Sage EugenieHon EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe Madam Speaker thank you. I am pleased to take a call on the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Hazardous Substances Assessments) Amendment Bill and the Green Party is pleased to support the bill. So what are the hazardous substances that this bill will improve the regulation of? Well hazardous substances are according to one definition I found chemicals mixes of chemicals that can be explosive flammable corrosive have a capacity to oxidise and/or be toxic to people and the environment. They include substances such as petrol cleaning products fireworks solvents cosmetics and one review panel noted even the ingredients of toothpaste. I found estimates of 200000 different substances which fit this definition and which are in use in New Zealand. So the safe acquisition use and disposal of hazardous substances is important for human health for nature and for the economy. There would be some native plants and wildlife which would be potentially extinct without the use of 1080 the aerial pest control operations using about a teaspoon of 1080 per hectare. So that's one really beneficial hazardous substance—but then substances like PFOS and PFOA those organic pollutants which are used in firefighting foams and have caused significant impacts with their leaching into waterways. So the purpose of the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act in section 4 is to protect the environment and the health and safety of people and communities by preventing [and] managing the adverse effects of hazardous substances and new organisms". I'd like to correct the misrepresentations by Stuart Smith: the Green Party is not looking forward to encouraging the use of GMOs. I think he was being sarcastic. To protect human wellbeing and nature we need to have a really robust assessment system for chemicals for their impacts and whether particular substances should be able to be used in the first instance by whom and under what conditions. We need a similarly robust system for assessing the sites where they're used and stored. We need solid reliable information on the transport use and disposal of hazardous substances a track and trace system to understand where they are and what volumes are in storage and in use around New Zealand from the time that they're imported or manufactured here through that whole transport use and disposal system. That is something we do not currently have. We need a really good system for dealing with hazardous substances at the end of their life. We need a clear regulatory framework where agencies are clear about their responsibilities. We need a strong and effective compliance monitoring and enforcement regime and we need a good financial assurance regime so that manufacturers and users are responsible for the disposal and reprocessing costs and we don't get orphan sites where the clean-up costs fall on the community and Government rather than the user. This bill is focused on the first of those seven elements the whole assessment process. While the Green Party certainly supports the bill there needs to be a lot more work in other areas to improve the regulation and management of hazardous substances in our country. Government needs to allocate significantly more resources and the Ministry for the Environment more staff time to prioritise improving the regime. There was as Rachel Brooking noted an independent review panel which looked at the whole compliance and monitoring and enforcement regime for hazardous substances and found that it was a very cluttered landscape without clear responsibilities. So that's a bit of work that has still to be progressed by Government.Returning to the bill the role of the Environmental Protection Authority the EPA is to obviously consider applications for the use of individual hazardous substances assess them identify their hazardous properties set conditions of their use if they approve them and also provide guidance. And they can reassess chemicals which are already approved for use and see whether the existing controls are fit for purpose. So this bill is part of a programme of work by the EPA and the Ministry for the Environment to modernise how hazardous substances are regulated. In progress there's work on shifting the whole classification system for hazardous substances to the Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals the GHS system and developing a new database to support it. That was due to be finished by the middle of this year. I haven't seen anything in the press release section of the EPA's website but I hope that work is well under way. That's an internationally agreed system and we are bound to implement it by being a member of the OECD. There was consultation—there were about 44 submissions on this document as a prelude to this legislation—and certainly it's going to improve the reassessment process with this concept of trusted international regulators. It's going to provide a simpler process to update hazard classifications for substances and controls. As others have noted the current system is very slow and resource hungry and we've got a low profile in chemical manufacture so it makes sense to rely on international data where those regulators are trusted.One key point the Greens want to make is that when the EPA is using information from overseas regulators they need to ensure that they are not relying on the data and research produced by chemical companies when they're assessing impacts. The information must be scientifically robust and it must be from independent sources. The EPA must also demand much more transparency from applicants and agrichemical companies around the chemical formulation of proprietary products so that the public and regulators know exactly what they're dealing with and can better assess the impacts. Apiculture New Zealand made a submission on the consultation document and they noted that they had attended a pre-hearing meeting for approval of an insecticide containing sulfoxaflor—I'm not sure that's correctly pronounced—but the applicant had withheld all of the information. They were only allowed to see the data but not to take it away and study it. One of the really good improvements in this bill is allowing the EPA to order the immediate suspension of particular chemicals. The thresholds in the principal Act are too cumbersome. They're too high because they require and I quote "significant actual or imminent danger to human health or safety [and] the environment". Because of that the EPA has never been able to suspend the use of a substance. I just note in our history when organophosphates and carbamate insecticides which are quite widely used in New Zealand—international regulators began expressing concern about their use between 2000 and 2010 and in New Zealand reassessment of carbamate and those other organophosphate insecticides only began in 2012. There was a decision in 2013 where the EPA revoked approvals for some of them. Canada had done that 10 years previously. So this ability to suspend and this ability to rely on trusted international regulators will help phase out I think some of the more problematic chemicals.We still need to deal with the compliance monitoring and enforcement and we need a track and trace system so that we've got a much better handle on hazardous substances coming in where they're stored where they're used and a much better system to prevent orphan sites which the Government has to clean up as happened at Mataura. Thank you."