Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Environment Committee to consider the bill. At the appropriate time, I intend to move that the bill will be reported to the House by 11 June 2018 and that the committee have authority to meet at any time while the House is sitting, except during oral questions, during any evening on a day on which there has been a sitting of the House, and on a Friday in a week in which there has been a sitting of the House, and outside of the Wellington area, despite Standing Orders 191, 193, and 194(1)(b) and (c).

This bill is relatively short. It makes an amendment to the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Act 2012—an Act that was amended just last year. One might ask oneself why this Act, which regulates activities in New Zealand’s exclusive economic zone and the extended continental shelf, which is necessary in order to promote the sustainable management of natural resources and protect the environment from pollution—why it is that this Act is necessary at all.

The sad reality is that this amendment bill, which we hope will be an Act in due course, is necessary to correct one of many, many, many errors in the Resource Legislation Amendment Act that was passed by this House by a fair majority—I think it was one or two votes—pushed through by the Māori Party in support of the National Party, when the ACT Party, United Future, the Labour Party, and New Zealand First were all voting against it because it was such an appalling piece of legislation. What that Act did, amongst many other mistakes, was take away the right of the Crown to recover the costs of applicants in respect of resource use applications made in the exclusive economic zone (EEZ). The prior law had been that the costs of the applicant, by and large, can be recovered so that they don’t fall on taxpayers. The effect of the bill that the National Party promoted was to accidentally remove that power.

The effect of this is that if this amendment legislation is not passed by this House, and until it is, the taxpayer foots the bill for the incompetence of the National Party. The average cost recovery, in respect of some of these very significant applications, for mining in the EEZ, for example—the costs of those often run over a million dollars. So the effect of this, if it’s not passed, is hard to quantify in that we do not know how many applications are going to be made in the EEZ in the future, but we do know that in the past they have been, and when they are made, the cost of dealing with the application is significant. At the moment, that cost now falls on taxpayers—hard-working taxpayers—who should not foot the bill of costs, and, as a consequence of the mistake of the last Government, they had that effect.

The process cost—and the cost in respect of this intervening period—will still be significant. This legislation is not retrospective. There is a current application before a board of inquiry that will incur costs on behalf of the Crown that cannot be recovered from the applicant because of the incompetence of the last Government. This will run to many hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is a bill that will be borne by taxpayers.

In addition to that additional cost to taxpayers, there is the cost of this process. The cost of legislative processes is not cheap: all of us here are paid; our officials are paid; the Clerk of the House is paid; we have occupancy expenses. The cost of any piece of legislation is—you know, it’s necessary as a part of a democracy, but you ought not to waste that on legislation that is unnecessary but for the incompetence to pick up this error in the earlier legislation.

It wasn’t for haste, in respect of the Resource Legislation Amendment Bill, which became an Act. As the select committee report notes—well, actually, the select committee report on that piece of legislation records the appalling process that was run in respect of that application. The bill was referred to select committee on 3 December 2015. Submissions were heard throughout the country by the then select committee—about 130 submissions. I was unlucky enough to be involved in that prolonged process, and we heard submissions in Wellington, Auckland, and Christchurch. Many were complex, but those submissions were heard by 2 June 2016. By the time this work had been finished by the select committee, there had been numerous provisional time periods that had passed. Everyone was put to enormous effort. By the time they did their deal with the Māori Party, they’d used up another six months and their departmental report ran to 400 pages. I was part of that select committee, and by the time it came to be considered, virtually every hard-working member of that select committee—we’d actually forgotten a lot of the submissions and detail that we had been given.

💬 Hon Scott Simpson: Only the Labour members.

“Only the Labour Party”, says Scott Simpson. The Hon Scott Simpson said—well, actually, I think, at the time, he was chairing the select committee, and he failed to pick up this error as well.

💬 Hon Scott Simpson: So did the member.

Not only did his colleagues do it, but the chair—he says “So did that member.” Well, actually, we criticised that legislation. We criticised the process. We actually warned the House that this legislation was so flawed that it ought not to proceed. We lamented the poor process. We actually said that that poor process hadn’t been the fault of the committee and then, somewhat generously to the chairperson, we also said it wasn’t his fault; it was actually his master’s fault. But the process for considering that bill, as was recorded in that select committee—it says the process for selecting the bill has been a shambles.

There are many aspects of that bill that were detailed in the select committee as being poor, but we warned of this very outcome—that rather than making the resource management processes both under the Resource Management Act (RMA) and the EEZ better, they were making them more complex, they were making them worse, and they were going to add to costs. This is just but one example of where that shambolic legislation added to costs. Those costs are falling on taxpayers—they are falling on taxpayers both by having to pick up these costs that the last Government managed to remove the cost recover provisions in respect of and through the cost of this process.

Now, I am hopeful that we will hear from the National Party that they agree they shouldn’t be wasting more time on this process and not arguing for hours and hours the referral motion, which says it slightly shortens the report-back time for the select committee. It is a very narrow bill. We don’t, in this bill, try and fix all of the other numerous errors in the underlying piece of legislation, because that requires a bit more time and thought and hearing from submitters. But this particular amendment should fly through, I think, because the National Party should be craven in their apologies to New Zealand, be craven in their apologies to the House, be craven in their failure to respond to the select committee report that warned that these sorts of errors were going to happen in this legislation, and admit that the Opposition had it right—that the Labour Party had it right, that the Green Party had it right, that the New Zealand First Party had it right, that the ACT Party, on that occasion, had it right, and that that legislation was always deeply flawed, as is proven once again by the need for this amendment legislation. With that, I support the first reading of this bill.

Debate interrupted.