Hughes GarethGARETH HUGHES (Green): Kia ora Mr Assistant Speaker. Nga mihi nui ki a koutou kia ora. I rise first of all to acknowledge you in the Chair and your years of service to this Parliament and the country.I rise to oppose this legislation the Maritime Transport Amendment Bill. It was a tough choice for the Green Party to oppose it. I remember standing on those Tauranga beaches when the Rena hit the Astrolabe Reef and the heavy fuel oil hit those beaches. I remember seeing those people in the HAZMAT suits. Actually I remember early on those people picking up the oil blobs themselves because there was no official response. There were not in those initial days the people in the HAZMAT suits organising the clean-up. Good old Kiwis just went on and did it themselves picking up those oily blobs.I remember the anger at the time that the taxpayer was going to have to pick up the tab for a company and a ship that had despoiled one of the most beautiful parts of the country a place that was called the kai moana supermarket" for Te Whānau-a-Apanui and other iwi and hapū in the region who had their kai moana taken away from them. There was the environmental the spiritual the social and the economic dislocation but it was doubly galling that the taxpayer had to pick up the tab.I think it is quite a fair principle which everyone in this House can agree with: if you make a mess you clean it up. What happened in this case was that because the Government had not signed up to these international maritime liability agreements—the 2003 International Convention on the Establishment of an International Fund for Compensation for Oil Pollution Damage had not been acceded to—we were not able to access the full amount of money there would have been otherwise. The taxpayer spent more than $100 million cleaning up a mess that it could have got the company to pay for.It was triply galling when our out-of-date Resource Management Act had a $10000 maximum daily penalty. For the worst environmental disaster we had seen a $10000 penalty was simply laughable when the taxpayer was forced to pick up the tab of $100 million. It is good that we are finally signing up to this agreement. I wish we could also be modernising our resource management legislation at the same time. I also wish we could be beefing up our oil spill response capability which was seen to be so woefully unprepared. So that is the good; the bad however is the outcry from the experts regarding the compulsory drug testing in the shipping industry and the potential damage to the Chatham Islands shipping service.We have heard a debate about evidence. The Government often talks about evidence. What we heard from the experts and the submitters—the actual evidence—was that these drug tests were not necessary they were not helpful and they were not there to improve safety in the sector. So we are going to listen to the experts; we are going to listen to those involved in the industry. And that is why we are opposing it. For a small island with a population of only a matter of hundreds it is important that they have an affordable and reliable service to the mainland. Opening this up to unflagged ships is risking that affordable reliable service that they aspire to. Those are the two reasons that outweigh the positives of this legislation and that is why the Green Party is opposed. Kia ora koutou."