Utikere TangiTANGI UTIKERE (Labour—Palmerston North): Well thank you Mr Speaker. For a moment there I sensed déjà vu. I think that when this bill was last in front of the House we had the same sort of issue from what is clearly an incompetent Minister for Oceans and Fisheries who just cannot even get the basics right.This is a shambles in terms of moving forward. On the side of the House we know that aquaculture is important. The Minister thinks that it's an anti-growth brigade over here—it is far from it. He talks about confidence and certainty through to 2050 but the question that the Minister has not touched on is at what cost does that come when we consider the environment. Listening through the Primary Production Committee process that confidence and that certainty can still be achieved just without the extent of the changes that are listed in this particular bill.The Minister also refers to the select committee process—and I'm going to spend a bit of time on that in a moment. It's interesting though that he chose not to delve into the depth of some of those concerns that were raised. And why might that be? Well quite simply it's because this is a Government that signed off on putting to this House a truncated select committee process shutting down the opportunity for communities to have their say because they are simply not interested in any other views that are dissimilar to their own. Well the message from this side of the House is: that is not how things work in terms of this Parliament and democracy.Now this blanket extension of 20 years that the Minister has proposed is not only excessive but unreasonable. This is an extension process for a lengthy period where there will be no room for any assessment—or indeed any reassessment—opportunities when it comes to existing farms or if circumstances change or indeed if mitigation might change as well. What this bill simply does is change the expiry date on existing permits. It does not have any sense of change to reconsider the nature of the changing environment in these particular localities or any further conditions of consent that might mitigate some of that change.Now when we talk about or reflect on the select committee process on this side of the House the last time this came to the House we expressed concerns about that limited opportunity for the select committee process. I do want to acknowledge the Primary Production Committee that has worked extremely hard to progress this bill in a short period of time. But really they were constrained in that sense because they were given a time frame from this House because that is what the Government wanted. There were only 13 days that submitters had an opportunity to submit. I do want to congratulate and acknowledge the fact that despite that there were 1100 submissions that were received from individuals and from organisations all around the motu. That was hard work for those individuals and organisations to meet that time frame. But what's really significant there is that because this is such an important piece of legislation they were committed to ensuring that their views were made known.The overwhelming majority of submissions—the overwhelming majority—actually 1000 of the 1100 were absolutely opposed to this bill—absolutely opposed to this bill. This shows a lack of public confidence in what this Minister and this Government is wanting to ram through this parliamentary process. The overwhelming majority do not want this bill.When we look at the report from the select committee there were a number of amendments that were proposed in the spirit of making this more workable and I want to just run through some of them that were proposed—certainly by Labour members on the committee. The first was in light of the fact that we do not support this blanket 20-year ban. There were many submitters—many submitters—that thought that a five-year extension might be the way to go. Now we were very happy to support that. That was not the view of the majority of the committee however. But in the spirit of trying to get some compromise around this we offered up a 10-year extension period albeit reluctantly. Again that did not find favour with Government members on the committee. It's also interesting that with the reduced number and time frame that would allow for existing use opportunities but that would be for a shorter time frame.The second—and I acknowledge the Greens promoting the exclusions around finned fish farms and that was something that we were very happy to support. But I think that acknowledges significant environmental aspects of that operation—there needed to be some stuff there that could have been worked through. That again did not find favour with the committee.The Minister talks about this sort of sense—well we infer—of distaste or dislike for anyone involved in local government—anyone involved in local government. As a committee we heard eight councils who submitted to this process many of them from areas that have coastal permits in operation in their particular rohe. Seven of the eight were in opposition to this particular bill. Now if we think about the seven out of the eight across the motu that submitted that reflect quite a significant sort of stretch of coastline—that is significant. The key focus from many of those councils was around this need for a cost recovery mechanism for any reviews that are undertaken. Now again we sought to provide some compromise in that space to perhaps limit the cost recovery opportunities by identifying maybe what might be fair and reasonable in those circumstances and even went to the extent of offering up an opportunity by way of amendment to effectively cap the cost of review at 50 percent. So 50 percent of the total cost would be the maximum figure that could be recoverable by the council. Again that found no favour from any of the Government members that sit on that particular committee.Let's be very clear Minister: Labour members on this side of the House are of the firm view that there must be a provision for councils that are involved in the issue of these permits to be able to initiate a review and that that actually needs to be without the consent or the permission of the director-general. This is extraordinary that the director-general would somehow be involved in a resource management process at that particular level. So we do have some concern around that. It's certainly something that we were rather concerned with.This is a bill that is going to be detrimental moving forward. The 20-year extension is not required. There is still time Minister—the committee of the whole House will be the next step and it might be something that you on a road to Damascus perhaps see the light on. But on this side of the House we remain of the view that this is a bill that we will not submit. But there is still time for the Minister to consider through the committee of the whole House some of the changes to make this not just workable but sensible. On that basis at this stage we will not be supporting this beyond second reading.