Crown Minerals Amendment Bill

I present a legislative statement on the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill.

SPEAKER: That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the parliamentary website.

Hon SHANE JONES: I move, That the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee to consider the bill. At the appropriate time, I intend to move that the bill be reported to the House by 31 October 2024, and that the committee have authority to meet at any time while the House is sitting (except during oral questions) during any evening on a day on which there has been a sitting of the House, on a Friday in a week in which there has been a sitting of the House, and outside the Wellington area, despite Standing Orders 193, 195, and 196.

For the benefit of the House and the broader community tuned in, I shall now focus on the key changes in this bill and explain why the Government is pursuing them. Our Government inherited a dire situation where gas supply has been tight and demand grossly exceeds supply. Why does this situation exist? It exists because of an ideological urge to reject the value of an indigenous resource in New Zealand called natural gas that represents a key contingency fuel that offers security to New Zealand’s energy system. There is an irrational belief that this valuable resource represents a threat to New Zealand’s reputation, New Zealand’s stamina, economically. Our Government rejects that ideological claptrap.

We need natural gas to provide electricity generation at a time where our hydro lakes cannot service demand. Yes, there is an appetite for more renewable resources to create energy. Sadly, our current fields are in decline. We need more investment, but who will invest when regimes come into place in New Zealand and go out of their way to demonise and stigmatise investors, indiscriminately destroying rights, undermining certainty, and going out of their way to trivialise the ambitions of economic investors?

Methanex, recently—a large international company—halted all production. This is a type of deindustrialisation, a direct consequence of an ideology driven by this vain pursuit that New Zealand can be a world leader, in the vain hope that New Zealand alone will save the planet—something that I personally reject. New Zealand must look after itself before it cares for the planet. Without secure energy, without affordable energy, we are going to see the closure of industry in New Zealand, just as the last regime closed down the only refinery in New Zealand.

That’s why this bill will create additional certainty and enable investment to take place. It will reverse the ban on offshore gas exploration put in place by the last Government. It will re-establish New Zealand as a place attractive to overseas investors and halt the slip of our reputation towards a Venezuelan destination. Not only will the reversal of the ban create good outcomes for energy security; it will open up new opportunities and enable the Crown to receive fresh applications for offshore exploration. But, at a more fundamental level, my message to Kiwis, is that the last Government did not put a large sign up for the rest of the world to believe that we’re open for business. They set up a closed-door approach, showing that we were the “Hermit Kingdom”. No, this bill clearly identifies that we most certainly are going to trust in our own ability to deliver secure energy and we will pursue gas, which is a better outcome than imported coal.

I have taken account of the concerns of the industry. The bill makes three key changes. It will reduce the burden on permit holders while continuing to protect the Crown, private landowners, and ultimately the taxpayer. We will bring more flexibility to how mandatory financial securities are held. We will limit the trailing liability to the immediate prior permit holder. We’re not going to go back to the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve, with you believing that you can pursue liabilities to multiple corporate generations and that having the effect of destroying confidence. Therein lies the ideological difference between this side of the House and that side of the House. They overstate risk and understate cost. In addition to that, we are going to ensure that small-scale mining can proceed with minimal bureaucratic interference.

Now, something might be said about the impact on our emissions. We remain dedicated to an energy transition, but not to the point of hollowing out jobs and deindustrialisation. That type of fuzzy communist thinking has no place on this side of the House. I repeat: natural gas is critical. It will have a place until at least 2050. Increases in emissions from gas supply are vastly preferable to our reliance on coal, but the reality is we need all of the options if we are to deliver affordable, secure energy. No one is going to invest in our economy if we cannot provide a menu of security. No one is going to trust a Government, a regulatory environment, if their rights are going to be indiscriminately destroyed, as it happened under the last regime. We’re going to hear apocryphal stories that the planet is going to boil and that jobs are going to suddenly appear because of clean green energy. Jobs follow investment. Investment dies at the feet of uncertainty and indiscriminate changes as a consequence of capricious bureaucracy, something that characterised the energy policy of the last Government.

In conclusion, this bill introduces a set of changes to the Crown Minerals Act to immediately improve the economics of the petroleum investment in New Zealand and the regulatory efficiency of the Crown minerals regime. It removes the ban on new petroleum exploration beyond the shore of Taranaki, signalling that NZ is open for business. It adjusts the decommissioning regime and moves away from these apocryphal stories, exaggerations, and we will have a response that is proportionate to the risk that is being managed—something sadly absent from the responses from the last regime. And it will boost gas production to improve the security of supply—something sorely needed by garden variety Kiwis and businesses. I commend this bill to the House.

Labour will be opposing this bill, and Labour will be opposing this bill in a very strenuous way, because this is a dark day for New Zealand. This is a day when the three-headed monster of a Government is taking New Zealand backwards. It is taking New Zealand backwards not based on any benefit to New Zealand, certainly not putting New Zealand first, but it is taking New Zealand backwards for the sake of it and for the sake of political sloganeering.

I am not going to spend the time of my speech reminding those on the opposite benches of the large body of climate science that tells us about the need to keep oil and gas in the ground—I’m taking that as a given. I’m assuming members opposite actually do engage in that literature. I am going to spend my time in this speech talking about how today signifies a time when the three parties of this Government firmly plant in the ground their backwards-looking plan that is no plan. All three parties in this coalition are showing their true colours today. They will be judged by their actions for generations to come. This is a bill that certainly does not put New Zealand first; it puts New Zealand at risk. This bill is quite simply climate denying, populist, right-wing virtue signalling.

Why are they doing this? Let’s go through the stated reasons why they are doing it. Let’s read from the explanatory note. They’re saying it’s “to ensure that gas remains a transition fuel until viable and cost-effective alternatives are in place.” Well, let’s go through those claims. Let’s examine it. Ensuring that gas remains a transition fuel: the reality is entirely different, and they know that because their own regulatory impact statement for the bill tells them that. Paragraph 37 tells them that “Exploration activity in New Zealand has been declining since 2014, before the 2018 ban on new petroleum exploration outside onshore Taranaki. This is consistent with global trends in upstream oil and gas”. They have, in black and white, the fact that gas production in New Zealand had been declining.

They need to face reality. There is no guarantee that investors will come—their own advice tells them that—and there is no guarantee that anything will be found. Even then, if they did find something, it takes on average of 16 years to take it from exploration to production. Any crocodile tears and claims that we hear about how this is an immediate panacea for our energy situation are simply false. It will be 2040, at a minimum, before we would see any of the gas from the reversal of this ban. But the Minister has come up with a plan, and what he sees is the fact that internationally people are not investing in new oil and gas. It simply isn’t here in New Zealand, and it hasn’t been commercially viable for a couple of decades. The Minister has a plan, and that has been cooking up what inducements he can offer to offshore multinational big oil and gas companies to come to New Zealand. When his officials told him that he couldn’t really use the taxpayers’ dime to underwrite the risk for these multinational companies to come to New Zealand, he’s gone back to the playbook of Muldoon, and he’s said he wants to put in place Muldoon-esque 30-year offtake gas agreements—once again putting the New Zealand taxpayer at risk.

Make absolutely no illusions, this bill is the wish list of the oil and gas industry. This is not the wish list of the New Zealand public. This is not putting New Zealand first. Certainly, the Minister’s plans around decommissioning are once again putting New Zealand taxpayers on the hook for the hundreds of millions of dollars that it cost to clean up big oil and gas’s mess after Tui, and they are once again going to be on play, because this is a Government that is beholden to the oil and gas industry. They do not have New Zealanders’ interests at heart; they have the big end of town’s.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. If we are to have a future on this planet, the oil and gas industry and the coal industry must have no future. Now, is it convenient to transition our energy system from the means by which we have powered most of the world for the last 200 years? No, it is not convenient. Is it something we do for a laugh? No, it is not something we do for a laugh. It is something we do because the science of climate change—which the other side of the House are in rabid denial of—tells us that we have to move away from oil, gas, and coal.

Now, the Minister spoke about the rights of the industry. What about the rights of future generations to a livable planet? The head of the United Nations, António Guterres, talks about us sentencing future generations to untold human suffering. That will be the consequence if we do not avert the worst effects of global heating by the end of the century, when we start heading towards 3 degrees of heating. That is why we must make a transition. I absolutely agree with the Minister that this is not about New Zealand being on some personal crusade—far from it. In fact, we are an absolute laggard in terms of reducing our gross emissions. We are way behind many countries in the world on doing this. It’s actually about us being part of the global community and addressing this existential global threat.

In regard to the reinstatement of oil and gas exploration, it is very important that we give a very clear message to the industry. That message to the industry is that it should be on notice that the consents granted during a climate emergency by this Government to oil and gas exploration will be revoked by a future Green Government.

Sam Uffindell: Vandals.

STEVE ABEL: That is—vandals. It’s interesting that the party that wants to vandalise the functional viability of the atmosphere on which all humanity and, in fact, all life on Earth depends, by continuing to pollute it with carbon dioxide, is calling those of us who want to stop the destruction of the viability of life on Earth the vandals. In fact, that’s exactly what we’re here to do: to stop the vandalism.

One thing that industry needs is a certainty in terms of their political future. I had the privilege of being part of the seven-year campaign against offshore oil and gas exploration. What I can tell you is that, one by one, the companies that came to this country were chased out of this country by alliances between members of the public, non-government organisations, and tangata whenua Māori—beginning with Te Whānau-ā-Apanui on the East Coast against Petrobras. The gentleman from Petrobras was so moved to tears by the commitment of the iwi at the top of the East Cape when he went there to meet them that he said that in the 20 nations where Petrobras operates, it had never encountered such resistance as it did in Aotearoa New Zealand to their oil drilling, and Petrobras left. Ngāi Tahu chased Anadarko away from prospects off Kaikōura. Likewise, Ngāpuhi sent Statoil packing. These companies, one by one, departed New Zealand, even before the ban came into place in 2018. This is a distant prospect. New Zealand is a terrible prospect because there is no political future in oil and gas exploration, and there is no future for any of us if we do not bring an end to it and move to clean energy.

What I also want to speak to briefly in the time remaining is how destabilising it is for industry in this country to have these massive flips in the wrong direction by a reactionary Government like this, because industry do want us to be in a general trajectory towards clean energy, towards actual sustainability, rather than destruction of nature and destruction of the climate for the profit of a handful of industries.

What I would say to the Minister is that it feels like the decisions are being made by older men who condemn future generation to that untold human suffering that the head of the United Nations warned us of. We absolutely condemn this bill. We will certainly be voting against it. When there is a Green Government at some time in the near future, perhaps in a couple of years from now, we will reinstate the ban on offshore oil and gas exploration, we will invest in renewable energy, which is what we need, and we will revoke any permits issued by the Luxon Government. The industry is on notice. Thank you.

Nothing says “buy now, pay later” like Labour’s announcement of 2018 that they were going to ban oil and gas exploration. Kiwis are paying for that announcement now in high energy bills, factory closures, and jobs being lost in the regions. Thanks, Labour.

When I heard that news, I was working as a civil engineer, and I couldn’t believe it. I thought, “That’s insane. What country in the world would pull the rug out of its energy industry, which supports industry, businesses, jobs, livelihoods, and people?” Well, the former Labour Government was that insane. No Government in the world has said they care so little about progress and people that, instead of promoting the use of minerals and resources that make people wealthier, they would just manage them—whatever that means—but that’s what the previous Government did.

It was that issue, amongst many others, that led me to ACT and led me to this Parliament. That is why I’m so proud to be here today supporting this bill, a bill that ACT campaigned on, and the policy changes that are in the ACT-National coalition agreement: to update the Crown Minerals Act, to restore its role as promoting the use of Crown minerals, to explore the potential for a critical minerals list, where such minerals would have a preferential pathway to access—that’s a separate piece of work that Minister Jones, the Minister for Resources, is undertaking with my support—and to repeal the ban on offshore gas exploration.

Now, I know this is going to trigger the anti-progress, anti-human lynch mob in the Green Party and their military wing, Greenpeace, but they should know that the ACT Party and the coalition Government are actually doing this for them, because ACT supports mining so that the Green Party and Greenpeace can have mobile phones. We don’t agree with them live streaming the thuggish behaviour when they locked up all of those terrified people at Straterra’s office yesterday, but we still want them to have a mobile phone. That’s why we support and promote the use of minerals. We support removing the ban on oil and gas exploration so that the Green MPs and their mates in Greenpeace can fly around on jet planes to climate conferences and back and forth to Parliament every week. We want the Green Party and Greenpeace to have the same benefits that we think all New Zealanders should have access to. That is what oil and gas and mined minerals deliver for all of our society.

New Zealanders need better jobs, they need higher incomes, the businesses they work for need to get back on the productivity cycle, and that is what mining minerals and oil and gas for energy and raw materials offers New Zealand. New Zealanders who wonder how they’re going to get ahead in life and are thinking about a career in mining or the oil and gas industry will have another option. Until now, it’s been, “How much is a plane ticket to Australia?” We want them to have an option to be able to work in these highly skilled, high-paid industries right here in New Zealand, particularly in the regions and the provinces where they might choose to live because that’s where they and their families feel comfortable.

New Zealanders need more certainty about gas supply, and that is what repealing the ban on oil and gas exploration offers. Increasing the availability of natural gas means that manufacturing and high-paid jobs are more secure. It means that businesses can invest with confidence when they can obtain the energy and the raw materials they need in their supply chain. It means that New Zealand is more resilient to energy and supply chain crises, such as we experienced during the COVID lockdown period. It means that household energy bills are more affordable than without indigenous natural gas. Nothing says this coalition Government is delivering real change like repealing the ban on oil and gas exploration and promoting the use of Crown minerals.

I’m proud to support this bill on behalf of the ACT Party and all the New Zealanders who voted for this coalition Government. Thank you very much, Mr Speaker.

On behalf of the National Party, we will be supporting this bill, the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill. A significant part of this bill reverses the ban on oil and gas that was made in 2018, which we believe, along with ACT, was harmful for our economy, harmful for our environment, and harmful for our energy sector.

This bill is about energy security. It’s about economic growth, improving productivity, lowering the cost of living, and helping us transition to a low-carbon future. It is good news for the people of Northcote who rely on energy and have concerns about cost of living, it is good news for the businesses in Northcote who rely on a high amount of energy to meet their production needs, and it is good news for the people of Northcote who are concerned about New Zealand’s transition to a low-carbon future.

I look forward to the select committee process as a member of the hard-working Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee, and I commend this bill to the House.

Tēnā koe e te Pīka. Tēnā tātou. E tū ana ahau ki te waha i ngā kōrero a Te Pāti Māori mō tēnei o ngā ture e kīia nei ko te Crown Minerals Amendment Bill.

[Thank you, Mr Speaker. Greetings to us all. I stand to give voice to the comments of Te Pāti Māori about this particular legislation known as the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill.]

We lovingly call it the “Ram-raiding Truck and Trailer Bill”. This bill and the takutai moana bill are a truck and trailer straight into iwi coastlines all around the country. As I plot my way around the coasts of this country—Ngāi Tahu, the bottom of the south, ngā iwi o Te Tauihu—they are all not interested. Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Porou, the whole eastern seaboard—not interested. Whakatōhea had to deal with Rena—not interested. Tīkapa, you know, Hauraki—not interested. Mariameno’s crew, Te Tai Tokerau—not interested. All the way down to Taranaki—not interested. Gee—not interested. It’s a lot of not interested iwi.

The bill aims to lift the ban on offshore oil and gas, the opening up of onshore exploration across the country and even in Department of Conservation (DOC) land. DOC land—I mean, come on! DOC land—really? Clean, green New Zealand, Aotearoa skiing, and all of that, shiny rivers—all up for grabs, pretty much. The Government talks about the declining reserves. Well, surely if you had declining reserves, you’d be really focused on a transition plan, rather than a “We’re going gas to 2050” plan, like old Mr Jones wants us to believe. A transition to renewable energy should be the focus, not just fossil fuels and maintaining the status quo, but you guys are keen on the status quo—we all see that.

Additionally, if I reflect on Te Pāti Māori policy, the statement says to end new onshore oil and gas permits, withdraw existing onshore and offshore oil and gas permits within five years, and aim to decommission sites by 2030. Here’s the rationale. The rationale is that Māori have been the vanguard, at the front of resisting international big oil and seismic testing interest in our coastlines, and all of those iwis I just described have all put up fierce defensive action over the last 10 years. So who are they?

Well, in 2011 Te Whānau-ā-Apanui stood up. If you don’t know where Te Whānau-ā-Apanui is, it’s where Rawiri’s from. They stood up and pushed back against Petrobras deep-sea oil exploration, and they won. They buggered off. That’s in the Raukumara Basin, if you’re wondering about it—for all the fishos in Aotearoa, that’s the blue fin run, right? In 2013, Sir Mark Solomon led the opposition against Anadarko’s arrival in Kaikōura—seismic testing. So Ngāi Tahu, Sir/Tā Mark Solomon, not interested in it.

In 2015, the hapū of Tai Tokerau, where Mariameno’s from, resisted the deep-sea oil exploration of Statoil, and in 2016, my home iwi of Ngāti Kahungunu, the eastern seaboard of this country—their rohe starts just over the hill, over there and goes all the way up to Māhia. They launched in protest against one of the biggest seismic blasting ships, the Amazon Warrior. They launched their waka hourua fleet to sail out to sea on a vessel that’s powered by wind and that’s travelled to Rarotonga, Tahiti, Hawaii, San Francisco, San Diego, all the way down to Mexico, out to the Galapagos, across to the Solomon Islands, and anywhere else in the world you want to go. That’s where that one’s been, with no power. They stood up and pushed back against those foreign interests, and they’re all foreign interests.

None of these big companies are from Aotearoa. None of the money they propose to make is going to stay here. It’s going to go overseas, and they’re all getting a kai and kōrero with Matua Shane down there.

After that, in 2018, in Wairarapa, my cousins on that Matau a Māui, the waka Hourua, stood up and did a big haka, like literally. They opened up the airwaves on Channel 16 so everyone could hear, and they did a haka from Kahungunu. It’s called Tika Tonu, and they knew the fullas on that ship would hear. After that, that led to 80 coastal hapū signing a declaration, unanimously rejecting exploration that was ratified by the national iwi chairs to oppose all seismic testing and oil exploration in Aotearoa. I doubt Shane has talked to any of them. So you can see why we oppose it. Yeah, we oppose it.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of National in support of the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill. The purpose of this bill is to remove the ban on new petroleum exploration outside onshore Taranaki, and the reason that we’re doing this is to wind back the tokenistic, virtue-signalling effect from the previous Government that put our energy systems at risk.

This ban has had a lag effect, which we’ve all felt this winter. Our economy needs energy. The price of gas has skyrocketed as a result of the restricted supply, and that hurts industry, and that hurts working people that that side of the House is supposed to support. In order to transition to a greener economy, we must do that in a way that keeps the lights on and keeps the economy running. On our side of the House, we are focused on emissions reduction and meeting that target by 2050, but we know that pragmatic change needs to be done in a way that can be accepted and supported by most people. We are driving a bus, not a bulldozer. I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for the opportunity to discuss this disgraceful Crown Minerals Amendment Bill. There are three things I want to cover in my short contribution: firstly, a climate change issue; secondly, the liability changes in this; and then, thirdly, the purpose of the Act that this bill would be amending.

Going first to climate change, I want us to spend a moment going back to 2018 when the ban was first put in place. Of course, this was two years after the Paris Agreement, and we have to get real about reducing our emissions. That is something that the National Government signed up to, and I would like to remind National members of that commitment. The year 2018 was before the zero carbon Act and all that bipartisan work that went on in this House before I was privileged enough to be here. All our climate change assessments were based on the fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report. This was before the Climate Change Commission, and it was before our emissions reductions plans. A lot of work happened in those six years—a lot of work to get real about our climate emissions, our energy work, and our energy use, and to decrease those emissions, not just by offsetting but by actual decarbonisation, which is of critical importance.

What have we seen since November when this Government took office? Well, of course, we’ve seen the abolishment of the CERF, the Climate Emergency Response Fund, and that funded a whole lot of decarbonisation measures. Instead of talking about mitigation measures, all we hear from this Government are little bits and pieces to do with adaptation and planting pine trees, nothing to reduce our emissions. What’s happened to conservation measures for energy installation? Gone. What about half-price public transport—getting people out of cars? That’s gone, too. In fact, this whole Government’s raison d’être seems to be to have more petrol cars on the road, and it is disgraceful. Because of this, we’re now justifying—or the Government, not this side of the House at all—gas, a fossil fuel. It’s got to be transitional. I remind everyone that this ban came into place in 2018, six years ago, and there has been a lot of transitional movement, and this Government needs to continue with that decarbonisation rather than just putting their head in the sand and saying, “Oh, we need to continue with gas exploration.” In 2024, exploring for gas is simply backwards.

Now, we talk about liability. There are some changes in this bill that seem rather peculiar, and that is that the Minister wants to stop the requirement for financial instruments and instead rely on perpetual liability. If you have a lot of gas being explored and you have a plant—and it needs to be decommissioned at some point—we know that that is expensive. We know that the Government had to fork out $443 million for the Tui oil field, for that amount of work, and that is not fair for the New Zealand taxpayers—that could, instead, have that public transport, have that insulation—to be paying for somebody else’s pollution—

Hon Dr Megan Woods: Hospitals and schools.

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: Hospitals and schools, even. There are so many opportunities for what you could do with $443 million that the taxpayer should not be paying. Perpetual liability doesn’t work if the company—if the offending company—that has created the pollution has gone bankrupt. That is why you have financial instruments, such as bonds, to avoid that possibility.

I hope that there are many submissions on this particular point, because, again, it just seems like a total backward step, as does changing the purpose of the Act back to promoting more oil and gas rather than managing it. This is a clear shift in emphasis to financial gain over environmental stewardship. This is totally consistent with everything else that this Government is doing, where the economy—a very short-term view of the economy, not a long-term view—overrides any of our environmental protections. It will only make our economy worse.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Natural gas is critical to our energy security. Without gas, we’ve got to rely on more expensive Indonesian coal brought in from overseas—other sources of energy. I have seen firsthand the devastating effect of not having a reliable and affordable energy supply. I’ve seen the devastating effect of the deindustrialisation of rural New Zealand with the closure of Winstone Pulp and the loss of 170 jobs.

Hon Dr Megan Woods: Go beyond your talking points.

SUZE REDMAYNE: Don’t you care? The devastating social and economic impact on Raetihi, Ohakune, and Taihape—in fact, the impact of it across the Rangitīkei. We’ve also seen the trickle-down effects—the Napier Port profit warning. Yesterday, KiwiRail announced the loss of jobs directly as a result of the closure of Winstone Pulp.

This bill gives confidence to industry, it will foster economic development, it will grow New Zealand, and it’ll give us surety of supply. Affordable and reliable energy—that is what we need, and it is a vital part of our plan to get New Zealand back on track.

The previous speaker, Suze Redmayne, just talked about deindustrialisation of regional jobs and asked if we cared. Well, we care, and that is why in 2018 the decision was made. It was around certainty, and it was around looking to the future. The future was one we’ve all agreed to, which Sir John Key signed up to, which was around decarbonising our economy. Making that very clear back in 2018 was around how we move forward from here.

The Rt Hon Dame Jacinda Ardern said that the transition to a zero-carbon economy must start somewhere. We began that in 2018, and we were getting on with it, and now that’s all being peeled back. Why? I live in Taranaki. I live in the place that this has impacted the most. It was around creating certainty for the future, because at some stage, someone has to flick the switch and say, “We are going to move forward.” We didn’t ban. We, of course, didn’t reissue any new offshore permits. Obviously, we continued with onshore—that continued—but it was around creating certainty for our transition, because, as we know, there are many, many consented renewable energy projects that are ready to go. There are things that we can be doing.

I just want to make a quote, and it says this: “Today is a historic day because there’s been a clear line of sight as to what happens when three parties come together for a common purpose.” That was the Hon Shane Jones back in April of 2018. Obviously things have changed, and he’s found some new friends, and he’s flipped the lid, but the challenge I have in this is the fact that he spoke around things like his mokopuna, around the challenge for them and their future, and what he was doing back in 2018 for their safety and for their future. We’ve got countries like Ireland and Spain and France and Greenland and Denmark and New Zealand, for a little bit longer, who have made commitments around ending oil and gas exploration.

There’s a lot of stuff going on in this legislation, and obviously we are specifically talking about oil and gas, but if you look at the reintroduction of offshore permits and you look at the change to the decommissioning, of course, this Government, the taxpayers, you and I, the people on the streets of the towns you live in, have spent almost half a billion dollars—almost half a billion dollars—in the decommissioning of the Tui oil field, which was an action that was taken by a company that upped sticks and left, and left us in the lurch. We created regimes around the decommissioning, which, again, are about to be repealed. There are also the amendments to the purpose we’ve talked about but also to small-scale gold mines, which I’m curious to know about.

Finally, I’m listening to some of the comments that were made in the departmental report and other statements on the Table, and some Taranaki iwi are concerned around this. We need to heed and listen because there is a lot going on, on the Government’s side of the House, which really is an attack on iwi. I look here in terms of the general explanatory notes around removing the restrictions on access to conservation land on onshore Taranaki. Now, we need to delve into this more and understand this, because I know that the people of Taranaki do not want that. I know that the majority of people in Taranaki are on the journey—are on our 2050 road map—to a low-carbon economy and are working with things like green hydrogen, things like offshore wind, things like solar, and things like biofuels. Those are spaces and opportunities that we can take, and we should take, to ensure that we decarbonise, that we are good ancestors in this House, and that we make courageous decisions in 2018—that we make courageous decisions today, potentially—and cross the floor and support the stopping of this piece of legislation.

Now, is anyone going to come back and start digging for oil and gas? Well, the fact that the last major discovery was in the year 2000—the last major discovery was in the year 2000—I think not. I think we are looking for better ways; we’re looking to innovate. We set that standard in 2018 around looking to the future for the sake of Taranaki, for the sake of the nation, and for the sake of us moving forward to decarbonising and finding new ways to fuel Aotearoa New Zealand.

Look, I just want to talk about this facepalm moment from 2018 that we are here to correct. This facepalm moment was a foresight of the fact that the plan hadn’t been made properly. What we were doing then, which we are undoing now, was the inability to plan for the future, a future which now we see has companies like Pan Pac uncertain about how they can proceed—$800 a megawatt in one week to $9.38 the next. This is unmanageable and untenable.

Now, the most astounding thing is that members opposite won’t even support our Fast-track Approvals Bill, which is going to help us get renewable energy built faster. We need to do both of these things so that we don’t have an absolutely unmanageable and untenable energy sector and energy crisis in New Zealand. This is important. We have these natural resources, and to go and ban them in the first place, to make us have to go back and do this as we are now, while fast tracking the ability to build these renewable energy sites—whether it’s wonderful wind farms, solar farms, hydroelectric, geothermal. This is important for us to do. This is important for us to do, and we need to make sure that we do this quickly alongside other measures to reach our targets. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is, That the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill be considered by the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee.

Motion agreed to.

Bill referred to the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee.

Instruction to Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee