Hughes Gareth: Marine Legislation Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hughes Gareth: Marine Legislation Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 11 September 2012. Volume:683;Page:5087. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
GARETH HUGHES (Green) 
: 
 Kia ora Mr Speaker. Nga mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. I rise to take a call on this Marine Legislation Bill. We are talking about something of great importance to New Zealanders: our oceans. In New Zealand we love our oceans and we want to protect them. We are a coastal people. It is not just about how we get our income from our vibrant fishing and aquaculture industries; it is also where we play and it is where we recreate. This is where we boat we fish and we surf.  
As we saw over the  
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incident which has been touched on numerous times in this debate that sacred relationship that we have with our moana—our water—in New Zealand was shaken right to the core. Oil on our beaches was not this academic thing you saw on TV and in the papers; it was something New Zealanders could see they could touch and they could smell. It was something that they were deeply shocked about with our Government’s response and its failure to act with the haste the urgency the expertise and the infrastructure needed to respond to what was our worst maritime disaster. 
I regularly went to Tauranga in the days and weeks following that disaster and what I saw there was almost like a relationship someone has when someone dies. In the first days we saw the shock—people could not believe what was happening on our waters. Then we saw the anger—anger because there was no one on the beaches to clean up the stuff. There were no booms at some of the estuaries. Then we saw the sadness—the sadness as those dead birds and those dead animals washed up on the beaches. So it is good to be in this House—the House of law in New Zealand—to be debating how we can improve our marine environmental and safety protection legislation. 
Looking at the structure of the bill—it is an omnibus bill—I think it has three main parts of importance. It amends a couple of bills the Maritime Transport Act and the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Act. It makes a couple of big changes. The first is to amend the Maritime Transport Act in terms of port and harbour safety local regulation and navigation safety. In terms of the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Act and in terms of marine pollution regulation it changes the way that rules and regulations are developed. And lastly it allows New Zealand to accede to the three international maritime conventions that we have talked about and that I will talk about at some length. 
First up I would like to say that the Green Party is welcoming the introduction of this bill. We will be supporting it. We urge the public to make a submission to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. We want to hear from experts because there are some good parts in this bill and there are a few questions we would also like to raise. 
 In this contribution I would like to touch very briefly on some of the environmental and safety protection changes advocated in this piece of legislation but then touch on the financial liability we saw with the  
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First up the safety provisions in the legislation we think make a lot of sense. They look pretty common sense from a cursory reading. That is why we welcome hearing from the harbour masters and hearing from the experts and hope they make submissions to the select committee. 
The bill gives effect to the amendments to the International Convention on Standards of Training Certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarers. This is something that we have heard in this debate. It is curious that this Government is quite happy to go against all the international evidence all the calls from New Zealanders—both experts and lay public—for a lowering of the blood-alcohol level. Internationally it is quite happy for seafarers watchkeepers and people doing environmental monitoring around ships to have a blood-alcohol level of 0.5 but when it comes to people driving a tonne of metal down the road at 100 kilometres per hour it is quite happy to have legal intoxication. I think it is quite curious and I think the mad contradiction of the Government’s policies has been quite graphically highlighted with this provision. 
We are seeing 37 pages of amendments to the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Act—37 pages about a law we passed only a month ago. I think the Government benches should be embarrassed. It is an absolute shambles. You have got to ask what is happening in the Government’s decision-making processes to have this happening. Are these different Ministers not talking to each other? It is an embarrassing shambles. It highlights the sloppy process. It is mostly highlighted by the fact that we saw over the  
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 that it was the taxpayer who had to pick up the tab because of the Government’s laziness because of the Government’s incompetence and also because of the Government’s simple inability to read the briefings to the incoming Minister that advocated New Zealand signing up and acceding through legislation to three international conventions that would have protected our taxpayers when this accident occurred. 
This accident was foreseeable this accident was avoidable and the taxpayers’ money could have been better protected but because of the decisions made by the Minister Steven Joyce who is in the House the taxpayers had to front up. We know from former Minister Nick Smith that the cost of the  
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 oil spill to date has cost the taxpayer $130 million. It was not only shock that people in the Bay of Plenty and around the country saw; it has had a huge fiscal impact on the taxpayer. 
What we know is that Steven Joyce must be the most unpopular Minister around the National Cabinet table. Well that is what we hear from the Whale Oil’s blog anyway. It is a cunning case study of how a Minister can leave a mess for other Ministers. What we saw was that in 2008 Minister Joyce had on his table a briefing saying: “You need to protect the taxpayer.” The Labour Government had done all the work. It had even started drafting the thing. Minister Joyce said: “Oh no don’t worry; a future Minister can deal with that. The taxpayer will pick up the tab.” Just like in transport the Minister the “Colossus of Roads” went around the country announcing $14 billion of motorways then he left it up to the current Minister Gerry Brownlee who has to face the music that there just is not enough money in the kitty. We saw it with the biofuels strategy. We heard this morning on the radio that Steven Joyce is now welcoming NorskeSkog moving to Tasmania and enlarging its plant. All of a sudden biofuels are on the Government’s agenda despite the fact that in May the Government scrapped all biofuel support. It is curious as a case study in how a Minister can leave a mess for other Ministers. The serious issue is that his very purposeful decisions have meant that the taxpayers have had to pick up the tab. 
It is good that we are seeing these international liabilities finally getting acceded to after some of them were negotiated decades ago—decades ago—and taxpayers picked up that tab. It is good to see. But I also want to point out that the Government is missing a whole bunch of other steps. It is good to see that the Government has finally listened to our oil spill protection plan released in October last year but unfortunately it missed out a couple of the other parts that the Green Party was calling for like an inquiry into the  
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. It is almost a whole year since we had the  
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disaster. We have had a couple of Government inquiries but no broad-based inquiries looking at the role that these—in many cases—untrained foreign crews have in New Zealand waters. We have one of the least regulated shipping regimes in the world. What role did that play? We need an inquiry to look at why on earth the Government did not have oil spill equipment in the country. It is meant to be able to deal with an oil spill of 3500 tonnes but it struggled and needed two airplane-loads full of equipment to cope with a spill of only a few hundred tonnes. We need to know why the Government refused the advice of both corporates and unions for a rapid response multi-purpose oil spill response vessel. That is why we need an inquiry. It is high time the Government got on and announced one. 
We need to ask the question of why the Government has not taken the advice of the Green Party—again in our plan—to adequately fund the Oil Pollution Fund. This Government raided it. There was $12 million to cope when accidents like these happen. The Government raided it and left only $3.4 million but we know that the cost is $130 million. We know that the Government raided Maritime New Zealand’s transport pantry leaving it without adequate funds. The Government has ignored our advice to recycle the funds from the fuel excise levy paid by boaties which currently gets spent on the roads. Why does it not use that to adequately fund Maritime New Zealand to protect the environment we love? Lastly what about compulsory shipping lanes and bringing back a form of flagging Kiwi vessels on our waters? 
I will not go into detail on the three maritime conventions. I have got to add that although we are increasing the amounts that the New Zealand Government can access in case of an accident like this—when a ship spills and bunker fuel goes out—there is no change to the Resource Management Act which was also shown to be woefully inadequate. There was a $130 million cost but under the Government’s law it could claim only $600000. It saw the light with the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Act and actually increased that amount but why are we not amending the Resource Management Act to allow those penalties to be increased here? Why are we not increasing the insurance amount required for oil drilling? We know that the Government wants to go on this risky dangerous deep-sea oil drilling binge. We know that in the Gulf of Mexico it cost the American Government and oil companies $40 billion yet this Government says: “Oh it’s all right guys just have $30 million in insurance and that is all you need.” 
We also see the Government failing to sign up to the Oil Pollution Compensation Fund’s supplementary fund which in the case of a tanker having a spill means that the Government has got access to more than US$1.7 billion. Again it is a missing piece of the puzzle that we will be raising in the select committee and hearing about from the experts. We look forward to engaging constructively. We acknowledge that this legislation is trying to improve the legislative regime for New Zealand and as such we will work constructively to try to improve it even further. Kia ora.