Hughes Gareth: Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hughes Gareth: Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 16 August 2012. Volume:682;Page:4497. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
GARETH HUGHES (Green) 
: 
 Kia ora. Nga mihi nui ki a koutou kia ora. I rise to take a call on the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Bill—the “Exclusive Economic Zone Drilling Bill” as I call it. It is disappointing that we are having this debate now. I think that the Green Party and Labour Party were quite earnest in their desire to see this bill go back to the Local Government and Environment Committee. I do not think it was a matter of playing politics with this bill; it is just the scope of the amendments put forward by the Minister for the Environment on Supplementary Order Paper 100.  
I have asked the Minister whether we could vote clause by clause because as I will explain in my call today some of the amendments we support and some we do not. We would like to be able to vote for the ones that we do support. But the Minister said that she would not support that because the Supplementary Order Paper is so long and there are so many clauses being amended. If it is so large if there are so many clauses being amended what is the harm of taking it back to the select committee to have more investigation and to actually get a robust solid bill coming out of the committee? 
 What I think everyone in this House wants to see is a good bill come out of this House. No party in this Parliament wants to see the current legislative regulatory vacuum that occurs in our exclusive economic zone. By means of introduction to the people listening on telly and in the gallery today what this bill does is set up a regime for our exclusive economic zone between the 12 and 200 nautical miles. It is a place where there has not been a great deal of rules or a framework through which you can apply for consents. 
The Green Party since 1988—the earliest reference I can find—when we first entered Parliament has been calling for comprehensive oceans legislation because there has been a huge gap. It is critical that this Parliament gets it right. A number of players be they oil drillers or conservationists want certainty. They want to know what the rules are. They want to know that the rules are not going to change and that the carpet will not be pulled from beneath them. What everyone wants is a robust bill that gets turned into law that we can all agree on. 
What we want is something like the Resource Management Act which has been an enduring framework. It is important to get it right because as the chair of the Local Government and Environment Committee Nicky Wagner pointed out we have a very large exclusive economic zone the fifth-largest in the world. It is an amazing environment where I think Kiwis take our sustenance from—our spiritual sustenance and obviously our physical sustenance with our kai moana. It is where we get our economic sustenance from. You know our $20 billion “clean green” brand in part comes from our ocean environment. It is where our tourism our aquaculture and our fisheries industries are thriving. The simple fact is that Kiwis love our environment. 
Obviously people want to explore and exploit the environment and that is why it is critical that we have this bill. So the Minister has come to Parliament with a huge number of amendments set out on her Supplementary Order Paper. I want to touch on this before going into a little detail on four of those points. The first thing is that we were earnest and up front with our desire to take this bill back to the select committee. I am hoping that the Minister will consider it. I understand that leave was sought but the Committee is the master of its own destiny. The Committee might wish to consider putting that motion again. After all what we want to see is a good law. 
We think that the process around those amendments was less than desirable. The Opposition parties went to the Minister off our own bats to try to negotiate in good faith. We had a good meeting and it is unfortunate that these amendments were literally sort of slammed on the Table or uploaded to the website with no notice. The Minister used what I call the Olympic strategy because what we have seen is a number of quite significant announcements over the course of the Olympics from Maui’s dolphins to sea lions to the seismic regulations. What the Government has done is announce a raft of top-level changes with its amendments but it did not actually alert the public or Parliament to the rest of the amendments. It is not just the five amendments that were highlighted in the press release. We are talking about pages and pages of various amendments. 
So while the Government was trying to spin the amendments as trying to strengthen the bill from an environmental perspective I chuckled at the headline in the  
National Business Review  
that said the Government was buckling to Green pressure. What we know I think is that it is simply spin. It is simply spin from this Government. There are some amendments we can agree with and a whole host that we do not but ultimately we are not seeing a better bill coming out. We are not seeing a more robust enduring solution for this vexed problem which has faced numerous Parliaments. 
The first significant amendment is to clause 10 the purpose clause. We endorse the change we have seen here which is in the language “sustainable management” but we think we should have gone a bit further. We take our hats off to the Minister because she got rid of that flawed “balanced” ideology as I put it. What I think the Government is talking about when it talks about balance is that you can trade off a little bit of environmental degradation for a little bit of profit. The flip side of that is that you can trade off a whole host of environmental degradation if there is a profit in it. 
What we know about New Zealand is that in our oil industry we have got the fourth-lowest Government royalty and tax rates for what we are getting. It is not the Kiwi economy that is benefiting on the whole; it is those foreign-owned companies meaning that New Zealand is facing 100 percent of the environmental risk for the fourth-lowest royalty plus tax rate in the world. It also means that there are numerous tax exemptions that there are hardly any jobs for Kiwis and that the profits are going offshore. We reject what we consider the flawed ideology around “balance”. We take our hats off to the Minister in that she has removed it. But she has gone only halfway because we have got those critical words “sustainable management” in clause 10 the purpose clause but what we do not have is the rest of it. 
The Government I think has been a bit confused about how close or distant it wants to get to the Resource Management Act. Some days Government members talk about it as if they do not want anything in the exclusive economic zone bill to be related to it and then on other days they want it to be strengthened to be more like the Resource Management Act. This comes with a whole host of problems because in the area inside 12 nautical miles one regime applies with one set of rules and in the area beyond 12 nautical miles another regime applies with a different set of rules. 
The Minister has gone part of the way with the changing of the purpose clause to include “sustainable management”. What we do not have are the other key words from the Resource Management Act. The current amendment that the Minister is proposing uses the words “take into account” in respect of certain matters. The key words from the Resource Management Act of course are to “recognise and provide for”. What we are going to see is the courts essentially deciding this and I think the courts are going to have a significant power. 
I want to touch on the international negotiations because what we are seeing here is a deliberate weakening of clause 11 “International obligations”. The committee which all parties supported wanted to have the word “consistent” in there. I think that we should have gone stronger and said: “This bill will be interpreted consistently with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea or UNCLOS”. This is critical because this is how we get the right—the responsibility—to use and enjoy our exclusive economic zone. It is clear that we have international obligations. 
The Minister is emphatic that the current legislation—the bill in front of us and her amendments—is consistent but has the Minister got an updated legal opinion on the changes? What we are seeing is clause 11 “International obligations” actually changing and we are seeing the purpose clause and a whole host of other changes. So if the Minister could table that new legal opinion I think that would be beneficial to the Committee. 
The fact is that many commentators from the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment to legal experts to the Opposition parties do not think the legislation will be consistent with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. I think it is clear that we should be aiming to do this. I think the Government is scared of being taken to court essentially over the interpretation. You know if you think it is consistent with the convention you should say so. We should say: “This Act will be interpreted consistently with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.” 
The Minister also touched on the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment’s support. Obviously the commissioner has come out in support but I think the Minister is taking it a bit far and may be putting words in the commissioner’s mouth when she gushes over the support for this bill. I think the commissioner like the Green Party wants to see something out there in the exclusive economic zone because we have not had anything. But the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment quite rightly says she has a number of concerns with the bill. The key question is that this still is not the overarching oceans framework that her office and numerous other commentators have been calling for. Where is the conservation side? Where is the spatial planning side? What we are talking about is a consenting regime. We are not talking about a management regime and this is what we need because we have got a gigantic ocean space yet we know so little about it. 
I looked into the research done by the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research over the decades. We still know so little about the marine environment—what is down there in the benthic and the atrophic environments. We know so little about it yet we are about to go and exploit it. I understand that soon we are expecting a consent to be lodged for ironsand mining which could involve 300 million tonnes of sand being moved off the west coast of the North Island. We are talking about Chatham Rock Phosphate’s proposal to dig up I understand 3000 square kilometres over the lifetime of the resource on the ocean floor. 
These are huge questions and with no information we think we should actively be managing our marine environment but this is not what we see. What we are seeing is an increasing strengthening in a few respects but on the whole we are seeing a bill that is still fundamentally flawed—in fact being taken backwards. I will be debating this in the debate on later parts because this is where the transition measures and the penalties come from. But basically what we are seeing is a missed opportunity from this Parliament a missed opportunity from this Government and a missed opportunity from this Minister who could have engaged a lot better.