Shirley Ken: Wellington Regional Council (Water Board Functions) Bill — Second Reading 
Shirley Ken: Wellington Regional Council (Water Board Functions) Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:623;Page:18509] 
Hon KEN SHIRLEY (ACT) 
: 
 The ACT party shares many of the concerns that have been expressed in this debate thus far. We will support the bill going on to the Committee of the whole House. Essentially what we are saying here is that there is a block of land surrounding the hinterland of Wellington that is now vested in the Wellington Regional Council but that is still covered under the old Wellington Regional Water Board Act. I am very familiar with that land. My first couple of years as a graduate back in the early 1970s were spent working for the Wellington Regional Water Board and I am very familiar with the catchments of the Orongorongos the Tararuas and the Akatarawas etc. There is a lot of land up there—a lot of essentially publicly owned land—and a lot of recreational use on that land. Although some of the catchments are protected from public access because of the nature of the water supply there are sites up there where we could have wind generation. Because there are remote isolated sites the wind farms would not necessarily be too obtrusive or the farms could be sited so they would not be intrusive and so any low-grade humming noise would not interfere with residents or adjacent landowners. There is a logic to that. 
 In saying that I have to acknowledge the concern that the council may start to engage in power generation as a core business. That would worry me. I think we went down the wrong track when we passed the Local Government Act of 2002 which essentially gave the power of general competence to local bodies. Clearly local bodies are an extension of governance. Their powers are granted by central government and those powers should be very clearly defined. But that Act essentially stated that central government was washing its hands of that responsibility and allowing a free-for-all situation whereby councils could do whatever they wanted to engage in. It stated that councils could have free range to put their hands into the ratepayers’ pockets and get into all sorts of businesses competing with the private sector and engaging in things that are non-core activities for local bodies. We are starting to see that to a very worrying extent. Councils do not have the same disciplines that private companies have. They can just go more deeply into the ratepayers’ pockets and engage in businesses that they should not be engaging in. 
I note that a heading in the report back on the bill by the Local Government and Environment Committee states: “Council may authorise third-party use of the land for renewable energy generation”. There is logic in that if Meridian Energy Genesis Power or any private energy company wants to come along to the council. But it is implied there that the council may enter into public-private partnerships with those companies—that the council will not be able to resist taking a shareholding in the business rather than just charging the company a rental for the site. 
The other curious thing is the incredible emphasis on renewable energy. It was actually inserted in the bill by the select committee that the provision is confined and restricted to renewable energy. I guess that is explained by the fact that the chair of the select committee is Jeanette Fitzsimons of the Green Party and of course the big thing trumpeted by the Green Party is renewable energy only. The point has already been made that it is implied that the salvation of New Zealand’s energy needs—and we do have pressing energy needs—is renewable energy. What absolute nonsense that is! If we doubled the amount of wind power generated in this country we would still only meet less than 3 percent of our power demand. That puts it into perspective. The point has already been made that the big wind farms are not without problems. They will have to run the gauntlet of the Resource Management Act too. They are obtrusive very unsightly—for anyone with a farming property who wakes up every day and looks at a wind farm it is a real problem—and noisy. They are very noisy and it is a very irritating noise: a steady unforgiving hum. 
Finally I make the point that although environmentalists love wind power people in California are finding that wind farms are chopping up native birds by the score. Wind farms are destroying the native flora and fauna far more than coal ever did—they are chopping them up. In California whole flocks of bald eagles are flying into the propellers of wind farms and all that is coming out is a lot of feathers and dust—they are getting chopped to pieces in the wind farms. I wonder what the Greens will say when the environmentalists of the future find that it is not coal that is the big energy bogey but wind farms because they are chopping up native birds. I do not think the Greens have actually realised the lack of robustness of their case. 
Be that as it may I think there are sites on this land that are appropriate for wind farms. I am not against wind farms; I believe that wind power should be part of our energy mix. To the extent that there are sites on the land that may be able to be used for that purpose then that is a good thing in itself. But I flag the concern that we do not want the regional council to spend ratepayers’ money on engaging in activities that are not its core business.