Shirley Ken: Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Stockholm Convention) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Shirley Ken: Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Stockholm Convention) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:609;Page:6979] 
Hon KEN SHIRLEY (Deputy Leader—ACT NZ) 
: I do not know how naive that Minister the Hon Marian Hobbs actually thinks we are. She is trying to sort of mollycoddle us and say we should not worry because if ever at some subsequent stage when she is still the Minister—she has only a couple of years to run but be that as it may—she will by Order in Council engage in consultation with everyone and everything will be done right. Well let us look what has already happened under this urgency motion. We can see the Government has rammed through legislation without any consultation with no calling for submissions and with no referral of bills to the select committees. So it is a bit rich for the Minister to say we should trust the Government to always consult and follow due process. We know that this Government does not follow due process; it fails to do that at every turn. So I am sorry but that reply from the Minister was very hollow and very unconvincing and she will have to do a lot better than that if she is to address the very real concerns that have been raised. 
The irony again is that we generally support this legislation. We signed the Stockholm convention 2 years ago and I understand we have to pass this legislation before we can ratify it. That is what this legislation is all about but why on earth are we debating it under urgency? This legislation has been ticking away on the slow burner simmering away and bouncing along at the bottom of the Order Paper. The Government did not have the presence of mind to bring it up the Order Paper but has then put it in the urgency motion and tried to ram it through the House under urgency. I put it to members that this bill would have gone through the House a lot easier and a lot less acrimoniously if the Government had put it through the House in normal parliamentary time and not under urgency. Understandably the Opposition parties become suspicious when these sorts of issues are put through urgency and bypass the due process. 
I now turn to the issue of what will occur if the international convention is subsequently amended—and we know that these conventions are always amended. Someone will try to raise the barrier and add a new chemical or substance to it. That will bind us and there is no safeguard here. The Minister is saying that that will go through under an Order in Council. That does not involve having the scrutiny of Parliament. It abrogates our sovereignty. The danger is that our bureaucrats go off to these UN conventions and committees—and there is one held every week somewhere in the world; it is as though they decide to meet somewhere in the spring. Those committees meet all over the world at huge cost. The bureaucrats and non-governmental organisations that have no mandate and no accountability go off to them and play a huge influence in these environmental conventions. Countries sign up to them and that abrogates their sovereignty because if there are changes then we will have to be bound by them. 
The bill is quite helpful with regard to this issue because it actually has the convention attached to it. If members look at article 21 of the convention in Schedule 1AA they will see it covers the situation of amendments to the convention. It states: “Amendments to this Convention shall be adopted at a meeting of the Conference of the Parties. The text of any proposed amendment shall be communicated to the Parties by the Secretariat at least six months before the meeting at which it is proposed for adoption.” So in other words all the unelected unaccountable non-governmental groups that control the processes in terms of such UN conventions can through the back door impose controls and restrictions on New Zealand law. I say to the Minister Marian Hobbs that that is bad. Her explanation when she leapt to her feet previously failed to satisfy us because it did not address the issue. The mere fact that she says she will consult before an Order in Council is issued is very hollow words. We want some sort of assurance that it will be brought back to Parliament and referred back to the select committee so that submissions can be called for and the due process followed. 
We know that substances like dieldrin and DDT have been very widely used in this country. Dieldrin was the basis of our sheep dips and DDT was used extensively to fight grass grub so there are large residues of that. Polychlorinated biphenyls were used in electricity transformers and tipped all over the landscape for many decades. Those have been widely used common substances. Fortunately we do not use them now and that is good. However we do need to be assured that if new substances are added to the list in the convention adequate consideration will be given to that by Parliament.