Parker DavidHon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): Thank you for those questions. The problem that we're trying to solve here is that for some decades now we've had declining water quality in New Zealand and although in some parts of the country it's getting better I think the latest data reported that twice as many monitored sites had declining water quality as evidenced by the macroinvertebrate index as were improving. So it's pretty clear on that probably most basic of indicators that if the little critters that live in the water are dying more often than they are improving things are still going backwards. That data also has a number of degraded rivers that are in a stable but degraded state and are not improving. And some of that's pretty serious in New Zealand. There's a stream called the Otapiri Stream in Southland that is a tributary of the—it begins with O"; I'll come back to what it's a tributary of. But the Otapiri Stream has a data set that goes back some decades as a consequence of work that's been done by scientists over the years. There was a report that was done by—I think it was the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research and a scientist employed by the Southland Fish & Game Council a peer-reviewed study that was recently in a journal which showed that in the Otapiri Stream which goes through mid to low country in Southland more than 90 percent of the macroinvertebrates are dead. This has been caused essentially by sediment and nutrients—I suspect mainly by sediment in those areas.Now in order to get these problems under control successive Governments have been trying to provide more central direction to regional councils through national policy statements (NPS). At one level you can say it should not have been necessary—that this has always been within the responsibility and control of regional councils—and you know some of the responsibility for that getting to the point that it has actually lies with regional councils. It can also be said that these are fiendishly complex issues where the changes in part are driven by the changing economics of new technologies fertiliser trucks changing price of dairy in the world and therefore it's not fair to blame regional councils—that there is a need for more central direction from central government. The problem with the current system is that it takes so long to change the plans that give effect to those central directions that I think most people agree are necessary. By way of example the last Government's changes to the national policy statement which for the first time introduced a periphyton control which is actually very important to control the overgrowth of slime in rivers which is you know—we don't want. The planned changes necessary to give effect to that national policy statement we know in a substantial number of regional councils were not going to be in place until 2030 13 years after the NPS was in place. During that intervening period because of the terms of the NPS it was also possible for waterways to be allowed to degrade. So we thought—and I think New Zealanders and I think virtually everyone in this Parliament now agrees—that that's just taking too long. So there are various steps in that chain in order to fix it.You need to change the national direction. Sometimes the regional policy statement that sits above regional and district plans also needs to be changed. At the moment until this bill passes those regional policy statements cannot be sped up through direct referral to the Environment Court. This bill allows those to be sent to the Environment Court. More often than not those things are sent directly to the Environment Court or to an Environment Protection Authority panel with the agreement of the councils who also think these things are taking too long. The second thing that this bill does is as the member the Hon Nathan Guy has said it introduces a new planning process so that rather than these new water plans going first to a council and then on appeal to the Environment Court—and they are contentious so they just about always go on appeal to the Environment Court—we're going to have a fused process which actually is based on a process that the prior National-led Government used to sort out the combined Auckland plan. So we created a body that has some standing members because you know the issues as to—virtually every regional council has got some dairy issues they've got some sediment issues from the high country they've got urban issues in respect to the urban streams. So rather than every regional council going about this separately with separate panels the bill proposes that we have these freshwater panels that will be chaired by an Environment Court judge. There will be some commonality of panel members who will have expertise in these issues. They will also be panel members that are nominated by iwi and by the regional councils. These panels will review the draft plans that are prepared by the regional council. There will be some assistance going backwards and forwards to those councils from the panel and from the Ministry for the Environment. And these plans I suspect in the end will be a little bit more uniform across the country and they'll certainly be faster than the current process so that we can get the next NPS which is due before we rise for the election actually implemented faster than the 13 year - plus delay that we're experiencing under the current legislation. In terms of costs overall costs in the system I predict will be lower because it will be a one-stage process rather than a two-stage process. The majority of those costs will still fall on regional councils to prepare the plans as was in the old system but there will only be one hearing process rather than two. And there are contributions coming from central government towards those costs as part of the sustainable land-use package that was in last year's Budget."