Resource Management (Waitaki Catchment)Amendment Bill

Just before the rising of the House last Thursday evening, the last Labour speaker was the Hon Jim Sutton, the member for Aoraki, which is the area where this particular legislation is to take effect. I could not believe my ears when the Hon Jim Sutton, who also happens to be the Minister of Agriculture, informed the House that he thought hydroelectricity and the generation thereof were in a much higher sphere than agriculture in terms of the national good. Let me just say this on the side: one can always tell when Labour members are on the way out and about to resign or retire, because they do not care how much damage they leave behind for Labour candidates coming in. Members should just pause for a moment and think about what the honourable member said—this is the Minister of Agriculture, a Minister in this current Government. He said that, in relation to the national good, the generation of hydroelectricity was of far greater importance than agriculture. That defies belief, and it is certainly manna from heaven for the incoming National candidate, who will clearly win that seat.

Let us have a look at the detail of what that Minister was proposing. He said that it is far more important that as little as 2 percent—

💬 Brian Connell: 1.7 percent.

—1.7 percent of the flow of that river—the amount promised by an Order in Council in 1969 to the farming group at the top of that catchment area—is spilt over a hydro dam than it is used for irrigating that area. In keeping with that sentiment, he then voted down the very good amendment of my colleague Nick Smith that would have meant that the agreement entered into in 1969 was honoured. That is a disgrace! Members on the other side of the Chamber should take a call and explain to this Committee what the Labour Party Government and the Minister of Agriculture mean by that, and why the Minister thinks that is a sustainable policy for that area.

Further, when we have a look at what happens in Part 4 and the regulation around the panel of commissioners that is to be set up—a water board—to allocate the water from the upper Waitaki, we see it will be so bound up in regulation that it will not be able to make a decision anyway. So in this part the Labour Party Government sets up a Labour-appointed quango because it does not trust the local authorities to allocate water on a sensible basis, which somehow or other, in terms of the national interest, takes preference to agriculture—that is the bit we cannot understand—then binds that panel up in so much regulation and Wellington-dictate that it cannot make a decision as to what might or might not happen, anyway. So the question out of that for those of us on this side of the Chamber who have not been close to the issue—some of my colleagues have been—is why this process is necessary. Why is this bill necessary? In the first place, why is this panel necessary, and why are all the clauses under Part 4 necessary in terms of controlling what that panel may or may not do?

I would be interested if the Minister in the chair, the Hon Marian Hobbs, took a call and explained that away, because I do not think it is possible to explain, first of all, why this group has to be set up, and also why the regional councils or the district councils cannot be trusted. They are currently going through a local body elections process whereby all of this could be sorted out in an open democracy, particularly under the power of general competence that was introduced by her Government. So why can they not sort it out?

I have some corrections. I actually have what my honourable colleague Jim Sutton said here the other day. When he quoted material about the benefits for the upper part of the catchment, he was not giving his opinion but quoting from a study. If the member looks at the study, he will see that.

The second thing is that I have just heard the last speaker show he is completely confused about Part 4. That part, in the original legislation, was about setting up a panel. There was a board to make the policy around the issue of water allocation, and a panel made up of people from the local community to hear the different applications. In Supplementary Order Paper 244, that panel is wiped—it is gone. In other words, what that member was talking about—the decisions going back before local bodies—is in the Supplementary Order Paper. In this legislation we are dealing with the setting up of a board but not of a panel. Part 4 is about dismantling the panel.

I would also like to address some of the issues under Part 4 that the Minister for the Environment has just discussed, but I cannot do that without putting into context some of the comments the Hon Jim Sutton made when he took a call on this part. Let us be very clear that Jim Sutton took a call last week and affirmed—whether or not it was his opinion—that one cumec of water was more valuable to the national good if it were used for electricity generation than if it were used for irrigation. That demonstrates the Minister’s ignorance, and it is why he should not be the Minister of Agriculture. All the studies I have seen and, I am sure, the Minister in the chair has seen show very clearly that one cumec of water, if used for irrigation, generates about five times the return achieved if it is used for electricity generation. That is a very clearly established fact.

The Minister for the Environment then spoke about my colleague Mr Ardern and his apparent lack of understanding of this part. That is not correct. If there is any confusion, it is because a very late Supplementary Order Paper was introduced. When Project Aqua was off the agenda, the Minister essentially lost interest in this bill. She found herself in a position where she may, in fact, have acted illegally by calling in all those consents, because there was no national good in her doing that. So what happened, in effect, was that Part 4 was completely gutted. The Minister essentially said that she had no interest in it any longer, and that she would put a line through all those components and put all the responsibility back on to the regional council, without the Government taking any responsibility at all.

The regional council has reacted to that. There is some argument, which I support, that if the regional council has not done its job, then a mechanism should be put in place to make sure that that does happen. I have to say, and it is no secret, that I think Environment Canterbury is the worst-performing regional council in the country, but I say to the Minister that we should fix the problem, not treat the symptom. Putting in place this type of legislation does not address that issue. If we have a look at clause 55, for example, which deals with the Official Information Act as amended, we see it now makes reference to a “Panel of Commissioners for the Waitaki Catchment”. Environment Canterbury wrote to all members of Parliament, I assume—because I have picked it up—“The commissioner panel appears to have the status of a local authority, but the bill”—and section 55 is referenced—“applies the Official Information Act to the panel rather than to the appropriate Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act. I think it raises a very good point.

💬 Hon Marian Hobbs: It’s been deleted.

I say to the Minister that I know it has been deleted now, but that was because the council drew it to her attention, not because she or her advisers thought it was a good idea. That type of thing really concerns me. Some of the other clauses that the Minister has been calling out will be deleted—and I agree with her—raise other questions. Clause 42, “Comparative consideration of applications”, will be deleted, as will clauses 46(1) and 46(5), which essentially deal with costs. The question now is how somebody, or who, will pay for the cost of any comparative analysis. I can tell members without fear of contradiction that the cost will be paid by not the Government but by the ratepayers of the Environment Canterbury region. That is the damage this bill will do now.

The Minister has lost interest in the bill. She will sit in the chair, shake her head, and say that this bill had nothing to do with fast-tracking Project Aqua, and that it was all about water allocation across the Waitaki region. If that is her answer, why, then, is the Minister not doing the same on the other main rivers across Canterbury, like the Rākaia, Waimakariri, or Rangitata rivers? Why is the Minister not intervening and putting in place some legislation around them?

We have just heard the Minister for the Environment emphasise the fact that the panel of commissioners—which is the heading of Part 4—is to be expunged before it even gets off the ground. That is not a bad thing in itself. This entire bill is all about setting up a committee; that is all it has done from the outset. It has proposed setting up two committees, actually—the board and the panel. The setting up of an allocation committee is all that this bill is about. There has been all this brouhaha, noise, and huff and puffery from the Government just to set up a special committee.

ACT has said from the outset that this legislation is a nonsense and is just a fast track that the Government is setting up to try to accommodate the State-owned enterprise Meridian Energy’s Project Aqua. The Government’s line has been that the bill has nothing to do with Project Aqua, that Project Aqua is absolutely ancillary, and that this bill sets up a necessary allocation plan, in any event. Over a year ago, when the bill had top priority in the legislative programme, successive Government Ministers said that they had to ram it through, but the day that Project Aqua was mothballed and canned this bill was mothballed and put on the back-burner. It has bounced along the bottom of the Order Paper for nigh on a year, yet the Government has the temerity still to pretend that it has never been about Project Aqua. It would be too embarrassing for the Government now to totally withdraw the bill, which is what should happen.

Part 4 highlights the point: it is just about an allocation committee. After the Water and Soil Conservation Act 1967 was passed, we had a dedicated Waitaki catchment commission. It did water allocation plans. Like a lot of bureaucratic plans, they have all been shelved. Since the passing of the Resource Management Act in 1991 and the establishment of regional councils, Environment Canterbury has had the specific task—the specific legislative responsibility—of doing a water allocation plan. We do not need the committee that is proposed in Part 4. We have a statutory body there. The fact of the matter is that Environment Canterbury has chosen to abrogate its responsibilities. If a statutory body chooses to ignore and abrogate its responsibilities, one does not rush to Parliament and bring in a whole new statute to set up another body. That is just nutty.

We should address the basic problem of why the regional council that was charged with the responsibility did not do its job—that is point No. 1. Both the Minister for the Environment and the Minister of Local Government had some responsibility to address that, but, no, they did not choose to do it. Call-in powers and all manner of statutory powers are given to a Minister to use when local bodies abrogate their legislative responsibilities—and this is a classic case of where that is the point. I do not know whether the Minister in the chair, Marian Hobbs, has even written to Environment Canterbury to ask where its water allocation plan is. Did she think of perhaps writing to tell it to get on with the job, and to say that if it did not, she as Minister would give it a shake-up? She has the powers to do that. No, instead she came to Parliament with a whole new duplicate, replicate body of bureaucracy—with another governing body and another committee. Now she is so pleased with herself because she has turned those two new committees into one new committee. That is the essence—whoop-de-doody—of this Government’s activity in relation to the Waitaki catchment water allocation procedures.

The National Party member who spoke on this was quite right. What is special about the Waitaki? The Government has told us that the bill has nothing to do with Project Aqua. Why not apply this measure to the Waimakariri, Rangitata, or Rākaia rivers? Why does it apply just to Canterbury? I ask the Minister why we do not have these plans and special little allocation bodies all over the country. That would be consistent. This is a foolish bill and ACT will oppose it.

Everything that is flawed about the approach of the Minister in the chair, Marian Hobbs, to resource management law is typified in Part 4. I simply tell the Minister what a diabolical mess she has made of this issue and of resource management law. It is quite extraordinary that we have had the 9-page Supplementary Order Paper 244 from the Minister, and we have yet to hear any Government Minister give an explanation of it. I ask the Minister to look at the explanatory note of that Supplementary Order Paper. It is the most congested and the smallest explanatory note that I have ever seen for such an extensive Supplementary Order Paper. It could read: “I, Marian Hobbs, stuffed up.” That would be quite honest; that would be upfront. Instead, we have had to listen to a whole lot of weasel words from the Government about its approach on this issue.

I want to put some quite serious questions to the Minister about what has happened to Part 4. The Minister told us that this bill had nothing to do with Project Aqua. She said that this bill was all about the proper management of resources in the Waitaki River catchment area. So why did the bill have to include a panel of commissioners 10 months ago, and not now? Why, when the Local Government and Environment Committee went through a very extensive process on the submissions, did all the Government members say that we had to have a panel of commissioners? What has changed since then? Why did we suddenly receive Supplementary Order Paper 244 2 weeks ago, which stated that the panel of commissioners was no longer required? It is a gigantic and an expensive flip-flop, and that is just so typical of the problems that this Government has with regard to resource management law.

Next, I ask the Minister why on earth, given all the public concern about delays in the processing of resource consents—and I note that Part 4 will now be labelled “Processing of applications”—she and the Associate Minister, David Benson-Pope, are saying that we need to speed up the consent process and that there are too many delays. I say hear, hear to that. But what will this bill do in terms of reducing the delays and the bureaucracy of the Resource Management Act? It will make things a whole lot worse. Some of the poor old cow-cockies who have dealt with consents for very minimal amounts of water—as contained in schedule 2—lodged their applications in early 2003. They had to wait for the Minister’s call-in last year, and have now had to wait almost 12 months for this bill to be considered. They will then have to wait another 12 months while the board develops the plan, and only then will their consent applications be considered. I say to the Minister that if that is speeding the process up, I would hate her to slow it down! I say that members of Parliament and people all over the country will be concerned about that.

I come to the issues faced by the farmers of the Waitaki. What occurred during the Minister’s absence from the Chamber last week, when we had a debate on that matter, was quite disgraceful. I want the farmers in the upper Waitaki catchment area to know how flawed the Government’s position was. Its position was that it would not support my amendment to take into account the promises that were made to the farmers in 1969, because that would interfere with the court process. That is what the Government said. But the very provision of that amendment was to state that actually the court should have to take those promises into account. I would hope that the Minister will come to her feet as the Minister responsible for the bill, and respond to those concerns.

The last point I wish to make in respect of the processing of applications is that people who get resource consents need to have certainty. Those who have applied for resource consents in the Waitaki River have been put through hell by this Government’s policy and the expense that it has caused.

I move, That the question be now put.