Sage Eugenie: Mount Maunganui Borough Reclamation and Empowering Act Repeal Bill — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Sage Eugenie: Mount Maunganui Borough Reclamation and Empowering Act Repeal Bill — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 07 November 2012. Volume:685;Page:6380. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
EUGENIE SAGE (Green) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Speaker. I am pleased to rise and take a short call on the Mount Maunganui Borough Reclamation and Empowering Act Repeal Bill. The Green Party like others supports the bill and congratulates Te Ururoa Flavell on bringing the bill to the House. The bill is going to repeal the principal 1975 Act that gave authority for the transfer of part of the bed of the Tauranga Moana the Tauranga Harbour to what was then the Mount Maunganui Borough Council and what is now the Tauranga City Council for its sewerage scheme and other municipal purposes. 
The improvements in sewage treatment and discharge in Aotearoa New Zealand over the last 100 years are due in no small measure to iwi such as Nga Potiki and many others who have championed clean water and the health of our harbours our rivers and our inshore coast and sought to safeguard these areas from the indifference of local authorities. As the Waitangi Tribunal said in its report on the Tauranga Moana claim: “for decades local councils regarded Tauranga Harbour as the obvious repository for sewage.” It was as late as the 1950s at Mount Maunganui that the sewerage system was still very primitive. Sewage effluent there could end up in an open drain. Residents relied on septic tanks right through until the 1970s with the associated risk of effluent leakage into the harbour and waterways. So it was this reclamation within the south-eastern arm of Tauranga Harbour the Rangataua estuary that the principal Act and this bill deal with. That was in response to the inadequacies of a growing population relying on septic tanks. So in 1972 the borough council’s scheme involved this reclamation within the estuary and the construction of oxidation ponds and effluent was proposed to be discharged directly into the estuary until an ocean outfall was built at Omanu. 
It was Tauranga Maori including the kaumatua of Nga Potiki who strongly opposed this reclamation and the oxidation ponds because of their effects on the estuary the destruction of a flourishing ecosystem on the tidal flats and their whole desire to protect their ancestral landscape their taonga of the harbour and to protect their shellfish beds. When you read through the Waitangi Tribunal report and its description of the intense efforts that Nga Potiki made to try to protect the health of this landscape it is very interesting to compare those efforts with the efforts of iwi now to protect the health of our beloved awa and roto our rivers and lakes. Back in 1972 Tauranga Maori convinced the Pollution Advisory Council of the time to reclassify the harbour waters to a standard that would prevent the oxidation pond discharges and then in the next year the classification was changed back again. There was an early claim to the Waitangi Tribunal and a whole series of appeals. The Act which this bill repeals cut across those local tensions and challenges and it gave the Mount Maunganui Borough Council the authority to proceed with this destructive reclamation and to construct the ponds. Although we now have wetlands that filter the discharge before it goes into the ocean the way in which the land was taken remains enormously hurtful to Nga Potiki and because of the hurt to their ancestral landscape. This bill is a small step in settling the claim and recognising the hurt that was caused. 
Just as that principal Act cut across the local challenges to the Mount Maunganui Borough Council’s proposed scheme today we hear that the Minister for Primary Industries and this Government intend to change the Resource Management Act to make it much more difficult for those councils which are belatedly trying to deal with the impacts on our rivers aquifers and lakes of the heavy nutrient burden that intensive agriculture is putting on these waterways. Changing the Resource Management Act to impose a more onerous cost-benefit test on councils when they are considering policies and rules to control the impacts of agricultural intensification would be creating an obstacle to the protection of our rivers and lakes just in the same way that the principal Act created the enormous hurt on this ancestral landscape by giving the council the authority to do this reclamation. Just as in this bill we are recognising the much greater value that we put on our estuaries and inshore coasts now we need to better value our roto and our awa and we need to remove that pollution burden that is happening now—not because of human sewage so much but more because of animal effluent. 
This bill is a step forward. I acknowledge the Tauranga City Council and the partnership that it is developing with Nga Potiki. Certainly at the Local Government and Environment Committee the joint submission from Nga Potiki and the city council wanted this bill to repeal the Act in a timely manner and I think the House is doing that. We are very pleased as the Green Party to support the bill.