Smith StuartSTUART SMITH (National—Kaikōura): Oh thank you Mr Speaker. It is a pleasure to speak on this bill although we don't support it. I'd like to firstly actually pay respects to Maureen Pugh the West Coast MP who's going through a pretty tough time at the moment. Our thoughts go out to Maureen and I know she would love to be here and be speaking on this bill herself. So all the best Maureen—we are thinking of you.A third of New Zealand's land is in the conservation estate and 81 percent of the West Coast is in the conservation estate. The West Coast is incredibly mineral rich and to have a complete ban on mining in it would be quite a significant impost on that economy but worse than that it actually has a huge impact on New Zealand as well. Even on the previous bill I know one of the members on the other side was talking about transitioning and actually to transition away from fossil fuels we need much more minerals than we currently extract to make that transition. Mr Speaker I have this very handy book which I can recommend to you. It's published by the Minerals Council of Australia and it's called 30 things and it lists all the minerals and things that you would not expect. I have used electric vehicles before from this book and I've talked about what's in mobile phones but today I'm going to talk about what minerals are used in medicine.I'm not sure you'd be aware of it—you may well be—but lithium for example: it's a very important psychiatric drug. It was actually discovered by what were American Indians; referred to now as First Nations people". There was a lake in California in particular that had a high lithium amount and it was well-known by American Indians that when people weren't feeling very good when they were blue or depressed they would go by that lake and they would feel much better—turned out that there's quite a lot of lithium content in that lake and that's led to the discovery of lithium being used as a psychiatric drug which is well used today. So lithium is used in medicine.Titanium of course—anyone who's had a hip joint or something like that knee joint or whatever: that's titanium. It's used in reconstructive surgery or even in plastic surgeries it's quite often used. Silver—I'm not quite sure what it's for; I can tell you it's antibacterial and aids healing. Who knew? Also platinum for pacemakers and medical apparatus. Copper: kills surface microbes and reduces infections—and electronic devices of course. Uranium of course—I always notice with a smile when I drive in from the airport: Wellington's nuclear-free so clearly there are no X-ray machines in Wellington. Well actually there are so it's not nuclear-free. Nuclear medicine's quite an important part of cancer treatments in this—[Interruption] Yeah. Niobium which is for medical devices—don't know what. Gold: cancer treatment. We use gold in cancer treatment—I know it costs a lot of money but—DEPUTY SPEAKER: This is pretty fascinating Mr Smith but at some stage—and I've probably been pretty generous—could you mention the bill?STUART SMITH: I know you're enjoying this—well yes I am. This is because all of these minerals come from the ground. They come from the conservation estate. Lithium is on the West Coast. I've actually flown over a lithium deposit; we know it's there. Is it able to be mined? Is it economic? We don't know. Will we ever know? This bill will not allow us to mine those minerals if it's successful.It's also aggregate of course and trying to get aggregate out to build our roads. A lot of people in this House are very concerned about climate change. Does it make any sense trucking aggregate from the East Coast over down to the West Coast to build our roads? No it does not.So this just goes too far. We've got adequate regulations to control the environmental impacts of mining—and there are impacts on the environment from mining; we all know that. The fact is we need to mitigate those and ensure that restoration of mining sites is done to a standard that we all expect. So it's with regret I actually cannot support this bill."