Dalziel Lianne: Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Dalziel Lianne: Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 28 February 2013. Volume:687;Page:8368. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East) 
: 
 I am surprised that the Government’s National Party members from the Canterbury region have not dominated its contribution to this debate on the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Amendment Bill. 
Hon Members 
: Where are they? 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: Yeah where are they? They’re hiding in their rooms. They’re gutless. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: Well I cannot refer to some of these matters. I know that my colleagues are trying to be extremely helpful in terms of my contribution to this debate. 
The point is that this is an important issue in Canterbury and I would have thought that every single National Canterbury member would be speaking on this particular bill. I actually think it is very important that they get up and speak in the House but we have seen Aucklander after Aucklander and I think only one representative from the Canterbury region has actually spoken in the House. I think that is a pity. 
I want to remind this House about the legislation that we are extending with this bill. I believe that it is important to continually remind ourselves of what was an utterly undemocratic bill that was passed through an undemocratic process that saw a Government predetermination become law through a sequence of events. 
I want to just remind the House what that sequence of events relates to. One of them was the general election obviously in 2008 and the determination that the Government had to make significant changes in the area of our resource management legislative framework. But there was a problem in Canterbury that it needed to address as a matter of urgency because the problem in Canterbury related to the allocation of water rights. That was a massive issue there because of the intensification of dairying on the Canterbury plains—parts of Canterbury that simply were never naturally resourced for dairying because of the amount of water that it requires. 
So the Government decided that it would do a review but very interestingly that review did not come from the council itself. We faced a similar situation when we were in Government with the Rodney District Council approaching us as we became the Government asking us to continue the process of the review that it had written to the previous Government about. In fact it was a unanimous decision of the council to have it replaced with commissioners so that the terrible issues that were arising in that area were able to be—[ 
Interruption 
] Yes it was a unanimous decision from the Rodney District Council. I have just noticed that Government members like to toss that across the House from time to time so I just want to remind the House that that was a unanimous decision of the Rodney District Council for the Government to intervene. 
So what did the Government do here? It appointed Wyatt Creech to undertake a review. Wyatt Creech has an association not only with the Government a fairly obvious one but also with the industry that demands so much of our water resources in Canterbury. So his selection to chair this review was utterly and completely inappropriate right from the outset. It was biased and—look I have made the point before that for a conflict of interest to exist it does not have to be a real conflict of interest. It is simply the perception. But this is real. It is a real conflict of interest when one is a dairy farmer and a former member of the Government and one is tasked with a role for which Government has set terms of reference; Environment Canterbury was not consulted. 
In fact the whole process was sparked off by the so-called letter signed by all of the mayors in the region. I see that my colleague is nodding her head—she remembers that—because we all know what really happened. We know that Jo Goodhew in her role as the MP in Timaru approached the Mayor of Timaru in order to get all the mayors to sign up to a letter which never went back to the individual councils for debate and was never signed off by any one of those councils for sending off to the Minister. But the mayors signed this letter at the request of the Government so that it would have the basis for this review—for this intervention—to occur. 
I worry that we have lost sight of what really happened in those early days. We all understood very clearly from the Minister Nick Smith that—and I want to quote him into the record again as I know others have done—“whatever the circumstances the next regional council elections in Canterbury will take place no later than those scheduled for late 2013.” Here we are in the inevitable position of seeing this Government break yet another firm commitment to the people of Canterbury that it would stand alongside them in their hour of need. On this particular occasion it promised the restoration of democracy. There was an acceptance that democracy was being set aside—nobody on this side of the House accepted it for 1 minute. The Government acknowledged that that is what it was doing but said it was for a very limited period of time. But no it was not for a limited period of time. We are now facing a further 3 years without any democratic return. 
What is extraordinary in this particular case is that not only was the original decision so fundamentally flawed—I have a copy of the Creech report here and it is a report of two halves. It is absolutely a report of two halves. One part has been written as a political analysis to support the Government’s predetermined position and the other part of it is written by an independent analyst who has described Environment Canterbury’s improvements in the operation and the challenges that it faced with the water chapter which of course was in a position to be implemented shortly after the commissioners took over. All of that work was completely ignored by the Government because it had a predetermined position. 
Then we fast track to today and we have got a regulatory impact statement that makes it absolutely clear that there has not been a Crown-led public consultation process with Canterbury stakeholders and communities on the options in the regulatory impact statement. It says: “This limits our ability to present community views on the options in this analysis.” I have to say that the two preferred options are those that are preferred by Environment Canterbury commissioners themselves—a mixed model of governance with one option being the legislation to establish a permanent mixed governing model and the other option being to have to have a transitional mixed governing body with the transfer back to a fully democratically elected council within a 3-year period beyond that—so the review of arrangements in 2017. 
I think that if the Government had actually adopted the advice of the regulatory impact statement and of the advisers in that regard then we would perhaps have been able to see our way clear to supporting some change in this area even if it had been a transitional provision as opposed to a permanent transition. That to me is the fundamental flaw in this whole process. The Government has started with a position. As I said at the Committee stage it is really the expression “improved water management” that sticks in people’s throats in Canterbury because we know that this has got nothing to do with improved water management. This has got everything to do with access to the water and unfortunately that is not necessarily in the interests of Canterbury.