Crown Minerals Amendment Bill

on behalf of the Minister of Energy and Resources: I move, That the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill be now read a first time.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Hon CARMEL SEPULONI: I move, That the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee to consider the bill.

The bill proposes changes as part of Tranche Two of the Crown Minerals Act 1991 review. The Government commenced a two-part review of the Crown Minerals Act 1991 in 2018. Tranche One was completed later that year. It gave effect to the Government’s policy to end future offshore petroleum exploration and confine any future onshore development to the Taranaki region only.

Tranche Two was intended to be wider in scope, to consider the factors needed to enable New Zealand’s petroleum and mineral resources sector’s contribution to a productive, sustainable, and inclusive economy. In progressing Tranche Two, the Government decided to focus first on the biggest issues and risks. The Crown Minerals (Decommissioning and Other Matters) Amendment Act was passed in November 2021. This strengthened the Crown Minerals Act’s provisions to help mitigate the risks to the Crown and other third parties of, potentially, having to undertake and fund decommissioning in the future and to expand its current enforcement.

To address other matters included in Tranche Two, it was decided to make changes designed to align the Crown Minerals Act with wider Government policy while maintaining its current role, which is for the economic development of Crown-owned minerals within New Zealand for the benefit of New Zealanders. This approach is intended to allow for a fuller understanding of changes in the wider regulatory system within which the Crown Minerals Act operates, such as the resource management and conservation reforms and their impacts, before considering whether further changes may be needed.

The bill proposes amendments to the Crown Minerals Act in respect to two aspects of the Tranche Two review: addressing the promotional purpose of the Crown Minerals Act in light of Government priorities, and iwi and hapū engagement and involvement in Crown-owned minerals. The bill also seeks to clarify and make consistent the permit, grant, transfer, and change tests in relation to decommissioning obligations. The Crown Minerals Act’s promotional intent provides little flexibility as to how the Crown manages and allocates rights to Crown-owned minerals.

The Crown Minerals Act was amended in 2013 to reflect the policy at the time, which was to attract investment in our petroleum and minerals sector. Among other changes, the amendments added the Crown Minerals Act current purpose statement, which is to “promote prospecting for, exploration for, and mining of Crown owned minerals for the benefit of New Zealand”. Since 2013, the strategic and wider regulatory environment in which the Crown Minerals Act operates has evolved. Climate change is an increasing focus, as is the use of an intergenerational lens in decision making that considers the longer-term and wider dimensions of wellbeing such as environment, social, and cultural outcomes. New Zealand now has domestic targets to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, with carbon emissions to reach net zero by 2050. We also recently updated our first nationally determined contribution under the Paris Agreement to set a target of a 50 percent reduction of net greenhouse gas emissions below our gross 2005 level by 2030.

In 2019, the Government released a resource strategy setting out our vision for the minerals and petroleum sector as a world-leading environmentally and socially responsible sector that delivers affordable and secure resources for the benefit of all New Zealanders. Since then, we have set an aspirational target of 100 percent renewable electricity generation by 2030. In May, we released New Zealand’s first emissions reduction plan, which sets out the strategies and actions needed to contribute to the global effort to limit global warming. As part of that, the Government has committed to developing the New Zealand energy strategy to set the direction for New Zealand’s path away from fossil fuels and towards greater levels of renewable electricity and other low-emissions alternatives. We are also developing a gas transition plan to establish transition pathways specifically for the fossil and gas sector.

While fossil fuels continue to play an important role in keeping the lights on today, we know the future will look different. In this context, the Crown Minerals Act’s current focus on promoting the development of petroleum and minerals does not enable enough flexibility in the choices available to the Crown as resource owner. While it is important that the Crown Minerals Act is able to sustain investor confidence to continue the development of Crown-owned minerals where required, the current focus of the Act limits the scope of decisions to achieve a managed and equitable transition away from fossil fuels.

The bill proposes to neutralise the promotional intent of the Crown Minerals Act to increase flexibility in the management of Crown-owned resources. We propose changing the word “promote” in the purpose statement to more neutral language that neither requires nor inhibits development of Crown-owned minerals. Associated provisions in the Crown Minerals Act would also be amended to make neutral their promotional intent. One intended effect of the removal of this promotional intent will be to increase flexibility in relation to when and how often future public tenders for petroleum exploration permits take place.

The proposed amendments are not intended to change the fundamental role of the Crown Minerals Act in the wider regulatory system, which is to allocate development rights to Crown-owned minerals in a way that increases economic benefit to New Zealand. The wider regulatory system, such as health and safety, environment, and conservation laws, will continue to provide the necessary checks and balances with regards to the stewardship domains.

Feedback from hapū and iwi has been that engagement with permit and licence holders is variable. While there have been improvements in some instances, engagement is not always prioritised, the quality of engagement is inconsistent, and there can be a lack of transparency when sharing information. The current approach to permit and licence holder and permit applicant engagement is largely voluntary and expectations for good engagement can be unclear. Where relationships are poor, potential benefits resulting from positive relationships are foregone.

We propose to create more certainty around engagement expectations. We are proposing providing hapū and iwi with opportunities to review and discuss annual iwi engagement reports that are currently required of Tier 1 permit holders under the Crown Minerals Act, and to enable the relevant regulations to specify minimum content requirements for those reports. We also propose to clarify that decision makers, under the Crown Minerals Act, may have regard to feedback from hapū and iwi on past permit or licence holder engagement when making permit allocation decisions. Regulation changes will also be progressed alongside the bill, to specify minimum content requirements for iwi engagement reports and to require, as part of certain application types, the provision of contact information to be passed on to hapū and iwi.

The Crown Minerals (Decommissioning and Other Matters) Amendment Act 2021 introduced changes to strengthen the decision-making test for permit, grant, transfer, and change provisions in order to reduce the likelihood of companies gaining permits in New Zealand that do not have the financial capability to undertake and fund decommissioning. For the avoidance of any ambiguity, we propose changes to clarify and make consistent the Crown Minerals Act’s various permit, grant, transfer, and change provisions to ensure that assessments can be carried out—not just in relation to compliance with work programmes and permit conditions but also in relation to the decommissioning-related obligation in the Crown Minerals Act.

We consulted on the policy proposals that form the basis of these provisions in 2019 and 2020, as part of the Crown Minerals Act review Tranche Two discussion document. Officials also carried out further consultation with hapū and iwi from November 2021 to February this year. We are confident that these changes seek to fairly balance competing interests in relation to the regime, and there will be further opportunity for input during the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee’s consideration of the bill. I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It is a pleasure to speak on the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill. The National Party will not be supporting this bill. This is quite pernicious actually. I will go into that shortly, but I note that the Minister who’s just taken her seat, Carmel Sepuloni, spent most of the time talking about legislation that’s already been passed rather than what this bill is about.

You would think if you were the Minister of Energy and Resources that you would have gone down a mine. Actually, I asked the Minister that very question, and in fact while she has visited a mine, she’s never been down one. Never got inside a mine to actually see how it works and what it’s doing and the good stuff that it’s bringing out. I think we’re seeing that lack of interest in the sector coming through in this bill.

To remove the word “promote” from the Act sounds quite innocuous—and to have more neutral language, as the Minister mentioned before. It actually has quite a chilling effect on the confidence to invest in the industry in New Zealand. It’s a very strange thing. I’m looking over the other side now, and most of the members are on their phones. Now, if they really want to follow through with this Crown Minerals Amendment Bill, throw your phones away—throw your phones away—because you don’t need them. You don’t want them. I’ve got this very helpful book here, which gives out a list of all of the minerals that are in everyday objects, and a number of them we can mine in New Zealand. At the moment, we mine a significant number of minerals in New Zealand, but we could do a lot more. We currently mine gold; silver; sand and aggregate, of course—and, actually, that’s getting hard to do, even though we’ve got rivers choked with gravel; iron sands; pounamu; halite; limestone; and, of course, coal.

I visited a mine on the West Coast just recently, Westland Mineral Sands, which are mining, among other things, garnet and rare earth minerals as well. Garnet, for those that don’t know, is used if you’ve got sandpaper when you’re doing your woodwork, the sand on that is actually garnet. Really small garnet is used in those liquid cutting tools to cut steel; a very fine garnet cuts the steel with precision cutting. But we could also mine lithium here, we have supplies of lithium, particularly, that’s associated with volcanic activity; rare earth elements, which at that Westland Mineral Sands mine, they will be able to get out—and I’ll come back to what the uses for those elements are later—vanadium; nickel; cobalt; and of course, tungsten. Tungsten has a lot of uses, particularly in manufacturing. So we could be doing all of those things.

But to go back to the mobile phones that they’re all using over there—the electronics in a mobile phone, the elements that are in them are: gold, copper, silver, tantalum, and tungsten. So there is tungsten—we can mine that here. Gold and silver—we also mine here. But I won’t talk about the batteries in them because I’ve got another example further in. The good old electric vehicle (EV), the EV has lithium, cobalt, nickel, and carbon. So the lithium and cobalt, we can mine here—most of the cobalt in EV batteries now is mined by child labour from the Congo. And carbon—does anyone know where carbon comes from?

Andrew Bayly: No.

STUART SMITH: Coal. And so it’s quite interesting, isn’t it? Coal is thought of—and West Coast coal in particular is metallurgical coal, and it’s used for all these sorts of things. And actually, the Spring Creek mine applied for a permit to mine for another useful element used in solar panels.

Now, the Greens and Labour love solar panels. I love them. We’ve got them on my house. But a major part of that is silicon—polysilicon, in particular. It requires an extremely high temperature to make polysilicon to get it to the purity needed for solar panels, and that comes from coal. That’s what the Spring Creek mine wanted to mine for; it’s quite high in silicon. But not only that, the high temperatures needed to make it, it’s coal that is used to make the polysilicon for solar panels. And also, polysilicon is used for computer chips, which your phones and computers all run on. All modern electronics do.

Just to give one more example, the windmills that we are now getting to generate our electricity—well, the blades are made of carbon and carbon fibre, and that, as I said, comes from coal. The resins that are in that come from methane—methanol at least. Now, methanol comes from natural gas, which Methanex makes here in New Zealand. All of those things, we do here in New Zealand. And yet the Government wants to make it more difficult than it needs to be. This is a silly, silly bill.

I think we have to judge this Government by their results. They talk a huge game on climate change, but since 2017, emissions have gone up in New Zealand—up under the big-talking, climate-change Government. And actually, our coal imports have tripled. So we are burning more coal. Everyone else in the world, they’re lowering their emissions. Do you know how they’re lowering their emissions, Mr Bayly?

Andrew Bayly: How?

STUART SMITH: They are swapping coal for gas. What are we doing in New Zealand? We’re doing the opposite—we’re swapping gas for coal. How does that work? It comes about because of not taking a problem definition in the first place to work their way through these policies. And of course, they don’t. It is these platitudes that come from the other side—an expert in this area has said that in the game between platitudes and physics, physics remains undefeated. And unfortunately, that’s what we’re seeing over there.

However, I’m going to end with some good news, Mr Speaker, because I know you need this on a Friday morning: they just finished “COP Flop”, the COP-27. Madam Speaker, this relates to this climate change issue that’s driving this bill. Actually, what we found out—we were expecting a business-as-usual case for temperatures to rise between 4 and 5 degrees centigrade by 2100. However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has backed right away from that; they are now saying business-as-usual is expected to be a 2.5 degree increase in temperature by 2100. So we’re all in a very good space, actually. So we need to actually acknowledge that. And that’s not been acknowledged because that is a really important piece of good news for New Zealand.

But this is a terrible bill. The permits that are—this will do nothing to speed up permits being processed. It’s way too long. It’s making it very difficult for the industry, an industry that we need to meet our climate goals, an industry that we need to electrify. All of the elements could be here, and, for strategic reasons, we should be doing it here rather than importing them. Rare earth elements, most of them are coming from China, and if they don’t have them, they control them in Africa. We can produce them here and we should be doing that, but we need a permissive but, of course, environmentally protected system to be able to get those permits up and running. And this will do nothing to help that. I condemn it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. While I don’t agree with everything that the previous speaker has said, I do agree about the importance of minerals.

What we’re talking about here is a change to the purpose clause of the Crown Minerals Act. Now, Crown minerals are defined in section 10 of the principal Act—that’s petroleum, gold, silver, and uranium.

The changes to the purpose at 1A(1)—at the moment it reads, “The purpose of this Act is to promote prospecting for, exploration for, and mining of Crown owned minerals for the benefit of New Zealand.” This bill will amend “promote”—which was inserted in 2013—to “manage”.

This is an important resource. It’s unusual because it’s Crown-owned so there’s a property interest. And rather than “promoting”, the change is to “manage”, and that is sensible for the reasons outlined by the Minister. I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Well, it’s a pleasure to be talking on this new bill. Gee, we’re ripping through them this morning. As my good colleague Stuart Smith has already identified, we’re opposing this bill, the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill. This is a ridiculous bill.

First of all, I listened to the member just before, Rachel Brooking, who talked about this being “an important resource”. Well, if you can’t use it, it doesn’t become a resource. It’s not a resource, and in fact I’d argue that in the title of the Minister, the Minister of Energy and Resources, why don’t we just strike out “Resources”—because that is what this is about. This is about stopping the exploitation of a whole lot of minerals in New Zealand, and we don’t need to worry about it do we, because we’re so wealthy! New Zealand is so wealthy, let’s just let that go—let it go—because we’re just going to survive, and we don’t need to worry about all this stuff.

It is interesting listening to Mr Smith talking about the rare earths that are available in New Zealand, particularly polysilicon, which he talked about, in UV panels, etc. But the electric vehicles, the batteries—all that stuff could be mined here. This is about keeping New Zealand in a situation where we’re self-reliant. What have we just learnt about COVID? It was about making sure that you keep manufacturing and you keep resources as close to home as possible so you’re not overly reliant on going offshore for a lot of very precious metals, which is what this Crown Minerals Amendment Bill is about.

This bill is about virtue-signalling, but, even worse than that, this is about throwing away billions of dollars’ worth of value. We all get the issue that mining needs to be done in an ecological and environmentally sustainable way, and it can be and has been and should be. We get that—that’s not up for debate. But to say that this resource is no longer going to be promoted, no longer going to be allowed, and that we’ll just manage what we’ve got is a different proposition and is absolutely wrong for New Zealand and for future New Zealanders.

Even in terms of managing it, Part 2 imposes a whole lot of extra requirements. Obviously, now you’ve got to get iwi sign-off on reports—all that sort of stuff. Slowly we will see, if we let this Government carry on for another term, that they will slowly increase the regulatory barriers to this to make it even harder for the mining companies, whoever might be taking it according to a consent arrangement, to be able to continue their activities because the Government has slowly ratcheted that up so that they get to the stage where most people say it’s not worth it.

This is a bad bill. It’s bad for New Zealanders. It’s bad for young New Zealanders and future New Zealanders, because it is throwing away and squandering the future wealth of New Zealand. It’s a bad bill.

Yeah, that’s a grumpy contribution there from that member Andrew Bayly. But that’s OK—it’s early in the morning. What he needs to understand is that we’re doing this in the best interests of New Zealand. For that reason, this side of the House commends the bill to the House.

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. This, the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill, is a good bill. It doesn’t go far enough. Speaking to physics, the reality is that we need to act very urgently as a species to end our use of fossil fuels. So it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever to have a piece of legislation arguing that we have a responsibility to promote exploration of fossil fuels, when we know that we actually have to stop our use of fossil fuels and we have to stop looking for more fossil fuels, because we can’t afford to burn all the fossil fuels we already know exist. And that’s very, very clear. The scientists have been saying that for quite a while now, but they’re saying it with ever more urgency.

And it’s not just climate change. At the same time, we have a biodiversity crisis, and these two things are interrelated. And that is why it’s vitally important that humans stop taking too much out of the Earth. You know, we’re killing the goose that lays the golden egg. And, actually, that is what the National Party—and many others—are recommending. They’re saying, “Oh, to be more wealthy, we need to keep taking more and more and more from the planet.”, which is ultimately going to stop us being able to live and thrive and live well on the planet.

Now, we can live well, but not if we’re in a race to the bottom with a whole bunch of other countries, seeing how fast we can dig up our non-renewable resources and then using them and throwing them away so that some billionaires can have private jets and fly for eight-minute flights. That is not a world that makes sense. That’s not an economy that makes sense. The things that are most important in life to people are spending time in nature and spending time with their children. Yes, we need to have the basics. We need to have enough kai—food—to put on the table. We need to have warm, dry homes. We can have all of this. We need to have an ability to get around in a fuel-efficient way, in an energy-efficient way, and in a way that doesn’t harm the planet. And all of that is possible. But if we keep engaging in this race to the bottom to exploit the non-renewable resources of the planet, then our children will not thank us, they will have no future—or they’ll have an increasingly dangerous and destabilised future where they’re struggling to survive with increased severity of storms, droughts, food shortages, not enough water, and conflict over resources. That is in the future if we don’t change course.

So the Green Party supports the bill. We think it should go further, and we think instead of “manage”, the word should be “regulate”. We need to regulate. And we need to have a clear plan to phase out the use of fossil fuels.

And I just have to recommend a couple of things to the members of the National Party. Firstly, I know you guys don’t have a lot of time or attention span for reading, but maybe you’d like to watch some documentaries on Netflix. Sir David Attenborough has an amazing documentary from a few years ago that really goes through the threats to life on this planet, and I recommend you all watch that, because you might trust him. And the other film that really comes to mind, listening to the National Party speeches on this, is Don’t Look Up. I don’t know if people watching at home have seen the film Don’t Look Up. It’s a satire. It’s tragically close to reality. If a comet was headed directly for Earth, I have no doubt the National Party members would say, “Oh, we shouldn’t destroy this comet to save humanity. There are some ‘tech bros’ out there, some billionaires, who have a plan, a really realistic plan, to mine all of the wealth on that comet that’s about to destroy Earth and all the life on it.”

That is literally what I’m hearing from those members—that we’re going to get wealth by continuing to take more out of the planet than is possible to sustain life on earth. So I really recommend a little bit of education for some people in the House on biology, physics—all of those things. The reality is that “necessity is the mother of invention” and humans are very adaptable. We have the opportunity and the ability to say “No more fossil fuels” to start preserving and conserving and rewilding parts of the planet. And that is how we’re going to allow nature to heal. And, ultimately, that is what humanity needs. Kia ora.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I just want to offer the ACT Party’s view on this piece of legislation. Now, it’s true there’s a problem that the Government would like to solve that they can’t solve. It’s another one of these Sisyphean paradoxes where they will tell us they’re trying to reduce carbon emissions to save us from a burning planet. Or as Green MPs regularly telling us, “If we don’t stop using fossil fuels, our children will have no future,” although we—

Hon Julie Anne Genter: True—it’s true.

SIMON COURT: Apparently it’s true, the member, Julie Anne Genter called out. Although I do seem to remember her riding a bike to hospital recently to have a baby, so I’m not quite sure that these two things, whether they exist in the same universe or whether they’re parallel universes. But we’ll put that aside for a moment.

If we’re going to solve the global problem of how to reduce carbon emissions because climate change is truly this generation’s nuclear moment and the climate emergency is the thing we should be spending all our time on, then it’s a great surprise that this Government banned oil and gas exploration at a time when New Zealand was so heavily reliant on natural gas as a fuel for energy and manufacturing. And then, lo and behold, the import and use of coal in New Zealand has increased two or three times in that period.

I’ve recently returned from a trip to the United States, where in Texas they told me, “Texas is doing better than ever because the US is reducing its use of coal, which produces twice as much carbon dioxide when you burn it as natural gas” and they’re using natural gas from Texas.

So what can New Zealand learn from the “lone star state”? Well, firstly, don’t elect Green and Labour Governments, because they never would. Secondly, if we’re going to actually deliver our best future to New Zealanders who are children today or who will be born into the coming generations, we actually need to secure an economic base—a wealth base—and that will deliver the money that we need to solve our environmental problems. The technology, for example, to capture carbon and store it in the ground.

In Australia, for example, where they’ve developed the Gorgon natural gas field in Western Australia, every year—in addition to supplying natural gas to Europe and Asia—the Australians are also capturing 7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide and pumping it into the ground back into the same wells that they took the natural gas out of. So they get to have their natural gas and then they pump the carbon dioxide back into deep geological reservoirs.

So for young people wondering, “What do we do to solve climate change?”, there are engineers in the oil and gas industry; there are environmental scientists who have already solved this problem. But in New Zealand, instead of allowing the technology that exists elsewhere, actually Kiwi scientists working in places like Western Australia to do the same here, this Government would prefer to ban oil and gas exploration and make it harder to get minerals—really valuable minerals—that are used in things like cell phones, like gold and aluminium and other minerals out of the ground.

So I just want to very briefly cover off some of the minerals that will be affected by this. In New Zealand, we mine for gold and we make some of the best gold in the world, and that is used in all kinds of electronic products. We also dig lime out of the ground. Lime rock—or limestone—is something that’s used to make concrete. Without limestone, we can’t have concrete, which means we can’t have safe buildings or concrete pipes that carry stormwater and waste water, for example.

But when you turn limestone into cement, it does release carbon dioxide. So we have to find a way to reduce that, but that’s not by making it harder to mine the limestone in the first place. That doesn’t make any sense at all, particularly when we know that there is technology now—and I’ve seen this at Stevenson’s concrete batching plant at Drury in Auckland, where as they mix the concrete in the big batching plant, they inject carbon dioxide into it. So when the concrete goes into the truck and the truck takes it to the building site and they lay it into the foundations, then the carbon dioxide that they’ve captured is actually locked into the concrete slab. That’s called carbon capture and storage. We can do that.

Then we think about natural gas and oil. Well, when I was first elected an MP—and I have to be honest, as a civil engineer, I never expected to be a member of Parliament, but I was elected in 2020 and I’m proud to represent the ACT Party and to help deliver, on behalf of the ACT Party and David Seymour, sound environmental, engineering, and climate policy. The first thing that happened when I sat in my seat in Parliament was the Prime Minister declared a climate emergency.

This Government had already banned the exploration offshore for oil and gas. Yet when we think about the role natural gas plays in our society, it’s not just heating homes—it’s natural gas that provides the heat at the cardboard recycling factory in Auckland at Oji Fibre. Without natural gas, all of the cardboard that gets collected when you put out your rubbish—it would just go to the dump. But with natural gas, it’s hot enough to boil all of that cardboard up in a big pot, essentially, and then recycle all the fibre and turn it into new cardboard. Only natural gas is hot enough to do that. Or maybe, if you’re another country, coal—but we wouldn’t want to use coal because we’ve got gas in New Zealand.

And then we think about how crazy it is that this Government would want to ban exploration for natural gas and oil, and then we end up importing more coal. Our coal imports have more than doubled in the past three years under Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s supposedly environmentally friendly Government.

Well, I’m a civil and environmental engineer and I started my career as an environmental scientist, because I believe we can have a better environment but we can also have high-paying jobs and people who work in industries like oil and gas, for example, or mining. If we think of the Taranaki region. Now, if you grow up in a family and your mum and dad don’t have books in the house because they’re not readers, and mum and dad live a pretty rough life and maybe they came from a family that had a pretty rough life, but your mum or dad worked in the oil and gas industry, they could be earning $80,000-plus a year—$80,000 a year just as a worker, blue collar or maybe an orange uniform or red overalls if you work in oil and gas.

They could be earning $80,000 a year, even without formal education, without finishing high school or going to uni. And those kids who grow up in families where mum and dad earn $80,000 a year have very, very good prospects. They’re likely to go on to be high-paid workers themselves, and that’s what the oil and gas industry gives to New Zealand.

Then we think about places like Kaitāia, where they don’t have an oil and gas industry. In fact, this Government won’t even build them a proper road. They’re cut off right now: State Highway 1 slipped into a big gully at a place called Mangamuka Gorge for the second time in three years. A town of 40,000 people is cut off effectively from the rest of New Zealand because they don’t have a proper road. Trucks are having to take an hour-long detour on very narrow roads to get to Kaitāia.

You think of the difference growing up in a family where mum and dad are both earning $80,000 a year because they work in the oil and gas industry in Taranaki, or growing up in a community where the average wage is $25,000 a year and that’s Kaitāia. That’s what this Government wants to deliver: more townships in more regions that have economic and social outcomes like Kaitāia—that’s what their policy around energy and resources will deliver. The ACT Party absolutely rejects that.

Now, I want to come to the role of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE). MBIE is the ministry that’s tasked with processing oil and gas and mineral application permits. They’ve got hundreds of permits they’ve handbraked for years that they are not releasing. And now this law change potentially puts, for people who’ve applied for permits legitimately, their application process at risk.

That creates sovereign risk. When a Government changes the rules halfway through someone’s application process for a new mine or a new energy development, that makes people stop trusting New Zealand. They stop trusting our Government, they stop investing in our country, and what they do is they choose to invest somewhere else. So the people in other countries like South America, Chile, Indonesia, and, of course, Australia, end up with the high-paid jobs and the thriving communities and healthy economies that New Zealand should have but that this Government, through their poor policy choices, denies us.

So what could be done? Well, what ACT would do is say, “Look, let the big mining companies who’ve restored the environment back to original standard in places like the Globe Progress Mine at Reefton in the South Island, where they saved the tree stumps and put them back after the mining so the little creatures have somewhere to live.” We can have mining, we can have energy, we can have wealth. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): The member’s time has expired.

Kia ora e te Mana Whakawā. This bill will bring the Crown Minerals Act up to date, changing the Government’s approach from “promoting” to “managing” it. I commend this bill to the House.

I call Penny Simmonds—a five-minute call.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m very pleased to be able to call out the Government and speak on this bill. Of all the vanity projects of this Labour Government—and there are plenty of them—this Government’s approach to mining generally and coal particularly has to be the supreme vanity project of all. This country’s energy: 7 percent is contributed by coal—7 percent. The rest of the world? Well, let’s have a look: US, 12 percent coal; EU, 14 percent coal; Australia, 31 percent coal; China, 62 percent coal.

Well, what’s our 7 percent of coal usage used for? Now, I know this will be a revelation to the other side of the House—it’ll be an absolute revelation—but New Zealand has got a primary sector. We grow and produce food and we send it offshore, and it makes about $30 billion a year for this country. It takes a lot of energy to be able to process that food and send it overseas and feed about 40 million people across the world. So, wake up, other side of the House.

This Government needs to remember they have more than doubled the import of Indonesian coal since they’ve been here. So if we do not mine coal in New Zealand, coal in those wonderful provinces of Southland and the West Coast of the South Island, then dirtier and more emissions-intensive Indonesian coal will need to be imported. And how does it get here? It gets here on boats, and they need energy. Then it has to be trucked to Huntly, and that needs fuel. More Indonesian coal needs to come into Huntly to provide electricity to the grid when we need that thermal backup.

So you go, you great Labour Government climate warriors—you go. You keep talking a big game on the national stage while you keep importing more and more Indonesian coal. Thankfully—thankfully—National has a lot more common sense and will oppose this ridiculous bill. Thank you.

Debbie Ngarewa-Packer—five minutes.

E te Pīka, thank goodness that ended. Not everyone has to take their full five minutes.

Look, I stand on behalf of Te Paati Māori to talk to the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill’s first reading. Look, we understand that the provisions and the purpose of this bill will address iwi and hapū whose rohe includes some of all of the permit or licence areas otherwise directly affected by mining and all—I guess that’s the whole of Taranaki iwi which I w’akapapa to—also, enable annual meetings between iwi and hapū, permit and licence holders, and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment for the purpose of discussing the content of our annual iwi engagement reports. So it’s good that finally, after 150 years, the Crown’s asking and learning how to engage. It also makes explicit that decision makers may have regard to feedback from iwi or hapū on the quality of past engagement with permit and licence holders for future permit allocation. It introduces minimum content requirements for iwi engagement reports.

So, again, you know, we can see the changes that the Government is making. However, we cannot understand why the Government is modernising an outdated Act rather than transitioning away from it completely, which would surely send a clear commitment and connection to climate change and overall transition agendas. What are you waiting for? Squeezing the last of the toothpaste out of the tube will not save decay. The Government was bold enough when it first came in to announce a ban on new offshore permits; where is the ban on new permits offshore in Taranaki? Taranaki is the only region who still has onshore permits. Where are the changes to the block offer regime, which is now out of date and not fit for purpose, especially if no ban for onshore exploration is being proposed. So iwi and hapū have been discussing this now with the Crown for more than two years. You have let Taranaki down shamelessly. While annual engagement reports with iwi are supported, this is not a fundamental change. This is weak. There needs to be legislative backstops to enshrine best practice of engagement with iwi throughout the whole entire permitting process, which includes a partnership approach with the Crown to agree on designating mining permit areas, to agree on collective decision-making, to agree on planned work plans. A bespoke partnership for Taranaki is urgently required. I would hope that my colleague Glen Bennett is pushing for this because he knows that this is what our people were promised when they got in behind and trusted that this Government was going to bring its nuclear-free moment. But no, what we see here is a bitter disappointment.

We could’ve had also the opportunity for a model for co-governance and partnership in this space. No. Kua ngaro. There has been a complete missed opportunity to review the Crown Minerals Act in conjunction with the Resource Management Act (RMA) reform, which you’ve announced this week or last week. I’ve lost track. Including to remove complexities of engagement and artificial separation of permitting and environmental impact. Remember, originally the Crown Minerals Act and the RMA were proposed as one Act prior to 1991. So we need to take a step back and look at the total integrated model, which is ultimately about moving forward with clear transitions away from fossil fuels.

The changes are not overall negative, but they’re unambitious. They’re uninspiring. They don’t land for anyone. So while most of the provisions in the bill could be marked as being sensible, they’re certainly not bold, and they lack any ambition and vision that’s needed to show as a nation that we’re taking the transitions away from fossil fuels and towards real Crown partnership with tangata w’enua. You could be announcing your ambitious strategy towards an iwi-led energy approach, but no, once again we have this hāpai ka pai approach. So you also fail to bring regulation in line with the reality that oil and gas is a sunset industry. The failure to reform the block offer system, the failure to ban new onshore permits in Taranaki sits starkly in conflict with what the Government promised. So based on these issues we will not be supporting this bill. We oppose it and encourage the Government to be more bold. Invest more in renewable energy and show leadership to your iwi and your hapū, particularly in Taranaki, my colleague Glen Bennett. Kia ora rā.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise to take a short contribution on the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill. This bill is proposing changes to modernise the Crown Minerals Act 1991 and to support more environmentally conscious management of resources, consistent with the Government’s climate change commitments. The new amendment bill brings the original Act up to date. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. I rise to oppose the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill in its first reading today. I’ve got to say, when I started reading this, I didn’t know where to start. I’ve only got 10 minutes, but this debate could take days.

I thought I’d start with the contribution from the Greens. All the movement towards green energy, but they fail to understand, where do they think electric vehicles come from? Where do they think solar panels come from? The technology, our building materials—everything you see in this room has been derived from some mining product, even if it was the steel to chop up the wood on these tables. It does not come from Santa Claus; it comes from mining. Please, join those dots.

I go back to the Christmas theme: I wonder why this bill is being introduced during urgency, at this time of the year. I’ve got a very strong suspicion this is going to be dumped on a select committee the next sitting block, which is the last one before Christmas. They’ll open it up for submissions over the summer period, when nobody’s really concentrating, and then it will be back and pushed through again next year. This is such a stupid bill, because everything that we do locally has the highest environmental standards in the world, and all we are doing is pushing those standards down by importing from countries with lower standards than ours. We only have to look at the track record of this Government to be sceptical about the outcome of this legislation. We are going to be the poorer for it.

I note the contribution from the Māori Party about iwi consultation. All that is doing is adding yet another layer of bureaucracy. Imagine a miner—now, this is a guy in his gumboots and muddy clothes—again, now having to make another contribution to his annual report. What on earth is that going to do in terms of adding value? The resource consent process has already gone through that.

I’ll tell you how some councils do it well. When I was the mayor in the Westland District Council, we looked at our mining sector, we looked at the bureaucracy that was involved in that, and the bit that we could control was the consenting. We now have a one-stop shop for land clearance and monitoring and the discharge consents, and that works extremely well, but you know where the bottleneck is? The bottleneck is here in Wellington.

Now, the Government says that it’s going to manage mining. It hasn’t been able to manage mining now, so how on earth are they ever going to manage it in the future? They won’t, because what they are trying to do is the sinking-lid policy. A great example of that is the Spring Creek application, with New Zealand Petroleum and Minerals’ decision to probably decline it. It’s an existing mine. There are no further environmental impacts from it, and New Zealand Petroleum and Minerals have advised that they are likely to decline it. If we can’t get a consent for an existing mine now under this legislation, it will be impossible. So I don’t know why the rush is to get this in through urgency, but I’m very sceptical about that.

So I’d like to turn my mind now to the global financial crisis (GFC) that we had a few years ago. One of the countries that I looked at and kept an eye on during that terrible economic time was Australia. Australia didn’t feel the impact of the GFC anywhere near as much as some international countries. And the reason for that? The reason for that was because they had a very healthy mining sector, and that kept paying the bills in that country.

We should be celebrating our resources and our mining sector, and we should be promoting it, not managing it into decline. If ever there was a time to be promoting economic development with the natural resources that we’ve got available to us in this country, it is now. We are heading into another economic quagmire because of this Government, and here they are with yet another bit of legislation that is going to sink us further into the quagmire. It’s hard to believe, as we are now embedded in an economic crisis, a cost of living crisis, that they would stymie one of the most productive industries in this country. I cannot believe that anyone would consider cutting us off at the knees in terms of economic development and productivity in this country, that this Government would go ahead with this bill; it is absolutely nuts.

In the meantime—in the meantime—as some of my colleagues have alluded to, what we don’t do here, we bring in from offshore. If the example could be any more stark, it is with the gas industry, the very transition fuel that we needed to transition away from high-carbon emissions into gas while we wait for the technology to catch up, as Simon Court proclaimed so well before. While we wait for that technology to catch up, we had a transition fuel, but that’s been knocked on the head as well.

Please join the dots. See what is happening on the ground in this country. We are doomed under the types of legislation that this Government keeps throwing at us. I cannot believe that it is even on the table. We have massive environmental controls over our mining sector. We have good people working in it. We have the resources here in this country, and I just think we are doomed under this country. The cost of living crisis that we are now in is only going to get worse with policy like this coming down at us. Don’t worry about the consultation, because I’ll be making sure our mining sector is well aware of what’s happening. There will be submissions, and, again, I’m a bit sceptical about that. We had 88,000 of them for the three waters consultation, and how many did we end up listening to? A couple of hundred—a couple of hundred of selected submitters, because the decisions were already made. I imagine it’s the same with this one. The National Party does not support this bill.

Well, thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to rise as the final speaker, and I think—[Interruption]

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Barbara Kuriger): Order! Sorry, just a moment. Sorry, but we cannot have the gallery participating in the debate.

TANGI UTIKERE: Thank you, Madam Speaker. What that contribution from Maureen Pugh indicated was what sums up the National Party’s approach: doomsday, pessimism, and scepticism. But on this side of the House, we’re something different. This bill will allow for greater certainty for the future within the minerals space, and on that basis I commend the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill to the House.

Bill read a first time.

The question is, That the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill be considered by the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee.

Motion agreed to.

Bill referred to the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee.