Court Simon; Parker DavidSIMON COURT (ACT): Thank you Madam Chair. Look that's a fascinating explanation of clause 40C and how it might be interpreted or applied Minister. I guess one of the problems with that is as an organisation or an individual or a landowner affected by a limit set under clause 40C how would you be able to establish whether in fact the effects on your property on your business on your undertakings or on your person were acceptable compared to the harm that the limit is intending to prevent because usually when we go to court we have some understanding of the rule of law and how it might apply. So if a Government organisation or a council is going to set a limit or a parcel regulation or a by-law based on certain facts or evidence that should be contestable—it always is—yet if what the Minister is saying is that we might just decide to limit something even though we don't have all the facts and the evidence but we've heard that a population might be at risk so we're going to set a limit—well imagine that that applied to say the Archey's frog in the Coromandel. Now the Archey's frog is a tiny little frog. In fact I say to the Hon Eugenie Sage that you might have even seen one in the flesh. I understand that it's about as big as your thumbnail. There is some concern amongst people who are passionate about the environment in Coromandel in the North Island that the population of Archey's frog may be quite small. In fact it may be almost on the verge of extinction or at least an endangered species and yet there's a mining company called OceanaGold which proposes to carry out some activity in the Coromandel and they have undertaken surveys of the Archey's frog population to provide some evidence about the population. What they've found from setting out some transects and from staking out some test and evaluation areas is that potentially the number of Archey's frogs is tens or a hundred times more than was originally estimated in those areas.So Minister if there was a case where a Government department or one of the people or entities that has power to set these limits was to set a limit say about a frog—they had heard anecdotally or from a lobby group or an activist group or a local environmental group that they were concerned about it—and yet there were actually businesses who wanted to undertake activities that employ hundreds and hundreds of people; potentially generate hundreds of millions of dollars in export earnings for New Zealand; and pay a royalty to the Crown for the minerals that they that they earn their business and their opportunity could be extinguished on the whim of a decision maker who decides in the absence of scientific certainty that they will set a limit on say how much land can be disturbed or how many trees can be cleared in order to protect a nominal population of frogs. I'm sure the member for Coromandel the Hon Scott Simpson who's also very passionate about the frogs as is the Hon Eugenie Sage a former Minister of Conservation—I'm sure that if they were to stand up and say We're worried about the frogs." a future Minister for the Environment might just say "Well we're just going to stop whatever's happening there." Imagine how difficult that would be to contest if you were involved in resource development if you had hundreds and hundreds of people's employment at risk and if you'd also proposed foreign direct investment in the order of hundreds of millions of dollars to drill a tunnel under private land to access the gold reserve under Department of Conservation - managed land so that you could get the resource out without even harming a frog—but somebody could still set a limit about how much soil or land you're allowed to clear in order to protect the frogs in the absence of any evidence. Minister would you care to explain how this might work in practice how this could be contestable and what opportunities there are for those affected by such a limit to challenge this? Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): The clause doesn't say that the decision maker is entitled to ignore relevant evidence. In that sort of situation I would have thought that if a limit was set ignoring that evidence the decision maker would be at risk of that decision being struck down to judicial review. So that's not what the clause says."