Nash Stuart: Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) (Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeNash Stuart: Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) (Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 26 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:2001. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]STUART NASH (Labour—Napier): The Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) (Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill may be a small piece of legislation considering the size of the bill. The chair of the Local Government and Environment Committee upon which this bill will fall said it is not that important and said the committee will give it due consideration. A lot of what the member said Labour actually agrees with but there is one thing I do not agree with. This is a really sloppy way to craft legislation. It is a really sloppy way to control an industry and when the chair of this committee says: “Well it was a little bit of an oversight and this is a big piece of legislation. We need to get it right and there is going to continue to be these sorts of amendments.” I wonder what sort of select committee this chair is chairing. Is he actually reading the bills the statements and the submissions that come before him?The reason I ask this is that the important thing about this piece of legislation is that it is actually about giving New Zealanders the right to appeal against a decision made by the Environmental Protection Authority. That is not a minor piece of tinkering. It is a fundamental right of democracy in this country. That right is the ability to appeal against a decision based on the facts that you may put forward or your beliefs or your principles. It is not a mild: “Oh goodness me. We forgot about this. I’m really sorry. We’ll just throw a piece of legislation in front of the House and it will be OK.” Luckily for Shell it will be OK because we will pass this piece of legislation and we will support it being referred to the select committee but the last thing we want to see before this House I would suggest is legislation made in this way.If this is such an important piece of legislation then what we need to do is make sure before we pass it into law that we know it is going to be robust and that we know it is going to meet the democratic principles upon which our Parliament is based. Anything like this—the fundamental principle behind the ability to appeal a decision to have your say—needs to be encoded in legislation. I am very very surprised that this amendment is needed. I would have thought it would be Politics 101 Legislative Drafting 101—the right of appeal in any decision; put it in there.We are going to back this bill because the security of energy supply is incredibly important in a First World economy. There is an example of what happened when the Māui platform went down for 5 days: it cost about $200 million. That is around $40 million a day. There is no doubt about the fact that we cannot afford to have this piece of really important energy infrastructure compromised in any way shape or form. But I just think this is a sloppy way to do it. There is no doubt about that.But there are other things that come into play as well in other debates that we need to be having at the same time. This is about gas. Unfortunately the Government and the Minister for the Environment will not buy into the promise of having 95 percent renewables by 2020. Shell Todd Oil Services is going to have to make some very important decisions very soon about what it does with the whole Māui platform and what it does with the gas industry. If we want to live our brand our “clean green” global brand which is in fact our global competitive advantage—in this day and age it is not just companies that are looking for a global competitive advantage; it is actually economies and countries and certainly small economies like our own—then we have got to make global commitments to make sure that our words are not empty rhetoric. I think what the Minister should be doing in terms of energy is sending a very clear signal that by 2020 we want to have moved to at least 95 percent renewable energy.We have a great track record on—well no we do not. We are beginning to build a track record but we have a reputation overseas as being great advocates for this. We have engineers who are developing world-class technology. It is one of those classic cases where our innovators and our engineers are doing brilliant things and they have a fantastic reputation overseas but they do not have the same sort of reputation in New Zealand. We need to move to this. I found out today a very interesting fact. Actually the wind turbines in Palmerston North are the most efficient wind turbines in the world. They have just broken some global record for the most power generated over a 24-hour period. That is fantastic. So we have the ability to do this and we have the know-how to do this; what we need now is the legislative will to do this.They say that it is very difficult to quantify the value of our “clean green” brand overseas. The Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment tried to do it in another guise and it reckoned it was worth about $30 billion which is a hell of a lot of money for us. These are things in areas that just cannot be copied anywhere overseas. Our brand is one of our most important attributes and if we do anything to diminish that brand we are in a lot of trouble. One of the major things that we can do to actually enhance that brand is to move to renewables. This is important because what we are talking about here is prolonging—well sort of—the life of gas exploration. It is important this point. I think the Māui platform makes up about 25 percent of New Zealand’s gas supply which is a significant chunk—there is no doubt about that. As the first Labour speaker Megan Woods alluded it employs about 300 people in Taranaki. It is a very important part of regional infrastructure. There is no doubt about that. But I have my doubts about whether this is the future of energy generation in this country and whether the Māui platform and the whole gas exploration industry are in fact what we should be promoting in the 21st century. Please do not get me wrong—I am not saying that we should not be supporting this bill and I think I have made it very clear that we will support this bill but what I am saying is that we need to understand where our global competitive advantage lies.The other thing I would say is that this piece of legislation is a poor way to regulate an industry. I have talked about the sloppy nature of its introduction to the House and the fact that we are actually speaking in front of something that is so important to us—i.e. the right to appeal—and it just highlights the sloppiness that has crept into this Government over the last 6 years. I think that what the people of New Zealand would like to see is a much tighter well-run Government that has a vision for the future but unfortunately we are not seeing that. In the first term of the Key Government it had that tightness it had that cohesion and there was a bit of a vision. We saw it slip last term and what we are seeing at the moment is a sloppiness that really just sends bad signals to the people of New Zealand that these guys have forgotten what it means to be a good caring Government and to put legislation in place that supports a growing economy. This is what this comes down to.This is not just a minor amendment; what this is about is the security of New Zealand’s energy supply. It might be minor because there are only 6 pages compared with a bill that we have been debating earlier that was about 1000 pages but this is an important piece of legislation. I know this is an environment bill but it is also about energy as well and it goes to the heart of what Mr Bridges was saying before. We have seen the price of fuel and the importer margins for example go through the roof. We wanted to launch an inquiry into that and it was turned down by the Nats because the Minister of Energy and Resources said he was aware of the facts and he had written a letter to the oil companies—so it did not matter; do not worry about protecting the interests of good hard-working Kiwis. I must admit that the only member of the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers also turned this down. I think he has forgotten that he does actually represent consumers and taxpayers. Well I think they have forgotten that his party exists.Anyway what this represents is a sloppiness and an arrogance that is most unattractive—the belief that there can be just a letter written to oil companies and it is all OK. What this does is that it begins I think to treat voters like they are idiots. Well voters of New Zealand are not. They understand that when they go to the petrol pump and pay $1.90 when they should be paying $1.20 or $1.30 there is something not quite right. What we miss is a real opportunity for MPs right across the House to work together—Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Come back to the bill.STUART NASH: —for the common good of New Zealand which is what this bill is about. I suspect that every party in this Parliament is going to support this bill because we understand the necessity of energy security but I think there are more things we could do working across Parliament to support the interests of consumers and taxpayers and good hard-working Kiwis. We missed a trick in the energy sector on Wednesday at the Finance and Expenditure Committee. We will not miss a trick this time but we want to see—Parliament wants to see and the people of New Zealand want to see—a Government that returns to a much tighter much more caring much more energised and much less arrogant approach to legislation in the issues that are important to the people of New Zealand. Thank you.