Little Andrew: Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill — In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLittle Andrew: Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 16 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10296. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]ANDREW LITTLE (Labour): I once again rise to speak on the Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill. I would like to invoke our good and well-loved late friend Parekura Horomia who when asked early in his political career in the House about a particular piece of legislation on a very important and topical issue of the dayresponded in terms that were regarded then as parliamentary so hopefully they will be regarded as parliamentary today. He said that he wanted a piece of legislation that could not be frigged around with. What has happened with this legislation is completely the opposite. We have not had a good quality piece of legislation and it has been frigged around with. Yet again we are asked to do exactly that today because this Government cannot and will not get it right. We are in the extraordinary situation of having a reasonably comprehensive amendment bill to an amendment Act that has itself not yet taken effect. If that does not tell you about the quality of the management of legislation through this House then I am not quite sure what will.Earlier in this third reading debate Jonathan Young said that the changes in this bill were necessary for health and safety in the industry. Well that is just patently not correct. The thing about that is that this Government has finally started to take health and safety seriously. It could not do anything other than that. It had the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy saying that things were in a parlous state and something had to change. It had its own committee chaired by the very good the very great Rob Jager himself the head of an oil company in this country Shell Todd Oil Services who recommended radical change to our health and safety approach. Nothing in this bill is going to make a single bit of difference to health and safety. We need a comprehensive approach and if anything what this bill will do is make it worse because the health and safety oversight required under—I have to get this right—not the primary legislation but the amendment Act that we are now amending is itself pretty weak. It is pretty light. It simply requires the Minister to be satisfied that it is likely that a permit applicant has the technical capability and the financial means to do the job. There is no objective standard to it and it of course requires the Minister merely to be satisfied. That is a pretty low standard. With all due respect to the members in this House that is a pretty low standard in reality.What this bill then does is split that up. It says that whereas before the Minister had to be satisfied about technical capability and financial means throughout the entire process up to exploration drilling now we will split that up and we will say: “Listen if you have got the technical capability and the financial means for the prospecting aspect of it we will just let you go then and come back to us for the next bit.” And then all of a sudden what apparently this bill contemplates is that if when the Halliburtons the Schlumbergers and the Shells have got their initial permit and the Minister’s satisfaction as to technical and financial capability they come back and say: “That’s it. There are barrels under there. The black gold is going to flow. We want to come back for the rest of it.” now the Minister is going to be able to stand up and say: “Uh-uh you’ve now got to show me a second round of technical and financial capability.” There is just no way on the track record of this Government that we can be sure that any Minister in this Government is going to be able to stand up to a Schlumberger a Shell or a Halliburton and say: “Oh no you’ve got to stop what you’re doing now because you’ve got to have better than what you’ve got now even though I approved it last time.” That is incredible. So what this bill does is it weakens that level of oversight at a time when we are meant to be being convinced that this Government is taking health and safety seriously. This goes in totally the opposite direction and that is why it is wrong. That is why we are opposing it.Mr Lotu-Iiga in his speech said that it is all about providing jobs. He trotted out the old repeated assertion that the parties in Opposition do not want jobs for people which is completely ridiculous. He might want to know—and Jonathan Young knows this as well as I do—that we have had probably the best summer of oil exploration and oil industry activity in many years in Taranaki in the summer just gone and you knowwhat the most recent employment statistics show? Unemployment in Taranaki went up by 500. In the last—Su’a William Sio: How much?ANDREW LITTLE: Five hundred. Five hundred more jobless in Taranaki in the last year after the best summer season of oil industry activity we have seen in many years. This is not the panacea. This is not the gold at the end of the rainbow that this Government trots out. Let us do this activity because yes there is the possibility of generating some value. But this is not the answer to New Zealand’s long-term economic structural problems. We have got to get past that. Until we have people in office in Government and on the Treasury benches who understand that New Zealand has deep-seated long-term structural economic problems and are prepared to do something about it then life ain’t going to be too good for us in 5 years’ or 10 years’ time. This is not going to cure it. This is not the cure. But while we have an oil and gas industry and while we have Ministers who have responsibility for providing oversight then the least I think New Zealand expects is that we will operate to world’s best practice. This bill will not do that. It does the opposite. It is a highly subjective approach a highly subjective test that will not ensure that we have the best possible not only health and safety but also environmental standards operating when it comes to oil and gas both prospecting and exploration.And then the other insidious aspect of this bill is the conceit in it. It is this attempt to legislate for something that we simply do not know we have the power to legislate for and that is control or management of all the water above the continental shelf. We have had evidence before this House in this urgent procedure that suggests that it is hugely doubtful whether we can even pass this law or at least pass a law and hope that it has meaningful effect. We do not have a response from the Minister of Energy and Resources. The Minister sat in the chair all through the Committee stage and did not respond to a single point that was raised—legitimate points backed up by evidence. We have not had the benefit of a select committee process where we can call upon the officials professionals and independent advisers. We have not had the benefit of that and we are ramming this through roughshod as Mr Henare was concerned to hear earlier in this debate. It is being rammed through roughshod and he knows what that is. He would have seen that a few times in his time as a union official I know because in his day when he was a union official ramming things through roughshod was the only way they did things. I was a union official in the democratic days of the union movement. Things were all sweetness and light—Hon Tau Henare: When was that?ANDREW LITTLE: —and it was good. And we did good things.Hon Members: Just after he left.ANDREW LITTLE: Just after Tau Henare left—that is right. So it is not possible—[Interruption] That is right—wore the leather jackets up to the Marsden Point oil refinery. We know how it operated. That was just for the clerical workers. We know how it worked. We are concerned. We did good things and the union members of Taranaki including the bits of Taranaki that fall in the electorate of the member opposite Shane Ardern—they were happy people and good people people who worked at Motunui and the Waitara Valley plant in the days when it fell in a different electorate. But it is in New Plymouth now in its rightful place and things are going well.We are opposed to this legislation because it treats with contempt the people in the oil and gas industry particularly those who are working at the coalface and doing the dangerous work. It treats with contempt those who wish to exercise their right to dissent to activities that are happening and raise a voice of protest. It treats with contempt the very members of this House and the lawmaking procedures that we are elected to doand to fulfil in good faith and with proper information and good process. It treats all of that with contempt. It is a bad bill. It is a wrong bill. And this will be a day of shame for this House when this bill goes through.