Brooking RachelHon RACHEL BROOKING (Labour—Dunedin): Thank you Madam Speaker. Well it's been an interesting Saturday morning here in the House. In the rest of the world it's June—but not here. I'm still wearing my Music Month badge and here we are and the calendar is saying it's 30 May.We've been in here on Saturday morning and I would say it's a beautiful Saturday morning for anyone who's beaming in from Dunedin and Christchurch where it's a beautiful day but of course we're here in Wellington. But of course we're always excited to be in this wonderful Parliament always excited to be scrutinising legislation. It's much more fun you're making it yourself and that is what I was doing in the last Parliament. I was working with some of the officials that the Minister has just referred to about new waste legislation because our waste legislation is quite outdated and we do need to do much better for product stewardship in particular. And that is something that the Minister has talked a lot about in the committee stage of the debate.And I think Madam Speaker—you were in the Chair for some of that and you might have even made the point that you heard in a lot of contributions on our opposition to this amendment bill that there was a lot of focus on the extension of what the levy can be applied to what it can be funded on and this is for the central government half of the levy and that it can now go to anything to do with the environment which is very wise.We had discussions in the committee stage with the Minister talking about the life of a product—a product can have many lives and so it should be extended beyond what is in the current Act the Waste Minimisation Act. I agree with that. It should apply to the landfills that we have that are contaminated sites and are causing all sorts of problems all around the country and they're going to continue to cause problems.And yes it should also apply to emergency situations—no problem with that—but what we're seeing is this wide extension to anything to do with the environment with no nexus to waste none at all with—and this is inserted by clause 4 into section 3—(2)(a)(ii) "activities that reduce environmental harm or increase environmental benefits;". There is no nexus there to waste. There could often be a nexus to waste and the Minister gave some examples of that but I also gave examples that referred to things like fertiliser running off a farm nothing to do with waste going into the waterways and contaminating those waterways causing a toxic algae bloom and having fish die. That is a terrible environmental thing to happen. I don't want that to happen which is why we need to fund our environment properly and that needs to happen in the Budget and needs to come from different streams that are not associated with a waste levy. That money needs to come from either some sort of polluter-pays principle—and that's a different argument that we could have—or a general tax not a levy. This is a levy and it's related to waste and there needs to be some nexus with that waste. Hence I proposed an amendment—the Greens also proposed amendments—that would have fixed this problem and provided that nexus but the Government very clearly does not want to do that because they want to have some availability of this fund to pay for things that should be coming from a general tax. And why they want to do that is because they've cut so much in this Budget from the environment. We know the good work that Jobs for Nature has done and the important work that was happening in the Essential Freshwater package. Those things have been cut as well as the 7.5 percent cut generally throughout the Ministry for the Environment. That is shameful when the environment is so important to our economy. It is just so short-sighted to not be spending the money to prevent pollution from happening in the first place and to do the remediation of it.This of course is in the context of all else that is happening in the environment at the moment. We had right at the start of this term the repeal of the Spatial Planning Act which would have done much better long-term planning for our infrastructure and our environment. We've also had the repeal of the Natural and Built Environment Act which was looking at environmental outcomes and trying to move the economic activity in the planning system away from the bespoke consent by consent up the system to the plans and national directions to save everybody money and time and to do better for the environment as well. That's gone. What have we got instead? We have a fast-track bill and the purpose of that bill overrides all that other legislation that provided for protections for the environment. That is what the bill does. We come here to question time noting that we're not having another question time for some time and the Prime Minister will say the fast-track bill is going to do better for environmental outcomes. I can only conclude that he has not read it—DEPUTY SPEAKER: Except that this is not a discussion on the fast-track bill. So can we come back to the—Hon RACHEL BROOKING: Well it's—DEPUTY SPEAKER: Well can we link it please at least. Thank you.Hon RACHEL BROOKING: The fast-track bill has a purpose to facilitate development. That comes before any environmental protections. There need not be any environmental protections in the way that that bill works. It's totally linked to this bill and totally linked to the Budget because there will be more environmental pollution and there will need to be more public funds spent to clean up that pollution. And those public funds—well they should never have to happen in the first place—will need to come from a tax not from a levy where there is no nexus.That is the point—again this is about a waste disposal levy. There is no nexus here. We had a discussion during the committee stage as well about the purpose of the Act and when we put it to the Minister that there should be some nexus she warned that you've got to be careful what you wish for here because the Waste Minimisation Act also provides for product stewardship schemes for things like F-gas and that's totally correct. But the product stewardship parts of the Waste Minimisation Act 2008 are not in Part 3 which related to the levy. They are in another part of the Act where the general purpose of the Act which doesn't change is still to encourage waste minimisation and a decrease in waste disposal in order to protect the environment from harm and provide environmental social economic and cultural benefit.So any amendment to the amendment in this bill would not have harmed any potential product stewardship scheme for F-gas and I was encouraged that the Minister made that particular reference because that would be a very good thing to have some movement on and I hope that she is doing that.This bill could have been a good bill. Some things that it does are in the regulations at the moment. The regulations set out what the levy is and they were always going to end in June 2025 and of course if we'd been in Government there would have been an amendment to the regulations to extend it out to set the fee. We're doing that here in this bill and that's a fine thing to be doing but it doesn't need to be in Budget urgency. The only reason this bill is here on whatever day it is in urgency is because of all the cuts in the Budget to the environment and the Government is desperate to still do some of that spending and so they're looking for ways to find some money and the only way they've been able to find some money is with this waste minimisation disposal levy. It's not a levy—this is now a tax. And it's a cynical move on behalf of the Government to try and dress it up as something green. It is absolutely not. It is the total opposite and it's totally consistent with the terrible fast-track legislation and everything else we're seeing from this destructive Government."