Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCrown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 11 April 2013. Volume:689;Page:9299. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) BillIn CommitteeDebate resumed from 10 April.Part 2 Amendments to Conservation Act 1987(continued)MOANA MACKEY (Labour): Part 2 of the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill of course deals with the Conservation Act which is very pertinent on “Love DOC Day”; on a day that we on this side of the Chamber are showing our support for the work the Department of Conservation does. We want to say to all of thestaff of the Department of Conservation that even if the National Government does not appreciate what they do we certainly do. So it is very very timely—Hon Member: So do we!MOANA MACKEY: Well the National Party members might say that they do but then they cut the funding which clearly shows that it is all lip service.But coming back to the Conservation Act the changes being made under the Conservation Act are typical of the problems right through this piece of legislation. There are some very good things in this legislation there are some very positive changes that are being made but it is always one step forward two steps back with the National Government. So although under Part 2 of this legislation we are very pleased to see the automatic inclusion—[Interruption]The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): Order! There is far too much background noise going on. It is totally discourteous to the honourable member trying to address the business of the Committee. Please be considerate of others.MOANA MACKEY: As I was saying with the National Government it is always one step forward two three four five steps backwards. Although in Part 2 of this bill we are very pleased to see that new reserve land will be automatically included in schedule 4 what is more disappointing is once again the dilution of the powers of the Minister of Conservation. Under the changes to Part 2 whereas it used to be the preserve of the Minister of Conservation to decide on the status of the land now that is going to be taken away from the Minister of Conservation and handed to Cabinet by Order in Council. So we are seeing right through this piece of legislation a weakening of the role of the Minister of Conservation.It is important to remind members that the Minister of Conservation is the Minister who is responsible for the stewardship of the Department of Conservation estate on behalf of New Zealanders—that is their mandate. So we have seen in Part 1 of this bill that where there is an application for a mining activity to be carried out on Department of Conservation land it used to be the Minister of Conservation who weighed up what the impact would be on Department of Conservation land and made that decision in the best interests of the preservation of that land for all New Zealanders. Now half of that responsibility has gone to the Minister of Energy and Resources. So the Minister of Energy and Resources who clearly has a vested interest in seeing those projects going ahead now has half the decision-making power and that is entirely inappropriate. It is not just inappropriate; it is an absolute boon for lawyers because this is going to result in judicial review after judicial review after judicial review.You see the Minister of Energy and Resources out there constantly promoting mining making it quite clear that they want projects to go ahead going to opening of company offices doing all the things that a Minister of Energy and Resources does—and there is nothing wrong with a Minister of Energy and Resources doing those things; that is their role. But then to say that they are unbiased or have not predetermined their choice when it comes to actually making a decision about a concession on Department of Conservation land I do not think that that is going to be feasible. It is going to result in people who are unhappy with the decision taking a judicial review saying that a proper process was not followed because the Minister of Energy and Resources had made up their mind all along. The simple thing to do would be to leave things as they are and leave it to the Minister of Conservation because that is where it is appropriate.As I said we are pleased to see the automatic inclusion of reserve land in schedule 4 but are very disappointed to see that despite the fact that the Government has claimed to have backed down on mining on schedule 4 land we are already seeing more exploratory work being done. It is like the Japanese with whaling you know—this is just scientific research nothing to see here we just want to see what is there. Well theonly reason you would want to see what is there—and it is private companies that are doing this not the Government—is that if at some point the Government said to them: “You know what? Yes we are going to let you”—Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Labour—West Coast - Tasman): We are speaking on Part 2 here of the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill. I will say in the Committee that perhaps I was a little harsh on the Government when speaking on Part 1 yesterday; I just find it very difficult to praise the Government very much these days.Part 2 does deal with the conservation parts of the Crown minerals legislation but can I go back and make reference to Part 1 because of course there is the ability now to include in the permitting provisions requirements around health and safety. Indeed we have hopefully through the lessons of Pike River learnt that we must include protection for human values for human lives for health and safety up front in the permitting regime and the mining oversight regime from the department—the new super-department the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment.It was perhaps pertinent that yesterday we were talking about that because I must make brief reference to the report—it is an independent report of course we are told—to the chief executive of the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment the new department. It is very very sad reading. It says there have been systemic failures in parts of a now superministry which we are told have been addressed. I am not quite sure whether they have been. The point is that if those systemic problems have not been addressed then we are further exacerbating the problems through the superministry oversight implemented with the passage of this Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill. It has good intent in some areas but as my colleague Moana Mackey said it does step back from safeguards for the natural values that of course are important to us not just now but into the future. So in making one step forward in protecting health and safety and human values the Government is taking one step backward in protecting natural values.The restructuring that has gone on in combination with the changes in this bill do leave a lot of New Zealanders wondering whether we are simply opening up the Department of Conservation estate to rampant development. On top of that there is a lot of experience within the Department of Conservation particularly in the West Coast - Tasman area where the department’s people have found the right balance between allowing wise and responsible mining on conservation land and protecting the natural values wherever possible.Part 2 deals with changes in the area of the conservation estate. It does allow the securing of some areas should they be deemed to be schedule 4 or of schedule 4 value but the question around other conservation land remains—that is if you gut the Department of Conservation if you—oh I see. If you remove the capacity—I am not allowed to use the word “gut”—within the department to astutely assess what is happening then people wonder whether in fact we are going to now see as we did with human lives a destruction of conservation values. That is not something that anyone wishes for any industry—mining agriculture forestry or whatever.So in summary I have to remind the officials and the Minister of Energy and Resources that if you can let the Department of Labour get to the point where “Its performance as a health and safety regulator of Pike was ineffectual and dysfunctional.” then this is the kind of oversight that can occur in a Government department if it is squeezed of resources. That is what the Minister of Conservation is doing to the Department of Conservation and that will lead to the same kind of dysfunctional oversight if we are not careful.So in Part 1 of the bill the Government has made some progress off the back of a terrible tragedy to implement some health and safety measures some requirements in the permitting regime for mining and some requirements in the ongoing oversight and that we welcome. In Part 2 rather than learning from the lessons of tragedies like Cave Creek and tragedies like Pike River we are making changes around the area of mining and conservation. I hope we are not setting up the department for a big failure.Although the Minister of Energy and Resources shakes his head his colleague the Hon Dr Nick Smith is not gutting but almost exterminating and certainly removing from the front line responsibility across the Department of Conservation and removing capability removing experience and destroying the livelihoods of people who have committed to conservation and the Department of Conservation all their working lives. They have been told that they are down the road because they are no longer needed. This is being done at a time when the Minister claims we are going to boost the capability of mining and we are going to allow mining companies to work in areas of conservation land. That is something I acknowledge we should do but we need to uphold the ability of the department to negotiate in a way that ensures the strictest of guidelines and protections for the water for the soil for the natural values and for all the protected species on Department of Conservation land.So this bill comes at a crucial time a time when we should be learning from the lessons of the past. A Green colleague today—and she is probably speaking here later on in the bill—raised the very sad issue of Cave Creek. I was a member of Parliament then. I dealt with the Minister of Conservation at that stage. He walked because he acknowledged that they had squeezed the department—just as the current Minister is doing now—to the point where the passion and the commitment to conservation by the individuals on the ground meant they got out and did work themselves. It was work that was proven not to be up to standard unfortunately in the issue of Cave Creek. But there is that same passion and that same squeeze on resources that is referred to in the Department of Labour report. Resources were not there to carry out the responsibilities of the Department of Labour and it gave rise to a dysfunctional and incapable Department of Labour in the area of upholding health and safety. The Ministers over there smile they shake their heads and they give reassurances. Some of those Ministers were in Government in 1990 when they did the same thing to the Department of Conservation.Part 2 of this bill deals with the issue of conservation. Unfortunately it does not deal with the issue of resources for conservation management. This very day people up and down this country are out marching protesting to try to protect and uphold conservation values. As an MP from an area of huge and spectacular conservation estate and resources I want good people to protect and look after that area. I also want mining and I want safe mining.So in this one piece of legislation we are summarising so many real issues that are at the front of the minds of people not only in my electorate but up and down this country around health and safety around the ability of the Government to regulate and oversee industry in the proper way and around the issue of the Government’s ability to manage conservation land on behalf of each and every one of us. We want that land to be there for our children and our grandchildren. We want jobs and mining is part of that economic mix but it must not be at the expense of New Zealanders’ lives and it must not be at the expense of the desecration of our environment or conservation land. This bill raises more questions than it provides answers for and I want assurances from that Minister that resources will go back into the Department of Conservation to properly negotiate in the areas of responsibility that are laid down in this bill.Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): Like my colleague Damien O’Connor who has just resumed his seat I think that it is particularly appropriate and really sad that we are debating these changes under Part 2 of this legislation the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill on a day when throughout the country people are offering their support to our Department of Conservation workers whose jobs are under threat. Their jobs are not under threat because they are inefficient. They are not under threat because the legislation has changed and somebody thinks they should not be doing the work that we have had them doing since 1987. They are under threat because the National Government has savagely cut the Department of Conservation’s budget and there is no way that it can live within its budget without massive job cuts. The cuts we have seen indicated will affect 140 people around the country. The people who are out in the regions implementing the very Conservation Act that we are amending in Part 2 are going to be losing their jobs but at the same time there is going to be a bunch more people put into the head office in Wellington.That to me completely undermines the purpose of this bill and it means that despite our support for the provisions in the bill we have even more concerns surrounding them. We would like to be supporting this legislation. We said that right at the start. We said that there were some fundamental concerns that we had and if they were addressed through the Commerce Committee then we would be delighted to support this legislation.The best thing that this Parliament can offer to people who want to have confidence in our conservation management and to the business community that wants mining is clear guidelines—a strong message from this Parliament. What they have got now is a total mess and I have to say that the Minister of Energy and Resources who is in the chair at the moment has made it significantly worse with his rammed-through Supplementary Order Paper 205 and Supplementary Order Paper 210 that we debated in Part 1. That is in stark contrast to the way his predecessor behaved. The Hon Phil Heatley—who is not used to being praised by me because I tell the truth—on this occasion actually picked up the recommendations from the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy. He took them to the select committee and the chair of the select committee Jonathan Young quite properly ensured that the select committee considered those recommendations as an extra bit of work and came back to this House having debated them properly. That is what should have happened to Simon Bridges’ Supplementary Order Papers but oh no he knows more than anyone and thought he could just ram them through at the last minute. Well his arrogance and his pride will trip him up. It will be a significant fall and I know that a lot of people are waiting for that to happen—particularly his colleagues I understand.The biggest concern that we have which was raised right at the very beginning of this debate is outlined in Part 2 and that is the new dual decision-making power. Instead of the Minister of Conservation having the decision-making authority mandate and responsibility under the legislation it is now being given half and half to the Minister of Conservation and the Minister of Energy and Resources. That is entirely inappropriate.My colleague Moana Mackey pointed out earlier in the debate about the vested interests that the Minister of Energy and Resources has. Quite rightly—we are not saying this is inappropriate—the Minister of Energy and Resources really has a responsibility not just to regulate the sector but also to promote opportunities for the sector and obviously mining is a key part of that. How can that possibly be balanced against the need and advocacy of the Minister of Conservation to protect our public estate? It just does not work. It is a stupid idea. Heaven only knows who thought of it—probably Steven Joyce I imagine—but it has got no part to play in clear legislationwhich should state so that the public understand our responsibility as a Parliament to ensure the protection and management of our conservation estate and separately under a different regime the need to have energy proposals pursued.I am very pleased that the reserve land now has an automatic inclusion in schedule 4 of the Crown Minerals Act—that is one good thing that has come out of this. My colleague Moana Mackey also talked about the exploratory drilling that is under way at the moment. The Minister Simon Bridges must think that every member of the public is completely stupid. There is only one reason for a private company to invest in exploratory drilling in schedule 4 areas and that is that it knows that at some time in the future the Government will give it the sign-off. Otherwise it would not waste its money; it would do exploratory drilling somewhere else.EUGENIE SAGE (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Chair. Thank you. I would like to pay particular tribute to the speech by Damien O’Connor who comes from the West Coast which has had two tragedies: Cave Creek and Pike River coalmine. The latter was due to a failure of regulation which this bill theCrown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill goes some way to addressing.In terms of the West Coast the Cave Creek commission of inquiry looked into the circumstances around the platform collapse and highlighted that the department had been starved of resources and did not have the number of staff or the resourcing provided through Vote Conservation that it needed to do its job well. That is what we are seeing with this Government and that is why hundreds of people around New Zealand today have turned up at Department of Conservation offices to post their messages of support for the department and the professional ability of departmental staff and the work they do. That is because New Zealanders love and treasure the places that the department is charged with managing.What we have in Part 2 of the bill is a major change so that a decision to reclassify land as a nature reserve or a scientific reserve will not be a decision just for the Minister of Conservation but will be a Cabinet decision. So the whole philosophy of the Government here is that you cannot trust the Department of Conservation to manage conservation land properly and you have to bring Cabinet in. When you bring Cabinet in—with the Minister in the chair Hon Simon Bridges and his responsibilities under this bill to promote mining—we will see conservation lands our public protected lands opened up to much more development.Where will that hit most? In areas like Coromandel and in areas like the West Coast where there are already some hundreds of alluvial goldmining licences. There is already a large-scale open-cast goldmine OceanaGold in the forests behind Reefton and it makes a huge hole in the Victoria Conservation Park and the wildlife corridor that connects the central Southern Alps with Paparoa.It is those sorts of big developments which destroy forests and pollute streams that this Government wants to encourage on conservation land. That is why it is depriving the department of staff and resources. The cuts last year saw the loss of a lot of the planning and technical staff who would make submissions under the Resource Management Act on applications to mine but who no longer do because that brings them into conflict with the mining companies and the cuts deprive the department of the staff who are responsible for overseeing applications that are granted to mine on conservation land. If you strip out that you are stripping out the ability to supervise mining operations and you are stripping out the field staff who are doing the work of predator control and actively protecting our plants and wildlife.Although the Minister of Conservation said today that he is confident that the department will continue to do its work his comments have been seen as insulting by the families of those who are losing their jobs in the staff cuts. We have had an openletter to the Minister inWilderness magazine which showed that there are front-line staff positions that are being cut. It is not back-room people. It is not the bureaucrats the paper shufflers whom the Minister refers to; it is people who are doing vital conservation work. They are doing work around threatened species. They are also doing work in supervising mining. If you strip out that you strip out the ability for the department to properly manage our public protected lands.This bill highlights how hostile the Government is both to conservation legally and in terms of its budget decisions to the department’s work on the ground because it is taking out the staff who have got the professional capability to do that work. So this bill is about not trusting the department. It is about the resource use Ministers—the Minister of Energy and Resources the Minister for Economic Development and the Minister of Science and Innovation—wanting to get their hands on conservation lands to promote more commercial exploitation focusing very much on the short term not the management of these lands to protect their conservation values now and for the future.So it is very short-term thinking and it is showing a complete lack of understanding of how the department operates of how much work is actually done in the field and that you cannot replace that professional work with volunteers. Nor can your replace it by commercial sponsorships because of the variability in those. This bill shows that the Government does not trust the Department of Conservation.Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour): Obviously the irony of the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill coming back to the House on “Love DOC Day” does not escape anybody. Although this part of the bill does not draw a great deal of criticism from us because it amends the Conservation Act in ways that are probably quite constructive the irony still remains that it is a very odd thing to have this piece of legislation which in other parts works against conservation and the protection of the environment being brought into the Committee on this day when people are protesting up and down the country about the cuts to the Department of Conservation.I want to add my concerns to those of others who have expressed their views about cuts to staff in the Department of Conservation but I want to use a particular local example that is of significance. If one looks at the numbers alone as the Minister of Conservation has done in the recent past it would appear that only 4.5 full-time equivalent positions will be taken out of the Nelson region of the Department of Conservation. In fact he conveniently ignores the fact that there are currently 10 vacancies. So we are losing 14.5 people out of that region.If this Part 2 of the legislation is to be upheld and implemented in a way that enhances the protection of our conservation estate it is a truism to say we need more people not fewer. If the argument of the Minister of Conservation in the House earlier today that in fact there is a way forward for maintaining these wilderness areas or sanctuary areas or whichever part of our country is going to be included and renamed into the conservation estate which is what Part 2 covers then the partnerships with the community seem to be the poor man’s way of achieving optimal protection. It is the cheap way to use volunteer labour of committed people up and down the country and relegating the Government’s responsibility for the conservation estate to the back-burner because it is with that idea in mind that the Department of Conservation with its reduced numbers will have to engage with the community in order to get any ongoing protection.My ongoing concern about Part 2 although it has words in it that I applaud and I do not have a particular problem with it is that there will not be the infrastructure and the personnel available in the Department of Conservation to allow Part 2 to be implemented and to be observed in the way that I presume the Minister intends it to be. So a conservation area for example under Part 2 “declared to be held for the purposeof a wilderness area a sanctuary area or both under this section must be managed in a manner that is consistent with that purpose or those purposes (as the case may be).” I am quoting from clause 57(4) of Part 2. So if a conservation area that is held to be a wilderness area or a sanctuary area is to be managed in a way that is consistent with that purpose then it needs to have the requisite personnel and the suitable oversight and resourcing given to it by the Government to meet that purpose and this is not what we are seeing. Thank you very much.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Chairperson. I feel an urgent need to take a call on Part 2 of the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill because after what I have just experienced in the last 24 hours around both this bill and around schedule 4 I am afraid that this part is fatally compromised. I was positive about this part of the bill and the Green Party was positive about it but now that we know that schedule 4 may be open to drilling rigs I feel less confident at the fact that pieces of land or other areas of sanctuary will go automatically into schedule 4. That is no longer the good news it should have been. I agree with the comments from my colleagues from the Labour Party that we need to uphold the core values of conservation but if schedule 4 is now open for drilling—and the Minister of Energy and Resources at question time would not rule this out—that shows you just how serious the situation is.New Zealanders expect Part 2 to mean what it says. New Zealanders marched—more than 40000 people—and made submissions so that Part 2 of the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill would have some meaning so that in fact areas like the Ramsar Convention wetlands areas like sanctuaries and scientific reserves and other reserves that are also covered later in the Reserves Act but are on the conservation estate—all of those—would have some meaning. So what we see now is the Minister—and I have a legal opinion to say that the minimum impact does not include drilling—is going to ensure through this bill that in fact because of other sections of this bill Part 2 will be literally undermined.Let us get real about what goes on on the conservation estate at the moment when you are talking about protection of special places in schedule 4. Archey’s frog is the rarest frog on the planet. It is the ancient amphibian that gives birth to live young. It is a tiny little frog. It is an absolutely amazing little creature which is very hard to see with the naked eye. In an area that should be in schedule 4 right now an area called Wharekīrauponga just south of Whangamata in the hills behind Whangamata right now there is a mining company called Newmont Mining Corporation with drilling rigs in that area. Now if we want to move that area into schedule 4 we will have to go through an Order in Council; it will no longer be purely the word of the Minister of Conservation.Even without some of the other parts of this bill that are very deleterious to the environment we are concerned about how we are going to get areas into schedule 4—let alone the protections once they get there. Take this little frog the most ancient and the rarest frog on the planet which you would think would be an iconic New Zealand species that everyone would uphold. What has happened is the consultants who were brought in—because the Department of Conservation does not have the resources to actually look at the activities of this frog—did a 2-hour daylight survey in the area where the drilling rig was going to be brought in and said “Oh well nothing is there.” I spoke to Dr Phil Bishop who is from University of Otago. He is the international head of the Amphibian Survival Alliance which is the group that is trying to keep the rarest frog in the world alive and he said nobody not even the world expert which he is could have found that little frog in daylight. It is simply impossible let alone in 2 hoursin the middle of the forest. It is simply not how a proper conservation expert would go about these things.That supports the point that others have been making which is for Part 2 you have to have robust support systems in order to make sure that the management and the sustaining of the conservation estate can be carried out. Instead after today I find we are going to have drilling rigs in schedule 4 land. So that means that the public are going to find out and are finding out today that a Government that said “No mining” actually meant “No mining except you can do everything but and then you can lobby us and maybe”—apologies Mr Chairperson not you. But maybe lobbying will help because if one has identified a gold reserve say for example in the middle of the Archey’s frog habitat perhaps the Government would look at schedule 4 again.So what we are seeing in this bill is that Part 2 talks about these very good values but as well as the risks to schedule 4 that we have learnt about in the last few hours there is also the problem that the Minister of Conservation is no longer the sole arbiter of what gets added to schedule 4. So although the bill is at pains to say that it will not remove anything schedule 4 if it has to go via Order in Council—i.e. Cabinet—rather than the Minister’s word the priorities of the Government of the day rather than the person whose job it is to uphold the guardianship values will hold sway. We talked about this in Part 1 but it also applies to this part of the bill in Part 2; you have to be able to apply those values. Any weakening of those values will result potentially in the loss of a species such as the Archey’s frog the rarest frog on the planet.The Government may be quite comfortable with that because actually for the Government mining for gold—a mineral that is mainly not used for anything particularly essential. Twelve percent of gold is used in electronics. The rest of it is in jewellery or it is locked up in banks.We are talking about destroying the ecosystem destroying the environment that has been set aside in schedule 4 for a whole lot of stuff that could be recycled from your cellphone and mine or from a landfill. But gold fever knows no bounds. Gold fever is about an obsession with a metal that can be found above the ground. There is lots of it above the ground sitting around doing nothing. Instead under this bill these special places can be sacrificed.The other thing that they are looking for in parts of the conservation estate of course is coal. Nobody mentioned it last night but guess what it is a fossil fuel we have a climate crisis and we need to transition away from coal. So what we are looking for is not a cure for cancer; what we are looking for are metals that can be recycled and minerals that we can also transition away from. There is no commitment and no vision behind this bill. All it is is how we can get into the conservation estate and make sure that we have access above all other things to these things like gold silver coal or oil. Anyone would think that climate change was not real to anybody who supports this bill—clearly it is not.So we have a bizarre situation where we have the Archey’s frog the rarest frog on the planet is endangered. The communities have opposed this. The people all over the country including Ngāti Hau just the other day on Radio New Zealand National saying that it does not want the conservation estate or its own land at Puhi Puhi dug up because of the mercury risk—all of these people are going to find that this bill is a facilitator bill. Part 2 which ought to be a strong protection is fatally undermined.It is very very disappointing because we are serious about conservation but there is no point in playing games and setting up these ideas of X protection and then undermining them in the next breath. And that is what has happened today. In the next breath schedule 4 which is protected in Part 2 is being undermined by the Minister who announced today that he would not rule out drilling rigs. There is only one reasonyou bring in the drilling rig. You have done your surveying. You have done your aeromagnetic surveying. You have done it all and you want to mine. The mining companies want to mine and the Government is saying: “One day boys this will all be yours.”The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): Just before I call the next speaker I just want to draw to members’ attention in the Chamber that this is a debating chamber. It is not a place to receive phone calls during sittings of the House. We are not a call centre. Phones should be on silent mode when they are brought into the Chamber.A party vote was called for on the questionThat Part 2 be agreed to.Ayes61New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes59New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Part 2 agreed to.Part 3 Amendments to Continental Shelf Act 1964MOANA MACKEY (Labour): Part 3 deals with amendments to the Continental Shelf Act and of course this Act is part of the area where the Government has got itself into quite a bit of controversy over the Supplementary Order Papers that it dumped on the public on Easter Sunday and on this Committee belatedly. Currently any mining for minerals that is carried out on the continental shelf is carried out under the Continental Shelf Act 1964 and what this part does is amend the Continental Shelf Act so that once this piece of legislation comes into force it will now be the Crown Minerals Act that governs the mining of minerals and petroleum on the continental shelf.This is where we once again have got ourselves into difficulty. The previous Minister of Energy and Resources the Hon Phil Heatley might want to take a call and give us the benefit of his wisdom seeing as he was the drafter of this legislation initially. He was not the drafter of the dreadful Supplementary Order Paper that we have dealt with to ban protest vessels and I know that the Hon Phil Heatley would never ever have stood for that as Minister of Energy and Resources. He was an upholder of people’s rights not a destroyer of rights and that is of course how he will be remembered in terms of his legacy as the Minister of Energy and Resources. Unfortunately his legacy as Minister of Housing ain’t so flash. But never mind—one out of two ain’t bad.So coming back to Part 3 and the Continental Shelf Act this is the area that we have been discussing in the House and in the media over the last week or so since the Government announced that out on the high seas which is where we find the exclusive economic zone and the continental shelf there will be limitations on the rights of people to legally protest against vessels and instalments that are on the continental shelf.The reason that we have an issue with it is that this is not about stopping illegal activity on the continental shelf at all. It is about making it as hard as possible for people to go out and voice their concerns and protest about what is occurring on the continental shelf and of course the exclusive economic zone. The reason that is the case is that the changes that the Government has made apply only to protest vessels and only to those who are protesting against oil and gas exploration. If this was about safety if this was about stopping illegal activity—activity that would be illegal in our territorial waters—then the law change would apply to everyone. But this is happening on the continental shelf for these activities.So what the Government has done by putting it into the Crown Minerals Act if it is in relation to a permit that is granted under the Crown Minerals Act—and currently those permits are granted under the Continental Shelf Act—is transferring that across to the Crown Minerals Act. I think petroleum always existed under the Crown Minerals Act. But what happens is when one of these permits which used to be granted under the Continental Shelf Act is now granted under the Crown Minerals Act anyone who protests against the activity that that permit is allowing and who gets in the way of or interferes with a vessel or a structure will now face significant penalties.The question we asked and the question that was never answered by any of the Government members or the Ministers who gave speeches was why would that not apply to everyone? Why is it only under those permits currently granted under the Continental Shelf Act that it is now covered? Because now what we are saying is that you have got within your territorial waters—[Interruption] it is a very important point Mr Chair—an activity that is illegal. But that very same activity that occurs on the continental shelf under a permit currently carried out under the Continental Shelf Act—that same activity that very same activity—will be allowed unless it is protesting against oil and gas exploration.So what I am saying is that this is focusing on the behaviour and on this particular permit that has been granted under this particular Act. It is not focusing on the dangerous behaviour which should apply to everyone and it should apply actually to those industry operators who have permits under the Continental Shelf Act. If they act dangerously or recklessly or in a way that would be illegal in our territorial waters then why should they not face the same penalties? Why is once again the playing field being skewed so incredibly towards the petroleum and mineral extraction industry but everyone else and every other industry that uses the continental shelf and that carries out activities there does not get the same protection under the law? And protesters who may be the target of some activity that would be illegal in our territorial waters do not get the protection of the law.It is simply not fair and it simply makes no sense to not have it apply to everyone and to only say: “Well if you’ve got a permit under the Continental Shelf Act and that has now been transferred to the Crown Minerals Act then we’ll protect you. But everyone else I’m sorry we are not interested. We’re not interested if people carry out dangerous and illegal behaviour against you.”CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): I will take just a brief call on this quite brief section Part 3 of the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill which as my colleague Moana Mackey has ably described is basically moving these provisions into the Crown Minerals Act. But I think that this part represents a theme in the bill which is what I would call putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank. It is about shifting the management of very important places such as the oceans into a resource model rather than a respect model. It may be news to some people but the ocean is not a great place to dig up. We have very little control on land with some of our pollution issues but we have far less control under the sea. That is what we learnt by seeing some of the disasters that have taken place in other parts of the world. It may be all very well and logical to move the Continental Shelf Act provisions relating to minerals into the Crown Minerals Act but it does not solve the fundamental problem which is that this is the new frontier and this is the big expansion.We have exhausted many of our resources on land. We now want to do over what is left—the great mysterious and sacred ocean which we do not understand. But it does not matter that we do not understand it because it is a see-no-evil environment. It is like outer space. You can chuck your junk into the sky you can dump your junk into the sea but it really does not matter because we cannot see it. So it is fine. You can dig a greatbig hole in the ocean and all of those subtle effects will not really matter and that is what is so pathetic about regarding the ocean as purely a place for the extraction of minerals. A lot of the mineral extraction in the ocean is going very slowly because it is incredibly difficult to do. If you look at the coast off the Raukūmara Basin for example where the proposal was to do oil exploration these are extremely deep waters indeed on every level both metaphorically and in a real sense.Also it is very ironic that in that very place was the birth of Supplementary Order Paper 205 which was referred to earlier which affects the continental shelf and which so far has not been applied to us on land but I would not be at all surprised if Minister Bridges’ brilliant idea of locking up protesters at sea gets moved to become a brilliant idea of locking up protesters on land. I mean that is always a possibility. It is perfectly logical. If mining is the only priority why do you not lock up everybody who disagrees with you and who comes near any of your operations? That is absolutely seen as being fair enough by what is intended in that Supplementary Order Paper. So—Hon Maryan Street: Don’t give him ideas.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: I am not trying to give those members ideas. I am aware that they have very strange ideas. It is what Bruce Jesson would have said: only their purpose is mad. I think that is a very interesting way to describe this bill and also this part which should be just another logical technical administrative thing. Nothing in this bill is logical and just technical; a lot of this bill is facilitative.All I can say is that if you think we know what we are doing on land where we are still trying to clean up our waterways and where we are still trying to basically understand what goes in our rivers which we can actually access and see we have no idea what is going on in the ocean and yet we are proposing through these continental shelf provisions to open up a new frontier that should be learnt about respected and looked after. It is not as if there are no alternative things we can do to find minerals and to create green sustainable energy. Those things exist but the companies want to invest in their new frontier—assisted often by GNS Science I am horrified to say—and that is where we are going with this. That is the tragedy of this bill. It opens up a frontier that forgets about a fundamental lack of information a lack of evidence and a lack of relationship and respect for the ocean. That is why Elvis Teddy stood up for Whānau-a-Apanui in his own fishing ground and said no and that is why Simon Bridges has to try to shut him down.The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 210 in the name of the Hon Simon Bridges to Part 3 be agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat the amendment be agreed to.Ayes61New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes59New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Amendment agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat Part 3 as amended be agreed to.Ayes61New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes59New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Part 3 as amended agreed to.Part 4 Amendments to Reserves Act 1977Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): It is fantastic to be speaking on Part 4 of the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill which deals with amendments to the Reserves Act 1977. This was one of the less contentious areas within the bill. As I noted earlier it certainly would have been our preference as we indicated as this bill was introduced to debate to agreement the concerns that we had and obviously the concerns that other parties had as well. I thought that the Commerce Committee made really rigorous efforts in that regard and I want to commend the chair Jonathan Young for his behaviour and conduct of the proceedings. There were obviously strongly held views on many of these issues but unfortunately when we got to the end of the proceedings we were not able to agree on the fundamental points that we had raised when the bill was introduced.The primary one was the dual decision-making. This part here is one that the Minister of Conservation maintains. It is very good. It has some automatic scheduling of reserve land into schedule 4 and that is obviously an improvement on the existing position that the Minister of Conservation holds. But tragically it does not outweigh the weakening of the ability of the Minister of Conservation to make a decision in regard to minerals whether it is exploratory drilling or mining itself. That has been discussed in earlier parts of this bill but it is particularly relevant to Part 4 as well. It does not outweigh the concerns that we have about that dual decision-making.In question time today I also mentioned the comparison of the current structure of the Department of Conservation which obviously is responsible for the Reserves Act 1977 and the way that the department has now modelled itself on Cabinet dual decision-making where we have the Minister of Conservation and the Minister of Energy and Resources taking decisions jointly where previously it was the Minister of Conservation’s mandate. In the same way the Department of Conservation in its proposed new structure is going to have two positions of equal status. One is going to be the chief ranger who is responsible for conservation issues and the other one in the same tier of the department is going to be called the relationship manager and that person will be focused on the business side of the Department of Conservation. Like most of this bill it represents a significant weakening of the mandate and the responsibility that the Minister of Conservation currently has.That concern was only heightened when on Easter Sunday we had the Minister of Energy and Resources the Hon Simon Bridges dumping on the Committee a massive Supplementary Order Paper Supplementary Order Paper 205 without any consideration of referral to the select committee. It is a significant piece of work that changes the rights of protesters in regard to their opposition to any activity on the continental shelf. If you look at how many changes the select committee made to Part 4 which was not a contentious area in comparison with some of the others there are significant alterations. There are large sections of Part 4 that have been deleted. There are significant insertions and obviously there was a lot of debate. So how could we have had this much debate and alteration in Part 4 a comparatively uncontentious areawhen the Minister Simon Bridges can justify dumping a significant controversial Supplementary Order Paper on the Committee on Easter Sunday without any select committee consideration or ability to debate it or change it? That is really the height of arrogance.I was very disappointed in the Minister’s behaviour when he was in the chair last evening. I was very disappointed in the behaviour of the Attorney-General. I have not actually heard before the denigration that occurred towards highly respected members of our community Dame Anne Salmond and Sir Geoffrey Palmer both of whom hold strong views but are very highly regarded. Dame Anne Salmond is the New Zealander of the Year and yet in this Chamber and in this debate they were treated very poorly. I really regret that in the same way that I regret the treatment that the Minister has given this Committee. If you can compare this Part 4—MOANA MACKEY (Labour): Part 4 of the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill amends the Reserves Act 1977 and this is where we see that synergy that we had with Part 2 where any new land that is deemed to be a reserve will now automatically go into schedule 4 of the Crown Minerals Act and will therefore be protected. Well that is the general idea.We have concerns that that may change in the future given the noises that have been coming from industry. Businesses are going out and actually prospecting on schedule 4 land. The Government says they are just having a look. They are just interested to see what might be out there. My experience is that businesses do not pay money just out of pure curiosity. They are doing it because they have obviously had an indication from this National-led Government that at some point in the future those parts of schedule 4 are going to be opened up for exploration. Otherwise why would they be looking?It is very very disappointing because obviously this is an issue that the public are extremely concerned about. When you have tens and tens of thousands of people marching up Queen Street that sends a very strong message. The Government said it would back down but all indications are that it is doing it on the sly now.So although I welcome this amendment to Part 4 which deems that any new land that is added to the Reserves Act 1977 automatically goes into schedule 4 and there does not have to be a process that is gone through—that is very good—it is the same thing again which is right through this bill: one step forward five steps backwards. That is a disappointing thing. Yes that is good. Yes it is good that Part 4 means that any new reserve land goes straight into schedule 4—that is fantastic.But what else does Part 4 do? Again it completely dilutes the role of the Minister of Conservation. One of the really big concerns has been where we have seen the role of the Minister of Conservation undermined—no pun intended—Hon Phil Heatley: Very clever though.MOANA MACKEY: —and replaced by Order in Council. Did you like that Mr Heatley? It was not bad was it? It has been completely undermined. The role of the Minister of Conservation is basically to be the guardian of the Department of Conservation land for the public of New Zealand. That is their role. They are there to ensure that future generations of New Zealanders will continue to enjoy the beauty the biodiversity and everything that our conservation estate has to offer.Here we are in Part 4 and for example clause 64 amends section 5 of the Reserves Act 1977 by removing the ability of the Minister of Conservation to declare State forest land to be a reserve under the Reserves Act. That might not seem like a big deal to a lot of people but again this is death by a thousand cuts to the Minister of Conservation. And we have had endless examples of that through every single part of this bill. It is a shame that we did not get a longer debate on Part 1 actually because we did not even manage to get to all the powers that are being removed from the Minister ofConservation in Part 1. But here it is in Part 4. We had it in Part 2 and we had it in Part 3. Here is Part 4 a seemingly innocuous part of the bill that does a good thing which is ensuring that all new reserve land goes into schedule 4. Yet again—time and time again—it is taking away the powers of the Minister of Conservation to be able to effectively protect the Department of Conservation estate. So that is clause 64—that is one example: the removal of the power to declare State forest land to be a reserve under the Reserves Act.If we go to section 6 of the Reserves Act 1977 this provides the Minister of Conservation with powers in cases where there might be doubt or uncertainty about a reserve. This is a very important role that the Minister of Conservation carries out because from time to time—and I suspect marine reserves in particular are a classic example—you are going to get uncertainty or doubts about what was agreed about where boundaries might lie and about the rules of engagement in terms of how people are able to utilise that reserve land. There are endless reasons why concerns might be raised or there might be difficulties with determining what actually was agreed to in the case of a reserve. It is the role of the Minister of Conservation to ensure that in deciding how that is worked out or sorted out amongst the various parties that disagree the best interests of the conservation estate and the preservation of the conservation estate are absolutely paramount.So what are we doing in Part 4 of this bill? What we are doing is again inserting through this amendment bill new legislation that takes power away from the Minister of Conservation and gives to the Governor-General the power to declare that the land is or is not a nature reserve or a scientific reserve. It says that this power overrides the powers of the Minister in section 6 of the current Reserves Act. So you know what that means. That means that the Government and Cabinet get to make the decision—because the Governor-General is not going to go out there and have a look. I mean his role is kind of a formal one. This is the Government again taking away the powers of the Minister of Conservation who is the particular Minister to have sole responsibility for that and giving those powers over to a Cabinet that by its very deeds thus far has shown us that it is not really interested—Andrew Little: You know who the Cabinet Minister is.MOANA MACKEY: —in protecting the conservation. That is right: Steven Joyce the Minister for Economic Development will be making this decision. It will not be the best interests of the conservation estate and the protection and preservation of the conservation estate for future generations that will be paramount when the Governor-General is making those decisions about whether to declare that land is or is not a nature reserve or is or is not a scientific reserve. That is not appropriate. Again it is diluting away the powers of the Minister of Conservation.But that is not the end of Part 4 and the diluting of powers of the Minister of Conservation. Clause 67 of this bill makes another change to section 16 of the Reserves Act. Under section 16 of the Reserves Act reserves are classified by the Minister of Conservation but under the new section 16A proposed in this amendment bill the Minister will have that power to classify reserves restricted. So the Minister will be able to classify recreation historic and scenic reserves but nature reserves and scientific reserves will be done by Order in Council.So again here we have a role that the Minister of Conservation rightly carries out. It is appropriate that that is a role of the Minister of Conservation. It is the way it has always been. It has worked well having a Minister whose role it is to be the custodian of the Department of Conservation estate on behalf of current and future generations of New Zealanders. Here again the National Government is saying: “No Steven Joyce knows better.” so it will give him that power under Order in Council to make decisionsthat should be being made—and up to this point are currently being made—by the Minister of Conservation.But that is not the end of it. Part 4 also amends section 47 of the Reserves Act to provide in future that wilderness areas will be set apart by Order in Council rather than by the Minister of Conservation. So here we have yet another area where Steven Joyce is going to be determining whether or not wilderness areas are set apart. Again we have the removal of powers that currently sit with the Minister of Conservation.Part 4 is seemingly not that controversial but it has been the same with every single part in this bill when you go through it. It is the habit of this National Government in areas where it is clear where the decision-making power lies to remove it from that person and then to provide that it is done through an Order in Council process which does not have to come to this House which does not get to be debated and which does not often get scrutiny because members of the public probably do not even know what the Order in Council process is how they can object to it or how they can take a complaint against it through the Regulations Review Committee which my colleague Maryan Street chairs.The Minister who is in the chair at the moment the Minister for the Environment was a very active member of that committee. She knows very well about and has a great respect for good regulations so I am sure she is appalled at so much more being put through these regulatory processes away from the ability of the public to scrutinise them adequately and away from the ability of the public to make complaints. As I said I think maybe even members of this House are not sure about how they would take a complaint against a process that was carried out by Order in Council. Even if they can take a complaint to the Regulations Review Committee the grounds upon which they can complain are very narrow—very narrow.So instead of having that broader debate where the Minister and the public know that this is the person who makes these decisions—this is the person who classifies reserves and this is the person who if there is any uncertainty we go to to clarify what the position is—now it is being done through this process that is very very away from the public difficult to understand and difficult to access frankly compared with going through the Minister because the Government does not want to have that level of scrutiny.That makes me wonder what it has planned for the conservation estate. Why is it trying to make it difficult by pushing everything through by Order in Council? And under this Reserves Act this is particularly worrying because this is where we have the schedule 4 land. This is the most precious land in the conservation estate and this is where it is classified. What is the Government planning to do that it wants to make all these processes go through Order in Council rather than openly and transparently going through a Minister who is then open to judicial review in a way that the Order in Council process is not? I think we know the answer to that. It is as I have said before that we have mineral companies out there now prospecting in schedule 4 land. They are not spending money on looking just for curiosity. They are not spending money on looking just for the hell of it.EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Part 4 of the bill the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill is deeply troubling. It is consistent with the changes elsewhere in the bill to deliberately weaken the powers of the Minister of Conservation and it establishes a new process as Moana Mackey has highlighted where it will be Cabinet through Order in Council rather than the Minister of Conservation that makes decisions about how reserves should be classified and what their protected status should be.There is a large area of conservation land that is stewardship land. That means it has not got the additional protection that reserve status such as scientific reserve or nature reserve would provide. That reserve status does provide additional statutory protection when you have applications to do activities in the reserve areas that might destroy the vegetation and modify the habitat values. The Reserves Act is providing that stronger statutory protection for areas that have the ecological or scenic values that deserve reserve status. So what this part of the bill is doing is making sure that it is a Cabinet decision rather than a decision by the Minister of Conservation as it is at the moment to gazette the reserve and to improve the protective status. Areas that would be affected are potentially a large area of forest south of the Cook River in South Westland which is part of the South West New Zealand World Heritage Area. The Department of Conservation was charged with undertaking a national park investigation into this area in the late 1980s but it never had the resources to do that.Now none of that land could be reclassified as scientific reserve or nature reserve without it going through Cabinet. That will mean of course that there will be other Ministers who will object to that and we will have what happened when the Kahurangi National Park was established. Areas that have mineral potential like Sams Creek were being excluded from the park even though they should be part of the park because of their ecological values. Areas like the Mōhikinui catchment were also excluded because there was lobbying at the time the national park was established to exclude these areas even though the investigations by the Conservation Authority had clearly shown that areas like Mōhikinui had status that deserved to be part of the national park.So the problem here is that the technical scientific and ecological reasons for a change in the land status are being dismissed and you are getting political considerations of whether that land can be available for exploitation which will determine whether it is gazetted as a nature reserve or a scientific reserve or whether the protective status is upgraded. Similarly with wilderness areas because that provides for the same process. The Paparoa wilderness area when it was established was controversial because of the mineral potential. So we will see as has happened with the marine reserves on the West Coast where you get commercial industry involved that they will lobby hard behind closed doors and not through the public process and the areas that are finally protected will shrink quite considerably.But one of the very troubling things in section 24(9) inserted by clause 68 of this Part 4 of the bill is where it talks about a change to the classification or the revocation of the reservation status. That potentially means that if the land status is changed areas that go up into schedule 4 that are supposedly protected will be open for mining. I think that is what the Government’s intention is. It says it is about permanent protection through schedule 4 but this clause means that that land status can be revoked. It may not be revoked over the whole of the reserve area but it could potentially be revoked over a part of an area which if it is in schedule 4 at the moment would then be opened up and available for mining.So this provision which allows for revocation without any obvious public process is a potential way in which the Government can undermine the protective status of a lot of areas of conservation land. Certainly there are some criteria in section 24(10) inserted by clause 68 that the Minister must be satisfied that the reserve is no longer suitable for the purposes of its classification but the wording in that clause is very general: “or for any other similar cause;”. That is very broad. That is giving the Minister a lot of discretion when he or she is bullied by Cabinet colleagues that the economic benefits the jobs that will be created outweigh the ecological values of that land. That is because that is what this Government is about—short-term jobs and exploitation rather than having areas properly protected and getting the legal recognition that they deservebecause of the biodiversity landscape and habitat values that would see them classified as a scientific reserve or a nature reserve.The fact that this applies to wilderness areas is also really troubling. Wilderness areas were established to provide areas that do not have tracks or huts and where people can experience nature in a completely unmodified way. They can rely on their own resources. Wilderness areas come from a tradition of recognising that there are some areas that we want to set aside that are totally undisturbed except by factors like climate change. This provision in relation to wilderness areas is potentially going to reduce the ability to have large wilderness areas that protect the capacity for people to walk to climb to enjoy those areas that are untracked and to camp. Again it is just this whole weakening of the Minister’s powers that the bill is all about and this is one of the worst provisions of the bill for that. Thank you.Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour): I rise to speak to Part 4 of the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill which amends the Reserves Act 1977. I am caused a great deal of concern by this part of the bill and I wish to continue the theme that my colleague Moana Mackey outlined earlier. As the chair of the Regulations Review Committee I am very aware of the process of scrutiny which is the only process of scrutiny that regulations have in our Parliament. Many members are aware of that but as Moana Mackey said many members of the public are not and are not aware of the checks and balances that are available through the scrutiny of regulation. The point of this is that clauses in Part 4 hand over the responsibility of the Minister of Conservation from primary legislation to regulation. Regulations do not come before this House for scrutiny. Primary legislation like this like a bill does but regulations do not. Regulations are promulgated by Cabinet. They are taken to the Executive Council where the Governor-General signs them and they become once the Governor-General has signed them Orders in Council. So they do not ever come to this House for scrutiny. The only way a check or balance can be applied to them is through the Regulations Review Committee which scrutinises every regulation and every Order in Council that the executive—that is the Government—promulgates.So I have great difficulty with these bits of Part 4 that divest the Minister of Conservation of the responsibility for declaring that land is or is not a nature reserve or a scientific reserve or declare that a reserve must be held for the purpose of a nature reserve or a scientific reserve—and that particular clause is subject to a Supplementary Order Paper Supplementary Order Paper 210 from the Minister of Energy and Resources anyway. But in addition in clause 69 section 47(1) of the Reserves Act is amended to say: “The Governor-General may by Order in Council”—this process I have just described—“made on the recommendation of the Minister (a) set apart the whole or any specified part of a reserve as a wilderness area: (b) vary or revoke any order made under this subsection.” So by regulation something that was a wilderness area may not be or become or remain a wilderness area if I read this correctly. If I am reading it wrongly I invite the Minister in the chair the Minister for the Environment to correct me but it seems to me that in section 47(1)(b) as amended: “The Governor-General may by Order in Council made on the recommendation of the Minister … vary or revoke any order made under this subsection.” That includes setting apart the whole or any specified part of a reserve as a wilderness area.My particular worry about this at the moment is enhanced by a visit that I paid over the Easter break to a very famous wilderness area around the Dart River. There is a proposal on the books that the Minister of Conservation is taking upon himself to decide on which is whether or not a tunnel should be built excavated dug—mined if you like—through those mountains in that wilderness area in order to cut down the travel for tourists to Milford Sound by about 5 hours each way. I use this as an example because Iam concerned that if it is possible for the status or the setting apart of the whole or any specified part of a reserve or wilderness area to be revoked by regulation then this Government is seeking to deliberately lose control of parts of our environment that are hugely valuable. Not only is this particular part of New Zealand—around the top of Lake Wakatipu and Glenorchy and that area surrounding the Routeburn Track—a World Heritage area but it is recognised as a wilderness area. And should that status or the purpose of that be able to be amended by regulation alone then all of a sudden it may be possible for people to be confronting activity in that area such as excavating a tunnel or putting down oil drilling equipment or whatever—mining equipment of any sort—and setting that into the environment without anybody knowing except the Regulations Review Committee.That is a serious serious consideration for this Parliament to make. That such a thing might be possible by regulation absolutely flies in the face of what this Parliament should be doing. It should be protecting and upholding and enforcing and enhancing by primary legislation laws that protect our environment and not allowing potential destruction of our environment and the overturning of primary legislation by regulation to proceed and to be passed in this way. This is a real concern. It is not about only the potential damage. I hope I am not reading too much into it. I am an optimist by nature but I am deeply concerned that there is a sinister agenda behind this.I am concerned also not only by the content of this but by the process that is exemplified by this particular part of the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill. Part 5 in amending—The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Part 4.Hon MARYAN STREET: Sorry—Part 4. I beg your pardon. I flipped the page. Part 4 which amends the Reserves Act 1977 should be something that allows proper scrutiny and the alteration of legislation that should be the remit of the Minister of Conservation to administer protect and uphold having been passed by Parliament should not be subjected to Orders in Council which do not get parliamentary scrutiny. So I have deep deep concerns about Part 4 on content and on process. Thank you.The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 210 in the name of the Hon Simon Bridges to Part 4 be agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat the amendments be agreed to.Ayes61New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes59New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Amendments agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat Part 4 as amended be agreed to.Ayes61New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes59New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Part 4 as amended agreed to.Part 5 Amendments to Wildlife Act 1953Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): I want to take just a brief call in relation to Part 5 and actually ask the Minister to put on record the answer to one question that I have. I know that the Minister in the chair Amy Adams is not the Minister who is primarily responsible for the legislation but I assume because of her background that she is competent to actually answer it so I would really appreciate an answer to that.In the Chamber last night we had one question to the Minister of Energy and Resources who is responsible for the legislation which was in relation to whether or not he had a legal opinion about the potential breach in relation to this bill of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act in Supplementary Order Paper 205 which he dumped on the country on Easter Sunday. If the Minister in the chair wants to answer that question as well that would be fantastic but that is not the one I want her to answer.Almost the total purpose of Part 5—almost the entire part—of the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill is related to a simple change which is to change the Order in Council provisions and regime or on the recommendation of the Minister. The change is to replace “by Proclamation” with the new term: “by Order in Council made on the recommendation of the Minister”. My question to the Minister is twofold. Firstly why is that considered to be more appropriate in this legislation? Why is it more appropriate to have an Order in Council or the recommendation of the Minister rather than the current regime which I assume has been in place since 1953 and which is by proclamation? And the second part of that question which is directly related asks whether this is going to be the regime from now on. Are we going to see this sort of change in other legislation? Obviously if that is the case what is the driver for it? What is the benefit that we will see as a result of that change in procedure?As I said I understand that Minister Adams is not the Minister who is primarily responsible for it but I also know her background and consider that she would be able to answer that question quite easily and therefore I would greatly appreciate it if she did. If she has any information to share with the Committee that neither the Attorney-General Chris Finlayson nor the Minister primarily responsible for this legislation the Hon Simon Bridges were able or willing to share with the Committee in relation to the legal opinion on Supplementary Order Paper 205 in the name of Simon Bridges then that would be even more greatly appreciated.That is the only question I want to ask and I look forward to hearing from the Minister.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): I support my colleague Ruth Dyson’s call for clarity. I think Part 5 of the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill is another example of changes that are allegedly technical but the submitters really struggled with those changes. For them there was a fear that once again changes were being made in order to privilege Cabinet over the Minister or Order in Council over proclamation. Again people did not know why. There was not a rationale for changing this. The Wildlife Act 1953 which was passed the year I was born has been functioning for a very long time. It is there to protect some of the most amazing wildlife in the world. If you look at the Auckland Islands Zealandia Kāpiti IslandHauturu—some of these places are not Wildlife Act reserves but some of them are. What people want to know is what is going on why we are changing this what the point is and how we can trust it.The whole issue with the Crown Minerals Act is because of the purpose—other parts being so clearly about privileging one industry. People at the Commerce Committee hearings were deeply distrustful of other changes. They were not satisfied with superficial rationales about Part 5. They were not convinced that wildlife would beprotected any more than reserves or other parts of the Department of Conservation estate—other areas that have been set aside before by the years of hard work of many many people to protect them. The people at the hearings were not satisfied and they were not clear about it. I do not think that the select committee process made it any clearer. It is unfortunate that my colleague’s questions were not answered. We do not have clarity. No one seems prepared to say why it is better to treat the Wildlife Act provisions in this way and why it is better to change the provisions in Parts 4 and 5.People could argue that we should just trust that the Government knows what it is doing but given Supplementary Order Paper 210 given the rest of this bill and given this week in Parliament I do not think that anybody feels like trusting that the best is being done. I think that if legislation is obscure arcane difficult to understand and unclear to people including those of us who were there after the select committee process and if we still do not see why and we have been through this process—because with officials doing their best the Government did not come clean about its agenda—we get this kind of confusion and we get this kind of concern. I just wanted to stand up and say that this bill has been dogged by the myth that it contains just technical and administrative changes when it is a fundamental shift in values. The Government has misread the values of this country. We do not privilege minerals over all else. We want proper law and proper regimes that actually create fairness and protection for sustainable things. That has not happened. This bill has gone the other way and so there is no trust around Part 5. There is no trust around any of the rest of it. I think that Supplementary Order Paper 205 which was produced on Easter Sunday—the Petrobras burning of the bridges—was a classic example. Thank you very much.ANDREW LITTLE (Labour): I want to take just a brief call on this part of the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill and the amendments to the Wildlife Act because that piece of legislation is not a widely known—or wildly known—piece of legislation and it has been around for a long time. It is an important piece of legislation and goes hand in hand—or hand in glove or hand in paw perhaps—with many other important conservation and environmental pieces of legislation that we have in this country. It has served us well without too much fiddling around for a long time. So when we are presented with amendments to the Wildlife Act in the context of legislation covering mining minerals exploration and the production processes associated with them we need to look carefully and somewhat askance I would have thought at the measures before we blindly go ahead and support them.I note that the principal amendment being made which is to section 9 of the Wildlife Act is to change the references to “by Proclamation” to the term “by Order in Council made on the recommendation of the Minister”. And herein lies the very same problem we have seen in other parts of the bill which my colleagues Ruth Dyson and Moana Mackey have spoken about eloquently and with conviction I might add in a way that we do not often see in speeches about the Wildlife Act.I just want to reiterate the concern that we have that is about the traducing of the rights of the Minister of Conservation which is redolent throughout this bill at a time when our country—we talked in the House only earlier this afternoon about the prospect of a million Chinese tourists coming down here—is marketing itself as a clean green nation and a nation that presents to the world its conservation estate its flora and its fauna as a selling point. That has historically been protected by the Minister of Conservation with the powers that that Minister has but those powers are being undermined by so many parts of this legislation and in no less a way than in Part 5 with the amendments to the Wildlife Act. It is for that reason that as with the other parts of the bill when it comes to Part 5 we express great concern about that and advise to the Committee great caution when proceeding with changes of this nature. So it is for thatreason that we are opposing not just the other parts of this bill but Part 5 in particular and the unnecessary fiddling around with the Wildlife Act 1953 which I know has been very important not just to many New Zealanders but to the Department of Conservation rangers even with their remodelled department now their revised job descriptions and the change processes that they will be undergoing. So on that basis we express great caution and reluctantly opposition to these particular changes to the otherwise innocuous piece of legislation that is the Wildlife Act 1953.The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 210 in the name of the Hon Simon Bridges to Part 5 be agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat the amendment be agreed to.Ayes61New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes59New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Amendment agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat Part 5 as amended be agreed to.Ayes61New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes59New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Part 5 as amended agreed to.Schedule 1AThe question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 210 in the name of the Hon Simon Bridges to schedule 1A be agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat the amendments be agreed to.Ayes61New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes59New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Amendments agreed to.The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 209 in the name of Te Ururoa Flavell to schedule 1A be agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat the amendment be agreed to.Ayes59New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Noes61New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Amendment not agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat schedule 1A as amended be agreed to.Ayes61New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes59New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Schedule 1A as amended agreed to.Schedule 1The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 210 in the name of the Hon Simon Bridges to schedule 1 be agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat the amendments be agreed to.Ayes61New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes59New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Amendments agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat schedule 1 as amended be agreed to.Ayes61New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes59New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Schedule 1 as amended agreed to.Schedule 2A party vote was called for on the questionThat schedule 2 be agreed to.Ayes61New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes59New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Schedule 2 agreed to.Schedule 3The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 210 in the name of the Hon Simon Bridges to schedule 3 be agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat the amendments be agreed to.Ayes61New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes59New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Amendments agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat schedule 3 as amended be agreed to.Ayes61New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes59New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Schedule 3 as amended agreed to.Schedule 4The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 210 in the name of the Hon Simon Bridges to schedule 4 be agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat the amendments be agreed to.Ayes61New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes59New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Amendments agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat schedule 4 as amended be agreed to.Ayes61New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes59New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Schedule 4 as amended agreed to.Clauses 1 and 2Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): I am pleased to be able to take what is probably going to be the final call in the Committee stage of the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill on the title and commencement—Moana Mackey: For you.Hon RUTH DYSON: For me; I am sure that other colleagues will want to make a contribution as well. The first query I want to raise—and I do hope that the Minister in the chair the Hon Chris Tremain is better able to answer questions that are addressed by members of the Committee than the other Ministers who have been sitting in thechair—is in relation to the commencement date. This is actually a really unusual situation. The original provision was that any provision that has not been brought into force earlier comes into force on the day that is 2 years after the date on which this bill receives the Royal assent. I know that the Hon Maurice Williamson is very attentive to detail and I would encourage him to take a call and tell me whether he has ever heard of such a rigmarole of commencement as that—any provision that has not been brought into force earlier comes into force on the day that is 2 years after the date on which this bill receives the Royal assent. It is a bit of a challenge. The next bill that we are debating the Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Amendment Bill fortunately has a much more straightforward commencement provision which is some time in the past. It may be equally contentious but it is quite different.The commencement provisions in this bill we are debating are very unusual. I would really appreciate the Minister of Conservation making a contribution in regard to that original proposed commencement date and then on why it was replaced with again a very complicated regime: “This Act comes into force on the earlier of the following: (a) the date appointed by the Governor-General”—not as is usual on the date of assent but—“by Order in Council: (b) the day that is 2 years after the date on which the Act receives the Royal assent.” Again it is quite an unusual provision. So that is my first question to the Minister and I strongly encourage him to take up the mandate of sitting in the chair and answering the question.He could answer the earlier question that I posed to Minister Adams in relation to proclamation because that was not answered either or he could answer the earlier question that I put to the Minister who is primarily responsible for this legislation the Hon Simon Bridges in relation to any legal advice he received on Supplementary Order Paper 205 which he dumped on the country on Easter Sunday. Simon Bridges did not answer that question either. They are all important matters. It is the only opportunity we get in this Chamber and frankly I wonder why some of these Ministers draw their salary. They sit in the chair read the paper fill out the crossword puzzle or read some important briefing papers that are significant to the future of the country but they do not take up what should be their responsibility and answer questions from members in Parliament. If they are not up to the job I consider that they should swap with somebody who is. The Hon Maurice Williamson is sitting there and I have never known him to resist an opportunity to make a contribution to a debate even if he is obviously unaware of any detail in relation to the particular matter. It has never stopped him from taking a call in this House before.I now want to refer to the title of this bill. This bill sounds pretty much like it will not do much harm. It is the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill. Well I think the title overlooks one of the biggest concerns that we have had with this bill. The title does not refer to it at all and it should. This bill is about the muzzling or bulldozing or sidelining of the Minister of Conservation in regard to significant matters of decision-making power and that should be reflected in the title. It should be called something like the “Bulldozing of the Minister of Conservation Bill”. That would not be far from the truth. It could refer to the outcome of this legislation because what is going to happen is that our conservation values are going to be put aside and the economic benefit test—where money is made for some company not even necessarily based in New Zealand or contributing to the New Zealand tax system—will win out over our conservation values which we have held so dear as part of the fabric of New Zealand society for so long. So we could just call the bill the “Money Over Values Bill” because actually that is going to be the outcome. What I think is a bit of a cheating of the New Zealand public is having a title of a bill that does not in any way refer to the outcome which will be as I said those conservation values getting trampled over andthe Minister of Conservation having his or her throat squashed to the point where just a squeak will come out not a strong clear advocacy voice as we have had in the past.MOANA MACKEY (Labour): I am disappointed that the Minister in the chair did not take heed of what my colleague Ruth Dyson said in answer to her question about the commencement date. I think it has been disappointing this afternoon that we posed a number of questions to the Ministers in the chair and all of them have sat there like dried arrangements and done nothing. None of them have gotten up on their pins and actually answered the questions. That is actually what the Committee stage is meant to be about.This bill the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill is a very very serious piece of legislation. It has very very serious implications not just for the conservation estate but for the general public and their ability to oppose the Government’s plans to ramp up deep-sea oil and gas exploration and what it means for the Minister of Conservation. So it is disappointing that the Minister has chosen not to answer my colleague’s question about the commencement date but he will of course have an opportunity in this part.Well I too do not believe that the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill adequately reflects as a title what this piece of legislation actually does. I think that if I had to rename it I would probably start by calling it the “Crown Minerals (This Is The Only Plan We Have) Bill” because that is the reality of what we are doing here. Regardless of what you might think of oil and gas exploration and mining—some people are for it some people are against it and some people are in the middle—I do not think that there is anyone who would believe that this should be the only thing that we do in terms of economic development and jobs. I do not think there are many people even in Taranaki who would say that this is the only thing that is happening in Taranaki and that this is the only thing that creates jobs. But to listen to Government members you would think that it is the only thing because they have put all their eggs in this one basket. This is it. If this does not work they have no plan B. So if all these jobs and all this money that they have been saying for years is going to flow from more oil and gas exploration and more mining—if that does not work they do not have a plan B.There is no other plan for economic development and in particular regional economic development. That is why we are seeing the kind of legislation being passed today—currently there is the Resource Management Act legislation and the exclusive economic zone legislation but today there is the Crown minerals legislation—where the Government is trying to undermine this legislation in terms of its protections for the conservation estate and its protections for the environment in order to make it as easy as possible for industry activity to go ahead regardless of the consequences.I suspect that this bill could also be called the “Crown Minerals (This Is Going to Cost a Lot More Money Than the Government Seems to Think It Is Going to) Amendment Bill”. The reality is that New Zealanders largely have faith in the process that is currently set out under the Crown Minerals Act and the Resource Management Act is another example. The minute the public loses faith in that process it actually becomes a hell of a lot more expensive for industry. When people feel that they have to engage now they have to appeal and they have to protest because they no longer feel that the systems that their Government puts in place are systems that they can trust that will uphold the highest levels of health and safety and that will uphold the highest levels of environmental protection and ensure that the preservation of the conservation estate is paramount—as soon as the public loses faith in that process then it becomes more difficult for industry not easier.When the public feels that the process is fair they will let the process play out. They will play their role in it if that is what they want to do. A lot will not; many will not. But this is a false economy. This bill could be called the “Crown Minerals (False Economy) Amendment Bill” because this is opening up so much scope for far more legal challenges and far more judicial reviews than under the current system which has worked well. Members opposite like to talk about Taranaki as being the crowning example of what this activity could achieve for the rest of the country. Well all that happened under the current Crown Minerals Act. And all that happened under the current Resource Management Act. So why do we have to really completely undermine these pieces of legislation when all that is going to happen is it is going to result in it being more difficult for industry given that we now have processes that the public do not trust?So as I said this is all the Government has. This is why we are taking so much out of the Crown Minerals Act—because it wants to make it as easy as possible. I do not think it is going to have the outcome that it thinks. I think it is actually going to have the perverse outcome of doing the opposite. What we could rename this bill—and we did not know that this was coming up of course—in relation to the Minister’s Supplementary Order Paper 205 to stop protest vessels in the exclusive economic zone from interfering with installations or with vessels would be the “Crown Minerals (Some Dangerous Behaviour Will Be Outlawed but the Rest Won’t) Amendment Bill” because the ridiculous situation that we find ourselves in is that the Government is saying that this is about safety and about complying with our international obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Well that is all very well and good but then why does it not apply to every vessel in the exclusive economic zone?If it is about safety then why should we not apply the same standard to commercial operators of any kind whether they be petroleum exploration or fisheries or cruise ships or protest vessels? Why should everyone not have the same level of scrutiny and legal obligation as we are putting on these protest vessels? Currently under what we are passing here an activity that would be deemed illegal in our territorial waters under the Maritime Transport Act is not covered by this unless it is a protest ship and that protest ship is protesting specifically against petroleum and mineral exploration. That is the ridiculous law that we are going to pass here and no member of the National Government has stood up and addressed that particular point.Then we had Minister Finlayson. I was embarrassed to see the Attorney-General come down to the Chamber to defend this. We thought he must have a legal opinion. We thought that he must have got a New Zealand Bill of Rights Act vet to challenge the legal opinion produced by Greenpeace and the group of New Zealanders who have supported it and he had not. He had nothing. We could call this legislation the “Crown Minerals (The Legal Opinion You Have When You Don’t Have a Legal Opinion) Bill” because two Ministers stood up and basically implied that they had legal opinions that supported that Supplementary Order Paper. When they were asked to table them neither of them could because they do not exist.This Supplementary Order Paper is not compliant with our New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. This does not comply with our international obligations. It is an embarrassment and that is because this Government has mishandled the issue of oil and gas exploration particularly in the exclusive economic zone so badly—it has mishandled it to such an extreme—that the public are taking to the seas in protest because that is the only way they feel they can get the Government’s attention. And they got the attention of the Government all right. The Government is now legislating away the public’s right to oppose what the Government does. That is completely outrageousand it is an embarrassment for an Attorney-General whose job it is to uphold the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act to come down to the Chamber and defend it. It would have been better if he had just ignored it and not come down here and put on the petty show that he did attacking Geoffrey Palmer attacking Dame Anne Salmond—New Zealander of the Year—in a display that can be described only as waspish and not becoming of our Attorney-General. And then at the end of it to not even have a legal opinion—apart from his own opinion; I guess he is a lawyer and that is a kind of legal opinion—and to not actually have done the work to back up what he was saying that is a shame on this country that our Attorney-General does not take his very important constitutional role far more seriously.My colleague Ruth Dyson talked about the fact that powers have been taken away from the Minister of Conservation. I remember that press conference where Gerry Brownlee sat next to Kate Wilkinson and said: “This will be a shared decision-making power.” and the visual image just said it all really. Minister Wilkinson sat there and said absolutely nothing and was completely dwarfed by Minister Brownlee who was the Minister of Energy and Resources at the time and who completely ran the whole press conference. He ran the show. So this could be called the “Crown Minerals (No One Really Believes It’s a Shared Decision-making Power) Bill” because the fact is that the Minister of Energy and Resources is now in charge of determining whether or not mining will go ahead on conservation land. We know that will then skew the current balanced approach towards industry regardless of the impact on our very very valuable and precious conservation land.This is a very important role that the Minister of Conservation carries out on behalf of the people of New Zealand. The Minister of Conservation is the custodian of the Department of Conservation estate and it is entirely appropriate that that is the person who determines whether the impact on conservation land is such that an activity should go ahead or should not go ahead and now that has been stripped out. Now it is this shared decision-making power. As I said no one believes it is a shared decision-making power. This is once again a National Government that is so bereft of ideas to create jobs and to grow our economy that it is having to make these kinds of changes in order to smooth the way as much as possible for these activities regardless of whether they are carried out responsibly. Where they are carried out responsibly and with minimal environmental impact that is fine. That is what the current system allows for and that is absolutely fine. But that is not what is happening here. Now we are saying: “Actually that goes out the window.” and the impact on this conservation land—and we will see I think more mining projects on schedule 4 land because companies are out there right now having a look at what is out there prospecting. You do not pay the money to look unless you have been told that you are going to be allowed to go in and get. That is the reality. So that is a broken promise. This could be called the “Crown Minerals (Schedule 4 Promise Broken—Surprise Surprise) Amendment Bill” because clearly the industry has been told that schedule 4 will be opened up or relaxed.GARETH HUGHES (Green): Kia ora. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. I rise to take a call in this Committee stage of the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill. We are looking now at the title and commencement clauses of this legislation. In earlier calls I talked about how it could be called the “Petrobras Law Bill”. Perhaps we could call Supplementary Order Paper 205 which now will be included in this legislation the “Anadarko amendment”. I also suggested that we could maybe call it the “A Bridge Too Far Bill” because of the way it tramples on our constitutional and human rights and the freedom to protest which successive New Zealand Governments and generations have held up as an honourable tradition and a key part about what it isto be a New Zealander—someone who sticks up for our values and our principles on the world stage.In earlier calls the Minister directly levelled a number of questions around economic management in my direction and that is why I would contend that actually this legislation should be called the “Crown Minerals (Lazy Economic Gamble) Bill”. I say “lazy economic gamble” because this is the heart of the Government’s economic strategy. We have seen the worst economic performance in 50 years yet—Hon Ruth Dyson: 51 I think now.GARETH HUGHES: —51 years Ms Dyson says—all the Government can point to is oil and gas as its strategy. We have seen some economic benefits in Taranaki and I am the first to say that the Green Party is not opposed to shallow offshore drilling. We are not opposed to onshore drilling. We think we should have a transition strategy because look even the International Energy Agency—hardly a bastion of radical green thought—is saying that we need to leave 80 percent of the oil that we already know about not discounting the stuff we do not know about which Anadarko and Petrobras were prospecting for in the ground. We have to leave 80 percent of it in the ground if we are going to avoid runaway climate change. So the Greens are not opposed to onshore shallow drilling. We think we should have a transition strategy.But look this is not an economic strategy for the country. We have got such a high unemployment rate at the moment yet when we look at Taranaki it has got the lowest job-creating potential of any sector in that economy. When you look at its economic statistics for every $1.2 million of GDP you see only one worker employed in the oil and gas sector. In agriculture it is 15 and in retail it is 33. I am the first to acknowledge there are many high-paid jobs but if jobs is your question oil and gas is not the answer to building a large number of workers. Take the Government’s East Coast oil and gas report. The most likely scenario there said we might see 199 jobs. I would love to see 199 extra jobs on the East Coast because that region is really struggling under this Government’s economic stewardship. But this region has lost more than 900 jobs in manufacturing alone in the first 4 years of the National Government’s term. Even if the most likely scenario went ahead and we saw dozens of fracking wells up and down the East Coast the region is still going backwards under National. So if jobs is the question and it rightfully is oil and gas is not the answer.It is a lazy economic gamble because the entire premise is the hope that some foreign offshore company will come down here find something and sell it offshore. There is hardly any value-add. There is hardly any benefit for our economy. We have got the fourth-lowest royalty plus tax rate of any oil-producing nation in the world. We are going to benefit less than most other nations in the world. Simon Bridges’ predecessor Phil Heatley made it easier to bring in foreign offshore oil workers. He amended the immigration rules and made 11 oil worker positions able to be expedited through the skilled shortages list. We know there are going to be fewer New Zealanders working in the sector so this is why I think the bill should be called the “Lazy Economic Gamble Bill”. It is lazy. There is no innovation there is no plan and there is no strategic thought. There is no sense of where the global economic trends are going how New Zealand can shape its economy how we can turn this direction and how we can address some of the structural imbalances in our economy.It is lazy because clearly the trends are moving away from oil. This is what the International Energy Agency says and this is what the IMF says. In the last month we have seen reports from HSBC and others such as Standard and Poor’s saying that actually with the risks of climate change and global high energy prices we are seeing a similar occurrence to the subprime mortgages in the States. Essentially these oil assets that some of these big oil majors have are toxic because they cannot be developed atthe moment. All the trends are going in one direction. When you look at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance report from 2011 it showed that for the first time ever more money was invested in clean energy than fossil fuels—the first time ever in 2011. This is the direction we should be taking our country. So instead of the “Crown Minerals (Lazy Economic Gamble) Bill” we should have a new energy bill to focus on the current century’s economic trend.This is what PricewaterhouseCoopers says when it says we could have a $22 billion economic opportunity in clean energy. It is what the likes of Pure Advantage says in its recent report on the green economy—that we could see 3000 jobs which the energy Minister says we could see if we develop an entire new petroleum basin. Of course that is direct and indirect jobs. But we could see 50000 green jobs in New Zealand if we embraced clean energy. You see the likes of Greenpeace saying 100 percent renewable is possible. We could be saving $600 million per annum. We could be reducing that $8 billion fuel import which I contend is one of the most significant strategic threats to our economy. The Government’s deficit is of a similar order of magnitude. Making a dent in that $8 billion fuel import bill would make a huge difference to the Crown’s books instead of a lazy economic gamble that bets it all on the hope that foreign offshore oil companies find something which again is still up in the air.I understand that in our exploratory wells there is in the order of less than half the likelihood of offshore averages of striking oil. We are called a frontier region to the offshore oil zone. What we know of course is we are going to see hardly any royalties hardly any taxes and hardly any jobs for New Zealanders. All the profits are going to flow offshore but then we are going to face 100 percent of the environmental risks. This is what my motivation is because I do not want to see oil washing up on our beaches. I do not want to see our agricultural sector our tourism sector or our horticultural sector devastated by an oil spill.What we know is that the exploratory drilling phase which is what we are talking about with this Government is the riskiest phase. A month ago the European Union put out a report saying that exploratory drilling is the riskiest phase. What we are talking about with deep-sea oil drilling is operating at the frontiers of geology geography and technology. We are talking about an environment that is a kilometre deep or deeper. Just off my home town of Wellington the permit the Government has recently given to the very same company that had a 25 percent stake in the Deepwater Horizon $40 billion oil spill Anadarko is 2.7 kilometres down. There the pressure would crush a person in a second. It is pitch-black and close to freezing yet the oil they are prospecting for is coming out close to boiling. It is the frontiers of geology and technology because we just still do not know what is down there despite advances in a modern seismic 3-D survey and computer mapping tools. You can still have an accident and that is what we have seen in Azerbaijan that is what we have seen with the Montara oil spill in Australia in 2009 and that is what we have seen with Deepwater Horizon. The spill there had an oil exclusion zone almost as large as the North Island.Tragically I do not think we were well enough prepared for theRena oil spill. We struggled with 300 tonnes of oil entering our marine environment there. With the Deepwater Horizon deep-sea oil blowout we saw up to 600000 tonnes of oil entering the environment. The US Government had a thousand vessels and 40000 people working on that spill. Maritime New Zealand in New Zealand has got three vessels—well they are really dinghies. They are a similar size to the skimmers. We have got approximately 200 to 300 staff. Our oil spill response capacity is minuscule compared with the US Government.We are a frontier region far from international oil infrastructure. The only solution to the Deepwater Horizon blowout was the relief rig which drilled a relief well to take offthe pressure so it could be capped. This is possibly the most worrying factor for New Zealand because this Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill does nothing about protecting us by having a relief rig in New Zealand waters. I got the Parliamentary Library in December last year to map where relief rigs capable of drilling to the depths of where we are planning to drill exploratory wells in New Zealand were located in the southern hemisphere. I understand there were three in the entire Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean regions. We could be waiting weeks or months for a relief rig to finally travel to New Zealand if it could be found if it could be contracted to finally drill a relief well and plug a well.So until we can get a guarantee from this Government and until we can get a guarantee from the industry that we will not see oil spills—similar to shallow drilling in New Zealand which has been done on the whole pretty well—and until we can see similar safety standards the Green Party is going to say no to deep-sea oil drilling. But we are going to say yes to clean energy we are going to say yes to clean energy jobs and we are going to say yes to an accurate and fair carbon price that has a level playing field. We are not going to pick winners in oil and gas which is what the Government is doing. We are not going to throw tens of millions of dollars at seismic surveys. We are not going to literally call out the navy and change the laws when people get in the way. The Green Party is going to have a smart future-focused economy. We are not going to introduce legislation that could—Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Labour—West Coast - Tasman): The previous speech was very interesting with a lot of facts provided by the member Gareth Hughes who indeed identified some of the many concerns we have. I will talk on the title and the commencement clauses of this bill the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill. There are a couple of issues here that I would like to raise.The title of the Act is to be the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Act 2012. The bill deals with a lot of issues there have been Supplementary Order Papers come up and the Commerce Committee recommended a few amendments. The most valuable contribution that this bill provides in my view is the implementation of better health and safety standards and requirements at every level of the permitting regime.There is one thing I would say with regard to the title. Given that the Pike River disaster identified and alerted us to huge flaws problems and systemic failure in the regime that oversees minerals extraction in this country probably the least we could have done was acknowledge the changes that are being made as a result of that disaster and I guess give recognition to the terrible loss. It might have been fair to consider changing the title of this bill which will become an Act to recognise that some of the key provisions and the greatest advancements made by this bill will be in the area of health and safety.It still will not guarantee the implementation of the standards because unless the Government and the Minister carefully read the report provided yesterday to the Labour Group of the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment accept it and admit total systems failure right from the top to the bottom and revamp and resource it the changes made in this bill will not mean as much as we think they might or as much as they should.So the title which we are debating at the moment at the latter stage of debate on this bill could perhaps have been changed to better reflect and recognise the reason that we are making some of these changes here. We are making these changes because of health and safety. We are making these changes for the protection of miners—protection of their lives and protection of their health and safety—and for their working conditions.I am I guess asking the Committee and the Minister whether we could perhaps have thought better about this. Rather than just plough on with the same title that wasdelivered to the select committee changes should have been made to reflect the significant incorporation of Supplementary Order Paper 152 which was a direct result of the report of the royal commission to the Government. And I acknowledge the Government’s taking of that report reading it and making the changes necessary.Another significant change to the title could have been made on the basis that this bill is putting huge pressure on the Department of Conservation. Although it is permitting it should also be protecting Crown land. What New Zealanders expect and what any landowner wants is the right to have a say over what goes on their land what occurs on their land and the rights that they have. As I have said before in the House although there will be some who think this is a wonderful step forward for the mining industry the compromising of landowners’ rights—that is the compromising of the rights of the Minister of Conservation to oversee the land for conservation purposes—sets a precedent that should worry any other landowner as well.If the Government is so blind and ignorant to the realities of the world that it thinks it can plough ahead with mining at all costs—even though it was challenged over the issue of schedule 4 land and stepped back from that—in an unbalanced way without proper protections for individuals and without proper protections for natural and environmental values then it is dreaming. It will undermine the progress that the mining industry has made over the last hundred years in terms of better awareness of environmental protection. I applaud the industry for the progress it has made. But a Government that drives inappropriate change will drive appropriate reaction and that may very well make it harder for the mining industry to progress some of the projects that it has. So it is a warning about trampling over the rights of landowners as was the case prior to 1992 when the Crown which owned the rights to the minerals under the ground was able to override the rights of the people who owned the ground. We find that rather abhorrent now but it was the situation until the early 1990s.The Government has reintroduced some of the principles of that here on the conservation estate where the landowner—the Minister—does not have the right to have the final say and there is in fact a compromise situation. Some may see that as comfortable. It is just a warning for other landowners. So the title could have been changed to better reflect some of the significant things that are happening in this bill.The other issue I will raise is around the commencement date. It will be 2 years after the date on which the bill receives the Royal assent. I guess that families and other people who are connected with the Pike River tragedy would say: “Why the delay?”. Indeed it is upon us to implement as quickly as possible the changes to ensure proper health and safety. The Government will say it has done that but actually if you have a look at what has happened with the resourcing in the Labour Group of the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment you will see that it is pretty pathetic. It has got a few more people on the ground it has got a bit more resource but whether it is sufficient is a question that I leave open because the damning report into the Labour Group’s systems would say that a total revamp is needed not just a few people added into the system.So the delay that the commencement date allows could do two things. It might allow the Government to go away and properly resource it to ensure that the provisions in this bill will be upheld and policed but it might just mean that the Government carries on with an inadequate regime of health and safety and oversight in the mining industry. I hope the latter is not the case. We need to make sure that any miner who goes underground—be it for prospecting be it for mining purposes or be it for the maintenance of a mine as is the case in Spring Creek—is going to a safe environment and that all the conditions laid down by the company by the ministry and by the miners themselves are at the top end of international safety standards.I have made my points regarding these two issues. I just hope that the progress here in health and safety does indeed deliver us a world-class system of protection of workers as they go into any mining environment and I have to say that that does not mean just an underground mine; it includes open-cast situations as well. I have been mining in Australia myself and I understand the dangers. They are not present just in underground mining and I hope that the Government resources the provisions laid out in this bill to ensure that they indeed can be policed.GARETH HUGHES (Green): It is customary to come up with parody titles when you are debating the title and commencement clauses of bills in the Committee stage. A parody title that I would like to suggest for this bill the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill is the “Crown Minerals (Lawmaking at its Worst) Bill” because what we have seen I think is a pretty shocking abuse. I use that strong word in a considered manner because I believe that it is an abuse of the process. What we have seen is lawmaking at its worst. It is as if Simon Bridges has been looking at the tributes to Margaret Thatcher in the last few days and has decided that that is what he is going to model his legislative style on—the most intransigent iron-willed nature of that formidable Prime Minister.What we see here is a Minister who has introduced a substantive amendment which international and legal experts and eminent New Zealanders have said has significant constitutional impacts and is an attack on rights. The Minister introduced this amendment on Supplementary Order Paper 205 on Easter Sunday when everyone rightfully was opening up their Easter eggs and spending time with their family and maybe not watchingQ+A in the morning. The Supplementary Order Paper introduces a substantive amendment but of course by being introduced as an amendment it had no select committee scrutiny it had no Attorney-General New Zealand Bill of Rights Act vet and it meant that we have seen this amendment—the “Anadarko amendment” it has been called—introduced and a week later voted on.The Government would have liked to see the third reading of the bill today. That was not to be the case so we have another week to organise and I see that the cyber-petitions are rolling in. There were 10000 signatures in the first 24 hours so I am sure there will be a lot more. It is lawmaking at its worst because by avoiding the select committee hearing you cannot hear from the public and you cannot hear from the experts.Another bill that I saw raced through the legislative process was with regard to ultra-fast broadband where $1.35 billion of taxpayers’ money was on the line. That resulted in some embarrassing snafus from the Government’s perspective and now we are seeing Chorus with a $300 million blowout. If you do not have that public and expert ability to submit and the ability for the select committee to amend legislation you have bad consequences. If you do not have a New Zealand Bill of Rights Act vet I believe that you can have much more severe impacts not just on the bottom line of a company but on fundamental values that we hold dear—that is human rights.I call this bill the “Crown Minerals (Lawmaking at its Worst) Bill” because we should not be addressing legislation to amend the law to benefit one sector. Simon Bridges in the earlier calls in the Committee stage was alleging that the Greens would have pro-protester laws. I say that no we have laws in New Zealand and they apply to all New Zealanders. But what we see in this legislation is laws specifically targeting one company. You can do the very same thing against a fishing boat and not face the same charges as you will under this legislation when it is finally commenced. It is only one sector that gets impacted. I do not believe that that is lawmaking at its best. We should not be writing laws to benefit one sector.This legislation contains arrest and detention powers for the military. Again we should be using these considerable constitutionally important powers sparingly only in extreme circumstances. We should not be turning the New Zealand Navy into the private security company for the Anadarko Petroleum Corporation.I know that you all read the Green Party blog Frogblog and what I have proposed there is—Hon Maurice Williamson: You have got to be joking.GARETH HUGHES: Parliament’s IT expert Mr Williamson is not a reader of Frogblog and I am immensely surprised.Andrew Little: I thought everybody read it.GARETH HUGHES: Yes apparently no one reads it. Not many people read it when you look at the blog rankings. Anyway I put up a blog there where I posted my proposal. I am going to take it to the Standing Orders Committee. I am going to introduce it and support what David McGee recommended to the Standing Orders Committee in 2003 with the Wellington District Law Society which is that we should actually have a New Zealand Bill of Rights Act vet for substantive Supplementary Order Papers. I think it is important. We have obviously a unicameral House and considerable legislative powers without the controls that you have in other overseas legislatures. I believe that it is important that we have a New Zealand Bill of Rights Act overview over substantive Supplementary Order Papers and I hope that other parties would support a move in that direction. I think it would be a positive step. What we do not want to see is Crown mineral lawmaking and worse legislation passing. We want to see lawmaking at its best and that is what I believe New Zealanders demand of this House. Kia ora.JONATHAN YOUNG (National—New Plymouth): I moveThat the question be now put.A party vote was called for on the questionThat the question be now put.Ayes61New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes59New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Motion agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat clause 1 be agreed to.Ayes61New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes59New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Clause 1 agreed to.The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 210 in the name of the Hon Simon Bridges to clause 2 be agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat the amendment be agreed to.Ayes61New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes59New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Amendment agreed to.A party vote was called for on the questionThat clause 2 as amended be agreed to.Ayes61New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes59New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Clause 2 as amended agreed to.Hon CHRIS TREMAIN (Minister of Internal Affairs) on behalf of theMinister of Energy and Resources: I moveThat the Committee divide the bill into the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill the Conservation Amendment Bill (No 2) the Continental Shelf Amendment Bill the Reserves Amendment Bill and the Wildlife Amendment Billpursuant to Supplementary Order Paper 208.A party vote was called for on the questionThat the motion be agreed to.Ayes61New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes59New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Motion agreed to.House resumed.Bill reported with amendment.The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): I moveThat the report be adopted.A party vote was called for on the questionThat the report be adopted.Ayes61New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes59New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Report adopted.