Wellington Regional Council (Water Board Functions) Bill

I know that with this bill the Minister, Marian Hobbs, is not acting in a ministerial capacity as such, but if she wants to sort out the issue of not having to come back and waste Parliament’s time with this sort of legislation on a regular basis, I suggest that the Government could start by opposing the new clause in Part 1 that effectively states that only renewable energy installations may be built on that land. I do not think that that would do any harm at all, to be honest. Will we find a large coalfield under Wellington Regional Council land? The Minister has the mapping—it has all been done—and the answer is no, so let us not worry about that. Will we find a large gasfield under Wellington Regional Council land? The answer is probably not, as well. But could we find a gasfield out to sea from the Wairarapa coast? The answer is yes, we could. I am sure that the Minister’s colleague the Minister of Energy has fingers, toes, and all sorts of parts of his body crossed, in hoping for a gas find out there.

Why would we not then want to bring that gas on and allow it to be converted into electricity on regional council land? I cannot think of one reason why we would not allow that. The whole station would be about the size of a small Woolworths store—not very big. It would be very unobtrusive.

Of course, by the provisions of this bill the council will not be able to do that on its land, so we will be back in Parliament with another bill that will state that the council can process gas because there has been a big gas find. So why do we not allow that situation to occur now? It is one way in which the Minister could live up to her wish to solve the problem of having those little local bills come through all the time.

The inserted clause, which states the provision applies to renewable energy only, is silly. It reflects the sort of path that the Greens forced the Government down with regard to lines companies and their power generation. That clause does not make sense in this day and age, at all, and I appeal to the Minister to remove it. In fact, the clause was not in the original bill; it has been inserted by the Local Government and Environment Committee and I think that the select committee has made a mistake. I encourage the Minister to take some time, maybe seek a bit of advice, and then say that we should pass the bill without that clause. The bill would still meet the Wellington Regional Council’s requirements, and it would give the council an option of doing that generation on Wellington Regional Council land.

I say to the Minister that there is a rig drilling in the sea off the Wairarapa coast at the moment, and there would not be a member in the Chamber who hoped that that drilling was not successful. So it would just make it a lot easier for everybody and, quite frankly, I am sure that Wellington regional ratepayers would welcome a cut of the slice, if energy were able to be generated on their land.

It would also make sense in relation to other land owned by the council. A lot of that land is old water board land. We would find that there were bits and pieces of that land by the port and God knows where—throughout the Hutt Valley, and all around the place. It makes sense that we should be able to put cogeneration plants and all sorts of things on that land.

The regional council did not ask for the renewable energy clause. I know that the select committee inserted it unanimously. In my view that is a mistake, and National supports the removal of that clause.

I can understand that at this point members may believe that the insertion of the term “renewable energy”—which was unanimously agreed to by the Local Government and Environment Committee, as stated in the commentary on the bill—should be seen as, and perhaps is, restrictive. But I bring to the minds of members here who were members of that select committee that the chairperson of the Wellington Regional Council and the other member from the council expressly said in the course of discussion with them that that was the use they wished to have confined in the change of designation, as it were, that this bill will bring into being, allowing them to proceed. That was made very clear to members of the select committee.

The insertion is, therefore, in line with the meaning and amendments of the Resource Management Act. The committee concurred with that. Although it may seem at this stage that it is a confinement or limitation, in fact it is the wish of the Wellington Regional Council, the initiator of the bill.

I would like to follow on from my learned colleague the Hon Roger Sowry, because I think he is right. I was on the Local Government and Environment Committee. I take up the point raised by Jim Peters. If the Wellington Regional Council expressly wants to ring-fence what it will do on that land, as it has done in this bill, then essentially it is pre-empting the public’s right to determine for themselves what they want to do on that land, as per the Local Government Act of 2002 consultation process. We have taken away the public’s ability to work outside the scope of this legislation. We have denied them the opportunity to think of alternative uses for that land. That is where I think Roger Sowry has it absolutely right.

I think that the Wellington Regional Council has erred in its fiduciary duty by specifying and confining activity on the land, instead of leaving it open-ended so that the community as a whole could partake in a consultative process to clarify what it needs and wants. The council should have allowed that to take place. This process now means that that option is not there. If the community wants to use that land, it will be able to do so only for the purpose of renewable energy and no other purpose. That raises a very interesting question about continuing to allow these sorts of bills to go through in relation to local authorities. In particular, now that the Local Government Act of 2002 supposedly provides councils with the power of general competence—if one thinks that that is definitely the case—then there is not the need to have a bill that puts constraints in place, as this bill does.

We are supposed to be focusing on the preliminary provisions, which include the definitions, so I will reiterate the definition of “renewable energy” that I pointed out to Ken Shirley before. It means energy produced from solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, biomass, tidal, wave, and ocean current sources. When it comes to energy generation, I would think that given that definition of renewable energy, at least we will not be limiting ourselves just to the consideration of wind generation. Other options within the definition of renewable energy can be considered. Geothermal generation is one of them, and hydro is another. We can even look at tidal and wave power. So there is a far greater range than wind power. But I would like to reiterate that even though I was on the select committee, in hindsight I think we have erred in ring-fencing what can happen on the land in question. The area is vast, and a lot of underlying provisions apply to various parts of it.

Going further to the definitions, it is good to see that there are some definitions here and that they are quite clear, because often that is not the case. In the Resource Management Act, the term “sustainable” does not have a definition of its own; it is coupled with “sustainable management” and is included in the purpose clause. Another interesting thing is that in the definitions in the new Resource Management Act amendments an “iwi authority” will be accorded the same definition as a “public authority”, so to all intents and purposes a renewable energy project could be under the control of an iwi authority as a public authority. A regional council could actually hand over that function to an iwi authority, under that premise.

Also, it is interesting to note that in this bill the Wellington Regional Council has specified a condition. If only local authorities could do the same when, under the amendments, they have to give effect to regional council instructions in their rules and plans. In this bill, if we excluded subclauses (1) and (2) of clause 4, the rest could stand alone. The land provision in clause 4(2) may still have to be specified—fine—but the rest could stand alone. If we excluded clause 4(1), the provision would still work.

I must admit that I have been a little disappointed with the contributions made by the National Party to the debate on this part. I was going to suggest that when Mr Sowry spoke he clearly had not talked to his party’s member on the select committee about these issues; otherwise he probably would not have made the speech he did. But then I heard the National member of the select committee talking, and he had seemingly forgotten what I understand was the select committee’s discussion on the issue of renewable energy. It is my recollection that when the Wellington Regional Council came to the select committee, it indicated that the only purpose for which it wanted this bill was wind farming. Despite the wording of clause 4(1), which is more general, nevertheless that is really all the council wanted the bill for. It was actually through the committee’s discussion with the council, in which I took part, that we suggested that it might want a broader purpose in terms of renewable energy.

The problem that arises if we start extending this beyond renewable energy is that non-renewable energy almost inevitably means some intrusive use of the land, and at the end of the day this is Wellington Regional Water Board land. It is a water catchment area for collecting drinking water for the use of Wellingtonians. Introducing intrusive things—coalmining, say, or something of that nature—will inevitably interfere with the primary purpose of the land, whereas the use of the land for renewable energy does not involve the same sorts of problems. Use of the land for solar or wind energy, or things of that nature—certainly this land will not be used for tidal and wave energy—is non-intrusive.

The second thing Mr Sowry seems to be oblivious to is that the land we are talking of is some way from the sea. We are talking about the Belmont Hills and the Tararua Ranges. Even if we did discover some oil or gas offshore, the chances that we would want to use the Belmont Hills or the Tararua Ranges for the purpose of collecting and transmitting some of that gas and energy are, I think, beyond even the realms of remoteness.

I think that when the Wellington Regional Water Board said that it was more than happy to have this bill extended from wind to renewable energy, and when the select committee unanimously decided that that was as far as we needed to go and was an adequate and good way to go without running into problems of interfering with the water catchment area, we had it exactly right. We provided a liberality that the Wellington Regional Council had not initially expected and that it was grateful for, without getting into some of the very clear conservation and environmental issues that would arise if we started to interfere with the collection of water for the Wellington region.

So I think that the effectively straw argument that the National Party has advanced in questioning whether the scope of the bill is too narrow in covering only renewable energy can really be seen as something of a nonsense and, in fact, certainly without substance.

The other point that I wanted to talk to—and that I was initially going to speak on—in Part 1 is the omission of the words “council-controlled organisation” and “council-controlled trading organisation”. I alluded to that in my previous speech when I talked about one of the concerns of the Hon Peter Dunne in respect of this bill and its limited scope. Members will know that our agreement with the Labour Party for confidence and supply includes the freeing-up of legislation to enable public-private partnerships in the area of land transport. The Government has been very faithful in meeting that condition, and we have passed legislation in this place that has enabled public-private partnerships to be developed with regard to our roading structure.

We faced exactly the same issue here. United Future was keen to see this bill modified so that the development of wind farms is not simply something for the Wellington Regional Council to try to do off its own bat, with the myriad problems that that may create in terms of local government organisations getting into business—and particularly into areas where cost efficiency is absolutely critical—and speculating to some extent with ratepayers’ money in order to do so. We wanted to see this bill broadened to facilitate the use of outside organisations, including major energy companies. These, after all, are the ones that have the expertise in this area to enable them to carry out the work with the assistance of, if appropriate, and in partnership with, local government—Wellington Regional Council in particular—rather than the Wellington Regional Council doing the work itself. That is the reason why clause 5 has been replaced with a provision that enables far broader use.

The United Future member who has just resumed his seat, who says he comes from the Hutt Valley, seems to be somewhat misinformed. He made the point that all those lands vested in the Wellington Regional Water Board cannot be used for any other purpose, because they are confined specifically for the harvesting of water for the urban needs of Wellington. Earlier in this debate we heard him waxing lyrical about Mount Climie. Well, as one who was born under the shadow of Mount Climie, I can tell him that it is not part of the water-harvesting area. The water-harvesting area is in the catchments of the Tararuas and the Ōrongorongas, which, combined with the aquifers of the lower Hutt Valley, with the recharge area in the Taita Gorge, are the sources of the water. Mount Climie is not used for water-harvesting catchments, so the member’s logic has gone right out of the window.

His logic is faulty in another respect. I made the point earlier in this debate that if we do not want coalmines, nuclear power-stations, or whatever, and if we really had confidence in the Resource Management Act operating as an effects-based gatekeeper, then we would not need this sort of prescriptive process. As the Minister would appreciate, this approach is against the philosophy of the Resource Management Act. This approach is prescriptive; it is picking uses rather than relying on the effects-based process whereby we can avoid, mitigate, and remedy, the effects of certain actions—and if we cannot do that, then we cannot allow the actions. This bill is totally contrary to the whole philosophy of the Resource Management Act, and it disturbs me that we are going down this track. We did it with mining on the Coromandel, and here we are doing it in specifying renewable energy and confining ourselves to that.

Again, what is renewable energy? I ask that seriously, because the definition in the legislation does not make a lot of sense, I believe. We have always thought that oil was a fossil fuel. There is growing evidence that, in fact, oil could well be derived from deep biosphere chemical seep, because people are finding that old oil wells that have become depleted are miraculously renewing themselves. There are a lot of very interesting scientific papers around at the moment that suggest that, contrary to the common belief whereby we just assumed that oil was a fossil fuel, oil may well be chemically derived from deep biosphere chemical reactions.

Equally, the same can be said of solar energy. Solar energy was said to be wonderful. Solar energy is nuclear energy. The sun is one big nuclear reactor—radiation is what solar energy is. So declaring ourselves nuclear-free is a nonsense. It is virtually saying that we do not want any sunlight. Logically, saying that we are nuclear-free is saying that we do not want any sunlight, because sunlight is radiation from a very big nuclear reactor that just happens to be a long way away. That is the nonsense of the terms defined in this legislation.

I ask the Minister why she does not rely on the effects-based principle of the Resource Management Act rather than allow Government departments and Governments of the day to preclude activities like mining in the Coromandel and, in this instance, to say that we can have only one definition of renewable energy. There is not a lot of sense behind it.

I was not going to take another call, but one of the worst speeches I have heard in the Chamber—it was made by the United Future member Murray Smith—makes me do so. I know that United Future is not noted for doing its work on an issue, but I would have thought that Mr Smith, who claims to live in the Wellington region, would not get up and give a speech in which he says that there is no flat land involved in this that could be built on. Well, actually, yes there is. Any tour of Wellington Regional Water Board land would show that there is quite a lot of flat land.

Secondly, Mr Smith said that we do not want to mine coal on the land because the water supply would become contaminated and the land is in the water catchment area. I say to Mr Smith that of course we will not be mining coal on the land, because there is no coal in the Wellington region. It is a small detail, I know, but I am sure that even he—no, I am not sure that even he could understand that. What we could do is build a combined-cycle gas-to-electricity plant on that land, particularly in the Wairarapa if gas is found offshore, and, on the level of probability, there is a fifty-fifty chance of that happening. Offshore Wairarapa is one of three areas in New Zealand, where people are currently actively exploring for gas, the other two being Taranaki and Canterbury.

I would have thought that, if United Future wants to stay in Parliament and stay representing some Wellington area people, it would say: “That’s good. We hope we find some gas in our region.” I would have thought United Future would say that that would be tremendous. If we do find gas we would pipe it ashore and at some stage it would have to be processed. The gas can be processed in a building about half the size of a Woolworths store. About 1,500 square metres of flat land would be sufficient to do that, including space for all the necessary carparking. With trees around such a site, people would not even know that it was there.

In fact, such sites are in Taranaki now, and Mr Smith has probably driven past and not even noticed. He has probably not noticed the Taranaki combined-cycle plant. We could duplicate it in Wellington if this silly clause were not in the bill. It was not in the bill that Marian Hobbs was asked to sponsor. I blame Marian Hobbs for a lot of things but I will not blame her for this. She was asked by the Wellington Regional Council to sponsor the bill, and she is dutifully doing that. I say to Marian Hobbs that this bill could be one of the last that she puts through the House—let us get it right.

💬 Jill Pettis: Oh, Roger!

It is nice to see the senior Government whip back from dinner. It would be good if Marian Hobbs got it right. We should remove this clause.

I was not going to take another call either, but I must respond to the provocation from National and ACT. I will not, however, stoop to the personal insults that are coming from the National member, because I do not think that it is very constructive. The comment I will make is that this is not coastal land. If Mr Sowry wants to debate with me exactly what the water board land does comprise in the Wellington Regional Council area, then I guess we could debate that all night. But we are not talking about coastal land and we are therefore not talking about land that would be suitable for offshore functions.

In terms of the comment made by ACT in terms of Mt Climie, the situation is that we are allowing all water board land to be used for these purposes. We are not saying that Mt Climie is or is not singled out. The fact is that if we give permission to use water board land generally for non-renewable matters, then we include catchment areas—even if Mt Climie is not one. It is interesting to hear that the member was born under Mt Climie. That is news I did not know. But even if Mt Climie itself is not part of the water catchment area directly, it is certainly within the water catchment area. Either we allow all the water catchment area to be used for non-renewable energy or we allow none of it to be used.

Again, I state that the balance is right, and that in terms of these particular areas of land, if there is no coal there, then there is no issue regarding the use of non-sustainable energy, anyway. This is an issue in terms of the Wellington Regional Council that is really irrelevant to what it wants to do, and beyond what it wants to do. I will not spend any more time talking about it.

Part 1 agreed to.

Part 2 Electrical installations and works