Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill

It is a privilege to take a call in the Committee stage, and to take a call from you, Mr Chair. It is, of course, in the real world, Friday night. I am here under some level of sufferance, although I have now learnt that the Chiefs, in fact, did beat the Hurricanes 17-12. I personally blame the National Government for that result. Had I been at the game I am quite sure there would have been a different result than that. That will make my contribution to this Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill perhaps even longer than it might have been had the Hurricanes managed to win that particular game.

Mr Chair, as you noted this is a debate around Part 1: clauses 4, 5, and 6 of the bill. This is the bit that Simon Bridges tried to tell us was the original policy intent that just got missed out the first time around, 6 weeks ago when the Crown Minerals Amendment Act was going through the House. I think Simon Bridges should actually just keep amendments to the Crown Minerals Act as a standing item on the Order Paper. That will just make things easier. We will just come back to it once a month, correct all of the mistakes that Mr Bridges makes, and then he can just get on with making a few more, and we will come back and correct them as the Committee is now having to do here in Part 1 of this bill.

In all seriousness, it is concerning that on an issue of such importance to the Government—the Government puts a lot of store in the question of minerals extraction and what that will mean for New Zealand in the future—the Government is so sloppy in its lawmaking on that issue. But that is not just the end of the matter. The fact is that it is sloppy in an area where health and safety concerns are huge and where environmental impact is massive. This Government has been completely loose with its lawmaking. We saw it in the exclusive economic zone legislation, and we see it again here in the Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill. We need a proper regime around these matters. These are matters of great significance to our economic and environmental future. It simply is not good enough to have to be back in Parliament 6 weeks after the amendment Act went through making yet another amendment to it.

Part 1 of the bill, as the Minister of Energy and Resources has alluded to, changes the process for what happens with particular types of tier 1 permits. This is where there has been a permit granted for committed work, that committed work is undertaken, and a different company is now allowed to undertake the later work, the contingent work. I have some questions for the Minister in the chair that I would like him to answer around Part 1. In particular, I would like a further explanation about exactly why it is that this did not appear in the first version of the Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013, because it seems to me to be a fairly significant matter.

The fact is that the Government clearly intends it that under this legislation there can be new prospectors coming into the process of work at a later stage than what had been envisaged when the Act was passed. Looking through the material, the regulatory impact statement on the last version of this bill—we do not have one for this version of the bill—it was quite clear to me in reading that that, actually, this was not envisaged. This actually was not envisaged. There was a process that was gone through to talk about what would happen with permits, but when I actually read that original regulatory impact statement I cannot see that the Government did intend for this process to occur. I would like the Minister to take a call and answer to us how it is that it was missed out. If it was not just missed out, what has changed?

My second question for the Minister—it is a question that I think a lot of people will be asking—is: who has spoken to the Minister? Who has come to the Government in the last 6 weeks and said: “Guess what? You haven’t allowed for what we want to do.”? Gareth Hughes mentioned in the earlier readings of this bill that there are companies wanting to work, for instance, on the continental shelf, and the question of protesting, which we will come to in Part 2. But what happened here? Who was it who came to the Government and said that they wanted this permitting regime that has been changed here under clause 6 to be changed?

That is an important matter, because the track record of this Government is to kowtow to corporate interests and to vested interests when they come knocking. Be it Warner Bros or be it Skycity, the Government will bow down. It will say: “That’s all right; the laws are for sale.” Well, who was it in this case, Mr Bridges? Who was it who came to the Government and said: “We think we need your law changed.”? That is the question that Simon Bridges needs to answer. Why are we changing this today? What went wrong? And who was it who wanted it changed? Simon Bridges should take a call and tell New Zealanders the answers to those questions.

When we look at the changes that are suggested here I do have some significant concerns about the process. If we work through the process, an applicant for a tier 1 permit for exploration who does not have the expertise or financial ability to undertake the exploration drilling activities can be granted a permit on a conditional basis. The permit holder can undertake what is called “committed work”—it is essentially seismic surveys—and then after that they can, acting as the farminee, farm out their rights, effectively. This, as the Government would like to tell us, provides us with a different route for this exploration to take place.

The two key elements to making this work are whether or not this can be managed through tighter permit conditions. The tighter permit conditions have to be put in place and monitored by the Minister. That is the concern that I have: whether or not the management of these permit conditions can be undertaken, and whether we can have confidence that they will be undertaken by the Minister in the way that we want. Again, the track record of this Government is one where if corporate interests come into play, the Government will back down.

If we look at new section 29B(3) in clause 5, we see that “If a permit is granted in accordance with this section,—(a) work cannot be undertaken after the exploration drilling committal date unless, before that date,—(i) the Minister has, upon application by the permit holder, satisfied himself or herself of the matters set out in section 29A(2)(b) and (d) …” of the original Act. Those are the matters around health and safety. So what they are saying is the Minister has to satisfy himself—in this case, himself—around the matters of health and safety. Well, what confidence do we have in this Government to do that? I do not believe the track record of this Government is such that we can say we have confidence that the Minister’s satisfying himself, as he has to do under section 29B(3), would actually be in the interests—[Interruption]—I thank my colleague Megan Woods for that—of the New Zealand people. That is a problem.

The permit holder themselves then goes on to be able to do the drilling and so on that was originally envisaged in the initial permit. So at that point in time a new player has entered the New Zealand extractive industries, has gone into our pristine environment, and has decided that it would like to be involved in this. It has picked up a permit that somebody else has got. What confidence can we have as a Parliament passing this law under urgency that we have in place all of the rules and the regimes to ensure that if a new player comes in, we can have confidence in it? All we have got under this law is Simon Bridges to give us that assurance. That is all we have. Given his track record of coming to this House 6 weeks after he put up the last bit of legislation, to amend the mistakes he made then, does that give New Zealanders confidence when he is the one thing—the one thing—that stands between some kind of cowboy player entering the New Zealand extractive industry—

💬 Hon Maryan Street: Sector.

—sector—thank you, it is very late. The one thing that says whether this new player is up to it is Simon Bridges, the Minister.

I simply do not believe that the new section 29B(3) provides us with the kind of assurance that New Zealanders would expect. In Part 1 of this bill that is the substantive matter that I want to raise. I simply do not believe that the Government has made the case for why this change has been made today. We need to hear from the Minister to tell us why this has happened now, who has come to him and asked him, and then we can actually start looking at the detail of whether or not we have sufficient rules and safeguards in place to ensure that any new player entering the extractive sector has the attributes that we would expect of them. This is sloppy lawmaking from the Government, and this part of the bill needs significant work.

I want to continue on from where my colleague Grant Robertson left off on Part 1 of this Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill because there are some serious questions that do need to be answered. My colleague was talking about proposed new section 29B in clause 5. I want to talk about proposed new section 20A in clause 4, which amends the clause of the legislation that we passed a mere few weeks ago that amends section 24 of the Crown Minerals Act. What this new section 20A says is “that each tender must include an application that complies with section 29A(1) and be accompanied by sufficient information in relation to the permit offered for the Minister to satisfy himself or herself of the matters set out in section 29A(2) or the matters required under section 29B, as the case may be;”.

This raises the very serious question of where the accountability lies for ensuring that the very, very highest standards are met when issuing permits during the tender process, particularly for tier 1 applications. I question very much, on two levels, the ability of this Minister of Energy and Resources to carry out that function to the satisfaction of the people of New Zealand. This is the law that governs some very risky activity in some very sensitive areas of both the marine environment and onshore. So we need to make sure that we get this right.

I have two concerns about the test being that the Minister must satisfy himself. The first is that we have seen from this Minister and from the previous Minister that really they are just so desperate for this to go ahead that I do not think they are going to be applying the kinds of stringent standards the public would expect when determining whether or not they have satisfied themselves. We saw it with Minister Heatley, who during the course of the passage of the legislation that preceded this—which we have only just passed into law and are now amending here—was in the process of giving himself immense powers under the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill at that time, immense powers to take half the decision-making power on Department of Conservation land away from the Minister of Conservation. He came into this Chamber and he was publicly naming specific projects that he thought absolutely should go ahead, criticising the Green Party for saying that certain projects should not go ahead, and really opening the Government up to serious danger of judicial review and excessive litigation.

There is a reason why the Minister of Energy and Resources should not have the decision-making power in that area, and that is that he does have a conflict of interest—he does. So when we see here again that this is merely coming down to a Minister to apply standards that are crucial for the protection of our environment and crucial for the health and safety of our workforce in this area, the same conflict of interest applies. I would like to know how the Minister is going to manage that conflict of interest, how he is going to manage the fact that his Government is so desperate for this stuff to succeed that it is prepared to do anything to get this stuff going, regardless of the risk.

How is he going to manage that conflict of interest with now being the Minister who determines whether or not he is satisfied that conditions have been met? I do not think he can—I do not think he can. We have discussed already that this is it for the Government. This, pokie machines, and asset sales are it. If it does not work, we are kind of in trouble—kind of in trouble. That is why I question the ability of the Minister—I question the ability of the Minister—to manage that conflict of interest in proposed new section 20A when he is determining whether or not he is satisfied that the conditions have been met to ensure the safety of the environment and the health and safety of our workforce. I really do question it.

There is nothing in the legislation that indicates how that conflict of interest is to be managed. It would have been nice, Minister, to have a regulatory impact statement on this bill, because that is exactly the kind of thing that I would have been interested to know. I would be interested to know whether or not the officials had indicated that that was a risk. But we did not have a regulatory impact statement on this piece of legislation, at all. Why was that, Minister? That is my second question.

We are here, where you are basically introducing a test that you apply, Minister—that the Minister himself applies. How is that conflict of interest going to be managed? That is exactly the kind of thing that a regulatory impact statement would have addressed. This kind of document is what we get with regulatory impact statements from the Government, so maybe it would not have been that helpful to us after all. It would have been interesting to see how much of it was redacted—it is a great word, “redacted”, is it not? It is one that will for ever be associated with the National Party, the party of redaction. The reality is that we need the Minister to answer that question because he has not provided the information to allow us to determine that for ourselves. He has not allowed this to go to a select committee so that we could ask those questions. He has not allowed any analysis of this at all.

My other concern about the fact that this section relies on the Minister satisfying himself that certain conditions have been met and the test for that is up to him is that this is a Minister who is so incompetent that here we are, weeks after we passed the last amendment bill into law, having to fix the amendment bill with another amendment bill to the amendment bill. It has not even been enacted yet. Jonathan Young said earlier that we had learnt from the experience since the bill had been passed. Well, it has not been enacted yet. I mean, it has not even come into force, so I do not know what we have learnt, except that a company possibly came to the Minister and asked him to make certain changes or suggested that perhaps the legislation had not gone far enough.

I would like to know whether anyone asked for these particular changes. You know what, it might just be simpler if, instead of having an amendment bill to the amendment bill to the amendment bill, we just passed a new bill every time a permit is put up that the Government wants to pass. We could just be honest about it, and each new permit that the Government wanted to fast track would just get its own legislation, which could go through all stages under urgency. That would be easier and simpler. That is effectively what we are doing in Part 1, constantly amending legislation to fit in with what industry is demanding from the Government, when instead what we should be doing is putting in place legislation that ensures the highest environmental and health and safety standards are upheld, regardless of where the permit is, regardless of what it is for, and regardless of who is asking for it. But that is not what we have got.

So here we have the Minister being required to satisfy himself, and we do not have confidence in this Minister that he is going to be able to handle that conflict of interest, given that he could not even pass a piece of legislation that lasted more than a few weeks before it had to be fixed up. Maybe we could just take out the word “Minister” and put in the words “Steven Joyce”, because that is the reality. Wherever the word “Minister” appears, we will just replace it with the words “Steven Joyce” because—

💬 Chris Hipkins: Or Gerry Brownlee.

Or Gerry Brownlee, because they are the ones who make all the decisions in the Government. That might be more honest as well.

The real problem with this Part 1 is that we were sold the original legislation on the basis that tier 1 applications were meant to be tough. This was going to be a tough, rigorous process that was gone through. And here we are in Part 1 already, before the legislation, the last amendment bill, has even come into force, undermining those tier 1 application processes—already, already. It was passed only a few weeks ago. It has not even come into law yet, and already we are undermining what the public were told were going to be very, very stringent and very, very tough conditions for those tier 1 projects. Well, the Government could not wait even a few weeks, until the law had come into force, to pass these amendments. It is so desperate for this stuff to go ahead that these changes in Part 1 to tier 1 application processes are already being put into place.

You know, the Minister is trying to say: “Oh, well, we just missed this in the original process.” Well, that was a process that actually went to a select committee. Can you imagine what he has missed in this bill, given it has not gone to a select committee at all, given how rushed it has been? I cannot even begin to imagine what other mistakes he has made in this legislation that we have not had time to pick up since it was tabled yesterday, late afternoon. Certainly, again, a select committee process would have allowed us to see whether what we are doing in Part 1 is actually what the Minister claims or whether, in fact, this is a quite deliberate undermining of those strict tier 1 conditions. This is an area where you do not want to have loopholes.

This is an area where internationally there is enormous litigation—enormous litigation. So when we start talking about arbitrary tests, like the Minister satisfying himself that this is being met or that is being met, with no information about how the very real conflicts of interest are going to be managed, that makes me very, very worried. I would hope that the Minister will take a call on this to tell us how he is going to manage those conflicts of interest to protect the New Zealand taxpayers—

I am very happy to take a brief call on the Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill. Actually, hang on—let me just get this right: this is the Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill, so if I am correct, this is a bill amending an Act that has not yet come into force. How did we get to this state of being, where we are here, under urgency, amending a piece of legislation that has not even yet come into force? Could it be—

💬 Hon Maryan Street: We could pass this one first.

Well, that is right. This one could be passed before the other one even comes into force. Could it be that the Government made a critical mistake when it introduced that last piece of legislation? It made the critical mistake of putting Simon Bridges as Minister of Energy and Resources in charge of it. It put Simon Bridges in charge of it, and he decided that he was going to make some changes and that he was not going to allow anyone to have a say on those changes that he was going to make. He was going to introduce them by way of a Supplementary Order Paper, after the bill had been through the select committee process, without any chance to give those changes adequate scrutiny. But that is OK because, according to the National Government, that is all a bit of an option these days—asking people whether they actually agree with anything or whether maybe they could improve legislation.

That is all just optional these days with the National Government. So it did not bother with that. And what do you know? Before the legislation is even in force, the Government is back here amending it because it stuffed it up. It completely stuffed it up. The Government left Simon Bridges in charge. It was his first piece of legislation in the House, I think, and he managed to completely stuff it up. I bet he is popular with his Cabinet colleagues. The very first thing he did was to introduce a piece of legislation, take it through the House, with amendments, and then within weeks he is taking up more House time to fix his stuff-ups. I bet that makes him really, really popular. Urgency on a Friday night—I bet that makes him really popular.

Oil and gas exploration is something that people do talk about in New Zealand. The first question that the people who come up to me in my electorate to talk about oil and gas exploration will ask—even those who are in favour of it—is whether it is safe. Even if they are in favour of it and they say: “Yes, we should go out there, and if we have got oil there, we should drill it.”—even people who are in favour of it—the first question they will ask is whether it is safe. They look at some of the experiences offshore, things like the Gulf of Mexico, which focused everybody’s minds on the risks involved in deep-sea oil drilling, so they want to know whether, if we are going to be doing it here, we have safeguards in place to ensure that that sort of thing would not happen in New Zealand.

I think New Zealanders’ minds were focused on that even more when a separate issue occurred with the Rena and with the clean-up that was required from the fraction of oil that came off the Rena compared with the amount that might come out of a deep-sea oil well if something went wrong. The amount of oil from the Rena was a fraction. We could have a lot more than that if something went wrong with deep-sea oil drilling. So people simply want to know whether, if we are going to do it, it is safe and that if, despite all of the safety precautions that might be put in place, something were to go wrong, we could remedy it quickly.

New Zealand’s worst nightmare—the worst nightmare of all New Zealanders—would be a Gulf of Mexico - like disaster, with oil continually gushing for weeks and weeks and weeks, without the ability to stop it. Think of the damage that would do to New Zealand. Our tourism industry would be down the drain overnight—one of the biggest industries in New Zealand and one that we rely on. It is our bread and butter. We rely on it to make our living as a country, and yet a massive oil spill would wipe out our tourism industry overnight because of the damage it would do to our clean, green economy. A lot of our primary exporting industries also rely on our clean, green image for their access to overseas markets.

So when people ask whether it is safe, they have got really, really good reasons for doing so because of the considerable damage it would do to New Zealanders, the New Zealand environment, the New Zealand economy, and New Zealanders’ way of life if something went wrong should deep-sea oil drilling happen in New Zealand in the future. So that is the first question that people ask, and it is the right question to ask.

Consider that now in the context of this particular piece of legislation and in the context in which it is brought into the House. The bill that we are now debating is fixing up mistakes that were made in the original piece of legislation that is yet to come into force, because it was rushed through and because it did not get appropriate scrutiny. I have said this once already in the House in this urgency debate, because this is not the first bill we are debating under urgency. This is not the first bill we are debating in this particular urgency motion that has not been referred to a select committee.

I said in the debate on the earlier bill, the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2), that I have not participated in any select committee hearing around a bill where the bill has not been improved in some way by comments made by counsel, by advisers, and often by the public, who pick things up that those who are dealing with the matter all day, every day, perhaps lose sight of. That is one of the reasons why we have a select committee process. This Parliament is made up of people who are lay people, I guess, in Parliament. We are not all subject matter experts in absolutely everything that goes on here. So we allow the people who are experts the chance to scrutinise what it is that we are doing in the House. It is a really critical part of our democratic process, and a part of our constitutional arrangements.

I do not know a heck of a lot about oil and gas exploration. I did work in the oil and gas industry for about a year and a half. I was not actually doing the practical, hands-on stuff; I was coordinating training for the people who were. It was a huge eye-opener for me. I learnt a lot about the oil and gas industry, but I would never for one second purport to be an expert on the matters that are covered by this bill and by this legislation. Therefore, as a parliamentarian, to do my job effectively I need the chance to hear from the people who are experts.

The other way we do that in this House is we have a thing called a regulatory impact statement, and that is where, again, independent experts check over legislation to make sure that the legislation before the House does what it says it is supposed to do and that the Government, in deciding what legislation to bring before members, has chosen the best of the options available to achieve the desired outcome. What is the regulatory impact statement for this bill? We do not have one. The regulatory impact statement that the Government is relying on for this piece of legislation is the same regulatory impact statement that it had for the first lot of legislation, which it completely stuffed up. So the advice, the best advice, that we have here under urgency is the advice we got when the House stuffed it up in the first place, because Simon Bridges is too lazy to make sure that we actually get better advice and that we are not going to be back here again in a few weeks because he has stuffed it up a second time.

It is vitally important that we work through these processes carefully, because there is a heck of a lot at stake. And every New Zealander is entitled to know that if we are going to be doing deep-sea drilling in New Zealand, it is going to be safe, there are appropriate checks and balances in place, and, yes, there are contingencies there so that should something go dramatically wrong, steps can be taken to address the damage, minimise the damage, before it gets completely out of hand. We have seen the Gulf of Mexico. We have seen what happens when things go wrong.

The Labour Party does, in fact, support exploration in New Zealand. We do see the value of the minerals we have here. I can see Gareth Hughes. I am sure Gareth has got something to say about that, and I am sure he will be speaking very shortly in the debate. We do see value, but we want to know that there are appropriate safety measures in place, and we want to know that decisions are being made judiciously and following appropriate processes. It may sound a bit bureaucratic to say “following appropriate processes”, but in a country like ours, a small country like ours, with a simple governing structure like ours, where there are not a huge number of checks and balances in our legislative processes, at least if we make sure that we are following a democratic process, we minimise the risk of things going wrong.

We do not have an Upper House. In many other countries, if a bill like this were introduced through Parliament and passed under urgency, it would then be subject to scrutiny by another legislative body. We do not have that in New Zealand. Once it gets passed by Parliament, it then gets the Royal assent, normally within a few days, and it is the law—that is it. It cannot be struck down via the court, because we do not have a written constitution that gives the court the powers to strike down laws in New Zealand, as many other countries do. Therefore, it is incumbent on all of us as parliamentarians to make sure that the decisions we make in the House are robust. And in order to do that we have got a series of processes that this Government, time and time again, has proven that it is willing to completely ignore and ride roughshod over. This, I am sad to say, is a return to the sort of practice we saw so much of in the last Parliament, when urgency was used to circumvent—

Thank you for allowing me to take a call on the Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill. It is a bit of a mouthful because, as we have just heard, the Government, well, it stuffed up, basically, the first time around. The Minister Simon Bridges had the original amendment bill amending the Act before the House just a few weeks ago, and now here he is already, in urgency, on a Friday evening, bringing back an amendment to his amendment. We have talked about this a bit tonight already but this is the very reason why a bill should not be rushed through, because it will come back time and time again.

In Part 1 of this bill we are asking the public to put an awful lot of faith in that very same Minister—that very same Minister—who could not get it right 2 or 3 weeks ago. Part 1 says that the public of New Zealand should put absolute faith in that same Minister to simply satisfy himself that the application is all fine and dandy. The same Minister who actually screwed up this legislation just a few weeks ago is going to have the power to satisfy himself and go: “Oh yes, OK. That application looks fine to me.”

I think that is a real concern, because what we know about the exploration of Crown minerals is that actually safety should be the predominant measure. In the explanatory note of this bill there is an alarm bell that goes off for me because it talks about “An applicant for a Tier 1 permit for exploration who does not have the expertise or financial ability to undertake exploration drilling activities will be able to be granted a permit on a conditional basis.” I just want to read that out again for the public because I think this is alarming: “An applicant for a Tier 1 permit for exploration who does not have the expertise or financial ability to undertake exploration drilling activities will be able to be granted a permit on a conditional basis.” They will be able to be granted that permit by the very Minster who got this legislation wrong just a few weeks ago.

That is an awful lot of power to put in the hands of a Minister—particularly a Minister for whom this is probably, I think, one of his very first attempts at putting a piece of legislation through this House—who could not get it right the first time. That is not going to end up as a catastrophe here in the Chamber tonight. He did not get the legislation right the first time around, and it means, yes, we are sitting at this time on a Friday night to rectify his mistake, but it is not really the end of the world. But if he gets it wrong in satisfying himself about one of these applicants, and they do not have the expertise and something goes horribly wrong, then that is a whole different scenario for New Zealand. It is a whole different scenario for New Zealand.

Here in Part 1 we are asking the public of New Zealand to trust, I guess, the wisdom and the judgment of the very same Minister who could not even get this basic piece of legislation right, to make a decision that could actually impact on the environment and safety of New Zealand and New Zealanders. I think New Zealanders need to be very worried about that.

I think, actually, the contribution from my colleague Moana Mackey shed some light on this before. It seems obvious, now I have heard her contribution to this debate, that it is not because the legislation was passed in this House and then it was enacted, and the Government saw it in practice and thought: “Oh, gosh, we’ve got it a little wrong.” That is not what has occurred here. The original legislation has not even been enacted. So what could it be that could cause the Government to come back this quickly under urgency to fix something up? Well, it seems that it has been got to. Some company, one of these tier 1 applicants “who does not have the expertise or financial ability to undertake exploration drilling activities”, has obviously come back to the Government and asked it to weaken the legislation further. I can see no other explanation for why, before the original legislation has been enacted, we are suddenly back here.

I am pleased to speak yet again on this very important bill, the Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill, in the Committee stage. In Part 1 the critical issue is the change that it makes in terms of the existing Act, which has not yet come into force, in relation to the oversight that the Minister of Energy and Resources effectively provides to permit seekers when they are having their permit approved for—presently, it would be for both prospecting and exploration. What the change does is it splits that up and requires a separate approval, at least in terms of the health and safety and environmental measures. It splits it between the prospecting stage and then a separate approval of the health and safety and environmental measures for the exploration stage.

Our concern is simply this: we know—and I do not think there is too much disagreement, actually, between members in this Chamber, especially in light of the events of the last 2 or 3 years—that health and safety is absolutely paramount. It is absolutely paramount for those who work in the industry, and indeed for the communities they are part of. The other aspect is, of course, environmental, and the events of 2011 off the Bay of Plenty tell us that the public’s demand is that the most effective and world’s best-practice environmental safeguards are expected. The question we then ask is what it is about the measures that are in this bill and the splitting up of the approval process for the health and safety and environmental safeguard measures that is going to improve what is already there. The reality is that it will not.

The reason for that is twofold. First of all, the present law, which we passed only a short while ago and which is not yet in force, is reasonably light in terms of the standard the Minister is obliged to require when considering approval of a permit. That is simply that the Minister needs to be satisfied that the permit applicant is likely to have the appropriate technical capability and is likely to have the financial capability, and then any other relevant information. That is the Minister being satisfied that these criteria are likely to be met. It is a pretty low test. Not only that but it is a subjective test, because it is the applicant’s means—the potential permit holder’s means—that are relevant. So the Minister’s satisfaction is confined to the particular applicant. It is not about meeting an industry minimum standard or a world’s best-practice standard; it is what the particular permit applicant can do. So that is a low test. Presently, it says that when the Minister is giving the approval, the Minister has to be satisfied that the appropriate health and safety and environmental measures are in place for both prospecting and exploration.

By splitting it up, it means that the successful permit holder needs to provide satisfaction only in relation to their prospecting part, and at that point they have a foot in the door—have a foot in the door. So if, having prospected, they gather the data and they decide that this is worth taking to the next phase, the exploration stage, then it is incumbent upon the Minister of the day to deal with a permit holder who comes back and says: “Right, we’ve done the prospecting. We’re satisfied there’s enough there to move to the exploration stage, to start drilling, and to bring down our rig.”—and those rigs can cost up to $1 million a day. The Minister then must deal with the permit holder, and is expected to hold them to a further test about health and safety and environmental measures.

I am just saying that on the track record of this Government, which has shown no ability, no intestinal fortitude, to stand up to corporate heavyweights from around the world, why would we rely on the Government—this Government, or, frankly, any Government—to be able to withstand the sort of pressure that large multinational enterprises can bring to bear—

I move, That the question be now put.

I rise to speak in this Committee debate on the Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill. There are several things wrong with Part 1. One is the process, one is the content, and one is the context in which this bill, and Part 1, sits. The particular concern about the process has been well traversed by members on this side of the House during the course of the first and second readings. It has been a shabby process. The first piece of legislation that the Minister of Energy and Resources brought in, which this bill is now seeking to amend, was not a stellar process either, in that one of the most significant changes to it—that is, the ban on protesting—was not brought in until after the bill had been reported back from the select committee. But in this part, the thing that gets my attention is that we do not have a regulatory impact statement here, and in the explanatory note of this amendment bill to the amendment Act, there is reference to the two previous regulatory impact statements. So I am forced back on to those two previous regulatory impact statements from which to draw my own suppositions and to apply them to the bill in front of us at the moment.

One of the things that struck me in one of the regulatory impact statements was that in one of the parts of the stocktake of schedule 4 of the Crown Minerals Act 1991—and that is one of the regulatory impact statements that has been tabled for us today—it said that given the public interest in this matter, full public consultation was undertaken, and there were three hui around the country, with iwi on Great Barrier Island, in Thames, and in Christchurch, in relation to areas of land that were proposed to be removed from schedule 4. In total, the regulatory impact statement says, there were 37,552 submissions—37,552 submissions. This goes to the process around this bill and Part 1 of this bill. Of those submissions, 32,000 were made by individuals using a standard submission form that had been supplied to them by groups that care and whose business it is to care about the environment. Even if you take those out, there were still 5,234 unique submissions made by individuals and organisations.

It becomes crystal clear now why the Minister has engaged in such a shabby process: he is afraid of public opinion. He is afraid that the people who care about the health and safety standards applying to the permits in respect of Part 1 of this bill, or the environmental standards, or the capability of organisations that are seeking to do exploratory or drilling work in our territory—he does not want submissions on those things. He does not want the weight of 37,000 submissions to come down on him, and because of that, because of the weight of those submissions, he has chosen—I can only assume he has done it deliberately. I do not assume the man to be a stupid man, so I can only assume he has done it deliberately in order to avoid the weight of public opinion.

Kia ora, Mr Chair. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. I just add to what the honourable member Maryan Street has said about the public opinion of New Zealand. When we looked at the regulations being developed by the Minister for the Environment, Amy Adams, we saw that 99 percent of thousands and thousands of submissions were not saying: “We want stronger rules.”; they actually said that deep-sea drilling should be prohibited, but she said her Government would not rule out making it permitted. This is a big worry, because the regulations of the new legal framework we have established over the exclusive economic zone and the continental shelf and the regime we have through the Crown Minerals Act are such that, potentially, if the Government did go with making it a permitted activity, Kiwis would have to go and get a consent for a deck, but not to drill down kilometres under the sea.

That is why it is important we have good rules, strong rules, and that is why it is incredibly worrying that we are in the Committee stage of the Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill and we have not had, obviously, a select committee hearing. In fact, we have not had a single National member seek the call to actually make a contribution. Without a select committee hearing, without public input, without experts’ input, without the members of the committee being able to grill officials—I saw a member trying to talk to the officials before; obviously we cannot talk to officials, so we cannot get advice—this is not how good laws are passed. This is not how we get good regulations that protect our environment, protect our economy, and protect our people and our workers.

When we look at Part 1 of this legislation, this is the only scrutiny it is going to get—basically, the Opposition taking a few calls. Hopefully, the Minister in the chair, the Minister of Energy and Resources, will take a call, because there have been a number of questions raised of the Minister, and hopefully he can ask his officials if he needs advice.

So I guess the question is, what is wrong with a select committee? Why have we not had a select committee process? Was there consultation with the industry? Was there consultation with the experts, with NGOs, in formulating this amendment Act amendment bill?

💬 Hon Christopher Finlayson: What does Clint say?

Did he have a casual chat to the member Chris Finlayson about the human rights implications? Was it a casual chat outside the Chamber or was it a proper New Zealand Bill of Rights Act vet, as you would expect with such significant legislation? Why was there no regulatory impact statement? Who has been lobbying whom? And why are we are in this farcical process right now? So Part 1 deals with permits and with how the tender process is opened up.

I have been having a bit of a read of the Government’s 2013 block offer. It is quite a significant document, because what the Government has opened up is 189,000 square kilometres of New Zealand’s waters, mostly up on the west coast of the North Island and on the east coast of the South Island and over the Great South Basin—189,000 square kilometres. That is a significant increase over the other tender block processes that have been in the order of around 40,000 square kilometres, like the PEG1 and PEG2 basins, which were offered to Anadarko and which it successfully tendered for, despite Anadarko having a track record of being a 25 percent stakeholder and paying out $4 billion for its role in the Deepwater Horizon incident.

The tender process, as outlined in this document, which we are amending in Part 1 of this bill, through relaxing and weakening the provisions, is allowing a weaker, more liberal approach—not in a good sense, of course, because regulation, when you are talking about potentially causing a catastrophic oil spill, is good. So you see the incredible detail of how to apply for a bid. You have to put it in the red tender box. I do not know whether members have seen the red tender box. It is a special box that you put your bid in. It has to be delivered in three copies, double sided, and in an electronic copy on a CD-Rom. They have to be received before 5 p.m.

There is incredible detail outlined in this document, yet when it comes to the actual content of the bids, what the Minister is doing is incredibly weakening the process, because what we see in this part is, of course, not the need for the financial capability or the expertise. So what we are seeing is a weakening of the process, despite all the bureaucratic attention to which coloured box you put your bid into.

So I think the Minister should answer these questions. Why is he weakening the process? What is the rationale behind it? Why can Kiwis not have a stronger permitting regime? Why should the Minister be the one to have the ultimate decision, because what you see, I think, in new sections 29A and 29B in clause 5, is that the Minister has to be satisfied of the matters relating to the granting of a permit. I have got no confidence in the current Minister in the chair being the one to be satisfied with regard to health and safety. I think it is deeply worrying—

I move, That the question be now put.

I hope the National members will take a call on this important part, Part 1, of the Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill. As I was talking about before, it is the Minister of Energy and Resources who has to be satisfied whether a permit will be achieved. It is incredibly worrying, because the Minister cannot do even basic legislation. We are here on a Friday night. I am sure he is not the most popular member in the National caucus at the moment, because all the National members have to stay here fixing up his mess on Friday night and under urgency. This is the Minister who is probably too busy having dinners with the oil companies to decide what is good for us. It is the Minister who is all behind the “Drill, baby, drill.” He cannot do even basic legislation.

While he is opening up 189,000 square kilometres of our waters, he is weakening the process. What he is allowing are cowboys to enter our market. The previous tender rules, as outlined in the Crown Minerals Act, allowed for people going for bids to comprise their committed work and then there was their contingent work. What you saw with the Petrobras example off the Raukūmara Basin was that it obviously outlined the planned work programme, which it had to put in its application in the red box in the foyer. It was not able to do it. We still have not received the answer as to why Petrobras pulled out, why it decided to surrender its permit at the point it did. Why did Petrobras surrender? Was there just not enough oil there? Was its seismic data not prospective enough? Was it scared of Te Whānau-a-Apanui and Greenpeace? Was that the reason why it left our country and surrendered our permit?

I believe that this is the rationale for amending the Anadarko amendment—sorry, the Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill—here, because what you are allowing now is for permits to be applied for without the financial backing or the expertise. It is incredibly worrying, because exploratory drilling, which is what we are dealing with, is the riskiest phase. It is the frontiers of technology, geology, and geography. It is the riskiest phase because, despite the 2-D and 3-D seismic data, you still do not know what is down there. With the considerable depth that operators are looking at in New Zealand, the risks are intensified, so we should not be releasing and weakening our tender permit rules when it comes to exploratory drilling, because this is the riskiest phase. We should not be playing fast and loose, but, sadly, this is exactly what the Minister is doing when you look at Part 1 of this legislation. I could talk all night about these important issues, but I think I will take my seat now. Kia ora.

I move, That the question be now put.

I want to return us to the important matter of the Minister of Energy and Resources satisfying himself on “the matters set out in section 29A(2)(b) and (d)”. This is the critical element of the decision that is being facilitated in Part 1 of the Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill, to allow somebody to take on the contingent work that has been agreed to as part of a permit when a company decides that it does not have the capability or the resources to do that. As I was discussing in my earlier call, the matters that the Minister now has to satisfy himself on are serious matters, which I am concerned that we are putting in the powers, at this point, of a Minister who has shown himself incapable of actually controlling this legislation.

But let us have a look at what it is that he is having to satisfy himself on. New section 29A(2)(b), implemented by section 24 of the Crown Minerals Amendment Act, covers “that the applicant is likely to comply with, and give proper effect to, the proposed work programme, taking into account— … the applicant’s technical capability; … the applicant’s financial capability; and … any relevant information on the applicant’s failure to comply with permits or rights, or conditions in respect of those permits or rights, to prospect, explore, or mine in New Zealand or internationally;”. So that is actually the Minister, effectively, acting as our policeman, our protector, when it comes to the question of whether or not a permit has been fully looked after and properly looked after.

But then when we get to section 29A(2)(d), this is where the rubber hits the road in terms of what is concerning those of us on this side of the Chamber. New section 29A(2)(d) of the amendment Act says that “in the case of a Tier 1 permit for exploration or mining, that the proposed permit operator has, or is likely to have, by the time the relevant work in any granted permit is undertaken, the capability and systems that are likely to be required to meet the health and safety and environmental requirements of all specified Acts for the types of activities proposed under the permit.”

So bear in mind that in this instance that is being proposed in this law, a new player to the extractive industries is arriving and it is up to the Minister to satisfy himself that that company will “meet the health and safety and environmental requirements of all specified Acts for the types of activities proposed …”. That is a wide breadth. That is something that will require the Minister to make decisions about vital matters for our environmental future, vital matters for our economic future. We do not know today why it is this did not end up in the legislation originally. We do not know who it is who has come to the Minister to ask the Minister to take this law on. All we know is that we have to trust the Minister to ensure that this company, which has not necessarily ever been involved in the extractive industry in New Zealand—it has come in off the back of another company’s permit—is OK. Will the Minister be able to assure this House of that about a company that he, perhaps, has had no dealings with before and the officials have had no dealings with before? He is the one thing standing between us and that company being allowed to undertake the drilling that is the result of the seismic work of another company.

So new section 29A(2)(b) and (d) is about health and safety, and it is about the environmental requirements of the Acts that govern anyone who wants to undertake drilling in our waters. That is a significant change. It is not a change that I believe should be undertaken through an urgency process like this. It is not a change, under Part 1, that I believe the Government has thought through. It is most certainly a change that, had we had a select committee process, there would have been significant submission on. This is exactly the kind of matter that people would have been raising their concerns about. This is a different process from the one that was envisaged when the bill first came before the House.

I simply do not believe that the Government has made the case to us tonight for why it is that this change has been brought in. Mr Bridges tried to tell us at the start it was all technical, it was all matters of policy that were meant to have been put in place, but I simply do not buy that. I do not buy that because it was only 6 weeks ago. I do not buy that some person found a paragraph that was meant to have been put into the law and suddenly thought “Gosh! We forgot that.” Something occurred that made the Minister bring this change forward. I believe Parliament and the people of New Zealand deserve to know what that was. They deserve to know why it is that a process that is now laxer for a company coming in to do drilling than it was when the amendment Act was passed previously is being put in place. The Minister needs to answer those questions for us.

I move, That the question be now put.

I have not heard from Carol Beaumont.

How very kind of you, Mr Chair. Having sat through the previous bit of legislation and now the Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill, it does raise some very fundamental questions about why we are here in urgency. In this case, clearly, on the Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill, it is because, as others have said, the Minister of Energy and Resources was so determined to push through the legislation that he left it riddled with mistakes, and now he has had to come to this House in urgency to fix up those mistakes.

In Part 1, which we are talking about now, we are looking at this concept of conditional exploration permits. Those proposed conditional exploration permits pose, we believe, a risk of creating a loophole in health and safety and environmental rules. These are serious matters, as others have commented. New Zealanders are concerned about these sorts of issues, as we should be. It seems that, under conditional permits, applicants no longer have to show that they have the ability to comply with health and safety, capability, or environment tests associated with exploratory drilling if, at the time, they do not intend to carry it out. So it is splitting the process in two. Others have been asking, and yet we have received no response from the Minister, why this change has come about. What is the need for this change? Who has lobbied the Minister? What is the purpose of this change? And what analysis of the risks has been made?

For the legislation that we had earlier in the day we had a regulatory impact statement that was absolutely blacked out most of the way through. You could not actually read the advice, but there was a regulatory impact statement none the less. In this case there is no regulatory impact statement. So under urgency we are being asked to push through legislation that initially we were told was merely technical changes, and yet it has this provision for conditional permits, which the Minister has failed to explain the purpose of. He seems unwilling to answer any questions, is sitting there reading magazines and other things, and is failing to follow this debate. Members on the other side of the Chamber have not taken a single call and have merely tried to close down this debate. What is going on here? Why are members opposite not taking calls? Why is the Minister not answering questions? Why is there no regulatory impact statement?

There is a substantial change being proposed here in Part 1, and we have the right, on behalf of the public, to ask what it is about, especially when it is being forced through under urgency here tonight. So I ask the Minister to actually get up on his feet and start to address the questions, if for no other reason than that New Zealanders have the right to expect that legislation is put to some scrutiny in this House. And we have a whole process for doing that, which includes the select committee process. The Minister in this case made mistakes after the select committee process, which was part of the reason we are here now, but then, furthermore, is trying to add in additional provisions to this amendment bill. There is no intention to take the bill through the select committee process, there is no regulatory impact statement, and nobody from the National Government is commenting on this bill at all. I say to people listening to this debate that surely that must raise alarm bells. What is going on here? There is the potential for huge vested interests in this area. We are talking about potentially very large sums of money involved, but we are also talking about very significant health and safety and environmental risks, and so it is incumbent on the Minister to address those questions.

We see that taking account of the environment and growing our economy are flip sides of the same coin. We need to be doing both, and the concern on this side of the Chamber is that members opposite are so focused on pushing through their mining and extractive industries at the expense of safety controls and environmental controls that we will see real risks for our environment. So, again, I urge the Minister to get up and answer those questions.

I move, That the question be now put.