Mackey Moana: Marine Legislation Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMackey Moana: Marine Legislation Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 24 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13627. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MOANA MACKEY (Labour): I am going to take a short call just because I forgot to mention Supplementary Order Paper 363 on the Marine Legislation Bill from the Green member Gareth Hughes in my first speech.The first thing I will say is that it would have been nice if we had got the Supplementary Order Paper earlier than 10.30 p.m. this morning.Jacinda Ardern: A.m.MOANA MACKEY: Sorry 10.30 a.m. this morning. By that stage we had gone through our procedures process of determining how we would vote. We had a number of members including the two MPs for the Chatham Islands Rino Tirikatene and the Hon Annette King who wanted a little bit more time to consider it. We certainly think that there is a lot of merit in some of the concerns that have been raised. I know that it is an issue that has been raised with Maryan Street before but we did not feel that we could vote for a Supplementary Order Paper at such short notice when we had not given affected members of Parliament in our caucus—part of the Chatham Rise is included in this protect area—the opportunity to hear both sides of the debate and to decide No. 1 whether or not this Supplementary Order Paper was actually going to deliver what the Green member Gareth Hughes intends it to deliver and also whether there were not going to be any unintended consequences because this is an area where there is significant scientific debate. It is very interesting and I am very very sorry but I am afraid that 5 or 6 hours’ notice of a Supplementary Order Paper really is not enough for us in the Labour Party to feel that we have given it due consideration and have looked at the science and the evidence around that matter. So it is an issue that we are going to continue to consider as a caucus and we look forward to working with the Green Party further on that matter but it is not an issue that we can vote for today.I want to also address a question that the member Gareth Hughes raised about deep-sea drilling—I know that the Greens support a ban on deep-sea oil drilling—and the Labour Party position on this. My first question when someone says to me “Do you support a ban on deep-sea drilling?” is “What do you define as deep sea?”. I have sat through many many select committee considerations on many many technical bills and many many environmental bills and I do not want to sit in a select committee for 6 months arguing down to the nanometre about what constitutes deep sea and what does not only to then have enormous reviews about how it was measured especially when I think that it would be difficult around the science to pick where deep sea begins and shallow sea ends. What I want to see and what Labour wants to see is a robust regime throughout the entire marine environment. Depth is very much a risk factor. It is very much something that does need to be taken into consideration and conventional wisdom says that the further out you go and the deeper you get the more risky it is.That needs to be considered and the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Act which we are amending today is not adequate to provide that robust risk assessment analysis. It is not. It is woefully inadequate.So what we want to see is a regime that is consistent right throughout our marine environment and that considers all the variables that are taken into account when carrying out a risk assessment. In some cases yes depth is going to be the overriding risk factor. In other cases it may not be. I would hate for a focus on one risk factor to be to the detriment of others. There may be other things such as seismic activity ecological sensitivity and a whole range of issues that occur in shallow water as well that need to be taken into account and that under the exclusive economic zone legislation are not adequately being taken into account.Labour supports a robust regime where environmental protection is the bottom line no matter how deep the water is—no matter how deep the water is. There may be some projects in shallow water that should not go ahead because of the risk assessment around them but at the moment the problem we have is that we do not have confidence in that risk assessment process. We do not have confidence in the Environmental Protection Authority which does not have an investigative capability and yet which under an amendment being raised in Part 2 today is now going to be the sole decider of whether or not a marine consent for exploratory drilling goes ahead. It will be the sole decider because it is not going to have the benefit of the submission process that exists in the current economic exclusion zone legislation a submission process that the previous Minister of Energy and Resources Phil Heatley promised would remain in the legislation. That process has now gone so all that information and the benefit of that information that comes from experts from interested individuals from NGOs and from industry is now going to be non-notified. It is not going to happen and that is the issue that we have.So I certainly acknowledge the Greens’ concerns around these activities. I can say that although the exclusive economic zone legislation is woefully inadequate until we get a Labour Government that changes it we do not support that activity going ahead in the exclusive economic zone. It should not go ahead until we have adequate regulation in place that has environmental protection as its bottom line. We need to recognise that the line between our territorial waters and our exclusive economic zone is jurisdictional only. It has nothing to do with the environment. It has nothing to do with risk. It has nothing to do with anything other than that our territorial waters are within 12 nautical miles and beyond that we have the right to extract resources only because we are a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. It is not our territorial area. For a jurisdictional line we do not see the need to draw some kind of difference between the two regimes in legislation that operate on either side of that: the Resource Management Act for our territorial waters and the exclusive economic zone legislation for our exclusive economic zone. When that line is jurisdictional only it makes absolutely no sense particularly on a scientific basis to have two such differing regimes one of which we are further weakening today by removing the public’s right to have their say during the consent process for marine consents for exploratory drilling.I hope that provides some clarity to the Green Party. As I said it is with regret that we were unable really to have the time to give more consideration to the merits of Gareth Hughes’ Supplementary Order Paper. It is an issue we will be considering further but in future the more time we are given to consider a Supplementary Order Paper around such a serious area the better. In terms of good decision-making on behalf of the Labour Party we simply did not feel that we were given that opportunity. Thank you.