Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Approvals and Enforcement) Amendment Bill

This Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Approvals and Enforcement) Amendment Bill was, unfortunately, interrupted last Thursday, when I was saying just how infamous this Labour Government was for imposing compliance costs on ordinary New Zealanders and on ordinary businesses, whether small, medium, or large, through the mechanisms of taxation, the Resource Management Act, and, of course, the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act itself.

I mentioned the very well researched paper by Annie English for the meat and wool board, for Dairy InSight, for Deer Industry New Zealand, for the Foundation for Arable Research, and for Federated Farmers of New Zealand, which pointed out just how costly the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act is for ordinary New Zealanders—and particularly for farmers, with an average cost per farm in the order of $3000 for arable farmers. When one looks at the explanatory note in the first version of this bill, and at the statements of net benefits of the proposal, one sees there is need for considerable concern.

💬 Rt Hon Winston Peters: Who brought it in?

The National Government brought it in—yes, it did, absolutely, and it was regarded at the time as one of the best pieces of legislation internationally. But over the last 5 years we have seen some of the most severe regulations in the area of new organisms anywhere in the world. It has sent—literally—hundreds of New Zealand scientists out of this country, when we badly need them, and I will give members one example—that is, the transgenic sheep experiment that was taking place at Auckland medical school to look for a cure for Huntington’s chorea. And what happened? The scientists said they would not carry out the experiment in New Zealand, as it would cost too much and it would take too long because of the regulations imposed by this Labour Government. I think that that is very important, and the former member for Tauranga should be aware that in this area we have one of the most—

💬 Rt Hon Winston Peters: It’s a boomerang.

He is saying “a boomerang”; well, I say to the former member for Tauranga that this—

💬 Rt Hon Winston Peters: Who brought it in?

Yes, we did bring it in, and he was a member of that Government, funnily enough.

💬 Rt Hon Winston Peters: No.

Oh yes, he was. He denies it—[Interruption] Well, maybe he was not. He obviously joined it later on, because he recognised the virtues of this bill. Nevertheless, I want to point out, with respect to the cost of transferring the approximately 70,000 notifiable toxic substances from transitional controls to the appropriate control regime under the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act, the estimation of saving is about $2 million. But we are concerned that nowhere in this amendment bill is there any suggestion that there will be monitoring to ensure money will be saved.

I will ask the Minister to take a call later on to tell this Parliament whether the Labour Government, which brought in this amendment bill allegedly to save businesses money, will indeed monitor the legislation when enacted to ensure that it is working. It is all very well to bring in extra burdens on farmers, manufacturers, importers, and exporters under the guise of saving money, but this Labour Government has had a very poor record over the last 5 to 6 years.

I did want to mention one of the good things of this bill and one of the reasons why the National Opposition—the National Government to-be—is supporting it. That is found under a new heading in Part 1, “Rapid assessment and approval of other hazardous substances in special emergencies”. It is something that became a very strong reality during the varroa bee mite epidemic. When it was finally realised by the Labour Government that it would not be able to eradicate that mite, there was great concern by bee-keepers that a miticide would be needed in order to protect hives.

At the time, it was impossible to bring in a miticide and, according to Federated Farmers, there had to be some very, very heavy eyeballing of the Minister in order for there to be a mechanism to bring in an appropriate miticide. It took a hang of a lot of trouble and effort to make any move by the Labour Government to make that possible, but finally it did. So it is quite good to see a rapid assessment and approval mechanism for biosecurity problems within this amendment bill.

I rise to support the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Approvals and Enforcement) Amendment Bill, and I am delighted to do so. I found that speech that went before me to be very rich, and I would like to remind the member that the first Act was passed in 1996. It was a very pure Act, it was a very theoretical Act, and since then we have had to amend it in order to save money for people. I am very grateful tonight that this bill will go through in urgency, because it is a bill about saving money.

At this stage, I want to pass some thanks. I know I am not the Minister in charge of the actual bill, but I want to thank the officials who put a lot of work into it, and I also thank my good friend Brian Donnelly, who took this on in the Education and Science Committee and did a whole lot of work in extra time to get this bill through. Now, why? He did it because this is a bill about reducing costs. The previous speaker actually talked about the reduction in costs—maybe as much as $2 million. But there are reducing costs to Government and industry particularly, through the introduction of group standards—by reducing the number of applications that a business or a farm has to make to the Environmental Risk Management Authority.

The 1996 legislation, as I said, was very pure. It was introduced, I think, by Simon Upton. The legislation that the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act 1996 replaced was, amongst others, the Toxic Substances Act. That legislation had been ignored for years. If I remember rightly, in the last Parliament a huge debate took place around the fact that many people had not actually notified that they were importing or using toxic substances, either on their farms or in their businesses. But when we gave the incentive under the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act to grandparent those to make it easier for businesses and farmers, we found that the number of toxic substances notified suddenly increased, I think, by about 100,000 so that we now have 110,000 toxic substances to be notified. That is effective legislation. It is the second reason why this bill is good.

The bill not only is about saving money but is about protecting our environment, as well, because if those toxic substances are notified and the environmental risk management process gone through, boundaries will be set around the use and packaging of those substances. Does that mean anything? Use of substances? Members know the complaints that have gone through sometimes about agrichemical trespass. So we are clearly laying out how those chemicals are to be used so that they do not affect, say, the avocado grower’s property rights when his or her crop gets sprayed by somebody misusing the chemical in the paddock next door. That actually is good environmental practice and good fair business practice in the terms of agribusiness.

The legislation does a second thing—and I can well remember when the Hon Nick Smith and I were on the case involving rat poisons being dropped into the sea along the Kaikōura coast. No one had done anything about legislating for the packaging and transporting of such poisons, which contaminated a whole marine area. That is what this legislation is about. It is about saving money—[Interruption] Yes, it was probably, and it was particularly well-named. It was also about protecting the environment.

The other important thing about this legislation is that it involves regional councils. Again, one of the holes found in that good piece of legislation of 1996 is that, rather like the Building Act, the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act relied on people to enforce the provisions themselves, and all dangerous goods inspectors were taken out of the legislation. That left us in a very vulnerable state. It is why it is a very good scene to see regional councils being included, probably with some funding from central government, as we work through these issues in order to enforce decisions made about the use of chemicals and toxic substances.

Let me make one other point about toxic substances, because it is also about health. If we do not notify or register a toxic substance, as would have happened in the past before this particular legislation was in place, then nothing is registered in the poisons centre about how to treat someone if that substance is swallowed. So if a child who is on a farm, in a factory, or in a workshop out the back drinks something that no one knows was actually in this country, we cannot treat that child. That is the value of this legislation. It is about people’s well-being—their well-being environmentally, and their well-being in the sense that we have heard people and have said that we will find a way through grouping standards so that people do not have to go through individually, and so that we reduce costs by $2 million. This is good legislation, improving on theoretical legislation that was passed in 1996.

We need to look only at the tragedy that has just occurred in Britain to understand the importance of our Parliament passing good-quality legislation for toxic and dangerous goods in order to ensure the safety of our public and our environment, as well. Where National believes the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act has got into significant difficulty is that the net has been thrown so wide that lots of things that have very low levels of toxicity and hold very little risk to the public have been caught up in this bureaucratic monster. That causes all sorts of costs, impositions, and really a breakdown in innovation within New Zealand.

The classic example of that for me was the realisation that good, old sellotape has now been defined as a toxic and dangerous good, requiring its registration under the legislation. So I say again that where we have got ourselves in trouble with this legislation is not in focusing on those goods and items that are of risk but rather in throwing the net so wide that we pick up just about everything. As the previous Minister for the Environment has said, in a country of 4 million people we now have 110,000 different substances and goods that are within the ambit of this legislation. We have become too carried away and it needs to be simplified.

This bill goes some way along that road, and National says that is good. We are, however, unconvinced as to whether it goes far enough in focusing on the goods that are truly dangerous and pose some risk to the public of New Zealand. I note that National does support the idea in the bill of having a group standard rather than having individual extra substances that all have to be individually registered. That makes good sense. We also support the introduction of exposure limits. That is a good thing.

But I also have to note that those changes were approved by Cabinet over 2½ years ago.

💬 Dr Paul Hutchison: How long?

It was 2½ years ago, I say to my colleague Paul Hutchison, who has a strong interest in these areas. So for all the rhetoric that we hear from Labour about its concern about compliance costs, we have had a set of quite sensible ideas to try to improve this legislation and it has sat before this Parliament for 2½ years. What does that say about the level of commitment from this Government to getting on with improving important laws such as the Act?

I want to give a practical example. The previous Minister, Marian Hobbs, was the Minister for the Environment for 6 years, and during that period we have done little more than tread water. We are now talking about legislation that is nearly 10 years old, and we are still in transition with it. We can accept, when we introduce a new statute, that it may take a few years—a couple of years—to get up and running, but when the transition period is 10 years long we really do put ourselves in something of a pickle.

There is a large number of horticultural industries in my electorate and, time after time, I have written letters to the Minister, asking about the compliance costs of introducing a new, less toxic approach to pest management.

💬 Lindsay Tisch: What was the response?

I received very little response. Basically, what has happened is that New Zealand’s horticultural industries have been tied to old technologies, simply because it is so expensive to introduce new ones. An organic kiwifruit grower in my area wanted to introduce a new organic substance for use in production. It was going to cost him $23,000 to be able to import a 44-gallon drum of a chemical that was approved for organic use. Not surprisingly, he threw his hands up in horror and he has gone nowhere. We have killed off that sort of innovation with the poor implementation of the Act and with some of its difficulties.

I also want to give a steer as to where National sees the future. In a global environment, the difficulty of being a country of just 4 million people, in trying to register everything from sellotape to glue to very complex agricultural pesticides and chemicals, is that it is just too much for a little country to do thoroughly. Just as is the case in respect of medicines and Food Standards Australia New Zealand, it is National’s view that we need to take a more international approach. We think there is a real opportunity to work more closely with our near neighbour Australia, and to come up with a common regulatory regime around many of these issues.

As much as we despise the Aussies, the reality is that they blow up just like we do. They are affected by chemicals, whether they be diesel or petrol or explosives—all of those things. The vast majority of the 110,000 goods covered by this legislation pose exactly the same safety and environmental issues in Australia as in New Zealand. If this Government really was concerned about compliance costs, it would sit down with its Australian counterpart and move the regulatory environment to the point where, when one of these new products or innovations is introduced, it is possible to establish common standards between New Zealand and Australia to provide protection against it. A small range of plant materials may pose a greater risk to New Zealand than Australia, but they will be a very small minority of what goes through this excessively bureaucratic process.

The last comment I wish to make in this debate is in support of my colleague Paul Hutchison, who asked where the system is to ensure there are savings. We heard the Minister proudly boast that this bill will save $2 million a year in the hazardous substances and new organisms mechanisms for approving new substances. Quite frankly, I do not believe that. I want to know which measure in the bill gives this Parliament any confidence that that will happen. I suspect it will be like the last hazardous substances and new organisms bill. This is not the first one; we had another one. We were told that that bill would solve the problems with regard to the Act, and it did not. Now we are back, 4 years later, having another crack at it. Quite frankly, I share the cynicism of Paul Hutchison that although this bill does some things that are useful, there are not the checks and balances to make sure they are followed through with savings.

The very last point I wish to make is that this stuff does matter. There is a very large imposition under the Act, particularly on New Zealand’s primary industries. Whether it be the horticultural sector, the agricultural sector, or our forestry sector, the sectors that are the driving force of the New Zealand economy are deeply affected by the legislation. As it stands at the moment, we are holding back innovation and holding back success in those industries, and we are stopping them from using the latest international technology—much of which is more environmentally friendly—because of issues with regard to the Act. This Government has been tardy in addressing those issues. Six years on, we still have problems with the Act. We want to see a wider reform. We want to see the Act working so that New Zealanders can be confident that their environment is looked after and that dangerous goods are managed in a safe way, but equally confident that we can be economically successful without holding back the industries that provide the wealth for our nation.

Just for the edification of the previous speaker, Dr Nick Smith, the Education and Science Committee in the last Parliament scrutinised three pieces of hazardous substances and new organisms legislation. One, of course, was the GE legislation when the moratorium came off, and the other two were more to do with toxic substances—such as this bill.

As has been pointed out, the bill is part of a raft of legislation stemming from the 1996 Act, which was the brainchild of Simon Upton and which sought to establish a common framework to regulate the use of a whole range of dangerous substances and novel organisms. Prior to that, these provisions were in a range of different Acts, and he was trying to put them all under one umbrella. So it is a little bit preposterous for Paul Hutchison to complain about compliance costs, because those costs flow through from the original legislation that was put in place by the National Government. It is a bit like the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA). National complains nowadays about NCEA but forgets that it was brought in by the National Government. However, one of the things that was not anticipated by that original legislation is the provision in the bill relating to group standards. The group standards mechanism in the bill will reduce compliance costs, and it is an endeavour to reduce those costs. The bill, together with subsequent Cabinet decisions, sets out a timetable for all the necessary measures that flowed through from the original legislation. The original legislation did not tie it all up. It had an expectation that further measures would be flowing from that—and this bill is one of them—particularly in response to the criticisms around compliance costs and the bureaucratic monster that Dr Nick Smith referred to.

The key mechanism, and the unique mechanism in this bill, not anticipated by Simon Upton, is that mechanism of group standards, so that substances of similar types and characteristics can be treated as a group rather than as an array of different substances, each monitoring its own set of regulations and controls. The outcome of this should be a more user-friendly, less-bureaucratic, and less-expensive way of regulating the use of hazardous substances in New Zealand, and certainly it was recognised as such by most of the submitters. Nick Smith referred to the Act turning into a bureaucratic monster. Well, if some changes had not been made to it in the previous legislation, we would have had the ludicrous situation of farmers, for example, having to get handlers’ licences purely and simply to distribute or use Billy Peach flea powder on their dogs. So some of those problems have been eradicated.

Although some submitters suggested that some changes be made, and some suggested that the manner in which we have gone about developing the procedures flowing from the 1996 Act are flawed, in fact, one of the arguments was that we have not sufficiently used some international work in this particular field to springboard off; we have tended to try to recreate the wheel all for ourselves. Everybody agreed. There was not one group of submitters that did not agree it was necessary to pass this bill in a timely fashion. I guess for some of those who hark back to earlier times and wish we had gone down a different path, the answer is to be found in Macbeth, in that statement he made, that we are so steeped in blood it would be as tedious to go back as to go forward. As chair of the select committee that saw this legislation through in the last Parliament, I want to thank sincerely the members of that committee, including those who are no longer with us in this House, such as Bernie Ogilvy and Deborah Coddington, because the issues were extremely complex. I would have to say that the bill was about as arid as Ayers Rock or as dry as a fish’s proverbial. Nevertheless, the committee members stuck with it. They made the effort to engage intellectually.

I think the hazardous substances and new organisms legislation was put before the Education and Science Committee because of the GE legislation. Normally it would go to the Local Government and Environment Committee. But we know that that committee was chaired by Jeanette Fitzsimons of the Greens, which was a partner to Labour, but I think that they probably were not quite comfortable with putting it there, so because we had the word “Science” in our title they shoved it towards us. However, the members, I must admit, made a sterling effort to engage intellectually, and they made some sensible amendments as we went through. For example, new section 20A(2) inserted by clause 6 has been amended so that it is consistent with the items for which an exposure limit can be set, as specified in clause 17. It is absolutely stunning stuff, and I am sure the House agrees, but it is critical for ensuring the safety of New Zealanders in using hazardous substances, into the future. Nick Smith made a very good point about the example in England. The committee also tightened up some of the provisions. For example, it recommended an amendment to ensure that importers who bring unapproved hazardous substances into this country will be required to pay the full costs of re-exporting those materials. Hopefully, this will deter the fly-by-nighters who would endanger the well-being of New Zealanders.

There was one issue that the committee was unable to fully resolve within the scope we had. It was an issue brought to our attention by vets, and it was the conundrum they face in that some of the products they use are regulated by two, and in some cases three, different pieces of legislation. So they have three different regulatory frameworks, but in most cases only two, that they have to go through. Further work does need to be carried out on this particular issue by officials. Fortunately, the vets themselves saw the implementation of group standards as the next best option, so they were not dying in a ditch on the matter, which they so sensibly brought to the attention of the committee.

The second reading of this bill cannot be allowed to go through without a criticism of the management of the legislation. I believe that Nick Smith’s criticisms are somewhat justified. This legislation should have been passed before the election for it to meet the time frames, and in fact a Supplementary Order Paper is now required to legitimise the actions of the ministry. This is simply not good enough, and it arose purely and simply from poor management of the work programme. A timetable has long been established as to when things have to be done. Otherwise, if they are not done within that time frame, we will have periods of time when we have no protections whatsoever. The Government, the Minister, and the ministry officials all knew what that timetable was. It is simply not good enough for officials to drop legislation and then put pressure on select committees to meet their timetable. It is certainly not all right for the Government to set report-back dates that require members to attend through January in order to meet those dates. It is certainly not all right to set report-back dates that do not allow the appropriate scrutiny of the legislation by the select committee—something that we would not agree to, especially with the sorts of complex matters that need to be scrutinised in legislation such as the bill we are discussing. So I believe we can concur with the criticism of Nick Smith that the timing of this legislation and the timeliness with which it was brought to the House can be justifiably criticised by the House and by members of the select committee.

New Zealand First, however, is pleased that it has been able to make a contribution to the legislation. We believe that the outcome will be to make New Zealand a more manageable and safer environment, and that has to be positive for our nation. In the end, whilst members brought up some flaws in the bill, I think it was unanimously agreed to by all parties on the select committee, and I think that possibly will be the outcome of the vote tonight.

It is interesting that Mr Donnelly talked about the legislation being as dry as Ayers Rock, because I had a look at it and thought the same thing. The previous Minister for the Environment, Marian Hobbs, talked about a few things that I thought were interesting, to do with the whole administration of the legislation by regional councils. I fear that it will just impose another compliance cost that will be a burden on the ratepayer, like so many other things passed through this House. This bill is complex legislation that we need some time to digest. I would personally favour amending the whole Act, but I heard Mr Donnelly say that that might be quite a task. In speaking to this legislation I am following on from my learned colleagues Dr Hutchison and Dr Nick Smith, who have added a lot of value to the discussion here tonight. I agree with a comment made by Dr Smith that we have to work more closely with Australia to get this legislation through across the Tasman. It is also worth noting, as Dr Hutchison mentioned, and as you would know, Madam Assistant Speaker, from my farming background, that this legislation—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ann Hartley): I am sorry to interrupt the member but the time has come for me to leave the Chair.

Sitting suspended from 10 p.m. to 9 a.m. (Wednesday)