Sage Eugenie: Debate on Prime Minister’s StatementText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement[Sitting date: 30 January 2014. Volume:696;Page:15711. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. It was interesting that we had the previous National speaker Minister Anne Tolley dismissing the whole MMP system failing to recognise that list MPs have a constituency that extends over all of Aotearoa New Zealand and we are out there in the community. I invite the Minister the Hon Anne Tolley to get out there and lose an election because as Russel Norman said earlier in this debate the Green Party is ready to govern. We have the ideas the experience and the credentials. Our focus in Government would be on rebuilding a fairer New Zealand building a sustainable economy and changing our laws and taxation system to better protect the environment that sustains us and our economy.We know as my colleague Holly Walker has outlined that the single most important way to address some of our major social problems such as crime imprisonment and violence is to reduce the gap between the rich and poor. That is why we have got solutions that will make a real difference like our schools as hearts and hubs of the community. That is why we have policies in housing like a warrant of fitness for rental housing to reduce the number of cold damp homes which will make children and families sick in winter. We want rental housing to meet a minimum standard.Everyone has a right to decent housing just as everyone has a right to clean water. A progressive Green Government would work to do both of those things because we know that New Zealanders are worried about our rivers and lakes. They want them better managed and they want less farm runoff. Lincoln University late last year published the results of its longstanding surveyPerceptions of the State of New Zealand’s Environment. Respondents said that freshwater management was our most important domestic environmental issue just as they did in the 2010 and 2008 surveys. That is the National Government’s legacy to Kiwis—an increasing number of dirty polluted rivers which are unfit for swimming. Two-thirds of the monitored sites on our rivers are too polluted to swim in.No country in the world relies as heavily on a clean green image for its exports and tourism as we do. Our “100% Pure New Zealand” brand identifies us as producing high-quality food and safe food while we look after our land and our water. If we trash that brand we trash the foundations of our economy particularly our primary production sector and tourism. Kiwis know that under this Government that brand is being flushed down the toilet. In that Lincoln University survey only 35 percent of respondents described the state of our environment as good and that was down from the 48 percent in 2000.Of all of the natural resources that were considered in that survey people said that fresh water was being managed the worst. We know why. It is agriculture intensification. So what has the Government’s response been to an unprecedented decline in Kiwis’ confidence in the state of our environment? Has it been to introduce strong rules for clean water so that farmers make every effort to fence their streams to keep stock out of waterways to look after their fertiliser inputs or to not intensify insensitive catchments? No of course not. National is in it for the short term. Its “dig it drill it mine it irrigate it” excuse for an economic policy is about exploiting nature to maximise short-term profits regardless of the environmental debt that that creates for present and future generations. Instead of using the Resource Management Act and the national policy statement to put in place a much stronger regulatory framework to give us rivers that are clean enough to swim in what is National doing? It gives us hands-off weak standards that people like Dr Mike Joy at Massey University say would lead us to rivers that have similar levels of nitrate to rivers like the Yangtze in China which is not a model we want to emulate.If it was a Green Government we would focus much more on a stronger regulatory framework incentives for landowners and investing in biodiversity and we would not expect the Department of Conservation to run a predator control programme on its existing funding. We would invest in a clean environment to support our economy.