Russell DeborahDr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour—New Lynn): I rise to commend this bill to the House. It's a tidying-up bill. It's a tidying-up bill in two senses. I do want to talk about both those senses in which it's a tidying-up bill tonight.As has been—eloquently?—described by Mr Young this bill deals with what happens at the end of life in some respects of oilfields. This is the first aspect of tidying-up in this Crown Minerals Amendment Bill. What goes on when an oilfield or a mineral deposit gets to the end of its life is that the original firm that perhaps discovered developed and then used the oilfield or the mineral deposit or whatever—they pull out. They've gotten their share out of it and they've reached the point where from their point of view continuing to work the field would just engage them in costs that they don't want to spend—in fact it's reached the end of its profitable life from their point of view.The original company or the business that has developed and used the field says that actually it's time to move on. Look this is a really common pattern in any sort of business or in many activities. In many activities it's very easy to say get the first 50 percent of the profits—or you know from my old profession as a university lecturer it's dead easy for students to get the first 50 percent of the marks—but often it's a lot harder to get say the next 20 percent of the profits. So you're up to 70 percent overall; then it's even harder to get the next 10 percent of the profits. It gets harder and harder and harder to make a decent profit out of an oilfield. At that stage what happens is that the company the business that was exploiting the oilfield in the first place stops and they hand it over to a specialist firm a specialist firm that has real skills and expertise in say getting the last 20 percent of the oil the gas or the mineral out of the field. They're clean-up companies. If we were being perhaps a little rude we might call them scavengers but that would be unfair. What they are are firms with specialist skills in cleaning up at the end of a field.It is in that sense that this bill is about tidying-up. It's about tidying-up the end of an oilfield. As has been described there are some real risks with this because typically when the Crown allows a company to exploit an oilfield or a mineral deposit or whatever one of the things that it is very concerned about is ensuring that that field is reinstated that it's tidied up properly that any environmental ills are put right that wells are properly capped off and that when the last of the minerals the oils are taken out of that field it is all tidied up. The big concern there is that the tidy-up firm will not have the resources to do it. That's why we have a system of permitting in place: so that the firms are contractually obliged to tidy up at the end so that we can assess them as to whether or not they really will have the resources to follow through on that obligation. That's why when the permit to exploit a field is changed from one operation to another we actually get some ministerial involvement. The Minister has to be notified and has to certify that it can all happen. So it's ministerial approval. Now that's quite a high level of engagement from Government in a field.But there's a little bit of a loophole in the current legislation and I want to make it very clear by means of an example. At the moment when there is a change of a permit operator then that requires the consent of the Minister. But what say the permit is held by a company which was set up for the purpose of just holding the permit? Imagine a firm which we might call something like—I don't know—Deep Drill Ltd. They hold the permit. They've got to the end of the life and they decide that they're going to transfer the permit sell the permit on to another firm—I'm going to call this firm something like Wring the Last Drop Out Ltd. When it is just transferred from Deep Drill Ltd to Wring the Last Drop Out Ltd you sell the permit then you get ministerial approval—you get the Minister involved. But there's a way to avoid that. Instead of selling that permit what could happen is that the company Deep Drill which holds the permit could be sold—all right? So the control of the company could be sold.So Wring the Last Drop Out Ltd instead of buying the permit would in fact buy the company. So you change who controlled the operation of that permit and at present that change of control doesn't need ministerial approval. In other words there's a loophole there which needs to be tidied up and closed up because in actual fact that is a change in who is operating that oilfield or that mineral deposit but because it is the company ownership that changes rather than the ownership of the permit itself the Minister doesn't get involved. Yet the reality on the ground is actually exactly the same as if it would have been a straight board sale of the permit. So we're going to get the Minister involved and make sure that when the control of the company that holds the permit is changed then the Minister gets involved too. That's one of the tidying-up aspects of this particular bill. It is seeking to tidy up that particular little loophole that was existing there.The work that does all of this is sitting in clause 8 of the bill and you'll see that there are a whole set of rules there that in actual fact mean that when there is a change in control that means that the Minister must be notified and go through exactly the same sorts of processes as there would have been if the permit was sold directly. So that's a very clear piece of tidying-up in this legislation around the tidying-up of the oilfields and mineral deposits. That's the first obvious reason why it's a tidying-up bill.I do want to draw your attention and the attention of my colleagues to another aspect of this bill in the sense in which it's also a tidying-up bill and I invite my colleagues to turn to the actual bit itself in the general policy statement—that's the first part of the explanatory note. There's a particular word that is used again and again and again in this explanatory note. You see the bill the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill clarifies that an extension of the duration of a permit cannot be denied. It clarifies time frames for notifying the ratification of permits. It clarifies processes in relation to changes of control. It clarifies that an access arrangement is needed. It clarifies which Ministers enter into access arrangements. It clarifies the applicable royalty of calculations. Clarifies clarifies clarifies clarifies clarifies—repeated again and again and again in the explanatory note of this bill. That's actually really important.A lot of the aspects that this bill addresses were kind of there in the legislation but just weren't as clear as they might have been—in particular they weren't necessarily as clear as they might have been for changing commercial realities. So part of what this bill does is clarifies the regulatory framework for Crown Minerals Act. That's really important. Businesses hate uncertainty. Regulators hate uncertainty. Government hates uncertainty. Business can operate pretty well in adverse conditions business can operate well in good conditions but talk to business operators and what they don't like is uncertainty.We are a Government that provides certainty. Our oil and mineral companies know with certainty how long they'll be able to get exploration permits for. They know how long they'll be able to continue to operate for. We have developed great certainty around this. This bill adds to the certainty of the regime around oil exploitation around mineral exploitation and around the exploitation of Crown minerals in New Zealand. That is why that word clarification" is terribly important in this bill. It's another aspect of the tidying-up that this bill does. So there are two sets of tidying-up: one for the oilfields that are being tidied up and one tidying-up the actual legislation to create certainty for business."