SpeechHon EUGENIE SAGE (Green): E te Māngai o te Whare tēnā koe. The Green Party is very pleased to be supporting the Prohibition on Seabed Mining Legislation Amendment Bill. I mihi to Debbie Ngarewa-Packer for bringing this bill to the Parliament and for the very long and strenuous journey that she Ngāti Ruanui environmental organisations community organisations like Kiwis Against Seabed Mining Greenpeace the Taranaki-Whanganui Conservation Board and coastal communities in Taranaki have taken and for all of the mahi that they have put into resisting the efforts—successfully so far—of Trans-Tasman Resources and its application to take millions of tonnes of sediment from the seabed. We are within a whisker—if Government members were supporting this bill—of stopping the reckless pursuit of minerals in the ocean. We are within a whisker of protecting the oceans recognising the huge role that they have in regulating the climate and absorbing excess heat and excess carbon dioxide and putting a line in the sand that Aotearoa New Zealand stands for healthy oceans not the rapacious pursuit by multinational corporations of private profit by bulldozing the ocean floor suctioning up millions of tonnes of sediment and then discharging that just to seek minerals that you can also get on land and that we could get by recycling and recovering minerals from electronic waste. One of the reasons the Green Party supports this bill is that all of the mahi to date has been done by the community. It has been done by iwi and hapū Ngāti Ruanui community organisations and individuals in resisting applications to date. The Government needs to take action and not leave it to the community and to iwi and hapū to shoulder the burden of protecting the oceans against deep-sea mining. [Interruption] ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Poto Williams): Order! Order! Hon EUGENIE SAGE: I find that the arguments being put forward by Labour members that the reasons they are supporting an inquiry isn't because of the provisions in this bill—it neglects that select committees have a fundamental role in reshaping bills in response to public submissions. If this bill was supported at first reading the public would be able to have their say. Bills that are introduced into this Parliament emerge from it much changed after the select committee process. It is not as if this bill automatically becomes law as a number of Labour members have implied. It could be changed in select committee to deal with that retrospective issue. Instead we have an inquiry. The Green Party will participate constructively in that inquiry but given that the Green Party alongside the community has been fighting for more than 12 years to protect our oceans from deep-sea mining in Aotearoa's waters this bill could have taken that burden away and put it on the Government to say We are taking action to protect ocean health." There are so many opportunities to recover and recycle precious metals from all electronic waste that currently goes to landfill and to take steps towards a circular economy rather than doing what ACT is proposing which is to allow deep-sea mining to really get started in Aotearoa. We should note too that Aotearoa is one of the countries like those in the Pacific where these multinationals like the minerals company DeepGreen and others think that they can do prospecting and then try and convince the people that there's going to be a lot of economic wealth and continue with that really exploitative approach to the oceans. This bill is an opportunity to say that the oceans around Aotearoa matter that all of the marine life that enjoys those oceans matters that coastal communities and iwi and hapū matter and that tikanga matters as the Supreme Court found with the appeals. These things all matter. If this bill goes to select committee there would be an opportunity for the public to have a say. Te Paati Kakariki strongly supports it. Kia ora."