Environmental Reporting Bill

I move, That the Environmental Reporting Bill be now read a third time. This bill represents the Government’s commitment to bringing New Zealand into line with best international practice when it comes to monitoring and reporting on the condition of our natural environment. It was a policy that the Bluegreens developed during National’s time in Opposition, that National campaigned on, and that we are now delivering on. It is about giving greater integrity to New Zealand’s “clean, green” brand by providing independent and authoritative information on how we match up. Also, it represents a major advance in improving the regularity and integrity of national-level environmental data, so that New Zealanders will be able to access the information on which to base important environmental, business, economic, and societal decisions. It is very much about the fact that we manage that which we measure.

As all parties in the debate on this bill have acknowledged, New Zealand is out of step with other OECD countries, in that we are the only country not to have a statutory system for regular, independent state of the environment reports. The bill that we are now debating contains provisions that will ensure that those reports are regular, that they are independent, that they are comprehensive, and that they are accurate. This means that the public can have confidence in and certainty about the scope, timing, and quality of New Zealand’s environmental information. It means that we are going to be able to get on, rather than just spending time debating the data and whether it is accurate, whether it is relevant, whether it is timely, or where it has come from. With this regime, New Zealanders will be able to actually focus and get on and deal with the issues that are important for us to improve the management of the environment.

What is under pressure? What is not working? Where is data getting worse? Where is it improving? How can we fix it? These are the sorts of conversations that are far more constructive than some of the arguments that go on in the environmental space about whether we can rely on the information. It is essential that communities, businesses, local authorities, and central government are able to use environmental information to make better decisions on very important issues that affect our environment, our economy, and our society. In fact, I would put it to this House that New Zealand, more so than any other OECD country, requires robust environmental reporting, given the importance of our primary industries like agriculture, forestry, fishing, and tourism, which are so dependent on our natural wealth.

The scope of the reports produced under this bill will be comprehensive and will go beyond the programme of just the environmental indicator updates that the Ministry for the Environment has produced in recent years. The reports will not cover just the state of the environment; they will describe the pressures that are driving those environmental trends and the impacts of those trends on our lives. To give a bit more detail, state of the environment topics will describe what the biophysical condition of the environment is and how it has changed over time. Pressure topics will describe the human activities and natural factors that influence the environment, in order to help us understand why it is in the condition it is. The impact topics will look at what the consequences of any changes in the state of the environment are across those five categories. These categories are ecological integrity, the economy, public health, culture, and recreation, and through the select committee process we have also added, with the representations from the Māori Party, Te Ao Māori, so as to include their view in environmental reports.

The impact topics will help New Zealanders to understand how changes in the state of our environment affect different aspects of our society. A good example of this is to look at an issue like air quality, which impacts on the health of New Zealanders, and whether it is getting better or worse. If the concentration of air pollutants increases, exposure to the increase in concentrations can have an impact in terms of increasing premature deaths and hospital admissions and restricted activity days for New Zealanders. Some of these health impacts will be the result because air pollutants can aggravate existing respiratory conditions such as asthma. People in organisations need to understand these links so that they are aware of how the state of the environment affects New Zealanders. Then we can make better-informed decisions about how we expend our resources to improve things.

The environmental domains that will be reported on, as specified in the bill, are the air, the atmosphere and climate, fresh water, land, and the marine environment. The bill requires the Secretary for the Environment and the Government Statistician to publish a domain report on each of these five environmental domains every 6 months. Then every 3 years the Secretary for the Environment and the Government Statistician will be required to publish a national-level report on New Zealand’s environment—one that covers all domains. After the reports are produced, the Minister for the Environment and the Minister of Statistics will be required to present such reports to this House. The bill strikes a good balance between ensuring the timely availability of information to the public and statistical integrity in developing these reports on our environment. As the new environmental reporting regime matures, the information and database on which it relies will improve.

Statistics New Zealand and the Ministry for the Environment are already working closely with organisations like regional councils, Crown research institutes, and the Department of Conservation to provide the environmental data to be able to support this national-level reporting. The independence of the new environmental reporting regime is guaranteed through the involvement of the Government Statistician in determining which statistics or measures for each topic meet the high-quality statistical standards that are required. I would like to add that the regime’s independence is especially supported by clause 16, which ensures that previously unpublished data, statistics and findings, and environmental reports will be released to everyone at the same time. This clause is a key mechanism for keeping our environmental reporting independent and at arm’s length from the Government of the day. The regime’s independence is also shored up by the role of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, who can audit each report. This provides the public with the assurance that the information is being independently reviewed and that Parliament and the New Zealand public are being kept informed on those things about our environment that really matter.

I know that both members of Labour and the Greens know this is a good bill that addresses a deficiency in New Zealand’s environment systems, and as I have listened to their contributions on the select committee report and at the Committee stage, I think they are in that space of just opposing for the sake of it. If you go into the details of the concerns that they have, they read very much like they are clutching at straws. Let me deal quite specifically with two of those issues.

The first of the issues is that this bill provides for regulations to be set around the topics, and there have been questions about that. The reality is that the topics that we need to report on do change with time. For instance, the issue of climate change was quite new and out of left field as that science evolved. That is equally so if you look at an issue like chlorofluorocarbons and how that developed. I am sure that over the next 20 to 30 years of the likely life of this legislation, there will be changes in the issues that we need to measure, and that is appropriate. I would also say that the process of consultation around those regulations is extensive and ensures that there is integrity in the way they are developed.

I also find rather churlish the criticism that the bill does not provide for the reporting of New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions. That, of course, is an important issue, but I would draw the House’s attention to the Climate Change Response Act, which requires that information to be reported through the United Nations system for its audit, and I would question why we would want to double that bureaucracy.

The last point that I wish to make is that I think this is a very important bill for the management of our environment. If you asked me, as a parliamentarian of 25 years, what the most important and best bill that has been put through this Parliament was, I would say it was the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1994, which required the open and transparent reporting of this country’s finances. We went from a period pre-1994, when this country had some of the worst public books in the world, and since then, we have moved to having some of the very, very best. My hope and ambition for the Environmental Reporting Act is that through this independent, quality information about the genuine state of New Zealand’s environment, it can shift the focus to those things that we do need to give priority to in order to improve how New Zealand manages its natural resources.

Can I conclude by thanking the officials and my colleagues—particularly Scott Simpson and the team on the Local Government and Environment Committee—who have done a good job of putting this bill on the books of this Parliament. It will give greater integrity to New Zealand’s “clean, green” brand, and that matters for this country of ours.

It is my pleasure to take a call on the third reading of the Environmental Reporting Bill. What is not my pleasure is the fact that Labour cannot support this bill, because I actually agree with a great deal that the Minister for the Environment, who has just sat down, said in his contribution. This is an important bill. New Zealand is the only country in the OECD that does not have environmental reporting. Labour absolutely agrees that it is timely and that it is preferable that this be rectified and that we have a way in which we monitor and report on our environment, so that we can be making the important legislative and policy decisions that we need to make in the future based on evidence. Our hope was that the Environmental Reporting Bill would deliver this.

We have consistently been saying throughout the passage of this bill through this House that we have very much wanted to support this bill. We certainly support the intent of it. I think it is pretty much motherhood and apple pie that we would be monitoring and reporting on our environment and providing that evidence base—that we would be looking at the key five domains of air, fresh water, land, marine, atmosphere and climate, producing the domain reports, and then every 3 years having a synthesis report that would cross all domains and draw together the best available data. But the Minister says that we are churlish and just entering into opposition to the bill for the sake of opposition, in our opposition to this bill. Nothing could be further from the truth.

We worked constructively at the Local Government and Environment Committee, and I would like to acknowledge the work that the select committee did on this legislation. We did actually manage to make some improvements to the legislation, and I think that that was a good thing. But what we could not change is what has been, since the first reading and since the introduction of this legislation, our core concern, and that is the lack of political independence in deciding what it is that we are going to report on, in setting those domain report topics, in setting those synthesis report topics—which is vested in the Minister.

We would have an objection to that whether we were in Government or Opposition. It is of concern. This is not the kind of legislation that we put in place on something so important, where we should be getting it wrong. It is our concern that we are getting it wrong. The Minister told us in his contribution today that there is that independence in clause 18, guaranteed by clause 16. This is not the case. We listened very carefully to the submitters as they came before the select committee. More than half the submitters who came to the committee and spoke to this bill spoke about their concerns around the regulation-making powers in clause 18 of this legislation. That is our reason for not being able to support this bill.

We had the Law Society come and tell us that, for it, “The regulation-making power enables Ministers to set the agenda by determining the topics to be reported on. This regulation-making power has the ability to undermine the independence and integrity of environmental reports published under the Bill.” This is not something that I could not listen to. This is not something that Labour members on the select committee could not take note of—when we had the Law Society come and talk to us about that.

We had many submitters, and I am sure some of my colleagues will go into some more of those submissions. Fish and Game New Zealand came and gave an excellent submission on this, and I think it made a very good point when it said that “The grant of some legislative power to the executive is inevitable in modern democracies but that does not mean that matters of high policy going to the heart of the Bill”—i.e., setting the topics—“should be contained in regulations.” This is simply giving the Ministers far too much power.

We supported the calls that we have the Government Statistician and the Secretary for the Environment, rather than the Minister of Statistics and the Minister for the Environment, making those calls on it because we did want to see that level of independence. The Minister says that the Ministers need to be able to make those decisions because things change, and said that we just need to look at how quickly in this space we might need to look at what needs to be reported on. He gave the example of chlorofluorocarbons as something that changes the environment quickly.

We are not for one moment, in our opposition—and I want this to be very clear on the record—suggesting in any way that we set down in the legislation what needs to be reported on. What we are saying is that we do not hand over that much power to the executive to set the rules and be the people making the decisions. This should be legislation that holds our executive to account. This should be legislation that provides us with the factual basis on which we are to measure how a Government is performing on the environment. To suggest that it is preferable that we then have the executive making the decision as to what we report on is nonsense, and is not the political independence that we want to see.

We do not want to set down in this legislation that we set the topics. That is not what we are suggesting for clause 18. What we are suggesting is that we take that power away from the Ministers and that we give that to the Government Statistician and to the Secretary for the Environment, who would also be required to consult with some of the groups that are laid out further in clause 18.

I think the Minister’s assurance that one of the reasons we could not do that is our need to be flexible and to move with the times simply does not hold water as a reason why we would not do what it is that the select committee heard submitters say—that is, take this much power away from the executive. We also heard from the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, and, of course, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment has a very important role in this piece of legislation, which is laid out in clause 17 of the legislation, and that is in terms of analysing the reports and having a commentary function. As Parliament’s person who is a bit of a watchdog for the environment, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment does have an important function under this legislation.

The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment gave a very full and very knowledgable submission that I think needed to be listened to far more closely by Government members of the committee than they did. I personally would have liked to see more of the things that the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, someone who is Parliament’s servant in matters of the environment, came to us as legislators and gave her view on. She said that “Giving the selection of topics to the Government of the day creates the opportunity for political interference. For instance, it would be possible to avoid reporting on an environment topic that is important but also controversial.” That is the point. No one is suggesting for a moment that any given Minister is going to politically interfere, but Labour cannot support a piece of legislation that enshrines in our legislation the opportunity for a Minister to do that.

We need to be better than that in terms of the legislation that we are putting in place. We need to ensure that we cannot do that—that we are putting something better in place. New Zealand has waited a long time for this legislation, and I commend the Minister for bringing this legislation. Actually, I commend the Government for bringing this legislation. But what I cannot commend and support it on is the fact that it is putting the legislation in place without proper political independence. It is a missed opportunity. We could have done so much better, and it is with a heavy heart that Labour cannot vote on this legislation.

I remain hopeful that we may be able to work to a more non-partisan position on this because I think it is important that the very structure that we are putting in place to be the monitoring legislation for our environment not be about partisan politics, that we can actually have some political independence, and that it genuinely be about the state of our environment.

As chairman of the Local Government and Environment Committee, it gives me enormous pleasure to speak in this third reading debate on the Environmental Reporting Bill, which is in the name of my friend and colleague Dr Nick Smith. This bill represents part of a suite of legislation that has been introduced during this National Government’s term of office that is real, meaningful, and important in terms of protecting and ensuring the enhancement of, and the benefit to, our beautiful natural environment. It is an important piece of legislation, and it is important that we as a Parliament get this piece of legislation right and correct.

Therefore, it is a great pity to watch the spectacle of Dr Megan Woods dancing in this Parliament on the head of a pin, trying to find some kind of justification and some kind of reason for objecting to this bill. This is a bill that Labour actually does want to support. It has made that very clear in its contributions at the select committee. It made it very clear in its contributions to debates on this bill earlier in this House. But oppose it must do, and it has tried to find a reason to do so.

What this bill actually does is it closes a gap in our environmental legislation that has needed closing for some time. This bill brings New Zealand into a state of best practice in terms of its environmental reporting, and I am thrilled and delighted to be part of a Government that is actually doing something that is constructive and good for our environment. As the Minister for the Environment said in his contribution earlier, you cannot manage what you do not measure. I would absolutely agree with him. The importance of providing good, reliable, accurate, and credible environmental information is the very foundation of making good quality decisions in terms of the future of our natural environment and our natural spaces.

What this bill does is it requires the regular reporting of the state of New Zealand’s environment as a whole—reporting on the state of our air and atmosphere, climate, freshwater, land, and marine domains. Those are the five key areas. It will mean that we get a production of environmental reports independently that are credible and accurate. As a Parliament and in policy terms, they will enable us to make good decisions for the future of New Zealand’s environment. Thirdly, and not at all unimportantly, is that this bill actually affirms the role of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment in terms of reporting on environmental matters, processes, and the objectives of that office. This bill requires the Secretary for the Environment and the Government Statistician to work together to publish a report on those five environmental domains. One environmental report will be released every 6 months, with the additional synthesis reporting providing analysis and cross-domain trends and interactions once every 3 years. That is at the real heart of this legislation.

It is a very good piece of legislation, it is a timely piece of legislation, and it is one that I am very proud to support. The select committee worked well, notwithstanding the Opposition’s desire to find at any length a reason to oppose. But, notwithstanding that, the select committee did make some useful and worthwhile changes and they have been included in the bill, and that, I think, is a further sign that the select committee process works well to improve what is already good legislation and refine it even further. It is with enormous enthusiasm that I support this bill, and I heartily commend it to the House.

I grew up in Ōtara, and went to school with many Māori peers who could trace their heritage back to either Ngāpuhi or Tainui. I learnt from them, when they introduced themselves at the Māori third and fourth form class that I took, about their references to the maunga and their references to the awa—to the mountain and to the river—which emphasises for the indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand how important the environment is. In later years, as I gained a better appreciation of my own cultures—Samoan, in particular—I learnt how we as Samoans viewed the sky, the lands, the trees, and the fishes as all having spirits and as all having human characteristics of their own. The older generations valued the environment so much that they treated each one of those characteristics of the environment as if it were a member of their family.

I raise those two points because that is the point of view that I come to this debate from. I am sure that I am not alone in that with other members of this House who will share a similar value when it comes to our environment. I also raise that at the outset because when this bill was introduced I think our initial stance was that we would support it, given the fact that our rivers today have this weed growing through them—in fact, we can no longer swim in some of our lakes. Once upon a time, as a young man in Ōtara, I used to fish in some of our lakes. We cannot do that any more, and that is because, by and large, we as a collective group of people have contributed to the degradation of our environment. We have polluted it through our economic activities or have done something else that has harmed the environment.

So when the Government said that it would introduce this bill and that the bill would allow a group of people to report to this House about the state of our environment, Labour’s view in the first instance was that we would take up this opportunity because at least then we would have the facts and the data that would show us what we had done wrong with regard to the environment and how we could better improve our situation going forward. After all, we as a country pride ourselves on having this “clean, green” image. We have used that image to sell our wares throughout the entire world. In fact, we have branded ourselves with that brand, and there is a high expectation that we maintain that brand. We saw the opportunity in this bill that if this reporting continued over time and we improved the way that we conducted ourselves and the activities that impacted on the environment, then, by and large, we would end up keeping the environment safe by ensuring that the state of our environment would be left in a better situation for the next generation.

You see, from an indigenous point of view, the land and the environment, and the skies, the air, and the trees do not belong to us; they are part of who we are. They contribute to our survival and, therefore, we have got to look after the environment. We saw the opportunity that if the bill was worded right and the information was independent, we would be on the same pathway collectively as a nation, irrespective of who was in Government. We would get the correct information, and whoever was in power would do the right thing by acting on it and ensuring that, one, we continued to protect the environment for the next generation and, two, we would maintain and even enhance our brand of “clean, green” Aotearoa New Zealand.

But, alas, when the bill went to the Local Government and Environment Committee and we began to hear the submissions from the public—and, I would say, from some very significant experts in the field of the environment—they said that to get it right, the information must be independent and it must be peer reviewed by an independent organisation or individuals. That is not what is going to happen here. What is going to happen here is that this Government wants to be able to control the information it releases, it wants to control the information that the public looks at, and it wants to control whatever environmental reporting is made available. In fact, it does not want the public to get the full and complete truth when it comes to the state of our environment, and that is the sad thing about it. As a matter of principle, we must vote against this bill because it does nothing of what this bill was written up for and was set out to do.

In fact, if we look at the general policy statement, it says: “The purpose of this Bill is to create a national-level environmental reporting system to ensure that reporting on our environment occurs on a regular basis and can be trusted by the public as independent, fair, and accurate.” Those are the key words—that this information can be trusted by the public as being independent, fair, and accurate. The submissions we heard from doctors and professors—experts, I call them—in the field of the environment said that as far as they are concerned, if the Government continues to try to control information, as it has set out in this bill to do, that information will not achieve accuracy or independence or be fair. Therefore, it is just a bloody waste of time because the Government has no such intention. What that signals to me, and signals to other people who care about the environment and care about the next generation and the kind of environment that we leave for them, is that that group there does not care. Government members do not care one iota because it is their belief that it will be somebody else’s responsibility.

They do not care what happens to this environment, and I will give you another example that shows that they do not care about the environment. I introduced as part of the process Supplementary Order Paper 92, asking to include in this reporting the impacts of our social and economic activities on the state of the environment in the Pacific, because there is a link. There is a link between our economic activities and what is occurring in terms of climate change in the ecosystem of the people of the Pacific. Those members did not support it. This week we had a person from Kiribati who was deported, and this Government refused to acknowledge the fact that he is being deported to a land that is literally sinking as a result of climate change and the impact of economic activities, not just from us but also from other big nations. Further proof that those members do not care is that in the Pacific Islands Forum it was reported to me by leaders of the Pacific that both Australia and the representatives of this Government treated climate change as if it was joke. That tells me that those members’ rhetoric is one thing, but their actions are simply totally different.

Despite what their flowery words are about this piece of legislation, it will do nothing—it will do nothing—to improve or protect the environment because the information is going to be controlled. Therefore, it will not achieve what the bill was set out to do, which was to provide independent, fair, and accurate information on the state of our environment.

I rise to take a short call to support the third reading of the Environmental Reporting Bill. Is it not extraordinary to follow such nonsense, dare I say, that is challenging this Government’s environmental credentials? As we have already heard from the two speakers on this side of the House, this is the most reforming Government in recent memory in respect of environmental improvement. The Land and Water Forum, reform of the Environmental Protection Authority, the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management, the National Objectives Framework—this is a reforming Government that has at its core a fundamental belief that you can only manage what you can measure. That has anchored our approach in respect of this bill as well. Only a handful of OECD countries do not have a similar piece of legislation. Under this Government, under the leadership of Nick Smith, we are going to get the job done here today, and that is a step forward for this country.

Unlike what we have heard over the last 5 minutes, I look forward to the requirement that sits on the Secretary for the Environment and the Government Statistician to publish a domain report on one of the five environmental domains—be it air, atmosphere and climate, fresh water, land, or marine—every 6 months. I look forward to the cross-domain synthesis report, with world-class analysis underpinning it, being published every 3 years. I look forward to having a Minister be able to assure this House that the topics are the right ones, that the report is underpinned by the appropriate analytic methodology of the highest order, and that what we are doing through those domain reports is being measured robustly and has been appropriately consulted, not only with the Government Statistician and the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment but also with the public and with iwi and with local government. It is an absolutely appropriate mechanism that sits in this bill to enable the Minister to do this.

I know that ultimately through this bill we will have greater data and greater information to underpin a national conversation, and it is this Government that has led this. The Opposition is nonsensical to oppose it. I support this bill.

I am pleased to take a call on the Environmental Reporting Bill. Government members can claim that this is a reforming Government in terms of environmental management, and the concept of comprehensive state of the environment reporting certainly is a key part of improving environmental management in New Zealand, but it is the way you deliver reform that is important. This bill will potentially do more to disguise the state of our air, water, biodiversity, and coast than it will do to provide New Zealanders with a fair, accurate picture of New Zealand’s environment, why it is like that, and what that means.

We have had a very stop-start history to state of the environment reporting in New Zealand, both in developing indicators and in producing reports. We have had only two nationwide state of the environment reports, in 1997 and 2007, and absolutely nothing since then. That was why the Green Party supported this bill’s introduction. We hoped for and worked to try to achieve a genuine consensus across the House, but the Government has persisted in rejecting the efforts of Opposition members to try to improve the bill, both in the Local Government and Environment Committee and in the Committee stage with a number of quite detailed Supplementary Order Papers.

Because of the way in which it undermines independence, we do not want to have the environment Ministers and the Minister of Statistics selecting the topics that are to be reported on in both the domain and the synthesis reports. That was something many submitters opposed, yet the Government persisted in politicising what should be an objective and independent process by giving the regulation-making powers to Ministers solely to enable them to choose the topics to be reported on. It is really disappointing that all of the changes in relation to clause 18 that we put forward in the select committee were rejected.

Another reason that we are opposing this bill is the poor quality of environmental information that the Government is prepared to accept as valid in terms of state of the environment reporting. In July the Taranaki Regional Council released its state of the environment report for the region. It really highlights the shortcomings of this regime, because the Government Minister Nick Smith went up to Taranaki to launch the report, and that report did not even follow the Ministry for the Environment’s own rules in terms of collecting water quality data. The regional council followed the ministry’s guidelines for measuring at only two out of 18 swimming spots in the region. The Ministry for the Environment requires weekly surveillance during the 5-month summer recreational period. It requires samples to be collected from a minimum of 20 data points, regardless of weather conditions. But what did the Taranaki Regional Council do? It collected only 13 samples, in good weather conditions, at 16 of the spots. By collecting data in only good weather conditions, it did not look at the variation that you get when you have got heavy rain and then much increased faecal coliform and nutrient runoff. That completely skewed the information, and it failed to tell families about the risks related to swimming at their favourite swimming spots.

When you have the Minister endorsing a state of the environment report from a regional council that did not even meet the Ministry for the Environment’s own guidelines for state of the environment information, how can we trust the information that is going to be produced under this bill? When the Government has given us a very bland report on air quality so far and when we are not seeing the sort of information that New Zealanders need in order to actually understand what is happening in terms of environmental quality, we do not think that this bill is actually going to deliver what New Zealanders had expected.

One of the other flaws in the bill is its focus on providing “best available data”. That means that when reports are done, there is no provision to include any requirement to generate information that is not currently collected or to include any requirement to identify gaps in the data. We have seen regional and district councils collect a lot of environmental information that is often for their own purposes and for their own priorities; it is not for pulling together a national data set. So their methods of analysis and their methods of collection, as we have seen in the Taranaki example, are often very different.

The bill, in relying on local authorities to collect that information, will simply fail to provide a good mechanism for collecting comprehensive accurate data from across New Zealand when there is no requirement that they do this in a consistent way. Also, in the Budget this year, the Government failed to provide any additional funding to local authorities or the Ministry for the Environment to ensure that there is good quality reporting. So it has been yet another example of the Government loading responsibilities on to local authorities but not providing funding to assist with the implementation of the laws that Parliament is passing.

When the disclosure statement on the bill says “Direct costs associated with this new environmental reporting framework will be managed within existing departmental baselines.”, we know that the same sums of money are being spread more and more thinly over a wider variety of priorities. When the Ministry for the Environment in 2007 took 28 staff and 200 other people to produce the 2007 report and when there has been no additional funding that I can find in the vote for the ministry to assist with state of the environment reporting other than the allocation to the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, how is the ministry going to ensure that the information is good quality and accurate? What other priority work is going to be sacrificed in order to respond to its responsibilities under this legislation?

The Green Party had wanted to support this bill. We need to have a good consensus on the law around state of the environment reporting, but because the Government has repeatedly rebuffed attempts to improve the bill and has rebuffed efforts to ensure that state of the environment reporting is independent, is not a politicised process, and does not have the Ministers choosing the topics to be reported on in both the domain and synthesis reports, we cannot support this bill because although we need robust information about the health of our environment to ensure that we make good decisions, we are not convinced that this bill will establish the framework and the regime to actually achieve that. Instead, it risks—take the Taranaki example, where poor-quality information was used to claim that waterways in Taranaki were in a good state—potentially misleading New Zealanders about the state of our biodiversity and about the state of our water quality, and it risks not providing them with the fair, accurate picture that we need.

This Government has a talent for turning a silk purse into a sow’s ear. It has done it with the flag referendums bill and now it is doing it with this legislation. This legislation should be something that all parties in this House would like to support, but the Government has made such a mess of the bill that it is actually not possible to do so. This is something that New Zealand First wants—a good environmental reporting bill—but this is not that bill. The defects in it are so fundamental that we cannot support it.

There are three main issues. The first one relates to the fact that Ministers are given the power to choose topics for reporting, and that is unacceptable to us. There are—and many other parties have said so in the House—better alternatives. One of those that has been mentioned already in the debate today is that the Secretary for the Environment and the Government Statistician could jointly make those decisions, and in doing so the public could see genuine transparency and genuinely independent decision-making. But there is another alternative and it is one I quite like. It is that there could actually be a schedule to the Act that could be changed every 3 years and would state what those topics should be. Three years is not so short a period that it would be impracticable. It would be good for Parliament to actually take part in such a process. It would be good for MPs to think about those issues and get their minds around them, and then we together could decide what the topics should be.

As it is, clause 18 is just another example of creeping increases of power to the executive under this Government. I have stood here in this House over the last few years complaining time after time about the creeping expansion of power to the executive by this Government, and this is just another example of it. This is especially bad and unnecessary when it comes to environmental reporting, because environmental reporting must demonstrate integrity and must generate full public trust.

The second main issue is this: clause 18 itself is not a robust process. I am looking at clause 18, and it says in subclause (2)(a) that the Minister must be satisfied that significant areas, resources, or numbers of people are involved for a pressure topic to be chosen, and, in subclause (2)(b), that topics must be measureable with robust statistical methods. That comes down to the personal opinion of the Ministers under this particular bill, and that is most unsatisfactory. How do we know what matters are going to be looked at and whether they are going to be looked at objectively in making those decisions? Minister Smith commented during the Committee process, saying: “Look, don’t worry about that. It’s OK because we have in clause 18(3) a provision for consultation.” Saying that means that he believes somehow that consultation is actually a substitute for an independent decision-making process, which, of course, it is not. It is simply an obligation to hear and to take into account the views of other people. That is not part of the decision-making process. It may well inform the decision-making process, but it is not itself independent decision-making.

This is very important in that people must see that that process is free of political interference. Like Megan Woods, I do not actually think that there would be many Ministers—no matter what party would be in Government—who would actually do that, but the point is that this bill makes it possible, and it could happen in the future that Ministers do interfere inappropriately in that way. What the public expects is that the decisions will be made objectively on their merits. Clause 14 of the bill does not save the situation. That is the one that says that the Secretary for the Environment and the Government Statistician are required to act independently. But how can they do that under this bill, when the Ministers actually have all the power? It is just not possible, and clause 14 is valueless as a result.

In addition there is clause 15, under which the Secretary for the Environment and the Government Statistician are required to assure in their reports “a fair and accurate representation of the state of New Zealand’s environment, or the state of the domain being reported on.”, but only “so far as it is reasonably practicable”. The words “so far as it is reasonably practicable” completely compromise the assurance of fair and accurate reporting that ought to be at the core of this bill. That is a great problem for us in New Zealand First.

The third issue for us is the issue of transparency. Ministers must have regard to pressures on the environment that could cause adverse impacts and other environmental changes. Again, I look at clause 18(2), where the Ministers must be satisfied that the pressure topics chosen have an impact on significant areas, resources, or numbers of people, measurability, and relationships between topics and impacts. But, in the end, these requirements actually place very little limitation on ministerial discretion. It is actually a very important issue and a very big problem for New Zealand First when we are being asked to support a bill on which there is such little limitation on ministerial discretion. What that means in practice is that Ministers could actually decide not to report on some topics at all, and nobody would know that they had taken such a decision. That is actually a very severe defect because Ministers could decide not to report on a topic simply because it was inconvenient for the Government or might embarrass the Government. That is a very, very serious issue for us.

So why are we not seeing much more transparency when it comes to the regulations that will prescribe the topics to be covered in synthesis reports and domain reports? Without transparency you do not get integrity and you do not get the trust of the public. That is what is at the core of this bill. That is the fundamental reason why New Zealand First cannot support it.

So what does transparency really require then? First of all, it requires, I think, the background information upon which the decision is made to be made clear. Secondly, it must show what the decision is in detail, why the topics were selected, why they were the highest priority, and so on. The bill will not only fail the transparency test but also prevent the Official Information Act from operating as intended, in relation to what is called untested information. Officials will be able to withhold that without genuine reasons for doing so. That, again, is putting far too much power in the hands of officials, and that should not be the case. The public are entitled to access that information. It is their information. There is no reason for the secrecy surrounding that. This is, after all, about decisions on what to report on the environment. It is not a major State secret. What is the reason for all this secrecy? The members opposite have not said.

For all of those reasons, there is no way that New Zealand First can support such a badly drafted and defective bill, even though we, like other parties, would like to see a good environmental reporting bill brought forward to the House.

Tēnā koe e te Mana Whakawā tuarua. In following on from that feeble piffle, I want to commend this bill to the House in the strongest possible terms. The Environmental Reporting Bill in the name of my distinguished colleague the Hon Dr Nick Smith is a very good bill. Dr Smith, along with Minister Maggie Barry, will go down in New Zealand’s history as being amongst the best champions of the environment we have ever had in this country.

This bill will provide reporting on five domains: water, air, atmosphere, land, and marine. It will cover the environment from the bottom of the swamps, from which the Labour Party research unit hoovers up its political muck to throw impotently across at this side, to the highest reaches of the ionosphere, those hypoxic regions where brain damage can ensue, and where the New Zealand First political strategists clearly operate. It will cover all of those environments, and for that reason it is a very good bill. I commend it to the House.

Most New Zealanders cherish our natural environment—our mountains, our forests, our rivers, our beaches. I know I do. I know that all of this is a core part of the national identity—of what it is to be a New Zealander. I know that many voters, even those who do not vote for the Green Party, care deeply about our environment not only because our “clean, green” brand is worth a huge amount to our largest exports like dairy and tourism but also because it is priceless being able to take our children walking in native forests and swimming in our rivers.

I have no doubt that there are many Government members over there on the other side of the House who do care deeply about protecting the environment. Todd Muller spoke up in this debate about how he believes that this Government has done more to reform environmental protection than any other. I am sure that he would like that to be the truth. I am sure that he would like to be part of a Government that was actually improving environmental protection because he cares about the environment and he probably knows that it is worth it to our economy. We cannot be economically successful unless we protect our environment. Those two things are inseparable.

Unfortunately, it is simply not the case that this Government has been good for the environment. In fact, its entire economic development strategy is predicated on degrading our natural environment—on increasing extraction and pollution. That is the sad truth and I have to speak up about that. This bill is a perfect example because although Government members have claimed that it is best practice, it is not best practice, and it is not going to result in robust and independent reporting.

We would like to vote for a bill that did that—we would. Government members in this debate have claimed that the Opposition is looking for reasons to oppose the bill. That is not true. That is ridiculous. We have supported good legislation when this Government has put it forward, and there is nothing I would like more than to see the Government of the day actually improving environmental protection in a way that makes it no longer a political football and that means that we can have cross-party agreement that New Zealand’s environment is worth protecting and, fundamentally, is critical to our long-term economic prosperity.

So we are opposing this bill because it is not going to result in the independent and robust reporting that is essential for us to make informed decisions about policy. Any business person would tell us that we must measure what matters to us. And it must be independent, because any Government of the day is going to come under huge pressure from vested interests to not regulate. We have seen this. The previous Labour Government, under its state of the environment report, suppressed a chapter about water quality because the Government was under huge pressure. That chapter, which the Green Party ended up leaking and providing to the public, told the hard truth that our intensive conversion to dairying had resulted in significant degradation of our waterways.

We have to face up to these hard truths. We are not going to be better off or save money or improve the economy by allowing people to continue profiting at the expense of our waterways and our natural environment. It is simply not possible. So the first thing we have to have is independent, robust, credible information.

To get that, we need legislation that sets out that framework, and we need the Government to actually fund it. That has not been forthcoming from this Government; in fact, it has been reducing the amount of money available. It speaks up about the importance of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. That is a small office and an incredibly important one, but it is now doing the work that the Ministry for the Environment should be doing itself.

There is a real opportunity for New Zealand to improve our economic performance, to ensure long-term prosperity for all New Zealanders, and to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, but we are not going to be able to seize that opportunity as long as we do not have the independent monitoring and frameworks set up to ensure that we can make the best decisions. The sad truth is that the National Government is simply looking for opportunities to say that it is doing something on these issues, just like it claims that we are doing something about climate change and that we are reducing our carbon emissions. The truth is that we are not—not under National’s policy.

So, again, this bill is window dressing. It is not going to make the substantial changes that we need, and the Green Party cannot support it, unfortunately.

Ā, tēnā koe, Mr Assistant Speaker, e ngā mema o te Whare nei, tēnā tātau katoa.

[Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker; greetings to us all, the members of this House.]

I am happy to take a short call on this bill. The State Sector Act charges public servants with the ability to provide free and frank advice, without fear or favour, to the Government of the day. Why is this important? It is because we need to ensure that our advice to Ministers and the Government of the day is apolitical in nature and impartial.

So I want to acknowledge the important role our public servants play in the running of our Government. I raise that because clause 18 takes that value of the State Sector Act and the protection of our public servants and says to our senior officials that “You are not good enough to provide free and frank advice to the Ministers on important issues like the environment. We don’t trust you; we actually think that sits with Ministers.” I am saying, for all members of the House, that we do not operate at the level that our senior public servants operate, so I am really disheartened to hear that this bill takes away that very important role of senior public servants and places the ability to pick and select the topics that are under this legislation with the Minister, and I am very, very saddened by that.

In the Minister’s speech on this bill, he talked about managing the environment. I got to sit on the Local Government and Environment Committee briefly this morning to hear submissions on my Environmental Protection Agency (Protection of Environment) Amendment Bill.

I heard another gentleman, a submitter, talk about managing the environment. I would challenge that the environment, or, how we term it from where I came from, the taiao, is something that you manage. What we are here to do—and my colleague Su’a William Sio mentioned this in his contribution—is to protect, to nurture, to awhi, to manaaki, and to look after what is ours for the short time that we are on this earth.

So there have been two occasions today that I have heard the expression “managing the environment”, and we do not have to look very far to see the impact of climate change, not just here in New Zealand but all around the countries. So I would say that the use of the word “managing” is inappropriate, but that is what the Minister has said in our reading of this bill for the third time.

I just want to clarify another point that the Minister made in this House. He talked about the grand or good advice that he received from the Māori Party, particularly in reference to new clause 4A of this bill, when it comes to the Treaty of Waitangi. Mr Assistant Speaker, perhaps for your benefit, and for other members of the House, can I make a very clear point around mandate. It is important, as holders of Māori seats, that there is only one party in this House that can say with confidence that its members speak on behalf of Māori, because Labour holds six of the seven seats.

So I just want it clarified in this House that when the Government talks about receiving good advice from its coalition party the Māori Party, it should keep that in perspective, because I would hate for the Government to feel that the advice it is getting from the Māori Party actually is a reflection of all the iwi around the country, because it simply is not. So I want to make sure that that point is really, really important.

But in terms of the clause that I indicated, new clause 4A, when it comes to the Treaty of Waitangi there are two particular phrases there that probably highlight my issue around the Government’s reliance on the Māori Party. New clause 4A(a) talks about “a Māori perspective”. Can I say that that terminology is very dated. It is a very 1980s term, and if you go around iwi Māori katoa, they do not use the words “Māori perspective”. “Kaupapa Māori”—yes, you hear that, but not “Māori perspective”. So I just want to give that piece of advice for free.

The second clause is new clause 4A(b), where it talks about iwi authorities. We well know, because we have got one happening right now, about the emergency of hapū entities. So these are two examples of the reliance of the Government on the Māori Party’s advice. I am saying that with all respect. Things have moved, and you need to ensure that you are speaking to people who hold mandate, and I am sure my colleagues on this side are more than happy to help build your strength in dealing with Treaty of Waitangi issues.

I stand there; that is my contribution. We cannot stand in support of this bill. It has lost the opportunity, and I think it has got really bad advice. Kia ora tātou.

Tēnā koe, Mr Assistant Speaker. I stand to take a short call on the Environmental Reporting Bill, and there are three really important points that I want to highlight. The first one is that this bill sets up an environmental reporting system that is everything that the previous Government’s attempts were not; secondly, it is robust, it is independent, and it is aligned with international reporting standards; and thirdly, there are major provisions in this bill that ensure the independence and reliability of the reports that are required. Finally, just from this side of the House: kikoraki te tai, kahuraki te tauka [Blue is the tide, priceless is the treasure]. A blue tide—where this is concerned, this Environmental Reporting Bill is a treasure. Kia ora.

Can I say that I am really disappointed that at this final stage of the legislation Labour is still not able to support it. I think it would have been a really great move for every single party in this Parliament to have been able to vote in favour of the bill, because the intention, the framework of the bill, is certainly sound. The devil is in the detail, and that is where we have the problem with it.

Can I commend the Hon Amy Adams, who was the Minister who originally brought this legislation to Parliament. It is my view that she recognised the gap that we have in our system. We do not have environmental reporting standards, and we do not have any public accountability for the state of our environment. She recognised that deficiency and sought to address it, and then that same cause was taken up by the Hon Nick Smith.

I also want to acknowledge the work of the Local Government and Environment Committee. I am not a permanent member of that select committee, but I did sit on it during much of the deliberation on this bill, and I think that the members of that committee worked hard to ensure that the concerns of the submitters were heard and understood. In all but one incident they were responded to, and that is the one instance that both the Green Party and Labour expressed concern about in their minority views when this bill came back to the House.

For me, it is even more frustrating because this is a lost opportunity. We all know that we were lacking in environmental reporting. We have had only two state of the environment reports done in New Zealand in the last 50 years, both quite recently. They highlighted, actually, the need for more regular reports on the state of our environment so that we can all monitor what is happening. We all care about the environment. It is hard to say whether it is going well or not, and then to develop robust public policy, if we do not have reporting. It is impossible for our non-governmental organisations—our community and voluntary organisations—that work so tirelessly for environmental causes to be able to say that what they are doing is making a difference and having a positive impact if, again, there are no measurements.

The most important thing about measurements, though, is that people trust them and that people can rely on them to be sound. You have to have evidence that is independent and evidence that is based on science, and in this legislation we have missed that opportunity. I know that there have been a number of attempts to get the Minister to just consider that point. He was dismissive of it in his third reading contribution, and I think he is better than that, actually. I think he is probably a bit irritated that he was not able to get his Cabinet colleagues to agree to changes in the legislation. He demonstrated earlier an understanding of the frustration that parties on this side of the House felt about the lost opportunity, but he then dismissed it in his third reading speech.

We should have independent environmental reporting so that not just in New Zealand but internationally we can hold our heads up and say that we know this is evidence-based and that we know it is independent—that there has been no political tainting of this in order to make a particular Minister or a particular party leading the Government look good. I do not think that either the Hon Nick Smith or the Hon Amy Adams had that in mind when they developed and progressed this legislation, but we cannot say that their personal integrity would be enough to carry the debate in New Zealand or internationally. We should have been able to send a clear message from this Parliament that every single member cares about environmental reporting and thinks that it is something that we should have in our legislation.

I suppose the other lost opportunity that is very sad, and it has been highlighted by my colleague Su’a William Sio in his earlier contribution, is that this was also an opportunity for New Zealand to show leadership amongst our Pacific neighbours, who are the most threatened of any countries by climate change. We have done nothing. So when they look to Australia and New Zealand for leadership on these issues, they are going to be so disappointed. This was another chance that we had to say that we care not just about the impact of decisions made in New Zealand on our environment but also about the impact of decisions made in New Zealand on the environment in the Pacific. That would have been not just a good move in terms of actually monitoring the actions that we take but also a clear signal to Pacific countries that we care enough about them to consider our actions and to put it in legislation so that we can be monitored against those actions.

As I said at the beginning, this was a bill that I think started out with a lot of hope. It did fill a gap in our legislation that needed to be filled, but it has been a lost opportunity. With just a few changes to the provisions in clause 18, all parties in this Parliament could have agreed to this bill, but that was not to happen. So I hope that in the future we are able to get better progress on this and that we can truly have robust standards of reporting.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 1 p.m. (Thursday)