Mackey Moana: Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Mackey Moana: Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 22 August 2012. Volume:683;Page:4648. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
MOANA MACKEY (Labour) 
: 
 I think it says more about the member who just taken her seat Jacqui Dean than it does about members of the Opposition if after all the time we spent together on the Local Government and Environment Committee and all the speeches in this Chamber she still does not understand why Labour and the Greens oppose this piece of legislation the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Bill. She said that it is because the exclusive economic zone is far away—it is far away. This was someone of course who did ask a submitter whether the ocean could be described as a deep-water marine environment at the select committee so I have to say that Jacqui Dean is being very disingenuous when she says she does not understand why we oppose this legislation. We oppose this legislation because it simply is not consistent with our international obligations and it does not provide the level of environmental protection that the community wants and that we should be expecting in an environment as precious as our marine environment which so much of our economy relies on. We contacted the Minister for the Environment Amy Adams and we tried to work with her to find a compromise where we could get a settled cross-party agreement so that there would be certainty for everyone. We were rebuffed on that. That is the reality of what happened instead of the fiction that we have just heard from Jacqui Dean. 
Part 3 of this piece of legislation is around appeals enforcement orders and abatement notices. One of our big concerns about this part is that unlike under the Resource Management Act where submitters or opponents are able to take a case to the Environment Court on points of fact where they disagree with an issue where new information has come to light or where they do not think the decision was right they can take it only on points of law to the High Court under this exclusive economic zone legislation. As I said in my speech yesterday a jurisdictional line has been drawn between our territorial waters and the exclusive economic zone. It is only jurisdictional. Many many other pieces of legislation in New Zealand operate across both perfectly adequately. Whether that be fisheries legislation whether that be health and safety legislation or whether that be maritime legislation they do not have any problems differentiating between our exclusive economic zone and our territorial waters. 
Apparently this is one piece of legislation where it is absolutely impossible to get consistency between the two. We disagree with that and one area where we do disagree is in the taking away of the rights of people to access the Environment Court on points of substance. I think it is a false economy to think that you are going to save a lot of time and money by doing this. One of the things the Environment Court has done—and there are plenty of protections in there to avoid vexatious claimants—is taken a lot of that negotiation and a lot of that mediation offline and out of that process. Because all parties know that there is potential for that to happen and there is that recourse a lot more effort is put into making sure that obvious issues are dealt with up front and that obvious stakeholders are consulted unlike what we saw up on the East Coast with Petrobras where local iwi heard about it on the 6 o’clock news. That is not adequate. What we know is that under Resource Management Act legislation it does provide an incentive for people to try to sort out as many of those issues as they possibly can before they get to the actual legal process. We note of course with some concern that the Government is now moving to remove that ability under the Resource Management Act as well and talking about these plans of regional significance which will no longer be able to go through that full court process. We are concerned about that as well. To parties who are voting for this bill because they like more alignment with the Resource Management Act just be aware of where the Resource Management Act is going. Suddenly being aligned with the Resource Management Act may not be as flash a thing as it used to be in the past. 
We have Supplementary Order Paper 95 in the name of Charles Chauvel to delete the clause that states you can take an appeal only on points of law and also to replace “High Court” with “Environment Court”. One of the interesting things about this is that when we come to the issue of enforcement orders which the member Jacqui Dean was talking about because of the experience and the knowledge held there it is actually the Environment Court that deals with that. It is actually the Environment Court that issues the notice. It is the Environment Court that upholds it. The Environment Court of course has a lot of expertise in this area and we just think that perhaps it should also be the court that is dealing with appeals when people have concerns about marine consents that have been granted or indeed where an applicant has concerns that the requirements that the Environmental Protection Authority has put upon them are too stringent. So it should be there for all parties. To create this kind of new set of goalposts just because we have crossed over an invisible line in the ocean which has nothing to do with resource management allocation has nothing to do with science and has nothing to do with environmental integrity—it has nothing to do with any of that; it is just an invisible jurisdictional line—and to suddenly say that the goalposts are a lot further away once you step over that line to us does not really make an awful lot of policy sense unless what you are trying to do is streamline these projects and make it harder for communities to raise concerns. 
I want to put that into context of the reality that a lot of communities face. We are already looking at local government which is struggling to make a lot of these decisions. It may be the first port of call in some instances for communities that have concerns about applications that are going to the Environmental Protection Authority where it might want its local authority to submit on behalf of the community. I look at the Gisborne District Council. It is a unitary authority with a low rating base. It does not have a lot of money to access the kind of research that these companies can access. There is not a lot of money in my community to access that research particularly within some of the time frames that have been given. Because it will be up to the Environmental Protection Authority as to how it sets the timing of the hearings there is a concern again that that timing could be so short so that these communities will not be able to even access those organisations that would be able to provide them with some help and with some assistance. The reality is that everything is weighed against communities that have concerns right from the beginning. We would like to have seen this legislation actually try to incentivise engaging with communities not a piece of legislation that essentially could see stuff being pushed through against a community’s will when it does not have the resources to access the kind of research that some of these companies—which remember go all around the world doing these projects and have big research teams because this is what they do on a regular basis—are able to access. They have access to vast amounts of money to produce that research. We would just like to see a little bit of a level playing field so that communities are not completely left out of the loop and are given a much higher threshold to jump over than the applicants that are applying to carry out the activity. 
I just want to quickly touch on the issue of penalties. We are very very pleased to see the dramatic increase in penalty. I really wish it could have been done at the select committee and we would not have had to bash our heads against the wall asking why the penalties were so low. It would have been nice to have been done at the select committee but it is great that it is being done here and I want to thank the officials for all their work on this part as well. 
I come back to a core point as well which we will address in Part 4 which is the ability to actually collect the money and to ensure that it is there. We could have a penalty of $1 billion but if these companies are simply going to fold or if we are unable to require bonds and insurance up front to ensure that that liability can be met then it really does not matter what the penalty is. There were concerns again at the select committee about that but we will come to that in Part 4. We have a Supplementary Order Paper in my name and there is also a Supplementary Order Paper in Gareth Hughes’ name to increase the rest of the penalties because of course there are a range of penalties under the bill. We are only increasing one of them here. As we have said we absolutely welcome that increase in penalty. It will provide a much bigger disincentive than the previous penalty but again we really would question—and I am not sure whether the Minister in the chair is able to have the answer to this; she is the Minister of Conservation so I am sure she is taking an active active interest in the exclusive economic zone legislation—why none of the other penalties are being increased because we also felt that they were inadequate. But we are not going to be churlish around the issue of the main penalty as $10 million is a very very very drastic improvement on what was in the bill as it came to the select committee. Thank you.