Nash StuartCROWN MINERALS (PROHIBITION OF MINING) AMENDMENT BILLFirst ReadingDebate resumed from 28 June.Hon STUART NASH (Labour—Napier): Thank you very much Mr Speaker. I'm standing to oppose the Crown Minerals (Prohibition of Mining) Amendment Bill. Now there are different ways to get things done in this House. There are members' bills which the Government of the day just simply does not agree with. It goes through a process and that's the end of it—it dies a death. There are other members' bills however that the Government actually supports in principle but for whatever reason the Government of the day decides that the more robust process in terms of achieving your policy outcome is for this to go through a Government process as opposed to the member's bill process and this is one of those bills. Now this is an important bill. It's something that in principle the Labour Government supports and as a former Minister of Tourism I understand the value of living the brand—you know we go out to the world with clean green" and "100% Pure". That's how we sell ourselves globally and at this point in time it is incredibly important that we actually walk the walk and that we live the brand. That is why this piece of policy is very high on the Government's work agenda. At the moment we've got Ministers and we've got officials who are actually doing the work with regard to this piece of legislation out there at the moment. Now let me just walk through the processes. If we supported this as a member's bill what would happen is it would go to a select committee. It is time-restrained and a select committee with cross-party consultation does work albeit with officials that attend the select committee. But the bottom line is it is constrained through the processes which are also constrained through the select committee process. If this is sponsored by a Government or if this is part of the Government's policy agenda then it is not constrained by the same limits that the select committee process is. One of the really important things with regard to this is to identify the key stakeholders understand what their concerns are work through those concerns and come out with a piece of legislation that when it's introduced to the House the really heavy lifting has been done. So of course when a bill around this piece of policy does come to the House it will still go through that select committee process and there will still be an opportunity for robust debate but the heavy lifting will have already been done by Ministers and by officials in a way that allows full consultation and in a way that allows us to understand the issues and hopefully come up with solutions that are suitable and that are amenable to those key stakeholders for whom this is a really important issue. So I'm not saying that by the Government's adopting this sort of policy statement or this principle it doesn't go through a proper process—it absolutely does—but by the time it comes to the House then we've ironed out a lot of the problems. Also there is a lot of work being done. As a member of the Environment Committee I can say that we have heard from officials about this very issue. I mean we understand that this is important for Kiwis—we really do—but we also understand that there is a high level of complexity. It's not a matter of just saying that we'd ban everything in the conservation estate. If it was that simple it would have already been done. But there are key stakeholders for whom the consequence of what we are talking about in this member's bill isn't recognised and it isn't dealt with. We believe—the Government believes—that we could end up with a piece of legislation if we followed this member's bill that was far from ideal and there is no doubt about it that when you're doing something with regard to our conservation estate we need to get it right. That is why the principle behind this is supported but this member's bill isn't. But that doesn't mean that we won't be seeing something come to this House at some point under a Labour Government in the next term that doesn't deal with this issue—Damien Smith: Ha ha! Hon STUART NASH: Yeah I know. Well it may come sooner—you know it may be within the first six months—but I can't make any promises. But what I can say is because a lot of the work will be done it'll be high on the next Labour Government's agenda. So all I would say to those who are watching and all I would say to those for whom this is a really important issue—and I understand that it is for a lot of people—please don't think that the Government's opposing this bill means we oppose the policy intent because we don't oppose the policy intent. We support it but we just believe that the work needs to be done so that when the legislation is introduced it has integrity we've worked out the issues with the key stakeholders and when it goes to the select committee it is in a much better space than this bill is. So Labour opposes this bill. Thank you Madam Speaker."