Sage Eugenie: Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Sage Eugenie: Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 28 February 2013. Volume:687;Page:8363. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
EUGENIE SAGE (Green) 
: 
 It is a profoundly sad and shameful day in this House to be here considering the third reading and final stages of the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Amendment Bill. 
We are here as members of Parliament because New Zealanders voted for us and voted for our parties. We are here only because people were able to exercise that fundamental democratic right to vote and yet this House is considering legislation that denies that right to vote to elect their regional council to over 400000 Cantabrians. 
This bill itself is a mere four pages long but its effects are profound because it extends the principal Act which has the same euphemistic and inaccurate title—the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Act—for another 3 years. So that means that Cantabrians are going to be denied their regional democracy and their right to vote for 6 long years. 
Mrs Wagner said that Environment Canterbury was struggling that people had lost confidence in the council. How did the Government know that people had lost confidence when it did not ask anyone except Ngai Tahu and the 10 Canterbury mayors? There was no public consultation. The organisation that had lost confidence in the council was Irrigation New Zealand. One of the reasons it had lost confidence in the council was that the council had increased the minimum flow in the Waimakariri River to better sustain that river’s health and functioning and Irrigation New Zealand did not like it because it impacted on proposals to take more water out of the river. That is who lost confidence—it was the irrigators not the people of Canterbury. 
Jacqui Dean 
: What about the mayors? 
EUGENIE SAGE 
: And the 10 mayors and they will be rueing that now with Government proposals for unitary councils in Canterbury. 
This is an indefensible bill and that has been quite obvious in the short speeches we are hearing from Government members and the very short calls that Government MPs took during the Committee stage. It is indefensible and that is obvious because the Minister of Local Government failed to take any calls to answer requests from several Opposition members to answer questions that we were asking. 
So Government members gave up. They know that there is no justification for this bill. They know that they cannot speak truthfully about the reasons for this bill. They know that the excuses given by the Minister of Local Government and the Minister for the Environment are spurious—those reasons being the earthquake and the need for stable governance. It is strange how that does not affect the ability of the Christchurch City Council the Waimakariri District Council and the Selwyn District Council to get on with working with their communities and representing their citizens in major decisions about earthquake recovery albeit constrained substantially by the sweeping powers of the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority. 
The real reason for this bill is to facilitate more irrigation and more dairy cows on the Canterbury Plains and elsewhere—the Central Plains Water irrigation scheme and TrustPower’s irrigation scheme for the Rakaia River and Lake Coleridge. That is because irrigation more cows and more dairying are a key part of this Government’s tired and unimaginative apology for an economic plan—if it could be called that. That plan is to continue with a frontier-style mentality of increasing cow numbers and increasing milk production without thinking about the cost of that to the environment and to other sectors of the economy such as tourism food processing and other industries that require clean water. 
That is why this Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Amendment Bill is proceeding. It is proceeding against the advice of the Government’s own appointed commissioners that there should be a transitional council which would have a mix of elected councillors and appointed members. So there is no substantive reason for the bill except to promote irrigation. 
We have not heard yet from National members the mistruths and inaccuracies that they have promoted in the past when we have debated the bill—that Environment Canterbury did not have a regional plan when in fact there was a natural resources regional plan since 2004 guiding consent decisions. We have not heard yet but I am sure we will that the council was not processing consents in a timely manner. The former Minister Nick Smith loved to talk about that when in fact if he had looked at the statistics in 2010-11 80 percent of the resource consents were being processed by the council within the statutory deadlines. There was a total failure by the Government to recognise that Environment Canterbury was dealing with more applications for water permits than all the rest of New Zealand’s other regional councils. It was doing that without any help from the Government in the form of national policy statements or national standards. 
This bill and what it represents are part of the profound changes that this Government is making to the relationship between central government and local government. This bill is one of the worst and most Draconian examples of that by denying people the right to vote. National does not trust local government. It does not trust Cantabrians to elect councillors who would promote irrigation and sign off on a very weak regional policy statement and an even weaker land and water plan which is what the commissioners are doing. It is those weak statutory documents under the Resource Management Act that will allow irrigation to flourish and the environment to deteriorate. 
National’s whole attitude to local government which this bill highlights is very different from that of previous Governments. National does not seem to recognise that local government is not a branch office of central government. It does not recognise that local councillors are elected by their local communities and derive their mandate from the exercise of that democratic right and that local communities pay rates and therefore are entitled to elect their representatives to make decisions about how those rates are spent. This bill cuts right across that relationship. 
Cantabrians are paying $84 million annually to the regional council but have no councillors to represent them. And as others have noted there is the ultimate indignity of Cantabrians paying the salaries of the commissioners rather than central government paying those salaries even though it appointed them. 
Last year we saw National take an axe to the Local Government Act. It substantially increased the power of the Minister of Local Government to interfere with councils to appoint Crown observers Crown managers Crown review teams and commissioners so that in future with other councils around New Zealand we will not need special legislation like the principal Act and this bill in order for the Government to intervene and appoint commissioners. It now has the powers in the Local Government Act to do that. 
Today we had the very disturbing proposals of the Minister for the Environment to attack the core of the Resource Management Act the way in which sustainable management is defined and to abrogate yet more powers from councils to central government. Those proposals would give the Minister the power to direct what councils should put in their plans and to direct the outcomes that those plans should promote. So this is all about concentrating and centralising power in Wellington and specifically power in the Beehive. This Environment Canterbury bill is one of the worst examples of that. 
In a healthy democracy you have the exercise of power and authority subject to a range of checks and balances. When government is distributed to local government as well as having checks like the judiciary robust select committees and government responsibilities are distributed then you have got a healthy democracy because local government is one of those important checks on central government. Yet this National Government with this bill with its proposals today and with its changes to the Local Government Act is wanting to centralise power and for Ministers to be able to dictate what local government does. That is despite local government in this country raising a good deal more of its revenue than occurs in many countries overseas. This bill is a profound attack on democracy but it sits with a suite of measures that this Government is taking to cut across local government to centralise power and to undermine democracy generally.