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

I present a legislative statement on the Hazardous—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): No. Order! I understand that the Minister is required to seek leave. Does he have those words?

No, I don’t.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): There you go.

Thank you. Madam Speaker, I seek leave to present a legislative statement on the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Hazardous Substances Assessments) Amendment Bill.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Leave has been sought for that course of action. Is there any objection? There is none. That legislative statement—one more thing I need to do—is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Madam Speaker, thank you, and thank you for your assistance in respect of that issue that we just dealt with.

This bill improves the way chemicals are assessed or reassessed—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): No. Sorry, just one more—

I move, That the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Hazardous Substances Assessments) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

This bill improves the way chemicals are—[Applause]. Thank you, it’s a high-wire act! This bill improves the way chemicals are assessed or reassessed by the Environmental Protection Authority, the EPA. Can I thank the chair of the Environment Committee, the Hon Eugenie Sage, and other members of the committee for their thorough consideration of this bill, and the submitters who made thoughtful and helpful written and oral submissions to the committee. The bill had broad cross-party support at introduction and through the select committee process, and I think this reflects the importance that people attach to the good management of chemicals in our country, which is needed to protect the health and welfare of the citizens as well as the environment.

We rely on literally tens of thousands of chemicals in New Zealand in industrial processes, in agriculture, and in many other aspects of modern life, including cleaning products in our own homes. As the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment noted recently in a report about chemicals management in New Zealand, the rules about how a chemical can be used or shouldn’t be used ought not to be static. We need to be able to adapt as new information comes to light. As he noted and, I think, many of us know, there have been chemicals that are in use in New Zealand for decades that have not been subject to close scrutiny. There are also many substitutes for those chemicals that are used overseas that are not registered for use in New Zealand, in part, because we are a very small market and the regulatory barriers to registration can sometimes stop the owners of the rights to those chemicals applying for registration of a new chemical, which may be better and less harmful than an existing chemical that is being used.

Our chemical reassessment processes for existing substances and our assessment processes for modern are slow and expensive, and this bill will help to speed up those assessments and reduce those costs by making it easier for the EPA to make use of information from international regulators. Now, I for one and, I think, most members of this House realise that there are some very good careful regulators overseas—not all jurisdictions would be on the list, but many would be—and some of those countries go through very, very expensive and thorough processes to consider the pluses and minuses of existing chemicals or new chemicals and bring out determinations that are very, very well reasoned. The purpose of this bill is to enable that work done in other countries to be more easily adopted in New Zealand, rather than us repeating it here or rather than us—actually, more often the case—not repeating it and being stuck with the status quo, which can be worse than improvements that could be made if the EPA can consider that overseas information.

So the Environment Committee considered the bill, and they’ve reported it back with some amendments, and I’m pleased to report to the House that I accept the committee’s commentary and the proposed amendments. The amendments that the committee has recommended include the express power to amend the notice on international regulations, which makes it clear that the EPA can amend the notice at any time whilst following the correct procedure. And there are other amendments to improve the clarity or transparency of the bill.

To conclude, I think this will result in environmental and business improvements in New Zealand. I, again, thank the members of the committee, acknowledge the advice from the EPA and the ministry, as well as the work of Parliamentary Counsel Office and advisors to the committee. Thank you.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. I think the Minister’s very accurately summed up the committee’s report back in this second reading in his legislative statement, and I appreciate his comments on it. I recall, in the first reading introductory speech that I made on this bill, that I sort of classified it as dull but worthy. Nothing that occurred in the select committee process has caused me to change my view on that—dull but worthy—but sometimes this Parliament needs to pass dull but worthy pieces of legislation because they have a practical implication that is actually common sense, that is pragmatic, and that is sensible. So we, on this side of the House, are supporting this legislation and will continue to do so.

We’ve got a sort of a quirky cultural conditioning that occurs in New Zealand too frequently, in my view, not just in relation to matters to do with the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA), but across so much of what we do as a society. That is that we have this view that we must always come up with a uniquely original, bespoke Kiwi approach to everything, and that anything we do should start with a blank piece of paper, and that our position on any kind of subject of the day should be a Kiwi New Zealand solution, and that we should completely ignore the work and effort and science and information that is available from jurisdictions similar to our own.

That’s not always the case, of course, and I’m kind of exaggerating, but essentially the way the Environmental Protection Authority was set up, and the legislation under which it operates and the regulatory environment under which it operates, has precluded it from taking on board and examining the oftentimes very useful scientific chemical information, the data that is available, from other jurisdictions similar to our own. So they’ve had to spend an inordinate amount of time, energy, resources, money on often replicating work that has already been done in other jurisdictions. And I’m not talking about jurisdictions that we might consider sort of—now, I’d better not upset the diplomats—fringe jurisdictions, but jurisdictions where we would recognise the credibility and the substance of their scientific data and information from similar bodies, such as our own EPA. It just seems to me to be eminently sensible that the EPA should be able to take into account the work, the data, the science that comes from those sorts of jurisdictions and other similar bodies, when they are assessing the worth and practical application of the literally hundreds of thousands of chemicals that we ask them to keep an eye on, on our collective behalf.

One of the reasons that this has been a problem is not just the cost and the effort that’s required to come up with our own bespoke solutions and science around all these chemicals, but it’s actually that in some cases the time taken to do it has actually prevented some really good environmental outcomes from occurring. And that delayed process has actually hindered some of the good things that could have been done by use of modern new chemicals and science that has not yet been tested under the previous rules that the EPA had to operate under.

So this is a piece of legislation that we are supporting. It provides, as the Minister said, a simplified process for the EPA to update hazard classifications of substances and corresponding controls. And, just to give the House and people who might be listening to this—the EPA is responsible for providing that kind of advice on something north of 150,000 separate chemicals. That’s a very big portfolio, by any measure. So if we can provide, as a Parliament, a level of greater efficiency for them to their assessment process and also their reassessment of chemicals as they are required to do for hazardous substances from time to time, then, on the face of it, the rationale for this piece of legislation seems to us to be very worthwhile indeed.

Currently, the assessment and reassessment of hazardous substances in New Zealand is time-consuming and it’s very resource-intensive. Our EPA is actually a very small agency by comparison to the environmental protection agencies and authorities in other parts of the world. And I think there is an argument for actually—notwithstanding the constraints of prudent use of taxpayer money, but I think there’s an opportunity actually to have a wider discussion that goes beyond this piece of legislation about the role and the shape and the future and the extent to which the EPA could actually benefit us and be a more useful organisation in an expanded form. That’s a discussion and a debate for another day. But I want to indicate to the House and to the Minister, who I see is nodding, that that’s a conversation we’d be up for at some point, and I think that that would be probably appropriate.

The EPA was established under a National Government with quite a narrow purview, in terms of what it was supposed to do, but actually a very big workload that goes with that narrow purview. And it’s an agency that needs to be funded, resourced, and equipped to do the job that we are asking of it in its current format, let alone any kind of a different or expanded role. So these proposals would, effectively, give the EPA the flexibility and the discretion in the decision making that they make to consider science, technology, information, and data from similar jurisdictions to our own that are credible, reliable, and trusted. I think that that will add enormous efficiency to the work that they do, that we ask them to do on our behalf.

The Minister, I’m pleased to see here, has accepted the recommendations that the select committee made. I think this was an exercise that actually quietly and sort of under the radar represents the very best part of the parliamentary and select committee process where the diligent, careful attention to detail is applied by the select committee and the submitters, and a good result is achieved. And as a result of that, the legislation has been improved a wee bit, and that’s a good thing; that’s part of the process. And I, too, want to commend those people that made submissions for their time, diligence, and effort, also to the select committee members, the secretariat who helped guide us through this legislation. National has no problem in supporting this piece of legislation. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, for this opportunity to speak on the second reading of the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Hazardous Substances Assessments) Amendment Bill. We’ve had some big discussions in the House this morning. We’ve been talking about how to reform the whole resource management system, climate budgets—how do we decarbonise our country and society—and then we’ve had the constitutional issue of parliamentary sovereignty with the legislation for the declaration of inconsistencies. There’s been very good debate in the Chamber this morning, in my opinion, about these really important issues.

But now we come to an amendment bill on hazardous substances. As the former speaker just said, “I think it’s dull but worthy.”, and I concur with that assessment. Even in the title of the bill, we have hazardous substances, which is the bit we’re talking about today, and new organisms. New organisms—that gets people excited. I had dinner with a number of members last night with the Royal Society and mentioned we’ve got a bill coming up on hazardous substances—or HSNO, hazardous substances and new organisms—and they were very excited that we might be doing something around new organisms. But in fact this bill is about making the regulation of those hazardous substances, the chemicals, better.

So as we’ve heard, the EPA, the Environmental Protection Authority, is the regulator of hazardous substances, of these chemicals that we’ve been hearing about. The purpose of this amending legislation is to enable that EPA, the regulator, to use information from international regulators. So this is for the assessment and reassessment of whether or not chemicals should be in New Zealand and how they should be used.

We heard from the Minister the “why”—why do we want the EPA to be able to use this information from international regulators? It’s because there can be benefits from regulating new chemicals. It may be that there is a new chemical, rather than one that’s currently regulated, that has fewer environmental impacts, or it may be more economic, or there might be fewer health risks. Currently, it is a fairly slow and costly process. In 2001 to 2019, the EPA did 51 reassessments, and at 2019 there were 39 remaining in the queue. That goes to the Minister’s comment about how we’re a bit stuck with the status quo, and hopefully this will be a prompt to change things.

Very quickly, I just want to go to clause 11 of the bill, which has a new section, 76E. This is a key provision about the role of these—how we’re going to use information from the international regulators. So, first of all, it’s good to note, or important to note, that there must be a notice in the Gazette to say whether or not an overseas body is one of these international regulators. We heard just then from the Hon Scott Simpson that we want to avoid what he termed “fringe jurisdictions”, so this is the part of the bill that deals with that.

Then there are some criteria for what those international organisations might be, and they include that “the body operates in a manner comparable to the Authority”—that’s the EPA—“in regulating hazardous substances;”, that “the legislative regime regulating hazardous substances in which the body operates is comparable to this Act;”—to our HSNO legislation—and that “the information from the body is readily accessible by the Authority.”; the EPA.

At the Environment Committee we had 28 submissions and 12 oral submissions. The changes being made or recommended by the select committee, that the Minister has just said that he agrees to, they were all unanimously in support across the table, which is always a good thing. It means that you come into the House, speaking after the Hon Scott Simpson, and agree with what he said.

💬 Hon Member: You do anyway!

Ha, ha! So, like the Hon Scott Simpson, I do want to thank the submitters for taking that time out to explain to us the issues that they have and why it’s so important that particularly the chemicals that they might use in agriculture or manufacturing or extractive industries or science—that the regulation of that is timely and is cost-efficient as well.

I commend the EPA for the work that they do with us and note that they are an important part of our Public Service.

Like the Minister mentioned—he talked briefly about the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment having a recent report on chemicals, and so I look forward to that coming to the Environment Committee and commend this bill to the House. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Well, it is a pleasure to actually speak on the bill. I didn’t sit on the Environment Committee on this, the hazardous substances and new organisms amendment bill—I won’t go through the whole name—but it is really important. I think that this bill will make life a lot easier for people and improve the availability, by either making it available or not available, of hazardous substances in New Zealand.

We are a small market, and drawing from my past life I know the difficulty of getting new chemicals into New Zealand that can be utilised in the wine industry is a long and torturous process. The costs are enormous, and the chemical companies see this as a very small market. The hoops that have to be jumped through to get chemicals which are accepted in markets that we would align ourselves with—like Australia, for example—are often very difficult to get into New Zealand, or other markets like the US or Europe. And so those hoops are very hard to get through, expensive, and it simply doesn’t happen. And we’re all worse off because the chemicals that they are replacing are often much more invasive or dangerous to the environment, and do a better job at controlling whatever it is that they’ve been brought in for. That’s the reason we do bring in new chemistry, because that chemistry is offering a service or an end that we want.

So it’s great that this allows the Environmental Protection Authority to adopt research and validate the claims that are from other similar jurisdictions, as my colleague said, albeit that there’ll be select jurisdictions—not just anything goes. I actually hope this is a sign of things to come, because the genetic engineering (GE) subject is something that we all need to have a discussion about, and perhaps we could come through with a cross-Parliament bill like this that we could end up having that conversation—I think it would be very timely. Given that we’ve all talked a lot about climate change today, that’s absolutely apropos to that GE discussion. So it’s good to see that that’s on the radar of people across the House.

The select committee—as I said, I wasn’t there, but I note that some of the things it’s doing are really quite important, like requiring the authority to publish their decisions, and when it gives its decisions in writing it’s to also notify every person who made a submission. I think that’s a very good thing. I wonder why we don’t do this anyway—I think that’s a very sensible thing to do. If people have taken the time to go to select committee and contribute to the process of approving or not a particular chemical, they should have the courtesy of a notification that it’s either been approved or disapproved.

This is a very iterative process. I notice that clause 4 is to require the authority to develop a work plan, and to give priority to certain hazardous substances that are either prohibited or restricted during a reassessment under section 64, amended by clause 24A, and that it will be made freely available on the internet—I think that’s a great idea. But I think the whole purpose of this is to allow chemicals and substances to be assessed, and if they are no longer appropriate to be used in New Zealand they are dealt with very quickly. If they are chemicals and substances that will be coming in and substituting other ones, and we’ve got good science for it, we make that simple and easy—I shouldn’t say “science”; I should say evidence or data, because science isn’t something we’d be looking for; it would be actually evidence and data. Scientific evidence and scientific data, but not “the science”—because that’s a nonsense term. But I think this is a very appropriate piece of legislation, and I have great pleasure in commending it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise and take a call on this bill—it’s a long name—the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Hazardous Substances Assessments) Amendment Bill, which actually amends the primary legislation of 1996, which is the hazardous substances and new organisms bill. I want to acknowledge the Minister, the Hon David Parker, and the Hon Eugenie Sage, our chair of the select committee.

People have talked about this being a dull bill, but nevertheless a practical one. What I would say is what sits behind it is a huge body of incredibly passionate people who really are interested and concerned about the uses of chemicals in this country and what we do with them. So while it is quite a dense piece of legislation—and lots of foibles are attached to it—I think as New Zealanders, as Kiwis, we’re all pretty interested in this area and making sure we’ve got the best system we can have in the world to ensure that our country has a good reputation and we’re safe.

So the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) have roughly 3,500 approvals, and again under those approvals there’s also another set of approvals which are like the group standard approvals as well. So I went and had a look—because this is quite a complex area—on how to get a chemical approved, and so you basically go into the EPA website and you work your way through the system to find your chemical. It’s highly complex and it’s quite technical, but it is actually quite a useful and workable system. I understand there’s about 150,000 hazardous-type substances in New Zealand, so this is a really complex huge area. But also, it’s an area that most of us probably don’t think about on a day-to-day basis.

So this bill just makes some technical amendments to change the chemical assessment process for the EPA. Part of that is, essentially, around making it faster, cheaper, and more streamlined, really, which you will note that it is unanimous across the House, that we all agree with this legislation. The member Rachel Brooking spoke to this really well and I always hate following someone who’s very technically competent in the law. She spoke about 76E, which is around making better use of information from overseas. There’s a whole series—we discussed this in great depth and at great length in the select committee process—around who we could use, which countries were appropriate, which regulatory systems were appropriate, for us to borrow the knowledge of and speed up the process.

So we worked and crafted this really carefully to ensure that the EPA, when selecting these similar jurisdictions, that they need to go through a process publicly, first and foremost, so that is they need to publicly notify that they’re considering this regulatory regime from another jurisdiction. They need to give those interested parties reasonable time to make a submission, and they also have to consult, actively go out and consult. So I think that’s a really safe place to land, in regards to finding those overseas jurisdictions.

The second thing is they can’t recognise those jurisdictions unless that jurisdiction’s operations are comparable, that the legislative regime is similar to our own, and finally that the information is easily found and accessible. So that jurisdiction publishes or is publicly available or available in a readily accessible form, and that way it means that there’s no secret squirrel about this stuff; it means that, actually, they are going to be able to find the information easily and readily. That’s important for the speed and also for ensuring that there is a real transparency.

So while this bill has been called dull, I would disagree. It is quite an interesting area, and I’m just going to stand up for the little piece of highly, highly technical but somewhat fascinating legislation. I commend it to the House.

E te Māngai o te Whare, tēnā koe. I’m pleased to take a short call on the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Hazardous Substances Assessments) Amendment Bill. This was an interesting bill in terms of submissions—particularly appreciative of submissions from the horticultural sector and Onions New Zealand, for example. Apparently, New Zealand is one of the best countries in the world to grow onions. A lot of our onions are exported and the sector is in the process of positioning itself as the premium grower of onions internationally.

So the concerns that a lot of growers have, and others have mentioned this too, is that because we’ve got a very small market for chemicals, where there are alternatives to existing chemicals which may have much reduced environmental impacts, it’s often not worthwhile for the companies to seek the regulatory approvals for their use here. So this bill is quite important, as others have also mentioned, in streamlining the process and enabling the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) to rely on information from trusted regulators overseas. And, as Onions New Zealand noted, particularly in the EU, the European Commission is proposing to reduce the overall use of pesticides, or current pesticides, by 50 percent by 2030. So a lot of the growers here will need to meet those targets if we’re wanting produce to market there. They see that as a great opportunity rather than just a challenge, and I think the bill, in allowing the use of trusted regulators, will certainly assist here.

Some submitters suggested that the EPA should rely much more on the European Food Safety Authority and the European Chemicals Agency as trusted regulators because their decision-making processes are much more hazard-based than some perhaps elsewhere, and they’ve got a much stronger focus on the toxicity of the formulations that are being assessed. So would encourage the EPA to look there.

In terms of the streamlining of processes, there were others like the Physicians and Scientists for Global Responsibility, who remain really concerned that in Aotearoa New Zealand we’ve currently got more suspected carcinogens being emitted into the environment than in Europe or the USA, and many of the chemicals that we are able to use here in Aotearoa aren’t authorised for use in the European Union. So ensuring that that assessment process through the EPA is well resourced is critical. That’s not something the bill deals with, but the EPA for a number of years has not had any increases in its funding and it would be able to do a much better job if we recognised its importance as an independent regulator and it was properly resourced by Government.

The bill, through select committee, we didn’t make any substantive changes to it—but would encourage the EPA to look at particularly the submissions of Ngāi Tahu, because the EPA has a Ngā Kaihautū Tikanga Taiao body to provide advice in terms of Te Ao Māori. But the concerns of Ngāi Tahu were that this wasn’t adequate in ensuring that a Te Ao Māori perspective was adequately reflected in the assessments, and the EPA having a duty to really encourage applicants for new chemicals to engage properly with Māori to recognise the concerns that they may have in terms of impacts on Papatūānuku or just their whole perspective.

So the bill is a small improvement, but we need to go much further in improving the regulation of hazardous substances in Aotearoa. And note also that a number of submitters sought changes to the legislation to allow the use of gene editing technology, like CRISPR. That is another whole debate. It’s not within the scope of this bill, and that is for the Government to pursue elsewhere. So the Green Party supports the bill and I commend it to the House.

Members, this debate is interrupted and set down for resumption next sitting day. The House stands adjourned until 2 p.m. today.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 12.55 p.m.