Simpson Scott; Salesa JennyHon SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's appropriate that on a cold winter's night when the Parliament is in session—Maureen Pugh: And the lights are on.Hon SCOTT SIMPSON: —and debating issues of high importance the lights are on. It's a good thing. That's a good thing because after the Minister's speech—and I have to say my colleague sitting to my right here Stuart Smith said he would wake me up. He said You won't miss your call Scott. I'll wake you up when the Minister is finished." This bill—look without making too much mockery of it—falls I think into the category of "dull but worthy". It's actually on the face of it I think a pretty practical change to the way that the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) assesses and reassesses the multitude of hazardous organisms and products and substances that they have to look into and that they're charged with providing information to us about.The thing that fascinated me most about my reading on this bill in advance of speaking in the House tonight was that I thought that this may have been a grand bold inspirational idea of the Government. Well it turns out it wasn't. Actually this is an initiative taken by the EPA themselves. This is something that they have said "Well look we are having to use a very cumbersome a very slow a very intense process to assess and reassess hazardous substances and there's got to be a better way of doing it." I come to this Parliament having had a number of years in the commercial sphere long before being a member of Parliament and one of those roles involved me leading a company that was working in the occupational health and safety area providing personal protective equipment for people.It always amazed me that New Zealand had its own standards for instance for hardhats and we had our own standard for steel-cap boots and we had our own standard that we had decided for hearing protection and earmuffs and earplugs and things like that and yet here we were able to import these products from overseas countries that had their own very good standards. But no we thought that in New Zealand we had to come up and invent our own wheel to define what the protection level for earmuffs should be or what the impact measurements should be for hardhats. So too it is that we have this kind of culture in New Zealand that sometimes serves us very well. It's sort of the number eight wire culture where we try and invent our own solution and cure and fix for almost anything when actually if we took a bit of time and effort to have a look around at what happens in other jurisdictions and see what they do and how they do it and how they've done it and how they've arrived at the answers that they have then in many instances we could shortcut our process.So I was delighted all those years ago when at one point in the health and safety game with earmuffs and hardhats and steel-cap boots and things all we did was simply adopt the Australian standard. We adopted the Australian standard as being our standard and said "Well if it's OK for the Aussies it's probably OK for us." I get a sense that this piece of legislation is attempting in its own way to try and straddle that kind of issue in terms of what work the EPA do on hazardous substances. To me on the face of it I think it makes sense. I would think that our Environmental Protection Authority would rightly and properly want to consider and have a look at the testing regimes the science the analysis and the investigation that's been done by sister organisations to their own in other parts of the world in places where we would trust the work that is being done.So I'm thinking that perhaps if a substance or a chemical has been assessed in Australia or the United Kingdom or in Europe or maybe Canada or maybe in the United States well we would want to have a look at those and say "Well why do we need to start with a blank piece of paper and assume that no knowledge has been collected on this substance by anybody else anywhere else in the world? And we will be a beacon of light as New Zealanders and we will find out what the pros and the cons of this substance are and we will come up with it and we'll just pretend that the rest of the world hasn't done any investigative work and we'll pretend that the rest of the world hasn't done any analysis or scientific interpretation of this particular substance or organism and we will try and invent our own." I think the risk of that for us as taxpayers and citizens is there's a relatively high risk that that will be firstly painfully slow; secondly it will be incredibly expensive and time consuming from a resource point of view and for us as taxpayers we'll all be paying for that.There's also a potential risk—although I have faith in the credibility of our EPA. I think they do a very good job but I think that there would be a potential that we would be somehow out of whack and off beam in terms of some of the work that had been done in other jurisdictions and other parts of the world. So from my point of view I think that this initiative taken by the EPA themselves—initiated by them as I said—is something that they should be given some credit for. I think that the fact that they have been able to convince the Minister and his advisers that this is a piece of worthy work that is worth pursuing and that the reasons for it should be brought to the Parliament and that a piece of legislation should go through—I think that they need to be congratulated for that. I think also that the Minister needs to be congratulated for saying "Well actually recognising the EPA this is a good idea." I think that if we can improve the timeliness of the assessment and reassessment of these hazardous substances then that would be a good thing.I was actually quite surprised in my research leading up to this debate tonight to find that the EPA actually is responsible for something in the order of 150000 individual hazardous substances and organisms. They're not responsible for them but they are the agency the regulator that is required to decide what the level of risk is or what the level of safety is in terms of having those substances available and introduced and used in New Zealand. So that's a very very big responsibility and the Minister mentioned the relatively small numbers of assessments and reassessments that are taking place primarily because it's a big job to have to do it. It's an expensive time consuming and difficult job to do that if you're starting from scratch on a blank piece of paper and not taking into account the work that's been done in other jurisdictions.So we on this side of the House are happy to support this bill at first reading. We look forward to teasing out some of the more technical issues at select committee and I'm hoping that the Minister will give the select committee the full length of time required to do that because I'm not anticipating that we will have thousands of submissions on it unlike some other legislation that the committee is considering at the moment. But I do think that there will be a number of organisations that will want to make submissions and I for one will want to hear what those are. I want to hear what the arguments for and against are because there probably will be some and we'll see how it goes. But I think that as I say this piece of legislation falls into the "dull but worthy" category. It's certainly very appropriate that the Parliament should be discussing it at quarter to nine on a winter's evening when the lights are still on.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): I call on Rachel—"