Craig LizDr LIZ CRAIG (Labour): Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker. It's an absolute privilege to talk on the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Amendment Bill.As we've already heard this bill is going to be amending the principal Act to make sure that those applying for notifiable marine consents have to pay the cost of the board of inquiry that's considering their applications because at the moment the bill for that is being picked up by the taxpayer.What I want to do is just talk a little bit about what the original Act was trying to do and then why we need to fix it. If you go back to the wording in section 10 of what the original Act was trying to do it was to promote the sustainable management … of the exclusive economic zone and continental shelf; and … protect the [marine] environment from pollution."So what this actual Act is about is the equivalent of the Resource Management Act (RMA) on land and what it's making sure is that if we do any activities in the marine environment we are considering the protections of that natural environment. It's pretty much very similar to the RMA in that it breaks up things into things that are permitted discretionary or prohibited. What we're talking about today is about getting marine consents—very similar to resource consents under the RMA—for discretionary activities. So a lot of these consents have to be heard by a board of inquiry.What are we talking about with these consents? Well—as Deborah Russell read out—in terms of the kinds of things you need to apply for it's things like seabed mining putting in place pipelines cables construction of any kind of structure on the seabed and anything that will disturb the seabed in a manner that's likely to adversely affect the subsoil marine species and habitat.I think the thing is for me down South we rely on our marine environment for a lot of our economic activity. So if you think about the Bluff Oyster and Food Festival and the contribution that makes to our local community and the fact that we rely on those oyster beds to be in pristine condition—thinking about our tourism down in the Catlins we've got a lot of wildlife that brings in a lot of visitors every year: the penguins the sea lions.I think the thing is if you think about things like pipelines that are laid on the sea-floor they are seldom likely to contain substances that are conducive to a positive marine environment. So if we're tinkering around with them removing them amending them we need to make sure that we're doing it properly. And to do that properly we actually need to have proper consents in place to make sure we're doing it in a safe way.So what we are actually trying to do with this bill though is we're trying to correct that legislative error that everybody's been talking about to make sure that the reasonable costs of those boards of inquiry get recovered from the applicants rather than having to be met by the Ministry for the Environment (MFE) and collected by the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA). What we've got at the moment is people that are benefiting or are likely to benefit privately from their applications and then the taxpayers picking up the cost when in reality the cost of those applications—for the cost of the hearings the technical advice all those kinds of things—needs to be borne by those who are going to get the economic gain from those activities.Unfortunately what we're doing at the moment—and this is why we need some haste—is that the taxpayer is picking up all of the bill. What we're asking the Ministry for the Environment to do is to in effect write a blank cheque. The problem we've got at the moment then is that people are coming in for resource consents for consents under the current Act and we know that many of those consents because they are very technical and of a really important nature are likely to cost half a million a million two million dollars. So the problem we've got is at the moment the MFE's going to have to pick up that tab every time somebody makes an application.The other issue we've got is that we're not going to be putting this in place retrospectively. And so what that means is until we change the legislation anybody that has got a consent currently in process won't be having to foot the bill. And you know for me in the health area we're already in an environment where budgets are constrained because what we've had is nine long years of underinvestment across our health and social services and yet what we've got here at the moment is a situation where one of our ministries is having to write blank cheques for several million dollars potentially at a time and so we need to correct this as quickly as we possibly can.So it's actually quite a technical small amendment and it's just got two or three main points. What it basically allows is the Minister to recover from an applicant the actual and reasonable costs in relation to a board of inquiry. It also allows for applicants to actually write in to the Minister and ask for an estimate of what those costs are likely to be because if you are going to be putting in place something that's going to have a huge financial outlay in an investment you need to know up front what that's likely to cost and factor that into your budgets. The other addition basically puts in that the Crown will be recovering those by the EPA on behalf of the Crown. So it's very very important that we are able to do that.What we're actually doing with this bill is making sure that this current Act is very closely aligned to the way the Resource Management Act does the same kind of consenting process on land and allows under that legislation with the RMA these costs to be recovered in a very very similar way. But as I was saying these amendments won't come into force until the bill's been enacted and so what that means is there is some urgency in this space.So I think in summary what we're doing—the underlying Act—is aiming to protect our marine environment and that is very crucially important for our tourism for our fisheries. We can't be having activities happening offshore where we get things like a pipeline that hasn't been laid properly and we get ruptures that come in and affect our marine environment our beach environment.It has crucial economic impacts and so what we're allowing is for the EPA to recover the costs of these consents from those who are going to be getting private gain from those applications. What we're talking about here is you know $1 million to $3 million at a time so it's potentially a significant financial risk. So we need to do this quickly. We just need to get on and do it with due process but as with any other application we need to make sure that everything's in place and correct. I therefore commit this bill to the House. Thank you.Bill read a first time. Bill referred to the Environment Committee."