Dyson Ruth: Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
Dyson Ruth: Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:661;Page:10070] 
Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills) 
: 
 Quite often in debates in the Chamber when we are talking about a bill’s title a number of innovative members get to their feet and give well-considered or poorly-considered alternative names. I commend the previous speaker John Boscawen—although frankly I think he spoke entire nonsense. He said some alternative names very eloquently but I did not agree with a single word of his speech. 
John Boscawen 
: I learnt a lot from Labour. 
Hon RUTH DYSON 
: That is excellent and to be honest Labour learns a lot from Mr Boscawen. 
The title of a bill is meant to represent the purpose of the bill so that members of the public can read it and say: “Now I know what that is about.” I think they would have quite a lot of confusion if they read the title of the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill. The first problem with it is the one that was identified briefly in the contribution of my colleague Brendon Burns the member of Parliament for Christchurch Central which is where the head office of Environment Canterbury is based. He alerted the Chamber to the fact that Environment Canterbury which is the name that is in the bill is actually the trading name of the organisation rather than the legal title. 
I will diverse momentarily from the strict debate on the title having been given that leadership from Mr Boscawen. The bill explains later on in Part 1 clause 4 “Interpretation” that “Environment Canterbury or ECan means the Canterbury Regional Council …”. However if we look strictly at the title we see that it looks quite sloppy. I think that of all Ministers Mr Hide is probably not very tolerant of sloppiness. I am sure not all Ministers are as lacking in tolerance of sloppiness as he may be. I think that had he been responsible for this legislation rather than the Hon Dr Nick Smith he would have preferred to say that we are talking about a legal entity. We are talking about taking away the elected representatives of the legal entity that is responsible for the statutory management of air natural resources water quality water management passenger transport and biodiversity in Canterbury. That is a huge range of statutory functions that the Canterbury Regional Council has so why do we not use its proper name in the title? 
It seems to be such a basic point that if we talk about gutting an organisation taking away the democratic right to vote of every single citizen of Canterbury and taking away our democratic right to vote for our regional councillors the least the Minister could have done was to give that organisation the respect of referring to it in the title of this legislation by its proper legal name. It is not Environment Canterbury; it is the Canterbury Regional Council. We all call it “ECan”. The Minister could just have sloppily referred to it as “ECan.” That is the first message that I would like to give to the Chamber. I think it is disrespectful I think it shows a sign of sloppiness in the preparation of the legislation and I think it shows a lack of attention to detail and rigour on the part of the Minister none of which are attributes that I think this Committee would want to commend. 
The second point that I want to make refers to the words that are in brackets. I want to refer to just the first two words to start with and those are “Temporary Commissioners”. It has been very clear during this debate that there is nothing temporary about the commissioners taking up the responsibility of an alternative to our elected representatives. My colleague Lianne Dalziel referred to the regulatory impact statement which gave a strong indication that this is just the first step. It is the first step towards the total abolition of Environment Canterbury and the total abolition of our regional council. The council will be replaced by either the maintenance of commissioners performing those statutory roles which would be a total disaster for us or—and for the Minister who is in the chair Rodney Hide this is his dream come true—the abolition of the regional council and the amalgamation of its functions into the city councils and district councils in the area. I think that it is quite misrepresentative of the actual facts behind this debate to use the term “Temporary Commissioners”. 
The legislation states that the commissioners will go until the job is finished. It is really hard to work out from the rest of the legislation what one would define as “the job”. They are temporary because there is a provision in the law that states that we should have elections by 2013 but there is nothing at all to stop the Minister coming into this House after those elections in the same way he did yesterday and saying: “I have had enough. I will get rid of all the elected councillors. I will appoint seven commissioners one of whom I will give the House the courtesy of naming.” We know the name of only one of the seven temporary commissioners of the controlling body of our new organisation. We know the name of only one of them yet this bill is about to pass into law. Then Nick Smith said that in 3½ years time he will be generous enough to let Cantabrians have a vote again. “Thanks for nothing.” I say to Minister Smith. We want our vote this year. We want the right to vote for our regional authority this year. Implying that the commissioners are temporary positions gives us no confidence because we do not have any faith or trust in the Minister that this is not the start of the demise of the regional council. We have no that the assurances that are alluded to in this legislation—that we will get a vote in 3 years’ time—will come true. Even if they do there is no justification at all for this law being put into place. 
My final point is in relation to the last part of the words in brackets in the title which is “Improved Water Management”. Dr Smith and I had an interchange earlier in this debate about whether we had a water management strategy. To make it technically correct we could go as far as to say that we have two because there is a plan that was notified in 2005 and the fact that it has not yet been endorsed under all the Resource Management Act procedures does not make any difference to the way that water is managed in Canterbury. If the Minister had bothered to get any advice from his officials on that particular point rather than trying to find an excuse for his ideological push on this issue then he would have known that. But we also have the particular strategy that is alluded to in the title and that is the Canterbury Water Management Strategy. 
I would be interested in hearing from the Minister at some stage of the debate about how this bill was designed because it has quite an unusual layout and structure. In a very unusual move schedule 1 of the two schedules in the bill is the vision and principle of the  
Canterbury Water Management Strategy: Strategic Framework 
 in its entirety. Page 31 through to page 35 is concerned with just the Canterbury Water Management Strategy. The legislation outlines the principles of the Canterbury Water Management Strategy. The Minister said that it is so terrible that we do not have a water management strategy he has to sack all the democratically elected regional councillors and appoint seven commissioners. The Minister then went on to say they would be paid $2000 a day. I am really interested to know what Minister Hide thinks of the value of commissioners who are replacing elected regional councillors who will be paid $2000 a day and who will only perform the statutory functions of the Canterbury Regional Council. There will be no connection with the city and no connection with the community. The commissioners will do the minimum amount of work that is possible and they will receive $2000 a day compared with the $50000 a year that the elected councillors currently receive. 
The worst part of all this is not only that the Minister said he was sacking our councillors but also that he was appointing commissioners to do the job and putting in place a whole lot of avoidance of natural scrutiny and public input. He is doing it all under urgency with no select committee process no scrutiny at select committee and no right for the public to have their say. At the end the Minister said that on top of all this the ratepayers of Canterbury will pay the bill. We get to pay the $2000 a day consultancy fee for Dame Margaret Bazley et al when we did not even ask for them. We asked for our elected representatives to be maintained in those positions. We said there were many options for an extension of the work. We could have a commissioner coming in and working alongside them if that was the Minister’s desire. This is expensive undemocratic and wrong.