Dyson Ruth: Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDyson Ruth: Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 16 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10242. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): Correct Mr Assistant Speaker Tisch—a 5-minute call each. One of the questions that came to my mind when the member resumed his seat was why this bill is going through this process as part of the Budget. Why is this bill being taken through all stages without its normal referral to a select committee to listen to submissions consider the bill properly and report back to Parliament and then take it through the next stages? Why is this bill going through all stages under urgency as part of the Budget? Well I think that is a very good answer from the Government—absolute silence. There is no proper answer to that question. Nobody has bothered explaining it. The Minister is sitting so far down in his seat you can hardly even see the top of his head.I would really like to have some better understanding so that when we finish here tomorrow night fly back to our respective homes on Sunday and on Monday morning turn up at the office and people say “What did you do after the Budget and why?” we might have some explanation. Why are we putting this through this process? What is the Budget relationship? And what is the urgency? I think the answer is none actually.We have also heard a lot from National Ministers about how important the minerals industry is how important the oil industry is how important exploration is for jobs. I agree with that entirely but I do not think the National members are serious about it. If they gave a toss about any of those players in the industry this bill would have been referred to a select committee and the industry would have been given the respect it deserves and been given an opportunity to make a submission. We could have learnt from it. Members of Parliament do not know everything; often industry players know a lot more about what works and what does not than people in this building who are a step removed. No matter how hard we try we are not nearly as knowledgable as people within the industry itself.By ramming this bill through all stages of the parliamentary process in one go we are being quite insulting to the industry and saying that actually its opinion does not matter at all and we know best in this Parliament. That is what Minister Bridges is saying: “I know better than anybody and we are just going to go on ahead and pass this bill.” It is quite a different way from the way the former Minister of Energy and Resources acted. The Hon Phil Heatley actually approached Labour and I am sure he approached the other parties as well and talked about the original Crown Minerals Amendment Bill. He asked whether we would like to work on it together: we could tell him the things that we disagreed with or agreed with and he would consider them. He did not give us any commitment to rectifying anything that we had concerns about but he gave us an honest understanding that he would give them proper consideration.So we supported that bill going to select committee and the rest is history of course. That Minister went elsewhere. Minister Bridges came in—boof! There goes the process—entirely gone. It was just foot down flat on the accelerator and away we go. So then we ended up with this bill that we did not support even though we really would have liked to have support across different parties for the legislation. But it was not in a shape we could support. It was also in a mess and we said that at the time. It was not corrected during the Committee of the whole House stage of the legislation so we ended up with a bill riddled with mistakes with a very narrow parliamentary majority which is a very bad sign to the industry. And now a matter of just a few weeks later before the Act has even come into force we have got amending legislation before us going through under urgency. I think it is quite a stunning process.