Sage Eugenie: Environmental Reporting Bill — In CommitteeText is subject to correctionSage Eugenie: Environmental Reporting Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 17 June 2015. Volume:706;Page:4553. Text is subject to correction.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green):I rise with some degree of trepidation given your rulings tonight on relevance but we will give it every effort to make sure that the comments are relevant. I could just thank the Minister for his contribution to the debate but I think it is interesting that if you look at the Statistics Act and section 6 of that Act it provides that “No government department shall commence or commission any statistical survey or make a substantial alteration to an … existing survey without the written approval of the Minister:”. I think that is quite different from the provision that we are seeing in this bill which has in clause 18 the Ministers actually setting the topics for environmental reporting. In the Statistics Act it is the actual Government Statistician who comes up with the ideas and the proposals for statistical surveys; the Minister simply has to approve them.I think it is quite ironic that we have celebrated 800 years since the signing of Magna Carta this week. From its beginning this Parliament has adopted the Magna Carta’s ideals of individual liberty and freedom and constraint of power. One of the concepts of the rule of law is checks on the power of the executive and an independent non-politicised Public Service that is able to provide robust advice to Ministers is one of the checks on the powers of the executive. So that is one of our major concerns with this bill because the regulation-making powers in the bill exist only for the Minister for the Environment and the Minister of Statistics to set the topics for domain reports and synthesis reports. That is concentrating power in the hands of Ministers. It undermines in our view the rule of law. It also signals that this Government does not trust the Public Service. It does not trust senior chief executives.By enabling the topics to be set by Ministers the Government is politicising this whole process. That is why my Supplementary Order Paper 87 and the changes it proposes to clause 18 provide for a much more independent and robust system because under my Supplementary Order Paper the Government Statistician and the Secretary for the Environment instead of Ministers would determine the topics to be covered in both the synthesis and the domain reports. The process that is set out in the bill for there to be consultation with the public iwi local authorities and the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment would continue. Instead of having regulations—there would be no need for those—the topics would simply be notified in the Gazette.So that is one of the changes in my Supplementary Order Paper. The other ones I would like to comment on are the changes to clauses 7 and 10 because clauses 7 and 10 set out the content of the synthesis reports and the domain reports—the synthesis reports being produced every 3 years and the domain reports on an occasional basis every 6 months. Clause 7 at the moment lists the matters that the synthesis reports should cover including the pressures that are causing or may cause changes to the state of the environment and the impacts that those changes may be having on ecological integrity public health the economy Te Ao Māori and culture and recreation. Officials told us that that was not intended to be an exclusive list of matters yet the bill is not clear on that.There is an advantage always in the law being clear. It reduces the scope for litigation. So my Supplementary Order Paper seeks to make it crystal clear that the lists in clause 7 and clause 10 are not exhaustive lists. There are other matters that are obviously missing here. One of them is general social well-being. That is not listed in clause 7 or clause 10. The other obvious omission is that there is no reference to climate change the greatest—