Sage Eugenie: Environmental Reporting Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Environmental Reporting Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 05 March 2014. Volume:696;Page:16365. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green): I am pleased to take a call for the Green Party on the Environmental Reporting Bill. New Zealand has lagged well behind international best practice because we are the only country in the OECD without an ongoing commitment in law to regularly monitor the state of our environment and that is why the Green Party is supporting this bill being referred to the Local Government and Environment Committee. It is a welcome step towards that and towards catching up with the rest of the OECD. But the Green Party has some quite significant concerns about the bill and our position beyond its first reading will depend on how those concerns are dealt with at the select committee and whether they are actually addressed.We certainly need to make sure that regular and independent reporting on the state of the environment is guaranteed by law because our history has shown that Governments can manipulate environmental data if it suits them. It was in 2008 that the Green Party revealed that the then Labour Government had suppressed the final chapter in the 2007 state of the environment report. The suppressed chapter suggested that increased car use dairying intensification and over-consumption were driving environmental decline. That chapter concluded that regulation was needed to protect the environment and New Zealand’s clean green reputation.The Government of the day did not want to hear this. It did not want New Zealanders to hear that so the chapter was suppressed until the Green Party found it and released it. That highlighted the need for this bill and independent state of the environment reporting. But there is an even more acute need for this bill because of what this Government is doing. It has declared war on the environment on a number of fronts. Wehave seen the outstanding values of the Denniston Plateau opened up for mining; an attack on our key environmental law the Resource Management Act; and big subsidies for irrigators.So certainly I congratulate the Minister for the Environment on bringing this bill into the House—it has been long promised by National—but what we have got in this bill is a lot less than what was promised in terms of independence. One of the major concerns we have is that the regime that is being proposed is not fully independent. What we are getting is the Minister for the Environment and the Minister of Statistics choosing what topics the reporting should cover the Ministry for the Environment and Statistics New Zealand doing the work and Parliament’s watchdog the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment being able to comment once the report is published.The problem is that the bill gives the Minister for the Environment and the Minister of Statistics very wide regulation-making powers to set the topics that would be covered in both the occasional domain reports which are done on a rotating basis every 6 months and the 3-yearly synthesis report. If we are to have credible and robust environmental reporting it needs to be independent and if we are to have a really independent system we do not think that Ministers would need the substantial regulation-making powers that are set out in clause 18. Those powers include prescribing the topics to be reported on the pressures that are changing the state of the environment and the impacts the changes are having. So that gives the Ministers the power through regulation to interfere with and restrict the matters that are being reported on and the type of information that will be relevant and it is another example of the very centralised decision-making that has been a hallmark of this Government.We are particularly worried because it has been under this Government that we have seen regulation used under the exclusive economic zone legislation to deny the public the ability to have a say on very risky applications for deep-sea oil drilling. We have seen regulation being used again—this is currently out for comment—to deny the public the ability to have say on things like marine dumping and seabed dredging and to make some of those activities permitted.Not only have we got those regulation-making powers but also we have got the changes that the Government made to the Resource Management Act last year where the Minister can direct councils and determine what indicators they should be collecting information on to feed through into state of the environment reporting. If we are to have a credible system Ministers need to be hands-off. That means that those regulation-making powers in clause 18 need to go and the topics should either be set by the Government Statistician and the Secretary for the Environment or be set in the primary legislation by Parliament. So we will be very interested in the submissions on this point of the bill.The second major flaw in the bill is that it enables both the Secretary for the Environment and the Government Statistician to withhold any environmental information or analysis that will be or has been used in an environmental report if it is integral to that report or if its release could compromise the independence of the report. The thinking here appears to be that the environmental reporting will be similar to the tier 1 statistics with things like GDP but one of the problems is that this non-disclosure clause covers the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. It cuts across the powers that she has in the Environment Act to request information from Government agencies. So it is undermining the whole independence of reporting and the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment’s powers by ensuring that this non-disclosure clause applies to her as well as to Ministers.Our concern is that it potentially would allow the Government Statistician and the Secretary for the Environment to block the release of quite considerable environmentaltrend and state of the environment information that will be being collected to prepare things like the synthesis report. It will also make it potentially impossible for researchers to question the accuracy of published environmental reports and the conclusions that are drawn if they cannot request this information. The bill says that the non-disclosure clause applies “despite any other enactment.” That means there has been a deliberate decision to override the Official Information Act which is the commitment to open government and freedom of information. That also means that there is no opportunity for the Ombudsman to review the non-disclosure decisions.The other major area where we have a problem with the bill is that it requires reporting to describe the impact that the state of the environment and changes in it may be having on “economic benefits derived from using natural resources:”. Under a progressive Government that might include an analysis of the financial damage that our polluted rivers are doing to our “100% Pure New Zealand” brand and our marketing platform but National’s economic policy with its focus on resource exploitation makes that sort of analysis unlikely. Our concern is that this provision risks being used to legitimise further environmental degradation and the trading off of environmental quality against short-term GDP and job benefits from big new irrigation dams and increased water takes.Those three major flaws are what we will be particularly interested in at the select committee and in terms of the submissions from the public. We support the bill going to the select committee because it is a step to give a statutory base to environmental reporting. But we do not see it as being fully independent and fully robust because of that provision for the Minister to set the topics in regulation and because of the way in which the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment’s powers to request information have been eliminated with that non-disclosure provision. They are quite significant shortcomings in the bill which we hope can be addressed through the select committee. The Minister has indicated that on the non-disclosure provision there will be some discussion but we definitely want to see that provision changed. Thank you.