that this bill will establish the framework and the regime to actually achieve that. Instead it risks—take the Taranaki example where poor-quality information was used to claim that waterways in Taranaki were in a good state—potentially misleading New Zealanders about the state of our biodiversity and about the state of our water quality and it risks not providing them with the fair accurate picture that we need.