Sage Eugenie: Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 16 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10228. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green): I am not pleased to take a call on the Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill because I think it shows the contempt with which this Government treats the democratic process and this Parliament that it is introducing this bill and passing it through all of its stages under urgency with absolutely no opportunity for public submissions or scrutiny by a select committee.The Minister of Energy and Resources talked about providing certainty for operators and that is certainly a theme that you hear a lot from this Government—providing certainty for applicants and operators. It does that by weakening the regulatory regime weakening our environmental laws and making it much less certain for the environment. That is what we are seeing in this bill with these proposals for conditional permits where the holders will not have to meet the same criteria and the same standards that the principal Act establishes. The Government sets up a regime in the Crown Minerals Amendment Act and then introduces legislation to apply a much weaker framework.The Minister also said that the bill would fix a number of technical errors in the Act. It was given Royal assent only on 19 April. It has not come into force yet and yet it is back before the House needing to be fixed. If the Minister and the juggernaut of the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment cannot even get the legislation right and have to come back to Parliament within the month then how can anyone have any confidence that this Government can effectively manage risky activities such as offshore oil drilling? The answer is that we cannot have any confidence that it will get it right either in the law or across our oceans.Other speakers have pointed to this noxious little clause clause 14 which extends the “no protest” law much farther out to sea—out 350 nautical miles from our coastline much farther out than the very controversial Anadarko amendment did. That of course was another change to the law that was dropped into the House at the Committee stage with a Supplementary Order Paper with no chance for public submissions and no chance to go to a select committee. In the same way today the Government is curtailing people’s democratic right to protest but without allowing the public to have a say onthat. When Greenpeace put up its petition it got tens of thousands of people objecting. But no the Government did not want to allow people to make submissions along those lines to the select committee so it smuggled it through at the Committee stage just as it is smuggling through this change under urgency.The bill raises questions about whether there are potential breaches of international conventions like the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea which enshrines freedom of navigation. When you have a look at the Ministry for the Environment website it says that in areas where the continental shelf extends beyond 200 nautical miles from the baseline the water itself above the continental shelf is not within New Zealand’s jurisdiction and is part of the high seas. So why does the Minister think he has the jurisdiction to extend New Zealand law to create criminal offences on the high seas? What does he think gives him the right to do that? That is one of the reasons the Green Party is opposing the bill.Another one is because it facilitates inexperienced prospectors and pushes them potentially to start drilling because if they get a tender and then they do not have the capacity to exercise it the bill is requiring them to surrender it or onsell it. If you have put that investment into doing the exploration why would you surrender the permit? It is tempting those permit holders to engage in very risky activities.We have not got a regulatory impact statement as other speakers have noted; we have got to depend on the one that went with the original Act. I would like to just quote from the explanatory note which says: “An applicant for a Tier 1 permit for exploration who does not have the expertise or financial ability to undertake exploration drilling activities will be able to be granted a permit on a conditional basis.” So the Government in the principal Act set up some conditions weak though they are and then in this bill is allowing people to go round those conditions. It is a very weak regime that the Government is introducing in this bill.