Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Hazardous Substances Assessments) Amendment Bill

I move that the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Hazardous Substances Assessments) Amendment Bill be now read for a first time. I also present a legislative statement to the House.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Madam Speaker, given that I did that in the wrong order, do you want me to move that name again, or is it OK as I’ve—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): OK, go on.

I move, That the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Hazardous Substances Assessments) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Environment Committee to consider the bill.

The Government has committed to making changes, where needed, to improve efficiency and to better safeguard people and the environment, and this bill actually advances all of those three aims in that it better protects the environment, it has positive outcomes for the health and safety of our people and communities, and it does both of these things by preventing or managing the effect of hazardous substances.

The purpose of the bill is to amend the underlying Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act 1996 in order to improve the assessment and reassessment of hazardous substances. These substances include the chemicals that are widely used in industry and in agriculture. The main changes being made to the hazardous substances law relate to substances—chemicals—not to new organisms. Under the HSNO Act, which I’m now going to shorten my reference to, the Environmental Protection Authority, or what we know as the EPA, is the regulator responsible for making decisions on whether or not to approve new hazardous substances for use. The EPA sets the necessary controls to manage risk and to safeguard people and protect the environment. These controls set out conditions as to how a substance can be used. The EPA also reassesses hazardous substances already in use and makes decisions about whether the controls need to be updated and whether the substance should continue to be approved.

Right now, the assessment and reassessment of hazardous substances in New Zealand is very time consuming and very resource intensive. As a consequence, since 2001, the EPA has only been able to complete 54 reassessments, and, in addition to that, there are outstanding 43 chemicals in urgent need of reassessment. These lengthy and costly processes mean that it takes time for beneficial chemicals, including safer alternatives to existing ones, to be approved for use. Delayed reassessments may also mean that chemicals continue to be used when their safety and environmental controls may no longer be fit for purpose. For these reasons, amendments to the HSNO Act are needed to improve the process for assessing and reassessing hazardous substances and to enable the EPA to make better use of relevant information from international regulators. The amendments include changes to enable better use of information from comparable international regulations and make other improvements to the reassessment process.

It had originally been envisaged that these changes would be made both via changes to the HSNO Act and via associated changes to the related secondary legislation, which is known as the “Methodology Order”. However, in the process of the bill being drafted, it was decided that it would be better to put all of these changes into the Act itself. It had originally been intended that the EPA would undertake a subsequent consultation as part of the process of amending the Methodology Order, and, as a result, some of the details of those changes were not consulted on in the 2019 consultation. However, there will still be an opportunity for public submissions on proposed changes to the Methodology Order as part of the public submissions that will occur during the select committee process.

The bill also includes three technical amendments to the HSNO Act to correct omissions or ambiguous language. These are not related to the main policy changes in the bill; however, the bill presents a timely opportunity to make these corrections too. These amendments, overall, enable the use of international regulator information. Amendments will enable the EPA to apply information from international regulators, considering the New Zealand context, without, effectively, having to redo the research from the start. An obvious example of this is some of the work that’s done in Europe. They’ve got very thorough practices in terms of their assessments of new chemicals. Quite often there isn’t a compelling economic case for those new chemicals to be registered in the New Zealand market, because we’re quite a small market, and we want to encourage the registration of new chemicals, especially where those new chemicals are more effective and less environmentally harmful and less risky for humans using them than the current chemicals being used. So we think that this will facilitate the consideration by the EPA of alternatives. The amendments will also provide a simplified process for the EPA to update hazard classifications of substances and corresponding controls based on information from international regulators.

Furthermore, the changes to the Act will enable the EPA to temporarily restrict certain uses of hazardous substances during a reassessment process. The bill will also make other improvements to the reassessment process to either increase efficiency or increase transparency. These improvements will enable the EPA to engage in more targeted consultation for certain reassessments. They’ll require the EPA to develop a publicly available work plan for reassessment. They’ll provide a simplified process for the EPA to update hazard classifications of substances when the EPA has undertaken a recent assessment of a related hazardous substance. They’ll enable the delegation of some EPA decision-making. They’ll also enable the EPA to align the time frames of assessment and reassessment of related hazardous substances.

As I mentioned earlier, there are three technical amendments to the Act which are unrelated to the policy of improving assessments but have been included to correct omissions or improve ambiguous language. Those amendments are an amendment to section 68 of the Act. This is a provision relating to ministerial call-in, where an application can be called in and determined by the Minister for the Environment rather than the EPA. The bill amends the Act to make it clear that the ministerial call-in provisions apply to publicly notified reassessments. Currently, there’s an ambiguity regarding this. The second technical amendment is to correct an omission that occurred in 2015, when section 103A was created—that relates to powers of entry for inspection related to hazardous substances—but the references to the new section were not included in other parts of the Act. The amendment fixes that. And the third technical amendment is an amendment to create a penalty for an offence under the Act which was created in 2015 for failing to comply with any of the requirements in an EPA notice. There was an omission in the 2015 amendments, in that an offence was created without a corresponding penalty. So that’s fixed too.

To conclude, this bill will improve the efficiency and speed of assessment and reassessment of hazardous substances. It’s important that we can more quickly get safer and more environmentally friendly chemicals in use in this country, and better controlled use of older, less safe substances. Transparency is improved, particularly by the requirement of the EPA to publish a work plan for reassessments. For those reasons, I commend the bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s appropriate that on a cold winter’s night when the Parliament is in session—

💬 Maureen Pugh: And the lights are on.

—and debating issues of high importance, the lights are on. It’s a good thing. That’s a good thing, because after the Minister’s speech—and I have to say, my colleague sitting to my right here, Stuart Smith, said he would wake me up. He said, “You won’t miss your call, Scott. I’ll wake you up when the Minister is finished.” This bill—look, without making too much mockery of it—falls, I think, into the category of “dull but worthy”. It’s actually, on the face of it, I think a pretty practical change to the way that the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) assesses and reassesses the multitude of hazardous organisms and products and substances that they have to look into and that they’re charged with providing information to us about.

The thing that fascinated me most about my reading on this bill in advance of speaking in the House tonight was that I thought that this may have been a grand, bold, inspirational idea of the Government. Well, it turns out it wasn’t. Actually, this is an initiative taken by the EPA themselves. This is something that they have said, “Well, look, we are having to use a very cumbersome, a very slow, a very intense process to assess and reassess hazardous substances, and there’s got to be a better way of doing it.” I come to this Parliament having had a number of years in the commercial sphere, long before being a member of Parliament, and one of those roles involved me leading a company that was working in the occupational health and safety area, providing personal protective equipment for people.

It always amazed me that New Zealand had its own standards, for instance, for hardhats, and we had our own standard for steel-cap boots, and we had our own standard that we had decided for hearing protection and earmuffs and earplugs and things like that, and yet here we were able to import these products from overseas countries that had their own very good standards. But no, we thought that in New Zealand, we had to come up and invent our own wheel to define what the protection level for earmuffs should be or what the impact measurements should be for hardhats. So too it is that we have this kind of culture in New Zealand that sometimes serves us very well. It’s sort of the number eight wire culture, where we try and invent our own solution and cure and fix for almost anything, when, actually, if we took a bit of time and effort to have a look around at what happens in other jurisdictions and see what they do and how they do it and how they’ve done it and how they’ve arrived at the answers that they have, then in many instances we could shortcut our process.

So I was delighted all those years ago when at one point in the health and safety game, with earmuffs and hardhats and steel-cap boots and things, all we did was simply adopt the Australian standard. We adopted the Australian standard as being our standard and said, “Well, if it’s OK for the Aussies, it’s probably OK for us.” I get a sense that this piece of legislation is attempting, in its own way, to try and straddle that kind of issue in terms of what work the EPA do on hazardous substances. To me, on the face of it, I think it makes sense. I would think that our Environmental Protection Authority would rightly and properly want to consider and have a look at the testing regimes, the science, the analysis, and the investigation that’s been done by sister organisations to their own in other parts of the world, in places where we would trust the work that is being done.

So I’m thinking that perhaps if a substance or a chemical has been assessed in Australia or the United Kingdom or in Europe or maybe Canada or maybe in the United States, well, we would want to have a look at those and say, “Well, why do we need to start with a blank piece of paper and assume that no knowledge has been collected on this substance by anybody else anywhere else in the world? And we will be a beacon of light as New Zealanders and we will find out what the pros and the cons of this substance are, and we will come up with it, and we’ll just pretend that the rest of the world hasn’t done any investigative work, and we’ll pretend that the rest of the world hasn’t done any analysis or scientific interpretation of this particular substance or organism, and we will try and invent our own.” I think the risk of that for us as taxpayers and citizens is there’s a relatively high risk that that will be, firstly, painfully slow; secondly, it will be incredibly expensive and time consuming from a resource point of view, and, for us as taxpayers, we’ll all be paying for that.

There’s also a potential risk—although I have faith in the credibility of our EPA. I think they do a very good job, but I think that there would be a potential that we would be somehow out of whack and off beam in terms of some of the work that had been done in other jurisdictions and other parts of the world. So from my point of view, I think that this initiative taken by the EPA themselves—initiated by them, as I said—is something that they should be given some credit for. I think that the fact that they have been able to convince the Minister and his advisers that this is a piece of worthy work that is worth pursuing and that the reasons for it should be brought to the Parliament and that a piece of legislation should go through—I think that they need to be congratulated for that. I think also that the Minister needs to be congratulated for saying, “Well, actually, recognising the EPA, this is a good idea.” I think that if we can improve the timeliness of the assessment and reassessment of these hazardous substances, then that would be a good thing.

I was actually quite surprised, in my research leading up to this debate tonight, to find that the EPA actually is responsible for something in the order of 150,000 individual hazardous substances and organisms. They’re not responsible for them, but they are the agency, the regulator, that is required to decide what the level of risk is or what the level of safety is in terms of having those substances available and introduced and used in New Zealand. So that’s a very, very big responsibility, and the Minister mentioned the relatively small numbers of assessments and reassessments that are taking place, primarily because it’s a big job to have to do it. It’s an expensive, time consuming, and difficult job to do that if you’re starting from scratch on a blank piece of paper and not taking into account the work that’s been done in other jurisdictions.

So we, on this side of the House, are happy to support this bill at first reading. We look forward to teasing out some of the more technical issues at select committee, and I’m hoping that the Minister will give the select committee the full length of time required to do that, because I’m not anticipating that we will have thousands of submissions on it, unlike some other legislation that the committee is considering at the moment. But I do think that there will be a number of organisations that will want to make submissions, and I, for one, will want to hear what those are. I want to hear what the arguments for and against are, because there probably will be some, and we’ll see how it goes. But I think that, as I say, this piece of legislation falls into the “dull but worthy” category. It’s certainly very appropriate that the Parliament should be discussing it at quarter to nine on a winter’s evening when the lights are still on.

I call on Rachel—

Brooking. Yes, thank you, Madam Speaker. I am sitting next to the other Rachel B and she might take a call in a minute but thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m delighted to be able to make a short contribution on the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Hazardous Substances Assessments) Amendment Bill that is—

💬 Hon Scott Simpson: Say it again with meaning!

Ha, ha! Very excited about this HSNO amendment bill. So as the Minister has said, it’s a piece of work to really add to the efficiencies of the system, and great to hear from the previous speaker, Scott Simpson, that we can agree that this is a good, even if dull, but worthy piece of legislation.

The Minister in his speech touched on the consultation process, as did the previous speaker, with where it’s been initiated from. Happy to talk briefly about how it was initiated with a compliance systems report done by some experts, and then both the Ministry for the Environment and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) went out for consultation in August and September in 2019. That discussion document mentioned this trusted regulator a lot of times through it, and that’s really this idea of having an international regulator that the Minister spoke about. Then the submissions were summarised and reported on at the end of 2019. So now we have this dull but worthy bill.

So not only—

💬 Hon Scott Simpson: Ah, it’s a concession.

Ha, ha! But I’m still excited by it. Not only does it improve the efficiencies, but it also requires the EPA to develop a publicly available work plan, and this is for hazardous substances reassessments. So this will be very useful for HSNO users to know when they can expect reassessments. So it’s in clause 4 of the bill, which will be the new section 20C, and this work plan is to list the chemicals or substances to be reassessed and give indicative time frames for the start of that work by the authority, and then it’s to be publicised on the internet. So I look forward to the submissions to the Environment Committee and working across the House on this bill. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I sympathise with the previous speaker, Rachel Brooking, because I have had my name mistaken, but mine’s so much more difficult than yours, so it is quite understandable! I also have sympathy for the Minister who—you know, this is quite a mouthful really. The Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Hazardous Substances Assessments) Amendment Bill—fortunately, I’m only going to say it once. The Minister had to say it several times and so I can see why he had to struggle with it a bit.

It is a dull but worthy bill. I know from experience that we are a small market, as the Minister said in his remarks. And actually, it’s quite important because often these chemicals are brought into the country, or attempted to be, into such a small market that the chemical companies just simply don’t find it worthwhile to actually bring them into the country and go through the process, given the size of the market that we are, to get the relevant process, to get the approvals.

That has a significant impact on our industries in New Zealand and often also it can be something like, for example, a chemical used in cereal crops that could be used in vegetables or something else, say a fungicide, and that actually has to have a label claim. So it’s not just having the original work to say it’s safe; it also then has a claim process that it has to go through for the particular crop that it’s going to be used in, because it may well be used in a different way, but it’s the same base chemical. They run up against those costs that can be quite significant and crippling, and then we as a country are poorly affected by that, because our industry is unable to utilise those products.

So this is a really sensible way to go about things, to be able to utilise existing research from other jurisdictions. We like to think of ourselves as being quite unique in a unique climate, and we are indeed in some respects, but most of these substances that are being used will not be affected by the slightly different climate and conditions that we have in this country. So a significant step forward.

I note that the consultation for this began two years ago, which shows how long it takes to get through the process to get a bill in front of us. You’d think in that time they’d, hopefully, come up with a better name for the bill that’d be easier to say. However, it is what it is and there’s probably good reasons why it’s sheeted home to the legislation that it’s amending. But none the less it is kind of hard work.

I think one of the things I’ll be looking to find out during the process in the select committee—and I think it will actually be one of those select committee processes that while there won’t be a large number of submissions, they will be enlightening because they’ll all be the people that are utilising the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) at least annually if not more often, and we need to make it easier for them. So we’ll be getting a lot of good information from those entities on how this bill can be made to work as best it can.

I think that I’ll also be looking to find out would this apply to something like the GMO grass that would lower methane emissions quite significantly, and I know that’s something the Green Party are very keen on. They want to get that GMO out in the market as quickly as possible, as we do, because we want to lower our methane emissions, and so that will be fantastic when we get that up. I know the Green MPs will be just so excited about this when it gets to select committee, and we’ll just come in behind and we’ll support the Green Party through that. I know they’re very keen on GMOs!

There are 150,000 hazardous substances that the EPA are administering. That’s a significant number and they do require reassessments quite frequently. I’ve seen that through ag chemicals that I’ve used in the past, and I know that for very good reasons they do have to come up, new evidence comes into the realm, and we do need to go through that and in our own environment. I note that the Minister said there will be a provision here for temporary changes to the regulations for using those particular chemicals, or may be used in that period while that reassessment is being carried out. I think that’s a very sensible change.

Some of these things, with all the best intentions in the world, the regulators are tied to the legislation that they have to work under. And if they can’t work efficiently through that, then it is not only an economic cost but also potentially a health cost and an environmental cost. I note that there’s only a relatively small cost-benefit here of $10 million to our economy over 10 years, which doesn’t sound like a lot. I actually wonder about that assessment, because I seriously doubt that includes the cost to the users of these chemicals, the opportunity cost that’s lost because of these chemicals not coming into the country in a timely manner or, in fact, being removed if they are no longer appropriate, because I suspect that would be a lot more than $10 million. But we will explore that through that process.

So, look, we’ve got a great select committee in the Environment Committee. We have certainly got our share of work at the moment, and that is a big workload to get through. But this will be quite different, something which will be kind of light relief, I suppose it might be, for the committee to get our teeth into, and it’ll be a quite different style and tenor from the submitters, I suspect, than the bills that we’re working through at the moment. So with that, I commend the bill to the House.

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. It’s appropriate that I start this with an acknowledgment of a kaumātua who passed away last week, from Tauranga Moana. His name is Dr Kihi Ngātai, and he was a well-respected person. His legacy lives on through his descendants. Last week he lay in state at Whareroa Marae. It was a very important occasion, and I want to acknowledge his passing. And also, connected to the bill that we’re talking about, the people at Whareroa Marae have real concerns about some of the chemicals that are floating around in the air, around down at the port of Tauranga. They have real concerns about the quality of the air around them. They have real concerns about the industrial estate that’s popped up around them, that has very hazardous substances and chemicals that give them great cause for concern.

So I want to stand and, with the other side of the House—all sides of the House, it seems—give my widespread support for this, which is something that’s been brought forward, as said by a previous speaker, by the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA), who are the regulators of those hazardous substances that we have here in New Zealand. We understand that their job is to assess and to reassess those chemicals in our environment that are dangerous to us but, if managed correctly, actually don’t pose the imminent threat that they could do if they didn’t have that level of management around them. We also acknowledge that the Environmental Protection Authority have noted that it’s a very timely process, a time-consuming, resource-intensive process, to be able to go through assessments and reassessments as well. So this bill should give New Zealanders some level of comfort that we have a watchdog that is out there that is monitoring the chemicals in our environment, that is reassessing whether or not chemicals are dangerous to our health. And it should absolutely give some certainty to the whānau that live around Whareroa Marae that we have a watchdog in place. It is the EPA, and they’ve brought this bill before the House.

I look forward, as part of the Environment Committee, to ushering this bill through, but also to hearing some of those submissions, whether in support or against, so that we can better understand how this legislation really does and is going to affect New Zealanders into the future. So I commend this bill to the House.

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker, thank you. I am pleased to take a call on the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Hazardous Substances Assessments) Amendment Bill, and the Green Party is pleased to support the bill.

So what are the hazardous substances that this bill will improve the regulation of? Well, hazardous substances are, according to one definition I found, chemicals, mixes of chemicals that can be explosive, flammable, corrosive, have a capacity to oxidise and/or be toxic to people and the environment. They include substances such as petrol, cleaning products, fireworks, solvents, cosmetics, and, one review panel noted, even the ingredients of toothpaste. I found estimates of 200,000 different substances which fit this definition and which are in use in New Zealand. So the safe acquisition, use, and disposal of hazardous substances is important for human health, for nature, and for the economy. There would be some native plants and wildlife which would be potentially extinct without the use of 1080, the aerial pest control operations using about a teaspoon of 1080 per hectare. So that’s one really beneficial hazardous substance—but then substances like PFOS and PFOA, those organic pollutants which are used in firefighting foams and have caused significant impacts with their leaching into waterways.

So the purpose of the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act in section 4 is “to protect the environment, and the health and safety of people and communities, by preventing [and] managing the adverse effects of hazardous substances and new organisms”. I’d like to correct the misrepresentations by Stuart Smith: the Green Party is not looking forward to encouraging the use of GMOs. I think he was being sarcastic. To protect human wellbeing and nature, we need to have a really robust assessment system for chemicals, for their impacts and whether particular substances should be able to be used, in the first instance, by whom, and under what conditions. We need a similarly robust system for assessing the sites where they’re used and stored. We need solid, reliable information on the transport, use, and disposal of hazardous substances, a track and trace system to understand where they are and what volumes are in storage and in use around New Zealand from the time that they’re imported or manufactured here through that whole transport, use, and disposal system. That is something we do not currently have.

We need a really good system for dealing with hazardous substances at the end of their life. We need a clear regulatory framework where agencies are clear about their responsibilities. We need a strong and effective compliance monitoring and enforcement regime, and we need a good financial assurance regime so that manufacturers and users are responsible for the disposal and reprocessing costs and we don’t get orphan sites where the clean-up costs fall on the community and Government rather than the user.

This bill is focused on the first of those seven elements, the whole assessment process. While the Green Party certainly supports the bill, there needs to be a lot more work in other areas to improve the regulation and management of hazardous substances in our country. Government needs to allocate significantly more resources and the Ministry for the Environment more staff time to prioritise improving the regime. There was, as Rachel Brooking noted, an independent review panel which looked at the whole compliance and monitoring and enforcement regime for hazardous substances and found that it was a very cluttered landscape without clear responsibilities. So that’s a bit of work that has still to be progressed by Government.

Returning to the bill, the role of the Environmental Protection Authority, the EPA, is to, obviously, consider applications for the use of individual hazardous substances, assess them, identify their hazardous properties, set conditions of their use if they approve them, and also provide guidance. And they can reassess chemicals which are already approved for use and see whether the existing controls are fit for purpose. So this bill is part of a programme of work by the EPA and the Ministry for the Environment to modernise how hazardous substances are regulated. In progress there’s work on shifting the whole classification system for hazardous substances to the Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals, the GHS system, and developing a new database to support it. That was due to be finished by the middle of this year. I haven’t seen anything in the press release section of the EPA’s website, but I hope that work is well under way. That’s an internationally agreed system, and we are bound to implement it by being a member of the OECD.

There was consultation—there were about 44 submissions on this document as a prelude to this legislation—and certainly it’s going to improve the reassessment process with this concept of trusted international regulators. It’s going to provide a simpler process to update hazard classifications for substances and controls. As others have noted, the current system is very slow and resource hungry, and we’ve got a low profile in chemical manufacture, so it makes sense to rely on international data where those regulators are trusted.

One key point the Greens want to make is that when the EPA is using information from overseas regulators, they need to ensure that they are not relying on the data and research produced by chemical companies when they’re assessing impacts. The information must be scientifically robust and it must be from independent sources. The EPA must also demand much more transparency from applicants and agrichemical companies around the chemical formulation of proprietary products so that the public and regulators know exactly what they’re dealing with and can better assess the impacts. Apiculture New Zealand made a submission on the consultation document, and they noted that they had attended a pre-hearing meeting for approval of an insecticide containing sulfoxaflor—I’m not sure that’s correctly pronounced—but the applicant had withheld all of the information. They were only allowed to see the data, but not to take it away and study it.

One of the really good improvements in this bill is allowing the EPA to order the immediate suspension of particular chemicals. The thresholds in the principal Act are too cumbersome. They’re too high, because they require, and I quote, “significant actual or imminent danger to human health or safety [and] the environment”. Because of that, the EPA has never been able to suspend the use of a substance. I just note, in our history, when organophosphates and carbamate insecticides, which are quite widely used in New Zealand—international regulators began expressing concern about their use between 2000 and 2010, and in New Zealand reassessment of carbamate and those other organophosphate insecticides only began in 2012. There was a decision in 2013 where the EPA revoked approvals for some of them. Canada had done that 10 years previously. So this ability to suspend and this ability to rely on trusted international regulators will help phase out, I think, some of the more problematic chemicals.

We still need to deal with the compliance, monitoring, and enforcement, and we need a track and trace system so that we’ve got a much better handle on hazardous substances coming in, where they’re stored, where they’re used, and a much better system to prevent orphan sites which the Government has to clean up, as happened at Mataura. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. ACT generally agrees with the problem definition set out in this bill, but what is the opportunity that’s being left on the floor of the Minister’s office?

There is an Environmental Protection Agency which is tasked with administering the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act and the regulations under that Act. The Environmental Protection Agency is simply an aspirational title. Imagine if New Zealand truly had an environmental protection agency, then we wouldn’t be having this ongoing discussion about why rivers and streams are polluted with sewage from council waste-water systems, whose contamination it is in the river, or which council or which agency is tasked to clean it up, and about how come local government gives itself 25-year consents to pollute and to discharge waste water into our urban environment, because nobody is actually protecting the environment and enforcing the existing rules we have. So an environmental protection agency currently is in name only, but they do have this important task to regulate hazardous substances and new organisms.

It wasn’t that long ago that New Zealand engaged in a social, cultural, and political debate about this original Act and the genies that might be let out of the bottle that were new organisms. Now, what we know is that at the time, there were genuine concerns about biotechnology, and about what would happen if a dangerous new organism escaped a lab, infected people or animals, and spread around the world and caused great harm and, potentially, millions of deaths. Well, I can tell you that the kind of biotechnology that New Zealand needs is actually good. It is the technology that’s going to allow us to solve the climate crisis by allowing grasses that when cows eat them, they produce very few emissions, and when the cows decide it’s time to let one go and what they’ve let go ends up in the paddock, those discharges do not end up in rivers and streams.

These solutions are available in laboratories and they’re being used in our competitors’ farming, and yet they’re not available here because New Zealand still has social and cultural objections to the use of this technology and these systems that other countries that we compare ourselves to that were got over decades and decades ago. So while ACT generally agrees with the problem definition in this bill, we believe there’s a huge opportunity left on the floor of the Minister’s office, and that is actually to address how difficult it is to get consent for new biotechnology to be made available to actually solve some of our worst environmental problems.

When you think about the problems of didymo, a contamination in our beautiful freshwater streams, it’s algae and slime that’s transported easily by fishermen and by boats. Using conventional chemicals and physical clean-up techniques, it’s impossible to clean that stuff up. That is where biotechnology has an answer, potentially, and yet it’s next to impossible to consent that and to release it from outside research facilities. New Zealand needs to grow up and to accept that some of these things sound scary but actually they are good.

Now, it’s important to streamline regulations and yet one question that we have for the Government is: where actually is the ambition to reduce compliance costs and improve efficiency? Because while this proposal actually describes a simplified process, what we’ve heard from the previous speaker actually sounds like a desire to impose more rules, more restrictions on what you can do with basic products and materials that are incorporated into hundreds of thousands of manufactured products that we use in our home and in our businesses every day. And while the aspiration is laudable, the ACT Party does believe there’s a real risk during this regulation reform process that actually the compliance costs will increase and the compliance process will be opened up. Rather than having experts carefully assess the information, the process will be opened up to all and sundry to object.

Now we know what that means when it comes to land-use consents and resource management consents when there are a whole lot of organisations that have no skin in the game but have their own axe to grind—activists, Extinction Rebellion, climate activists—who might want to protest or object to a particular product that they feel doesn’t meet their social test, and are climate shaming and fearmongering about products that are used every day by people with no evidence of risk. It’s important that any regulation very clearly sets out what risks need to be evaluated, who are the people qualified to evaluate them, and which voices, while well-meaning, will not be considered in any look at hazardous substances. Because it’s no good saying, “Well, we need to adopt a precautionary principle.”, actually, we need to be not just thinking about protecting our environment and human health. We need to be ready to accept that there are many new products coming on the market much faster, at a much more rapid rate than previously, developed to deal with some real, real problems.

When we think of varroa mite that was killing our beehives and our bees, it took a very significant amount of courage for the Government at the time to actually agree to allow that insecticide to be used in our beehives with all of those risks that it would reduce the number of beehives and the status and quality of our honey that’s produced in New Zealand because we had to use a dangerous chemical pesticide. Well, as far as I’m aware, apart from a very small number of teething troubles, there has been no effect on human health recorded from allowing the pesticide used to control the varroa bee mite, but we still have beehives; we still have pollinators; and our farmers, our pastoral, and our horticultural producers can still rely on bees because the alternative, based on the fearmongering campaign that was run at the time about that particular pesticide, would have been no pollinators. So it’s important to recognise that while there are many well-meaning people who have genuine concerns about hazardous substances, it’s not necessary to take account of everybody’s concerns when we’re actually talking about some very limited risks that are well understood and that decisions can be made relatively quickly to allow new products and new substances to enter the market.

In terms of regulatory reform, ACT supports this bill to the first reading for some very simple reasons: we are seeking regulatory reform that simplifies and reduces compliance costs. We believe that Government should respond quickly to new information about existing substances where hazards and risks to human health are found and that a process should be applied to low-risk products in a timely and efficient manner. And that is the key: “timely and efficient”. Now, this is the same Environmental Protection Agency that’s been tasked with fast tracking consents. And what we know is it doesn’t appear that they are any faster than your local council. So, of course, in any reform process, we hope that the Government adequately resources this agency and sets some very clear targets and goals for what efficient processing, cost-effective processing, looks like to the businesses that will be applying for permits and applying to use new, manufactured substances in the course of making products and delivering services in New Zealand. For that reason, ACT supports this bill at first reading. Thank you very much, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a real pleasure to rise for the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Hazardous Substances Assessments) Amendment Bill. Before I have a very quick contribution, I’d just like to speak to the member who just resumed his seat, Simon Court. The concerns that you’ve raised—this is exactly what this bill is going to be doing. It’s going to speed things up, it’s going to make things a lot more sensible and a lot more practical. It is, essentially, going to make sure that we can use international knowledge and skills to speed up this process. So I think it does what it says on the tin, and I think you’ll be quite happy with the process.

Look, I am going to take a very short call, but I do want to just raise new section 76E, the international regulators. I think this is our key area that we need to be looking at at select committee. As a member of the Environment Committee, I’m very much looking forward to this matter. So we need to look at what has similar operating standards as the Environmental Protection Authority internationally. We need to look at a legislative regime that is comparable. So we need to look at similar comparable legislative regimes across the world, and we have to make sure that those decisions that are made are readily accessible. So we need to be able to easily find that information.

Now, that is going to speed up the process for us remarkably. This is a really important bill, and I just have to say to the Minister, I appreciate the work that has gone into this bill. It’s a really important bill and many of us knew about the aluminium dross that happened recently and how upset we all were in this country about that situation. This bill goes to addressing those issues; I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise to take a very short call to speak in support to select committee stage of the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Hazardous Substances Assessments) Amendment Bill. Now, we support it not just because it is dull but worthy, as my colleagues have somewhat unkindly characterised it, but mainly because it’s such a shock that this Labour Government is promoting anything that might address and reduce time-consuming, resource-intensive, inefficient and cumbersome bureaucratic processes, because quite frankly, most of the bills they put up for us to deliberate on have exactly the opposite aim and effect.

So following best-practice parenting skills, we should catch them when they are good, and give positive reinforcement in the hope that they might continue on in this vein. However, my colleague Scott Simpson has ruined that completely for me by telling us, in fact, that it was initiated by the Environmental Protection Authority, not the Government. So, clearly, we’re not entering an era of new, enlightened Government direction, and my initial euphoria has evaporated.

The bill, however, on the face of it, makes sense. We should try and avoid duplication and over-complicating processes, especially where they could have unintended consequences around the safety and environmental costs around delaying safer alternatives, and the continuation of use of not fit for purpose chemicals. Of course, we should be using relevant information from other international regulators instead of reinventing the wheel. Perhaps Pharmac might like to think about that also. We should be supporting an amendment that allows quicker and more efficient processing by the Environmental Protection Authority.

So we are happy to support the bill to go through to the select committee stage to enable further scrutiny of it and public input. I commend the bill to the House.

It is a pleasure to take a call tonight on the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Hazardous Substances Assessments) Amendment Bill. On behalf of the bill, it’s been called dull and uninspiring tonight, but, actually, I’ve got quite a pack of fascinating information that I’d encourage you all to read—including, as members of the House have pointed out tonight, the discussion document and the submissions that had come from the Environmental Protection Agency.

I must just respond to the previous speaker, Penny Simmonds, because it is disappointing, after a night of goodwill and camaraderie across the House in what I like to call “silly hour” at the end of the night, to see politicking around a bill that, actually, I think, many of us around the House tonight believe will make a positive difference to our industries, to our businesses, and to those organisations that have to work with hazardous substances.

So just coming back to the bill—because it took the previous speaker quite a long time to get to the bill tonight—as colleagues have pointed out, including my neighbouring electorate MP Stuart Smith from Kaikōura, this bill is actually incredibly important when you think about industry and the way it operates globally. As we recover from COVID and as we deal with some of the pressing issues of our time, like climate change, it is important that we reduce the unnecessary regulation and processes that we have. It is important that we do that to ensure that we can continue to trade, we can continue to grow our economy, and we can continue to assess the status of a chemical and how hazardous it is or isn’t; that we can make that assessment quickly. What this bill specifically does is it ensures that we are referencing global information, global best practice, and using that information to enhance our processes here in New Zealand.

On that note, it has been a pleasure to take a short call on this bill tonight. I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise to take a call on the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Hazardous Substances Assessments) Amendment Bill. I have to say, at the start of this debate the contributions were somewhat reasonable and then as we’ve got closer towards the end of the debate, the only relevance, I think, from the other side of the House is that the contributions have been hazardous and of limited to little substance. I certainly hope that, perhaps, the speaker from the Opposition that will follow perhaps will rectify that record moving forward.

As the Minister indicated, this is a bill that will continue to protect the environment. It’s actually quite discrete in nature because it will focus on an increase in the efficiencies, particularly in that regulatory process, but only relative to assessment or, alternatively, reassessment of hazardous substances. So it’s very, very defined in terms of the bill in front of us.

However, those efficiencies won’t be at the expense of the integrity of the process. So I think we just need to remind ourselves that it is quite a discrete bill that we are talking about here and previous contributions, I think, have missed that point. So as a member of the Environment Committee, I’m looking forward to getting my teeth into this, alongside colleagues, and on that basis I commend the bill to the House.

Well, I was going to be complimentary about my neighbouring MP until he took an unnecessary crack at the other side of the House. I won’t respond in kind but I will make the point that I’m of a generation whose father only listened to the Budget to see what the subsidy on 2,4,5-T would be. So I will appreciate the need for a hazardous substance piece of legislation going through this House.

I also am old enough to remember the lectures we got from Steffan Browning on the use of glyphosate, and he would’ve spent the full 10 minutes and glyphosate would have been mentioned every second of that speech, were he here tonight.

But I think this is a very good bill. The reason I think it’s a very good bill is because if you go back in history and you look at our history as a country, and our use of—or our, I guess, application of what we call hazardous substances, and a lot of them, of course, aren’t hazardous substances at all because the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) makes sure of that. In this country we find that we’re a very small market but they’re a very important part of what we do as a very small market in that we’re food producers. We use all sorts of products to produce that food. We’re large-animal users in New Zealand for various reasons, and, of course, a lot of these substances apply to animals. I guess if you take it to the extreme a lot of these sort of products apply to humans as well, but not necessarily through the EPA or hazardous substances and new organisms (HSNO).

But it is necessary for us to have access to the best possible products we can get around the world. Many of the big international companies that supply these products have difficulty justifying coming to New Zealand because our market’s so small, and the cost of entry here is so large. So I think this bill and the protocols around this bill and the method it intends to use to introduce product to New Zealand, I think, will be of great value to the country, and I think will improve, in my view, endlessly the process of getting product approved in New Zealand and ensuring that we are competitive in the international marketplace.

Only last week, interestingly, we had the EPA in the Primary Production Committee talking about this, not this bill but these very issues and how they go through the processes that they do to approve product in New Zealand. I think we should be pretty pleased or pretty proud, actually, of the way the EPA operates, given that we are a very small market, and we’re dealing with hundreds and hundreds of different products. They have a pretty challenging situation. So for them to be able to use international information from countries of like interest to New Zealand will be hugely valuable as we go forward in life.

As a person who’s spent half a lifetime, I guess, using these products, it’s always been a concern to me that New Zealand wouldn’t have access to the best international products. If we don’t have access to those best international products, whatever they might be, then we become uncompetitive. I think that would be a great challenge for New Zealand. So that’s one of the—well, that is the reason I think this bill has got such a lot of value to New Zealand.

Just going back to those Budgets of old, and if you think about subsidy on 2,4,5-T, for example, I can think of at least Bill Rowling and Rob Muldoon, both of whom as finance Ministers approved those sort of subsidies. Those days are long gone, but none the less it is necessary for us in New Zealand to encourage the use of the right type of product, and also to encourage the use of product that we can later justify in the international marketplace. That’s why I refer to the things like 2,4,5-T because at the time those products were perfectly legitimate, and they were they were accepted as being products that would do no harm in the future. I don’t know whether the work had been done on those products, but none the less they were products we used, and that’s how life seems to evolve. We go through stages where things that are perfectly acceptable, later on in life, become unacceptable.

I think that it’s hugely important for the science behind the work that the EPA does to be as good as you can get at the time. Of course, science evolves as well. One product that comes to mind for me that was mentioned by the Greens speaker earlier is per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), which we thought was a perfectly legitimate product to New Zealand. It was used in firefighting and all sorts of, I guess, community-good projects. Now we find it contaminates water supplies. So that’s how things evolve and change. I guess at the time PFAS was introduced, for example, we didn’t understand the potential damage it might do; we now do. So the world changes quickly. So it’s important that not only is the EPA able to use the best information available worldwide, but it’s also able, I guess, to fund the work that it needs to do, and clearly they’ve got a mechanism in place to do that.

I have great faith in the EPA. I have great faith in the HSNO Act, and I think that bringing it to the House is probably—well, it’s not probably, I think it’s certainly—very good for New Zealand. I hope the discussion that happens in the select committee is constructive, I’m sure it will be, and that we get this bill passed as quickly as possible. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Over the last couple of years, I’ve had quite a few people contacting my office and quite a lot of concerns about the chemicals and sprays going into the environment, and not just in the context of the Mataura dross situation, but a lot of them are concerned around the use of herbicides, weedkillers, and the tendency to spray them in our waterways or around our waterways or just along the kerbsides rather than manual weeding. I think that’s why, thinking about the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act, it’s really important to make sure that we know that chemicals are safe and they’re used in a safe way.

I think that’s one of the main purposes of the Act, to protect the environment and the health and safety of people and communities from the adverse effects of hazardous substances, but the problem we’ve got at the moment is that reassessments and assessments of hazardous substances can take a long time, take quite an in-depth process, and so what happens is it may mean the delayed entry of new chemicals coming in which could actually replace more unsafe chemicals. That happens. Then, basically, the other issue is that some chemicals may continue to be used, or the controls continue to be used, when they really shouldn’t, and so it’s really important that we do get more efficient in terms of the assessment process.

So what this bill will do is allow the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) to make better use of information from international regulators, leading to more timely assessments and reassessments of chemicals. So, basically, for example, the rapid assessment for importation and manufacture of hazardous substances, that part of the Act—what it will now mean is the EPA potentially could approve a hazardous substance if the same substance has been authorised by an international regulator. There are a lot of other issues around that to be considered, but what it will mean is that things can happen in a much more timely manner. So it’s a small but very effective bill, and I’m very happy to commend it to the House.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a first time.

The question is, That Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Hazardous Substances Assessments) Amendment Bill be considered by the Environment Committee.

Motion agreed to.

Bill referred to the Environment Committee.