Annual Review Debate — Environment and Ocean and Fisheries

We turn now to the financial review for environment and oceans and fisheries. The Hon David Parker is in the chair. Before I take the committee chair, can I just remind the House that the financial review, as, indeed, the Estimates, works most effectively when it is conducted as a Q and A session of the Minister. The smaller parties may find that taking a five-minute call in the context of a half-hour debate really does eat up that party’s time, which is proportional to the House.

Point of order, Madam Chairperson. The process so far this afternoon has run not according to the timetable that was, as far as I’m aware, agreed by the Business Committee, and what I’m seeking at this stage is—because we are running significantly behind time and this is an important questioning period—that the Minister give us an assurance that he’ll be available after the dinner break to conclude this session.

Speaking to the point of order, I just wanted to reassure the committee that we are actually on time. We started this slightly late and, Madam Chair, you’ve done a very good job of making sure we do keep to time.

OK, thank you for that. Just to add to that, the comment I’ve previously made—and I’ll keep this short, because this is using the House’s time, but so did the point of order—is that this session is now designed to be a Q and A. That seems to be the most effective way of holding the Minister to account. Five-minute speeches do not directly hold the Minister to account. So I’ll leave that up to the members, and that’s all I can do.

E te Māngai o te Whare, tēnā koe. Thank you. Speaking to the annual review of the environment sector 2019/20, which is at pages 284 to 317, volume 1 of the reports of select committees. As chair of the Environment Committee, in speaking to the annual review of the environment sector, including Te Papa Atawhai, the Department of Conservation (DOC); Manatū Mō Te Taiao, Ministry for the Environment; Predator Free New Zealand, I am really conscious that we are missing the energetic presence of the Hon Kiritapu Allan and wish her well in her fourth week of cancer treatment and in her recovery, and hope that we see her back in this House very soon.

Can I also acknowledge the other members of the hard-working and thoughtful Environment Committee, and the range of searching questions that they asked of agencies, and I acknowledge the work of staff in those agencies, both in fulfilling their statutory functions and in answering some hundreds of questions.

So with the Climate Commission, the first annual report of the Climate Commission—because it was only established independently, separately, in December 2019—it has done a lot of work over the last year to establish itself, to build up the infrastructure for an organisation that has quite ranging technical capabilities, was one of the things we heard. The data that goes to the Climate Commission and that it considers is quite critical. So the select committee spent some time examining the modelling data that the commission used to base its draft report, and we are continuing with that work subsequent to the annual review.

We heard of the quite extensive community engagement that the Climate Commission has engaged in, partly as a result of COVID, and moving its consultation with stakeholders online, and some 2,000 people have attended the webinars that the commission has held on its draft report, and there have been thousands of submissions as a result. So I think the committee was very interested in that quite extensive community engagement.

Turning to conservation, there’s been a substantial increase in the Department of Conservation’s budget—5 percent in 2019/20 compared to the previous year, and also the department has received $502 million as part of the Jobs for Nature package. So that is something that the committee has looked at in depth and will continue to.

In terms of highlights through the last year, one of them was the partnership with Ngati Porou and Te Whānau a Apanui in doing massive predator control in the forests of the Raukūmara Range. The committee was also interested in the fact that the department’s procurement systems and practices aren’t fit for purpose and need upgrading, and the department in the last financial year started work on implementing a $62 million five-year corporate services work programme. There’s been some improvements in terms of digital strategy improvements in the way capital projects are managed, but we recognise the need to continually improve there.

A couple of the other highlights in the last year that the department brought to our attention was the release of Te Mana o te Taiao, the Aotearoa New Zealand Biodiversity Strategy; the achievement in the Tiakina Ngā Manu project; aerial control of predators over nearly a million hectares to improve the chances for our native plants and wildlife; the work of Zero Invasive Predators in the Whataroa and Perth valleys, and getting rid of possums and stoats; DOC’s five-year climate adaption plan, because, of course, the department is increasingly affected by intense weather events, and they saw that during the year with a weather bomb in Southland, which affected more than 78 tracks and led to the temporary closure of the route Burnham-Milford.

The committee also heard from the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) and it was, in terms of its presentation, highlighting the increasing pressures that the authority is under as its functions increase—functions like the work under the COVID-19 Recovery (Fast-track Consenting) Act—and the work that it is doing on chemical mapping across Aotearoa being affected by COVID, because its chief scientist redirected his work to COVID. One of EPA’s highlights is the Mātauranga Framework, that it has developed.

Then the Ministry for the Environment, its work in implementing the recommendations of the Randerson review. The committee asked questions about whether the ministry has capacity to do that, because of the wide scale of the Resource Management Act reform, and was reassured by the ministry noting that its staffing had increased and it was confident that it could do that over the two-year time frame.

Other highlights were the expansion of the waste disposal levy and a long list in the committee’s support on climate change.

The elephant in the room in terms of this review has been the Government’s response to the Randerson report. And my question to the Minister is that after initially having told the public in this Parliament that his Natural and Built Environments Act (NBEA) exposure draft would be released in March of this year and then subsequently in April, and now we’re into May—can the Minister update Parliament on when this exposure draft will be complete, and if he still expects the NBEA to be introduced this year and then passed by the end of 2022?

I’m not sure that’s strictly a matter for the annual review, because it’s this year rather than last year.

The point is that the Government’s response to the Randerson committee was covered extensively during the select committee’s review and, therefore, it absolutely falls in scope. So if he can’t tell us when his exposure draft will eventually find its way to the select committee, can he tell us when he expects that his Strategic Planning Act will be passed?

Well, I can. I was just making the point on what this debate’s meant to be about. In respect of the Natural and Built Environments Act, my recollection is that we were never aiming to have it in select committee by March. We were aiming for May; it’s probably going to be June. And the reason for that is that we’ve decided that the scope of what we want to put to the select committee is going to include a little bit more of further consideration of what we’re doing to put together the regional level plans. What’s happening is that the number of plans is going to jump down from over 100 to about 14, and the mechanisms of doing that were not fully worked through in the Randerson report. We did consider leaving the exposure draft blank in respect of those particular provisions but, on reflection, thought that it was better to work up some of that detail before we put it to the select committee inquiry, which is why we’re taking another month to do that properly.

So if that timetable is now in place, then it seems unlikely that the draft exposure will be presented to the select committee until June. The likelihood of it being eventually passed through this House in this sitting term is heroic. What, then, will that mean in terms of actual implementation for planning changes to councils who may then take another several years to actually implement legislative changes?

Well, for a start, the member’s wrong if he doesn’t think we’ll still be passing the replacement legislation during this term of Parliament. I’m still expecting both the Natural and Built Environments Act and the Strategic Planning Act to be passed during the term of this Parliament, and we’re on track to do so.

In respect of what happens in the meantime, the law is the law. I hear people saying that they should just take a deep breath and wait until the law changes before they do anything. It’s actually one of the reasons why we didn’t immediately embark upon the Resource Management Act (RMA) reform. It was that we needed to get cracking on water quality, on issues relating to climate, and also on development opportunities for housing, which we’ve done using existing instruments under the RMA. We’ve updated the National Policy Statement on Urban Development, and the councils are required to make more room for house-building opportunities both through intensification and, where necessary, at the margins of growing urban areas, and that work’s flowing through.

We, of course, have already promulgated a real increase in the standards that we expect of those who are using land and are causing harm to waterways. I heard the Hon Mr Bennett asking questions about that. In reality, what we inherited was a situation where twice as many rivers were degrading in New Zealand as were improving year by year, according to the macroinvertebrate index, which is probably the most accurate measure of aquatic health. So in advance of changes to the RMA, we thought it was necessary to make changes to cause those problems to be brought under control. And I’m happy to answer questions about that, because, in fact, that did happen during the year under annual review.

The committee, at review, spent quite a bit of time investigating and prosecuting questions relating to the Government’s Jobs for Nature programme, and I’m keen to know from the Minister what the methodology is that the ministry uses to determine how many new jobs have been created and what the criteria is for determining whether a job is a job.

Again, that information’s already publicly available, but, essentially, we measure the number of people who are in employment at any one time and we report on that. We also measure the total number of full-time equivalent jobs for a year based on a number of hours of employment. That information is also available on a website and is updated regularly.

So in light of the Minister’s assertion that the reforms to the Resource Management Act will be brought to select committee, with all of their attendant problems to be solved before new regulation is passed, the Minister is surely aware that one of his previous reforms or attempts at regulation of water quality, the National Environmental Standards for Freshwater, has included a series of prohibitions and bans on activities that mean that certain activities like earthworks and quarries and clean fill disposal sites which rely on being able to get an earthworks permit in order to clear vegetation, carry out their physical works, and then reinstate that land to a much higher standard, with planting, with constructed wetlands, and with indigenous biodiversity that flourishes as a result—that Minister must be aware that the National Environmental Standards for Freshwater included the term “prohibited” when it comes to describing activities that disturb a wetland.

So for that very reason, there are a number of existing quarries which, this construction season, have not been able to develop their land, to access the hard rock that’s absolutely vital to deliver roading and infrastructure for housing, and a number of affected businesses and industry organisations—the Aggregate & Quarry Association and others—have written to the Minister, we understand, asking “Please, Minister, will you consider changing the wording in this flawed regulation so that we can access the land that we own, the land that is already well understood will be used for quarrying and other intensive activities, and where, yes, there may well be some type of grasses or some kind of area where water ponds, but that it was always envisaged that that land be modified as part of their development activities?”

So will the Minister care to tell us when his ministry and his office will respond to all of those submitters who have been afraid to bring their concerns out in public but who have sent him letters and who have asked me “Would the ACT Party follow this up?” Would he explain to the committee exactly when his ministry and his office will come back and explain when they will remove the word “prohibited” from the National Environmental Standards for Freshwater that stops legitimate activities, like quarries and like resource extraction, from going ahead? It is affecting infrastructure delivery. It is introducing massive additional cost variations on to public and private infrastructure and construction projects, and these organisations have been promised for months and months and months that his office and his ministry, the Ministry for the Environment, will address it, and they have not had an answer. So Minister, will you please explain it?

Thank you for that contribution. The member does raise a fair point. The background to this issue is that, quite sadly, New Zealand’s wetlands have largely been lost, even including wetlands that are within national parks. New Zealand lost 90 percent of our wetlands quite a while ago. That’s sad, but even sadder still is that in the last decade, of the remaining 10 percent, we lost about a 20th. So we as a Government decided that we needed to introduce strict rules to stop the further loss of wetlands, and our intention was to stop the major loss around agricultural areas, which is probably where most of the loss has been. We wanted to make it harder to lose wetlands to subdivisional activities, and we came up with a rule that, as the member has quite rightly said, included a prohibited activity from nixing other wetlands generally.

It’s fair of the quarry industry and the landfill industry to say we might have gone a bit far. They’ve come to Government—

💬 Hon Paul Goldsmith: That’s why it’s expensive to build houses and get concrete and everything like that.

Well, I’m not actually accepting that there’s a current problem, but if we don’t fix the problem, we will cause a future problem, because they do need to consent more areas for expansion of their existing quarries. Many of the quarries already have consents to expand into areas that they need to go next, but I think they are correct that we’ve gone too far in the prohibited activity status in respect of some of those activities, and we’ve said that to them. We’ve said it in public meetings, and they’re not scared to express their viewpoints. They’ve said it in meetings to me personally, and I’ve said that we will address that matter this year. If the member wants to know why it is that some of these regulations we made are imperfect, in my opinion it’s partly because we, in respect of environmental regulation, make it far too hard to both make and change environmental regulation. If there were easy ways to fix mistakes both in terms of environmental degradation and environmental—and fixing imperfections in regulation, we would already have done it. But it’s an unfortunate reality that it’s much harder to make environmental regulation than it is virtually any other area of regulation across Government. Whether it’s health and safety rules or public health regulations or animal welfare regulations, those regulations are all less process-bound than the making of—

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jacqui Dean): Getting a bit wide.

Well, this is actually the reason why we’ve got a problem here, and the longer-term fix to actually being able to, with more alacrity, fix these problems actually lies in the Resource Management Act reform that the Hon Scott Simpson referred to, because through that process we should, I think, be setting up something like a standing committee in order to more quickly remedy issues such as the one the member has raised.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Just in relation to that Resource Management Act (RMA) then, and moving to the oceans and fisheries space, does the Minister envisage any new aquaculture areas will be consented pre these RMA changes actually passing?

Well, again, that’s not a matter that’s within the period of this annual review.

Well, it does fit, though, within the Government’s aquaculture strategy, which was part of this annual review period. So I would be interested, if the Minister does have an answer, if he could share it with us. But moving along from that, in terms of the aquaculture strategy, I’d be interested to know how many jobs have been created as a result of the implementation of this strategy. How is the Government tracking on actually delivering on their proposal to create 3,000 new jobs in aquaculture?

I don’t have that number. What I can say is that I’m sure that during this term of Government, we’ll be making a lot more progress than that Government did in nine years when things were stuck. The problem that we’ve been dealing with is that the system was actually hamstrung for over a decade under the prior Government. We are working through those issues. We are making progress, but I don’t have that number to hand.

OK. Does he have to hand, then, the contribution economically that has derived from the aquaculture strategy as a result of the implantation of this? No? Righto. OK. Well, if he’s not across aquaculture, that’s fine. Will he rule out granting partial or full ownership of the foreshore and seabed to Māori, as suggested by He Puapua?

Well, that matter doesn’t sit within my ministerial responsibilities.

💬 Simon Court: Point of order, Madam Chair.

Tim van de Molen: Well, for oceans and fisheries it does, actually.

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jacqui Dean): The member will wait until I call him.

Thank you. I was going to make a point of order, Madam Chair, that I think it’s important that we stick to the purpose of this debate at this committee—

The member will resume his seat.

Thank you, Madam Chair; delighted to contribute to this annual review debate. Also, as a support person for the Minister in the chair, Hon David Parker, and as the Under-Secretary for Oceans and Fisheries, I wanted to pick up on the matters that had just been raised previously. Could the Minister give us an overview? Looking back at the past 12 months, the fact that this is a new portfolio, the combination of oceans and fisheries—the first of its kind in the history of our country—what particular actions is the Minister taking to focus on fisheries issues, particularly around inshore but also looking at the aquaculture industry as well and the particular strategies and measures that he’s undertaking?

One of the issues that we’re considering is how you allocate marine aquaculture space, how you do that in accordance with obligations under Treaty fisheries settlement legislation, and how you do that in a way that minimises environmental risks like biosecurity risks. The ministry, I think, is conducting some very important work about how we should be conceiving of aquaculture areas as discrete biosecurity areas so that, if we have an incursion in one area, they’re actually not ruining the whole of the New Zealand industry. Those would be a couple of examples.

Members, the time has come for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break. The committee will convene again at 7 p.m.

Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Ā, kāti rā, tēnā rā tātou katoa. The committee is resumed. Members, when we rose for the dinner break, we were considering the question that the report of the Finance and Expenditure Committee on the annual financial statements of the Government for the 2019/20 financial year be noted.

Thank you, Mr Chair. During the previous examination with the Minister of Agriculture, he traversed some questions around water quality, and I’d just like to ask the Minister for the Environment if he could take us through what’s happening and what are his thoughts in relation to water quality.

Thank you, Mr Tirikatene. During the year under review, this was actually the biggest piece of work that the ministry had on. It was against the background of declining water quality, particularly in our rivers. Sadly, the latest data from the Land, Air, Water Aotearoa data series showed that twice as many rivers are degrading in New Zealand as are improving, according to the macroinvertebrate index, and this is a long-term trend that has coincided with increasingly intensive methods of agricultural production. Not all the problems are in rural areas and some of the most serious problems are in urban areas, but the rate of change has been greatest in respect of rural areas. Ninety-nine percent of rivers, by length, are in those rural areas, so we’ve got to address those issues.

So during this period—in September last year—we landed quite a comprehensive package that had three objectives. The first was to halt the decline, the second was to show material improvements within five years, and then clean waterways up to a decent standard over a generation.

There are a number of components to that package. We’ve promulgated an updated national policy statement (NPS) on freshwater management. That had a number of new attributes in it that weren’t previously regulated and has standards to achieve over a generation through plans that are promulgated by regional councils that have to achieve those outcomes, which are, essentially, based on aquatic health. The guiding principle that’s being used here is te mana o te wai, which puts at the primary centre of water regulation the health of the waterway as the first priority; second, human needs—for example, drinking water—and, third, economic uses of the water.

In addition to the national policy statement on freshwater management, we changed the way in which new freshwater management plans are made through amendments to the Resource Management Act. The Resource Management Act now enables freshwater commissioners to involve themselves in that process, and we’ve appointed two, with the leading one of those for the first period being Emeritus Professor Peter Skelton, who’s a former Environment Court judge. So they will be assisting regional councils to make the plan changes that are necessary to give effect to the new national policy statement on freshwater management.

We’ve also required farms over a certain size to have a farm plan, or an environmental component of a farm plan, which enables a farm by farm assessment of what are the critical source areas for erosion, for example. Why is that a problem? Well, we know that in some areas like the Kaipara, we’ve got recent mudbanks that are 2 metres deep. This is the largest harbour in New Zealand and it’s where the majority of snapper on the West Coast of New Zealand spawn, and yet we’ve got such high sediment loads coming into that estuary that we literally have mudbanks of recent origin that are 2 metres deep. We have contributed at central government level $100 million to a restoration package. That money is being matched by local government and farmers in order to bring forward improvements there.

In addition to the national policy statement on freshwater management, we’ve promulgated a national environment standard (NES). Unlike an NPS, which requires plan changes to give effect to what’s required, an NES has immediate effect. That NES puts in place controls on increasing intensification of agriculture. For example, a new conversion to a dairy farm will require a resource consent, so that we can consider whether there is an extra nutrient load that the river can’t sustain and how adverse effects are minimised. It also puts controls on the additional area that can be put into intensive winter grazing.

I’ve talked of the sediment problems that we’ve had up north. Around the South Island, we have got serious problems of degradation of estuaries. We’ve got midland rivers in Southland where 90 percent of the macroinvertebrates are now dead compared with 30 years ago, which means there’s not many fish. The main cause of those problems there is sediment. Those sediment problems are most concentrated at the bottom of rivers. Where we have estuaries, we’ve got estuaries there that are just covered with recent mud that is smothering and killing the shellfish beds.

We’ve got kelp beds out at sea off the coast of Otago and Southland that are not thriving. They are decreasing in mass and, indeed, they’re not just not as thick but also their area has decreased probably by about 50 percent.

So we’ve got many serious problems in our fresh water. This package is meant to overcome them.

Health