Parker DavidEXCLUSIVE ECONOMIC ZONE AND CONTINENTAL SHELF (ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS) AMENDMENT BILLSecond ReadingHon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): I move That the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.The bill corrects an error in legislation that governs the management of activities in our offshore environment and ensures that a cost recovery regime that charges the applicant can fairly operate. A new board of inquiry process for dealing with some marine consent applications was added to the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Act which I will shorten to the EEZ Act in future. This was added in 2007 through the Resource Legislation Amendment Act and an additional provision is needed to allow recovery from an applicant of the board of inquiry costs that are applied under that Act.Now members who were in the House during the last term will remember that there was quite a controversy around that piece of legislation. It had a shambolic passage through the House. It lay around at select committee for about a year because the Government couldn't put together the numbers for the bill. The chair of the committee was Scott Simpson and he was having to turn up time and again—it wasn't his fault; it actually wasn't his fault but he had to turn up time and again because his Minister didn't have the numbers for the bill because it was opposed not just by the Labour Party but also by New Zealand First by the Green Party and by two of their then coalition partners United Future and the ACT Party. They couldn't even get support from the Māori Party for it until they did a trade on some other legislation.Now throughout this the bill was lampooned as being overly complex and ill-considered and this is one of many examples of where it was flawed. So the effect of it was that taxpayers were left footing the bill in respect of applications for consents within the EEZ area that went to a board of inquiry and this bill fixes that relieves the long-suffering taxpayer of having to do that in the future.The select committee's now heard this and can I thank the Environment Committee for doing that and for the scrutiny that they gave it at the end of which the committee has unanimously recommended that the bill should be passed with one minor amendment which corrects a cross-reference. Can I also acknowledge the New Zealand Law Society who wrote to the Environment Committee and to me about another area that they've suggested clarification for. They've suggested that it would be easier to follow the legislation if there was another provision put into the Act by this amendment bill to make it clear that existing cost recovery provisions in the EEZ Act will continue to apply and we're intending to do that at the committee of the whole House stage.There are other issues that are more substantial for me in respect of the EEZ legislation that are not in this legislation. I find it hard to understand why we have a different legal test and a different set of rules applying to sea areas out to the edge of the territorial sea compared with the rules that apply within the EEZ. It's unnecessarily complex to have two different sets of legal principles and two different processes that apply inside and outside that boundary of the territorial sea. It makes no sense and indeed that's been made clear in some applications that have had to make applications at the same time for consideration under the Resource Management Act out to the territorial sea boundary and a separate application for the same activity in respect of the portion of the sea outside the territorial sea to the EEZ. We can't fix that in this bill but it does point to more work needed on this in the future.The bill also sets out criteria: the Minister must have regard to when recovering costs from an applicant—those who have sat on the Regulations Review Committee in recent years will have seen complaints from applicants where some of the board of inquiry costs have run to millions of dollars and they haven't felt like the board of inquiry has had appropriate controls on the way in which they incur costs which are eventually recovered from the applicant.I don't think any more needs to be said other than that. After this amendment bill passes through subsequent stages applicants will be subject to the cost recovery provisions they ought to have been subject to. I make the point that we're not applying this retrospectively and anyone who's filed an application before this law comes into effect effectively does so at the cost of the taxpayer. That's appropriate given that we ought not to be imposing these things retrospectively. I commend the bill to the House.