Shirley Ken: Resource Management (Waitaki Catchment) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Shirley Ken: Resource Management (Waitaki Catchment) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:620;Page:15408] 
Hon KEN SHIRLEY (ACT) 
: 
 We have just heard the Minister for the Environment emphasise the fact that the panel of commissioners—which is the heading of Part 4—is to be expunged before it even gets off the ground. That is not a bad thing in itself. This entire bill is all about setting up a committee; that is all it has done from the outset. It has proposed setting up two committees actually—the board and the panel. The setting up of an allocation committee is all that this bill is about. There has been all this brouhaha noise and huff and puffery from the Government just to set up a special committee. 
ACT has said from the outset that this legislation is a nonsense and is just a fast track that the Government is setting up to try to accommodate the State-owned enterprise Meridian Energy’s Project Aqua. The Government’s line has been that the bill has nothing to do with Project Aqua that Project Aqua is absolutely ancillary and that this bill sets up a necessary allocation plan in any event. Over a year ago when the bill had top priority in the legislative programme successive Government Ministers said that they had to ram it through but the day that Project Aqua was mothballed and canned this bill was mothballed and put on the back-burner. It has bounced along the bottom of the Order Paper for nigh on a year yet the Government has the temerity still to pretend that it has never been about Project Aqua. It would be too embarrassing for the Government now to totally withdraw the bill which is what should happen. 
Part 4 highlights the point: it is just about an allocation committee. After the Water and Soil Conservation Act 1967 was passed we had a dedicated Waitaki catchment commission. It did water allocation plans. Like a lot of bureaucratic plans they have all been shelved. Since the passing of the Resource Management Act in 1991 and the establishment of regional councils Environment Canterbury has had the specific task—the specific legislative responsibility—of doing a water allocation plan. We do not need the committee that is proposed in Part 4. We have a statutory body there. The fact of the matter is that Environment Canterbury has chosen to abrogate its responsibilities. If a statutory body chooses to ignore and abrogate its responsibilities one does not rush to Parliament and bring in a whole new statute to set up another body. That is just nutty. 
We should address the basic problem of why the regional council that was charged with the responsibility did not do its job—that is point No. 1. Both the Minister for the Environment and the Minister of Local Government had some responsibility to address that but no they did not choose to do it. Call-in powers and all manner of statutory powers are given to a Minister to use when local bodies abrogate their legislative responsibilities—and this is a classic case of where that is the point. I do not know whether the Minister in the chair Marian Hobbs has even written to Environment Canterbury to ask where its water allocation plan is. Did she think of perhaps writing to tell it to get on with the job and to say that if it did not she as Minister would give it a shake-up? She has the powers to do that. No instead she came to Parliament with a whole new duplicate replicate body of bureaucracy—with another governing body and another committee. Now she is so pleased with herself because she has turned those two new committees into one new committee. That is the essence—whoop-de-doody—of this Government’s activity in relation to the Waitaki catchment water allocation procedures. 
The National Party member who spoke on this was quite right. What is special about the Waitaki? The Government has told us that the bill has nothing to do with Project Aqua. Why not apply this measure to the Waimakariri Rangitata or Rakaia rivers? Why does it apply just to Canterbury? I ask the Minister why we do not have these plans and special little allocation bodies all over the country. That would be consistent. This is a foolish bill and ACT will oppose it.