Goudie Sandra: Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Approvals and Enforcement) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Goudie Sandra: Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Approvals and Enforcement) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:628;Page:849] 
SANDRA GOUDIE (National—Coromandel) 
: 
 There is no doubt that the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act actually needs some substantial change and this bill goes some way towards doing that but it is only a very small step. National supports the bill contrary to what Brian Donnelly would have everybody believe because he said that National opposed the bill. 
Hon Brian Donnelly 
: No I never said that. 
SANDRA GOUDIE 
: The member did say that. If he goes to  
Hansard 
 he will find that he did say it. I was listening and I took the member to task at the time. National is supporting the bill but there is a long way to go towards addressing the compliance costs associated with the whole Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act. With this bill we had an opportunity to address some of the issues of compliance cost but that did not happen. So let us see what the Labour Party lackeys—once known as New Zealand First—really understand about compliance costs if they do not understand that substantially more has to be done to reduce compliance costs and have them properly addressed in the Act. [ 
Interruption 
] I said “the Labour Party lackeys—once known as New Zealand First”. 
The explanatory note has in it what I presume is the Government’s compliance cost statement under the heading “Statement of net benefit of proposal including the total regulatory costs (administrative compliance and economic costs) and benefits (including non-quantifiable benefits of the proposal) and other feasible options”. Do members know that that statement does not identify one single dollar—not one? I just wonder how the Government assesses any sort of cost when it does not even provide the figures to show it has done any number crunching or sums. Then under “Government” the statement talks about the benefits and costs blah-blah-blah but no dollar figures are mentioned there either. The general policy statement states: “This bill offers a means to reduce costs …”; it does not state that the bill does reduce costs. So we have to look very closely at what the words actually say. Of industry the explanatory note states that the standards will reduce the compliance costs for business. It talks about a number of things to make that happen but it is questionable whether that will be the case. 
I am very sceptical when it comes to this Government because I find it to be highly fiscally irresponsible and the student loan situation is a classic example of that. In respect of society and the environment—and I say to Mr Donnelly that it might pay him to read the bill—no environmental social or cultural costs have been identified. So what does that say? The Government has not even done any cost-benefit analysis or assessed any environmental social or cultural costs so I presume that it has not done any actual business or compliance costs assessment at all. I ask the Minister to stand and take a call and perhaps give us some evidence that he has actually done any sort of compliance costs assessment whatsoever. 
Hon Brian Donnelly 
: It’s the third reading. 
SANDRA GOUDIE 
: That is the whole thing about urgency. Everything gets rushed through to such a degree that it is questionable whether a proper oversight of the bill has been undertaken. 
We are disappointed that this bill is the fourth Hazardous Substances and New Organisms amendment bill introduced into the House by the Hon Marian Hobbs. When she introduced a previous amending bill we said she did not have a hope of registering the 70000-odd chemicals and hazardous substances that were required to be registered by the deadline of June 2006. That is only 5 or 6 months away so I do not think there is any hope of achieving that. 
We remain disappointed that 5 years later the Act is still not enforced. It is definitely another failure of this Government. That is no surprise. But who really believes there will be any cost savings for anybody? There may be cost savings for the Government because it just passes it all on to local government to farmers and to businesses and says that there may be some sort of cost reduction and reduced compliance costs but it has not done any assessment to prove that. No cost-benefit analysis was done—nothing. So I do not know about Labour’s lackeys New Zealand First. If Brian Donnelly’s passionate defence of Labour’s position is anything to go by I say that New Zealand First has certainly changed its position. Sector groups are already saying that they believe compliance costs will increase—and of course they will. This Government has no fiscal sense of responsibility at all and that has been proven time and time again in this House by my esteemed colleagues. 
Questions have already been raised as to why the bill was referred to the Education and Science Committee instead of the Local Government and Environment Committee. Why was that? It should have gone to the Local Government and Environment Committee. After all that is where the real grunt is. The bill probably received a bit of spelling improvement and that is about it. I cannot imagine that New Zealand First would have had much to do with that. So why the need for urgency? Going into urgency and the bill being sent to the wrong select committee may explain why no proper scrutiny was done. 
I can give some examples. I refer to the very serious issue of bona vacantia raised by my esteemed colleague Eric Roy—what a fantastic find. Who has heard of bona vacantia? There is no definition in the Act and there is no definition in the bill. Clearly nobody considered that. What happened to the call from Mr Donnelly that the committee had actually done a great deal in regard to this bill? Bona vacantia means “without a home” so what happens to a hazardous substance that arrives on the doorstep of New Zealand? Section 122(1) inserted by clause 27 states: “If a customs officer has reasonable cause to believe that a hazardous substance is being or has been imported in breach of this Act” So a customs officer—just an average Joe Bloggs—says: “I don’t know about this one. Is this a hazardous substance or isn’t it? Well OK I’ve got reasonable cause to believe it is and there has been a breach of the Act so yeah well this stuff has got to go back to where it came from.” The poor importer asks: “What am I going to do now? What are my appeal provisions?”. 
The importer can appeal to the District Court but guess what? The hazardous substance has to remain on the ship or the aircraft at the importer’s own cost. Well I am sure the aircraft or the ship will remain for the number of weeks and months it might take the importer to appeal to the District Court! Quite clearly that is a compliance cost even if the customs officer is wrong and there was not a breach of the Act. For the person who is affected by the importation of a substance that has been wrongly identified as being a breach of the Act it would probably be far cheaper to send the stuff back. 
 So clearly some things did not get identified correctly through the bill and that could have been well addressed by the select committee but were not. I guess that is the problem with not giving proper oversight to legislation not giving due regard to it taking time over it and not putting in the amount of grunt that is necessary. Of course when we are talking about compliance costs we are talking about loading local authorities once again with costs from the Government. The Government is once again putting a compliance cost on to local authorities. Maybe at the other end they could take out the auditing of long-term community plans and make them a non-statutory document. All that will do is allow the Government to slowly dump social services and anything else it can on to local authorities. That will send rates through the roof. 
Already fixed-income people our senior citizens are the ones who will be hardest hit. By the year 2020 they will be 52 percent of the population. That is pretty serious. But does this Government care? Absolutely not! If they can get rid of costs to the Government they will do it any which way they can and dumping it on to local authorities keeps them really happy. It keeps this Government really happy. But what does it do to the local authorities and to the ratepayers? It just pushes them down into the ground and makes it so much harder for them to survive—particularly our older citizens who have worked hard all their lives and are on a fixed income and who just cannot support all of these increases. 
Yes we are supporting this bill but it has a long way to go. Is it not amazing that it is easier for a hazardous substance to get here illegally than legally? It is about time we streamlined the Act so that people can legitimately import genetic material plants etc. in a streamlined process and meeting all the obstacles they do. Instead we get illegal substances like rock snot establishing really quickly and they are absolutely disastrous for this nation.