Pugh MaureenMAUREEN PUGH (National): Thank you very much Madam Speaker. I rise to oppose the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill in its first reading today. I've got to say when I started reading this I didn't know where to start. I've only got 10 minutes but this debate could take days.I thought I'd start with the contribution from the Greens. All the movement towards green energy but they fail to understand where do they think electric vehicles come from? Where do they think solar panels come from? The technology our building materials—everything you see in this room has been derived from some mining product even if it was the steel to chop up the wood on these tables. It does not come from Santa Claus; it comes from mining. Please join those dots.I go back to the Christmas theme: I wonder why this bill is being introduced during urgency at this time of the year. I've got a very strong suspicion this is going to be dumped on a select committee the next sitting block which is the last one before Christmas. They'll open it up for submissions over the summer period when nobody's really concentrating and then it will be back and pushed through again next year. This is such a stupid bill because everything that we do locally has the highest environmental standards in the world and all we are doing is pushing those standards down by importing from countries with lower standards than ours. We only have to look at the track record of this Government to be sceptical about the outcome of this legislation. We are going to be the poorer for it.I note the contribution from the Māori Party about iwi consultation. All that is doing is adding yet another layer of bureaucracy. Imagine a miner—now this is a guy in his gumboots and muddy clothes—again now having to make another contribution to his annual report. What on earth is that going to do in terms of adding value? The resource consent process has already gone through that.I'll tell you how some councils do it well. When I was the mayor in the Westland District Council we looked at our mining sector we looked at the bureaucracy that was involved in that and the bit that we could control was the consenting. We now have a one-stop shop for land clearance and monitoring and the discharge consents and that works extremely well but you know where the bottleneck is? The bottleneck is here in Wellington.Now the Government says that it's going to manage mining. It hasn't been able to manage mining now so how on earth are they ever going to manage it in the future? They won't because what they are trying to do is the sinking-lid policy. A great example of that is the Spring Creek application with New Zealand Petroleum and Minerals' decision to probably decline it. It's an existing mine. There are no further environmental impacts from it and New Zealand Petroleum and Minerals have advised that they are likely to decline it. If we can't get a consent for an existing mine now under this legislation it will be impossible. So I don't know why the rush is to get this in through urgency but I'm very sceptical about that.So I'd like to turn my mind now to the global financial crisis (GFC) that we had a few years ago. One of the countries that I looked at and kept an eye on during that terrible economic time was Australia. Australia didn't feel the impact of the GFC anywhere near as much as some international countries. And the reason for that? The reason for that was because they had a very healthy mining sector and that kept paying the bills in that country.We should be celebrating our resources and our mining sector and we should be promoting it not managing it into decline. If ever there was a time to be promoting economic development with the natural resources that we've got available to us in this country it is now. We are heading into another economic quagmire because of this Government and here they are with yet another bit of legislation that is going to sink us further into the quagmire. It's hard to believe as we are now embedded in an economic crisis a cost of living crisis that they would stymie one of the most productive industries in this country. I cannot believe that anyone would consider that cutting us off at the knees in terms of economic development and productivity in this country that this Government would go ahead with this bill; it is absolutely nuts.In the meantime—in the meantime—as some of my colleagues have alluded to what we don't do here we bring in from offshore. If the example could be any more stark it is with the gas industry the very transition fuel that we needed to transition away from high-carbon emissions into gas while we wait for the technology to catch up as Simon Court proclaimed so well before. While we wait for that technology to catch up we had a transition fuel but that's been knocked on the head as well.Please join the dots. See what is happening on the ground in this country. We are doomed under the types of legislation that this Government keeps throwing at us. I cannot believe that it is even on the table. We have massive environmental controls over our mining sector. We have good people working in it. We have the resources here in this country and I just think we are doomed under this country. The cost of living crisis that we are now in is only going to get worse with policy like this coming down at us. Don't worry about the consultation because I'll be making sure our mining sector is well aware of what's happening. There will be submissions and again I'm a bit sceptical about that. We had 88000 of them for the three waters consultation and how many did we end up listening to? A couple of hundred—a couple of hundred of selected submitters because the decisions were already made. I imagine it's the same with this one. The National Party does not support this bill.