Hague Kevin: Regulatory Improvement Bill — Second Reading In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hague Kevin: Regulatory Improvement Bill — Second Reading In Committee 
[Sitting date: 30 March 2010. Volume:661;Page:10177. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
KEVIN HAGUE (Green) 
: 
 The member who has just resumed his seat Stuart Nash expressed puzzlement at the fact that votes are being cast against this bill the Regulatory Improvement Bill. So I will start this first contribution on this stage of consideration of the bill by recapping that. 
The purpose of this bill is that it is supposed to be a set of uncontroversial measures that are intended to address regulatory duplication gaps administrative errors and inconsistencies between different pieces of legislation. That is what the bill is supposed to be about. I have spoken both in the first reading debate and in the second reading debate about the set of changes proposed for the Conservation Act and for the Reserves Act. The changes there change two things: they change the maximum period for which concessions can be granted from 5 years to 10 years and they change the provisions relating to public notification of the intention to grant such concessions. Neither of those is about any of those objectives for the bill. So one of the reasons for the Green Party’s objection to this bill is that it contains provisions that are inconsistent with its objectives. 
The second reason is that the proposed changes to the Conservation Act and the Reserves Act are bad changes and I will talk a little more about that in this Committee stage. The land administered by the Department of Conservation is land that is administered on behalf of all of us—on behalf of all New Zealanders. It is not the “DOC estate” as it is sometimes referred to; it is actually the public conservation estate. It is administered by the Department of Conservation but it is administered with the objective of protecting the conservation values that are in that land. I readily admit that there is land of varying qualities within that estate but the department is protecting and preferably enhancing the conservation values in that set of land for all New Zealanders. 
The principal Act sets out in effect a hierarchy of values. This is important to understand for the context in which the proposed changes to the Act will take place. The paramount set of values in the hierarchy of values in the Act is about the protection of the conservation values—that is the natural biodiversity and indigenous biodiversity of those places including all of the indigenous animals and plants and the ecosystems within which those animals and plants live. The Act is protecting and preferably enhancing those. That is the paramount objective of the Act. The second level down is about recreational access. The Act sets out to encourage New Zealanders to have recreational access to the places that are being protected on our behalf but the recreational access ought not to occur at the expense of the conservation values. Then the third tier down is about allowing for tourism and other commercial activity. That commercial activity ought not to occur at the expense of either the conservation values of these places or New Zealanders’ recreational access to them. 
One of the ongoing critiques of the performance of the Department of Conservation and of the performance of successive Governments in conservation relates to the blurring of recreational access and commercial activity—that the hierarchy intended by the Act is not always respected by the process. What we are now faced with is a set of pressures that are on the department and indeed on Governments of any hue that should hold that conservation responsibility related to the increasing threats to biodiversity and to the conservation values that we are trying to protect and enhance. In the face of this the Government has made a number of decisions that have compounded that problem and have in fact made it worse. 
In the Prime Minister’s statement to the House at the beginning of this year the section that dealt with the environment and conservation was entitled “Unlocking resources”. That is directly germane to this bill because this bill is about commercial activity that occurs in the public conservation estate. The Prime Minister’s statement was code for a new approach to the conservation estate that says it is not a set of land biodiversity and conservation values that is protected on behalf of all New Zealanders; it is a set of resources that could be exploited for commercial gain. What he is doing with that statement is reversing or undermining—“undermining” is probably a good word for it—the hierarchy of values set out in the Act. 
Just over the last couple of days we have seen the attacks on water conservation orders and the proposals for mining in schedule 4 lands which are the practical application of the Prime Minister’s intent. That represents an expropriation of land and resources that are held and are owned by the public in common—an expropriation for private gain. That is directly relevant to this issue of concessions because the Government has created a set of drivers that will require the department to be looking for more and more revenue. It has cut the budget for the Department of Conservation by $52 million over 4 years at a time when the pressures on the conservation estate are increasing. That has led to a Department of Conservation that is now looking for more and more opportunities for creating revenue so we are starting to see pressure placed on the department to make inappropriate decisions about concessions. They are inappropriate decisions: decisions that actually put the revenue stream ahead of the conservation values that are to be protected. 
Under the existing law a 5-year maximum term for concessions at least provides the public with some protection but proposing to increase that term for concessions creates the risk that bad decisions—decisions made by the department for the purpose of revenue rather than for conservation values—will be locked in not for 5 years but for 10 years. The bill goes further in potentially compounding that by stating that in those cases where the concessions extend for a 10-year period the public will not even necessarily get to have a say about that. 
I am grateful to Lianne Dalziel for addressing these conservation issues in her first intervention in this Committee stage. I think that it is probably the first time in our discussion of this bill that anyone besides me has done so. I am grateful to her for doing that and for posing that question. I am also grateful to Minister Mapp for answering that question. Unfortunately that information provides us with a retrospective look at what has been occurring in regard to concessions and I am saying in this intervention that it is essential that this Committee takes a prospective look—again “prospective” may be a particularly appropriate word to use in the context of this debate—at what this Government is doing with the conservation estate. I would encourage the Committee—