Appointments — Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment

I move, That this House recommend to the Governor-General that, pursuant to section 4 of the Environment Act 1986, Rt Hon Simon David Upton be appointed as Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. Mr Upton will be well-known to many of the members in this House, having served for some 21 years prior to taking up a position in the role of a director of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development—the OECD environmental director post—outside New Zealand. He has been back in the country for a number of years now, and has also been engaged in environmental advocacy, one would say.

Mr Upton’s team at the OECD was responsible to all of the member countries and was instrumental in putting together policies that would improve outcomes for the environment on a range of issues that included water, biodiversity, climate, and then the widespread use of agricultural chemicals. He played a key role in the OECD’s green growth strategy.

Mr Upton is a New Zealander who has had a long commitment to public service, and that, coupled with his obvious interest in better outcomes for our environment, means he is, I think, an ideal candidate. His previous portfolios as a Minister in a Government of New Zealand were in the areas of not only the environment but also research, biosecurity, health, and State services. So in Mr Upton we have a person who has broad experience of the government process in New Zealand and somewhat unique experience as a Minister in the field that he is now, hopefully, going to be confirmed as commissioner for, as well as having very vast international experience and understanding of how the rest of the world considers some of these matters. I have no hesitation at all in nominating—as this motion does—the Rt Hon Simon Upton for the position of New Zealand’s Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment.

Officers of Parliament have to bring independence of political bias, and if there was any doubt that the Rt Hon Simon Upton had not left behind his political allegiance to the National Party, then we would not be supporting this motion—and, indeed, were that the case I do not think the Government would put him up as a nominee. I think that that does need to be stated, because when he was Minister his responsibilities as Minister of Health included some very controversial proposals to introduce user-pays charges into the hospital system that, on this side of the House, we are very opposed to.

He left this Parliament in 2001. He since then has not involved himself in domestic political affairs, and with his role as environment director of the OECD he has had contact with, I think, many people in this House on all sides. My own contact with him has had him as absolutely independent of any political bias in favour of the National Party or any other party in this House. And so on that basis the Labour Party reached the view that you can actually move on from this place and come back to roles that are associated with it without being in some way tainted by your earlier political career.

That hurdle, if you like, being overcome, we then were able to deal with whether the Rt Hon Simon Upton has the skills to do the job. On that there can be no doubt. And, indeed, I think there is actually some advantage to New Zealand in having someone who has been out of New Zealand coming back to New Zealand with the eyes of that international experience and actually judging whether we really are doing as well on some of these environmental issues as we would like to think we are. I suspect that the perspective that he will bring back, which—although he did not draft the OECD report on New Zealand’s environmental performance recently, he was responsible for it and came and explained to New Zealand what the OECD saw in respect of some of the issues where we are not doing so well, namely fresh water quality and greenhouse gas emissions.

I suspect the other thing he will want to get his head round when he gets back is actually the terrible rate at which we are losing soils in New Zealand to the sea—the rate of erosion in New Zealand, which is filling our estuaries with silt and has got to such a serious point in New Zealand that our inshore fisheries are not as healthy, because we have got so much turbidity in our close seas that the kelp beds are dying at depths where they used to live, and, therefore, the habitat and food for fish is less than it was. That is a measure of how much productive soil we are actually losing from our land, which is not good for our long-term agriculture, as well as being detrimental to the environment.

So I hope that he will be focusing on those three issues: land use, climate-changing emissions, and water quality. I really think that he will make a difference. I think he will be a fine Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. At the same time, he is actually carrying on a good tradition. We have actually been very well served by our recent—well, by all of our appointments to the Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, and I think Simon Upton will carry on in that vein.

As I have said, I think this international perspective is important. I know that there are some European countries that have had prior problems, for example, with nitrate levels in their waterways—notably, Switzerland—that have got on top of those problems, and I would like to think that with the wise advice from the new Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, we can do likewise.

Tēnā koe, Mr Assistant Speaker, thank you. The Green Party is very pleased to support the nomination of the Rt Hon Simon Upton to be the new Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. He has been deeply immersed in environmental law and policy for many years, and I think his experience in this House as Minister for the Environment, Minister of Health, and also Minister of Research, Science and Technology will serve him well in this position. But it is particularly the depth of his involvement with the OECD, the breadth of his experience with policy initiatives to tackle the most challenging issues of our time—from climate change to land use and water quality; how you use things like economic instruments—and just his overview of and connection with New Zealand that means he can bring that international experience and that knowledge to this position of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment.

This role of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment is absolutely critical. When the office was set up it was called a watchdog, and it has been that, with the succession of commissioners—Helen Hughes, Dr Morgan Williams, and then Dr Jan Wright. They have provided invaluable advice to Parliament—independent advice—with a small staff, at the moment, of around 20 and a budget of about $3.3 million.

A number of critical reports from retiring Parliamentary Commissioner Dr Jan Wright have made a real difference. I would like to acknowledge her work and the depth of the reports on issues as diverse as the status of the longfin eel and its decline, land use and water quality, and the use of 1080 as a tool for predator control. I think the office has assessed in the last year that the success of its recommendations in being adopted by the Government was somewhere around 58 percent. You want an office that can review the evidence, base its recommendations on robust science, and actually have them presented to Parliament to inform parliamentarians and inform the Government on where policy should move. I think we have seen that with the current commissioner, and I am sure that the Rt Hon Simon Upton will continue that tradition.

One of the strengths of the current Parliamentary Commissioner has been the accessibility of her reports. They are clear, concise, and easy to read, and it is that accessibility and explaining of the science behind land use and water quality and the impact of nitrates on water quality that has engaged the media and enabled a lot more New Zealanders to understand the issues at stake here, which are affecting our extraordinary natural landscapes and environment, some of those challenges, and how the Government, communities, and local government are best to respond to those.

We are very pleased to support the Rt Hon Simon Upton in this new role. I am sure that he will bring robust analysis, his use of his quite deprecating sense of humour, and his wide range of policy experience to ensuring that the office remains a vital part of our environmental policy structure in New Zealand in providing independent and robust advice to this Parliament and to the Government. Thank you.

I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to say that New Zealand First has major issues with Mr Upton being appointed as the next Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. We made our views well known early on in the piece. I think, from our perspective, he fails at the first test, which is that the appointee should be politically neutral, and we do not share the confidence of other parties in the House that he is so. For our part, we see Mr Upton as being a retread. He was a National Party member of Parliament for 19 years, and a Cabinet Minister who, in the pantheon of Cabinet Ministers, is right up there with Dr Nick Smith. We see this, actually, as a bit of victory for Dr Nick Smith, in what will be the final conversion of the Bluegreens into the “Greenblues”, as the greenies within the National Party cement their hold on rural policy and rural environmental laws, which are slowly being rolled out upon them through such things as the Resource Management Act (RMA).

What we do not believe we need in this Parliament is a Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment who is a previous Young Nationals chairman. We fail to see why Mr Upton, a Rhodes scholar with degrees in English literature, music, law, and a Master’s degree in political philosophy, is suddenly qualified for this important role. The three previous commissioners have all been highly qualified scientists devoid of any political entanglements, unlike Mr Upton, who is donkey deep inside of the National Party’s old boys’ beltway network. We look at past commissioners, such as Dr Helen Hughes, a Fulbright scholar and an expert in botany; Dr Morgan Williams, a hugely respected ecologist with a Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries background; and then there was Dr Jan Wright, a physicist with a doctorate from the John F. Kennedy School of Government. To be fair, we have not always agreed with the commissioners, but these were all experts with no agenda. They shared two things: legitimacy and integrity.

Then you come to Mr Upton, who is regarded as the Dr Nick Smith of his day—an ideologue with little political nous, who was ever so accident-prone in whatever portfolio he touched. Mr Upton entered Parliament in 1981 as the MP for Waikato, aged 23. He left it 19 years later and did what red-blooded Kiwis all do: he went to France. At the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development nothing he authored was very convincing, because he swapped one beltway for another cosmopolitan-type beltway. So what is Mr Upton’s track record? It is shameful. All other parties rolled over and allowed their tummies to be tickled, and we have the “Pepsi-Coke coalition” between National and Labour. Nothing is new here.

Mr Upton was responsible for messing up the Resource Management Act at the outset, including the removal of private property rights from the original 1989 Resource Management Bill. The RMA is unloved by many as being a bureaucratic Hydra, and Mr Upton was its midwife. Mr Upton, not content with stuffing up our planning system, set the groundwork for the Kyoto Protocol, which sees taxpayers paying close to a quarter of a billion dollars to achieve absolutely nothing.

He also broke up the legendary Department of Scientific and Industrial Research into competing Crown research institutes, and what an absolute disaster that has proven to be. Now we scrap over smaller and smaller pieces of research, with this Government actually then handing that funding over to the private sector, and we end up with the myrtle rust disaster that is now 1,000 kilometres off our shore and, who knows, it might even be here, because we have not put in place any sort of protocols about people moving on and off Raoul Island. We forget that he was one of the most useless Ministers of Health. He showed a cold heart over compensation for bad blood transfusions, and even was the person who introduced cash registers into hospitals.

New Zealand First has a serious problem with this propensity to employ old boys from the parliamentary beltway back into State appointments, with their political backgrounds. We need a commissioner whom we can have confidence in, and we have not got confidence in Mr Upton.