Dyson RuthHon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): I want to talk a little more on new subpart 4 of new Part 3A but not on the must" or "may" point that has already been mentioned—except to say in passing that if members look at the previous new section 100A which was struck out at the Local Government and Environment Committee and replaced by the new section that the member Kris Faafoi has just been referring to it does say "owner must" submit a decommissioning plan actually. That was struck out. I do not know whether that was a conscious and deliberate decision of the select committee but it actually said in that previous section as well that "The EPA may by written notice require the owner of an offshore installation to prepare a decommissioning plan." I presume that that is when the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) has made the decision that this operation should no longer carry on. But either way what we have as a revision has quite a different onus of responsibility.As I said that is not the point that I wanted to make in my contribution though. Whether by "may" or "must" there are a number of requirements that the Environmental Protection Authority is putting on to owners or operators of the offshore installation that is being proposed for decommissioning. So they have to identify the structures fully describe how they are going to be decommissioned and identify changes from the accepted decommissioning plan if they are doing a new one. They have to include other information required by the regulations. There is quite a lot of responsibility on the owner or operator to do all of these things and my question to Minister Smith is pretty simple: what if they do not? I cannot find it anywhere in Part 5 or in any other part. I have looked right through to the schedules and I am pretty sure that I have not missed it in any of the parts that we have been debating up till now but there does not seem to be any comeback.It seems to me that with such tiered layers of responsibility all these things that the owner or operator has to do there is not a tuppence ha'penny fine to them if they do not do it. Can they just say "Here is our decommissioning plan." and the EPA checks it and accepts it—"That is now your decommissioning plan."—and then takes not a blind bit of notice of it? That seems illogical. I cannot imagine that that would be the case. I hope I have been unable to find the relevant section rather than it having been omitted but I think now is the opportunity to make sure that if we do have what are really important environmental protections in the decommissioning of an operation such as this that if things go wrong—we know about things going wrong with oil spills and nobody knowing who is going to pay for it so let us make sure that with this sort of decommissioning there is really clear responsibility in the legislation for who carries the can if things go wrong. If the decommissioning plan has been accepted and then not followed who is monitoring it? Who is responsible for saying to the owner or operator: "That is not what you said in the plan and the consequences of breaching the plan are x y and z."? I would really appreciate it if the Minister could just take the opportunity to answer that question.I have to say that we have heard a lot of opposition to parts of this bill but I do want to commend the select committee and the Minister for the requirement for public consultation in new section 100D. A lot of the provisions in this legislation as we have seen in resource management changes since 2009 have watered down the councils' responsibility—territorial local authorities' responsibility—to publicly notify consent applications. They have reduced the opportunity for members of the public to make a submission or to appeal through the normal Resource Management Act processes and I have been exercising some caution against a number of provisions in this bill because of that very fact. It just carries on the trend of reducing public involvement. But here in new section 100D it is not just that this would be a good thing to do; it is actually a requirement for public consultation. This is a big deal. It could have really negative impacts and I think that having the public involved and having their say is a really important thing. So if we can get the responsibility for monitoring and the liability if the decommissioning plan is not implemented clear I would be really happy. Thank you."