Sage Eugenie: Environment Canterbury (Transitional Governance Arrangements) Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Environment Canterbury (Transitional Governance Arrangements) Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 13 October 2015. Volume:709;Page:7131. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Deputy Speaker. I would be pleased to be speaking on the Environment Canterbury (Restoration of Democracy) Bill but we have got the exact opposite here. The Green Party strongly opposes the Environment Canterbury (Transitional Governance Arrangements) Bill. Cantabrians should not be treated as second-class citizens and have to live with second-class local body representation which is what this bill is about by continuing to have appointed commissioners that the Minister has handpicked and with not returning to a fully elected regional council.That is what Nick Smith promised in 2010 when the Government axed elected councillors at Environment Canterbury—that we would get democracy back in 2013. That did not happen and it is not happening in this bill. No other regional or unitary council across the whole of New Zealand—in fact no other council—has this half-pie democratic option of having half the members of council elected.Hon Dr Nick Smith: Every district health board.EUGENIE SAGE: The Minister talks about district health boards. The Minister does not seem to realise that most of Environment Canterbury’s funding comes from rates and that there is a constitutional principle of no taxation without representation whereas district health boards receive a major chunk of all of their funding from central government through taxes rather than rates. So district health boards are not an appropriate model.But I would just like to talk a bit about history because the Minister has misled people again. He claims that Environment Canterbury had no water plans in place in 2010. In fact there was a proposed natural resources regional plan that was reaching the end of its hearing process and which the commissioners picked up adopted and made operative a couple of months after they were appointed. The Minister said there was no—Hon Dr Nick Smith: It’s not true.EUGENIE SAGE: It is true Minister. The Minister said there was no collaborative process. Well that is interesting because it was elected councillors who developed the Canterbury Water Management Strategy which provided for a collaborative process and which finalised the strategy before they were rudely got rid of. The Minister claimed there were no prohibitions on water takes in red zones. It was an elected council that recognised that ground water was being overused and that established the red zones and that was moving to actually restrict additional takes from those.So this whole process is undemocratic. The regulatory impact statement highlights that there is certainly no certainty that we will even get democracy back in 2019 because it contains the statement: “In the long term if the planning frameworks for freshwater management and earthquake recovery have been effected as planned this model would provide a mechanism for transition to a fully elected body”. There is a big if in there. The Minister promised democracy back in 2013; that did not happen. We are not getting it back in 2016 when the local body elections occur and there is no certainty that we will get it back in 2019 either.There is no justification for Cantabrians being given this half-pie model that the bill sets out. Why is that happening? It is of course because 60 percent of the water that is allocated for irrigation in New Zealand is down in Canterbury. So the Government wants to keep Environment Canterbury under its thumb by appointing commissioners. That whole water issue is why the Government got rid of councillors because it was an elected council that increased the flow regime for the Waimakariri River. The directors of Waimakariri Irrigation and Irrigation New Zealand objected to that—how dare elected councillors move to improve river flows to better protect the health of rivers! So they lobbied the Government along with councils and that resulted in the councillors being removed.Under this bill we will have a halving of the level of elected representation we had in 2010. In 2010 we had 14 elected councillors. This bill provides only seven. In 2010 Christchurch citizens elected eight regional councillors. Under this bill they will elect only four.We are returning to what Peter Dunne has called the days of the squattocracy where a vote in rural areas is worth more than a vote in the city. Under this bill we will see one councillor in Christchurch representing more than 90000 citizens but in South Canterbury a vote is worth more because one councillor there will be representing only 59770 citizens. So it is gerrymandering effectively where you get constituencies established and they have not got the same number of citizens being represented by councillors.So what do we have under this bill? We will have our second-largest city being able to elect only four regional councillors and that contrasts with the 20-odd councillors who are elected in Auckland and the 13 over the whole of Greater Wellington. So this Government wants yes-men and yes-women in place at Environment Canterbury so that it can continue to control the direction of that council and it can continue to ensure that we have more irrigation more intensive agriculture and of course more water pollution.You only have to look at the performance of these commissioners that the Government has appointed and we have seen a decline in water quality. At recreational bathing sites on rivers in 2009-10 74 percent of those sites were suitable for swimming but in 2013-14 that had decreased to 67 percent. So water quality for recreation has declined under the commissioners. They have not improved water quality. They have certainly made it easier for irrigators by allowing more takes but they have not improved it for recreation and for swimming.This whole model—the Minister has said that the commissioners have made good progress. Yet in the regulatory impact statement it says that the implementation of the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management and the final chapters of the Proposed Canterbury Land and Water Regional Plan are not expected to be completed until at least 2020. So we have got a double standard here. We have had the commissioners in place for 5 years and yet they are being allowed another 5 years to finish the planning process and to have a second-generation regional plan when that was at the heart of the Minister’s misplaced criticism of Environment Canterbury in 2010.I think it is worth reminding the House that Environment Canterbury back then was dealing with more applications for water takes than all of the other regional and unitary councils in New Zealand combined and that there was no national guidance and no national policy statement on fresh water to help provide that assistance to the council. We got that only last year. So it was dealing with a situation by itself with a failure by successive Governments to provide the guidance that the Resource Management Act intended.So we have the commissioners continuing when if the Government was really concerned—genuinely concerned—about continuity there would have been other options. The Government could have provided through this bill for elected councillors to return in 2016 to have a fully elected council and for some of the commissioners to be contracted as advisers for a period after those elections and to continue without having the right to vote.That would have been an alternative if the Government trusted the citizens of Canterbury which it does not. But the Green Party does. It believes that Cantabrians are ready to elect a competent council to pursue policies of sustainable management of water the coast soils air quality and natural hazards and to make much more progress than the commissioners have made in actually improving water quality not allowing it to further decline as has happened under the commissioners.The Green Party would listen to the more than 500 submitters on the Government’s review document who wanted democracy restored. It would listen to the Christchurch City Council which has said that it wants effective open and transparent processes back rather than this hybrid model that this Government is proposing.We oppose the bill. We oppose the truncated select committee process and we want the restoration of democracy in Canterbury. That is what Cantabrians deserve not this half-pie model.