Sage EugenieHon EUGENIE SAGE (Minister of Conservation): Tēnā koe Madam Assistant Speaker. Thank you. I am pleased to speak on behalf of the Green Party on the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Amendment Bill.Now Mr Muller's comments previously—of course if the National Party was occupying the Government benches they would be proceeding full tilt into changes that would make no sense to the Resource Management Act and to the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Act which serve to complicate the legislation which override public participation rights which shut out the public and which made it easier for their developer mates to go ahead with subdivisions without any opportunity for public participation. This Government does things differently.This has got to be corrected because at the moment it would cost the public and taxpayers and cost the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) if the bill doesn't get passed for any notified applications that go to a board of inquiry under the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Act. There will be change coming on the Resource Management Act but it will be a lot more coherent and carefully thought-through than that complicated Resource Legislation Amendment Bill (RLAB) which the National Government introduced and which completely turned the whole process into a shambles. Has it demonstrated any benefits to the administration of resource management in New Zealand now? No.So this bill is necessary because of a major oversight by the last Government. The EPA has a small budget of some $30 million; $25 million of that comes through Vote Environment—the balance is from applicants' fees. The EPA is organised to recover from applicants the fees for processing their applications because as Ms Marcroft noted the benefits are to the applicant. But here because the Government made the mistake under the RLAB legislation it meant that any applications in the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) for things like seabed mining and for things like new drilling that went to a board of inquiry and were notified for public submissions—it left the EPA bearing the costs of that process. So what this bill will do is it will ensure that those costs can be recovered. This consultation done with industry participants and others indicated that there was broad support for that. What it does too is correct the inconsistency which currently exists in the legislation that if it was a non-notified activity going through a marine consent process under the EEZ legislation the cost could be recovered but if it was going to a board of inquiry it couldn't. It also corrects the inconsistency with the Resource Management Act where boards of inquiry under that piece of legislation—their costs can be recovered from the applicant.So given the way in which the past National Government starved the EPA of resources given the fact that it only allocated a measly $4 million a year for the last three years for the EPA to undertake its functions in the exclusive economic zone—the fourth-largest EEZ in the world—the last National Government did not provide that as baseline funding. So this bill is critical to prevent taxpayers and the public being burdened with the cost of processing. So it's fixing mistakes of the last Government and it's ensuring that those costs can be recovered if they're actual and reasonable. Of course it's a factor of National Governments that they look to socialise the cost but privatise the benefits. So this bill is correcting that under the Resource Legislation Amendment Act.The costs of not putting the bill through are significant because the decision-making committees which are appointed by the EPA—they in the oil and gas space have generally cost between $450000 and $950000 per application. Under the Resource Management Act the average board of inquiry costs in the region of $1.6 million. So those are significant costs for a small organisation like the Environmental Protection Authority and those costs should rightly be borne by applicants.This bill will ensure that it only applies to applications that are made after the Act comes into force so it is not retrospective. It is a good piece of legislation that corrects the mistakes of the last Government which ensures that private applicants have to pay for the cost of their application rather than the public. I commend the bill to the House.