Simpson ScottHon SCOTT SIMPSON (Chairperson of the Environment Committee): Thank you very much Madam Speaker. As the newly minted committee chair it's a pleasure to be participating in this the first parliamentary debate on the long-term insights briefings that were part of the last Parliament's work programme.Now the whole point of these long-term insights briefings was that they were supposed to have the ministries and the various Government departments and agencies that were required under statute to produce them provide information to select committees and ultimately this House about the medium- and long-term trends risks and opportunities facing New Zealand. Now that's a very laudable a very plausible and a very worthy objective. So the Ministry for the Environment duly invested a lot of time—many many hours of work by staff from the Ministry for the Environment an agency that in the last six years of the last Government had quadrupled its number of employees—and they presented a very big fulsome report to the select committee.It was typical of Ministry for the Environment reports: it had lots of very nice warm words lots of aspirational goals lots of pretty pictures and it sought to actually ensure—and I've got the select committee's report here; it only runs to about four or five pages. It's actually quite a short report in balance. But the Ministry for the Environment presented their long-term insights briefing. The briefing topic was Where to from here? How we ensure the future wellbeing of land and people. Well that was good work. The briefing it says in this committee report looks towards 2050 which it says represents an important timescale for both climate change and native ecosystems". Well that's very true. I don't know that that took too long to figure out.In Chapter 2 they said that the briefing describes how New Zealand's land is under pressure. Well again kind of obvious. Chapter 3 of the briefing referred to the need to set out a vision for the future of land. Again very good laudable. And then the report from the Ministry for the Environment went on to list some transformational change that was needed to meet the aspirations that they contained in their report. Chapter 4 for instance discussed pathways to a more resilient future for the land and every generation. And they talked about achieving incremental change. They talked about increasing effectiveness of policy and legislation empowering communities investing in sustainable infrastructure and technology investing in science promoting environmental education embracing collaborative governance. And it sounded all to me like a Bluegreens policy manifesto. I thought that they had been reading some of the stuff that the very good Bluegreens had put together! The briefing notes as well—that there would be a need for transformational change that would require choices about priorities. Well again go figure. I think we all know what that is.So I want to record in this debate because this is the first of these debates that the House has had and we'll have more of them in years to come and in months to come and that's probably a good thing—but I want to read and quote from the select committee of the previous Government where there was a then Labour Government majority on that select committee. I quote: "While the Long-term Insights Briefing articulates an integrated worldview the committee considers the report did not significantly contribute to an increased understanding of the issues the committee regularly deals with and the issues that are important to New Zealand." Further quote: "If these Long-term Insights Briefings are to be useful they need to go beyond stating the obvious and bring new insights and potential solutions to inform policy thinking."I think that for a committee in the last Parliament that was dominated then by Labour caucus members to have given that approval which was unanimously agreed by the committee at the time speaks volumes about the quality of what was a really long really glossy beautifully presented worthy piece of work but did not actually as the report says go beyond stating the obvious. I hope that future long-term insights briefings will be far more beneficial to the insightful work that this House has to do."