Hughes Gareth: Marine Legislation Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHughes Gareth: Marine Legislation Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 24 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13613. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GARETH HUGHES (Green): Kia ora Mr Chair.Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. It is a privilege to rise and take a call on Part 1 of the Marine Legislation Bill in front of this Committee. First up I would like to thank all of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee members and the submitters. In Part 1 I am going to take a pretty short call. It is Part 2 that I am very interested in exploring in depth. Part 1 is pretty non-controversial. All it does is some port and harbour navigational safety upgrades and it is acceding to some international conventions and clarifying some miscellaneous amendments. It is the implementing of those international conventions contained in Part 1 that is the substance of my call.TheRena catastrophe almost 2 years ago was a wake-up call for New Zealand. It should have been a wake-up call for the Government but it is clear that the lessons of theRena still are not being learnt by this Government. What we know from theRena catastrophe is that the New Zealand taxpayer had to come to the party to the tune of tens of millions of dollars more than $100 million because successive Governments had not signed up to conventions or updated our legislation to protect the taxpayer. I think it is a shame. This money could have been spent on better things like breakfast for kids in schools supporting Kiwi businesses or creating jobs. I point to the Labour Party of course as those in glass houses should not be throwing stones. What we know from the Labour Government is that like the National Government it dragged its heels. It did notsign up to and ratify these conventions despite successive Governments signalling internationally that they wanted to.There are three international conventions on the subject on the floor of Parliament today. Firstly there is the Protocol to the Convention on Limitation of Liability for Maritime Claims 1996 or the LLMC. All this does is update the limit for liability when ships have accidents at sea from $11.2 million to $27 million. Hopefully an Australian proposal to extend that further will gain international traction. Again we know that theRenawas I think the third most expensive maritime disaster this century possibly of all time. Still it was much much greater than the $27 million maximum cap under the Protocol to the Convention on Limitation of Liability for Maritime Claims. Secondly you have got the International Convention on Civil Liability for Bunker Oil Pollution Damage and then lastly the Protocol Relating to Intervention on the High Seas in Cases of Pollution by Substances other than Oil which extends powers in the Maritime Transport Act. They are three common-sense legislative upgrades ratifying international treaties that all parties in Parliament support. I agree with the Labour Party. We should have done this years ago and the taxpayer would not be in hock for tens of millions of dollars with theRena.Likewise what we should have seen is the maximum corporate rate under the Resource Management Act upgraded. The maximum penalty is only $600000 and the Government is not taking the opportunity in this legislation or further legislative actions to actually upgrade that. $600000 is laughable when we have seen the taxpayer having to pay tens of millions of dollars. While we were at it—protecting our Kiwi environment and protecting the taxpayer—we could have been upgrading our oil spill response capability. We could have been building up the Oil Pollution Fund. We could have been listening to business in union and purchasing a rapid response multi-purpose vessel. We could have had a truly independent inquiry into theRena not a stitch-up from the Government benches—getting the Prime Minister’s mate to do an in-house job which I am sure is just going to find that everything was hunky-dory. But what we know from theRena was that it is a case study in how not to deal with a spill how not to communicate with the public and how to alienate the public when it comes to volunteers who are going down to the beaches and picking up the oil blobs themselves because there was no one from Maritime New Zealand to tell them what to do.This Government fails to learn the lessons to protect the environment or protect the taxpayer. All in all the Greens will be supporting the measures in Part 1 but we should have learnt these lessons an awful long time ago.