Waste Minimisation (Waste Disposal Levy) Amendment Bill

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Wishful thinking from you! I want to thank members whose contributions have shown such a passion for waste minimisation, and this bill will help fund a more comprehensive set of Government—

SPEAKER: Just a minute. There’s a line here that I think you might have overstepped at this late hour.

Hon PENNY SIMMONDS: I move—

Tangi Utikere: Point of order. Thank you, Mr Speaker. Just seeking your guidance: there is a very strict interpretation in terms of process that members of the executive, specifically Ministers are required to—[Interruption]

SPEAKER: Sorry, can we just have no conversations going on while we’ve got a point of order.

Tangi Utikere: Thank you, sir. Just seeking your guidance: there is a very strict interpretation and expectation for members of the executive, particularly Ministers, when they are progressing a piece of legislation through the House. Those words were not used. So I seek your guidance about what the next steps would be in light of that.

SPEAKER: Well, if you had noticed, I had actually stopped the Minister’s speech and suggested that there was a line that needed to be stated at the start of that contribution. So you were following up on something that I’d already seen to, as it were. Thank you.

Hon PENNY SIMMONDS: My apologies, Mr Speaker. Thank you. I move, That the Waste Minimisation (Waste Disposal Levy) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

This bill will help fund a more comprehensive set of Government waste and environmental priorities. These changes mean that, as well as waste minimisation activities, the levy revenue can also support projects to improve freshwater quality, remediate contaminated sites, and restore the health of important New Zealand ecosystems. Just a couple of examples of the types of projects that would benefit under the changes include the Kaipara Moana Remediation Programme, which supports landowners and communities to improve and restore the catchment; the Freshwater Improvement Fund, which will result in improvements to the health of waterways and catchments. Increases to the waste disposal levy will better reflect the true costs of using resources and disposing of waste, incentivise more reuse of materials, reduce greenhouse gas emissions from organic waste to landfill, and improve the onshore processing of materials.

We’re mindful of the cost of living, and the implications for households and businesses across New Zealand. However, we expect this to be relatively minor on them. The levy rate change from $60 per tonne—the levy rate that will be in effect from 1 July this year; up to $75 per tonne from 1 July 2027 for class 1 municipal landfills—will equate to an average increase in levy costs of around $5.07 per annum per household.

Central government will be able to provide more funding for the remediation of contaminated sites vulnerable to the effects of severe weather events, including closed landfills, before they become an issue. This will improve the resilience of communities. It will also help with the recovery and clean-up where it is needed. It is estimated there are hundreds of such historic landfill sites and other contaminated sites that are vulnerable around the country. The changes will significantly increase the amount of money available to support the remediation of vulnerable landfills each year. Councils will be able to request a levy waiver for any waste from the remediation of the contaminated site, ensuring this cost does not become a barrier to the cleaning up of such sites.

Government funding will also assist councils with the costs of cleaning up waste and repairing or replacing damaged waste infrastructure after an emergency event. This will ease the financial burden on councils and communities at a time they most need it. The Canterbury and Kaikōura earthquakes, our recent cyclones, and the Auckland Anniversary floods, and many other large-scale events have underscored the importance of resilient waste management and minimisation facilities and services across the region. To date, costs arising from managing waste caused by emergency events have been dealt with on an ad hoc basis.

Waste management is a critical service to get up and running quickly to reduce public health risks and support communities to get back on their feet. With these outcomes in mind, I therefore commend the Waste Minimisation (Waste Disposal Levy) Amendment Bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Now, of course, I’m reminding people that we are in urgency. They’ve just seen me not that long ago speaking on the first reading, and now here we are with the second reading. So I’m going to go through in some more detail about that issue of the nexus and the criteria—I think it’s critical that we are all understanding exactly what’s happening here.

Also, I want to respond to Dr Hamish Campbell’s comment, something about the previous Government making a mess. Now, I would contend, and I do contend very strongly, that the previous Government was doing excellent work in waste—though I would say that, I acknowledge. But there was a lot of work on the responsibility for reducing the waste Act to come, so that was really to have a whole lot of new tools to regulate in this space, particularly around product stewardship, to have some new tools, some more waste-tracking national standards and national licensing, and to help with moving and transitioning to a circular economy. Now, I am very hopeful that the Minister for the Environment will progress with that legislation because it was very useful.

In the lead-up to the different papers involved in the development of that responsibility for reducing waste, there was a lot of consultation about the waste levy, and waste issues in general. It was already raised to the attention of the Ministry for the Environment officials, of course, that the waste minimisation levy was too constrained in what it could be spent on. So that is why we’re agreeing that, yes, it should be extended out to some other issues that are related to waste, like old landfills. But it should not go to be the primary fund almost, or a total fund for anything that has to do with the environment that should be funded elsewhere—in the Budget, for example.

So this is, of course, an amendment Act to the Waste Minimisation Act, and that has these narrow criteria that Simon Court talked about earlier—that it’s got to be related to waste. So there’s an amendment here to the purpose, to “raise revenue to fund … (iii) activities that reduce environmental harm or increase environmental benefits;”. That is the width that we’re talking about, that is the expansion, and that is the phrase causing concern. There are other additions, including the promotion and achievement of waste minimisation—that’s good. Local authorities are to manage emergency waste and to repair or replace waste management and minimisation infrastructure damaged by an emergency—that also seems fairly sensible. Of course, it would be good to know what the industry thought about this, if there was a select committee process.

Also, the ministry is “to undertake its functions and duties and exercise its powers in relation to waste management and minimisation and hazardous substances.” There’s some discussion in the documents about what that means, but, in general, the extension to hazardous sites—that’s not an undue extension, either. Then, finally, “(v) projects that provide for the remediation of contaminated sites;”—again, we’ve been talking about the Fox River. So a lot of the expansions are sensible ones and there has, in part, been some consultation on those in the past—not explicitly, though. However, this general “activities that reduce environmental harm”—without any reference to waste, that just gets rid of the nexus completely.

I want to focus a little bit on the supplementary analysis report. It’s dated 15 May 2024. There is a bullet point right on the second page that does allude to activities that reduce environmental harm and/or increase environmental benefits. So that—to remind the House—is the wide clause that we have an issue with. It could be amended to refer to waste, and we’ll be talking about that in the committee of the whole House stage. That wide bullet point right at the top of page 2 is in the executive summary. But then, when you go further into the analysis, you look at paragraphs 93 to 110, you see there that there are little underlined sections, that there’s quite a lot of detail, some analysis, about these changes. So one of them is supporting remediation of contaminated sites, including closed landfills, and there’s a useful discussion. Another one is supporting emergency waste management activities. Again, there’s a useful discussion there. Then, underlined, there’s also one supporting more of the ministry’s waste and hazardous substances work programme. Those three underlined sections align with the changes that I just referred to in the purpose that seem OK. There might be some little fish-hooks in there that it would be good to have a select committee process about, but, in general, they seem OK.

There is no underlined discussion of this very wide “all environmental outcomes”—that is not included in this report, apart from in the executive summary and a little bit of scattering. The detailed analysis is not there. I presume there was some policy change that happened during the Cabinet process, but I’m worried that it’s a very cynical one. That was what my first reading speech was about, and my colleagues’ as well—that this is just a grab for some cash, and it’s a totally unwise extension of this hypothecated fund that should be addressing waste issues. Those waste issues do include the many old landfills that we have around our coastlines and near both our electorates—the Minister’s and mine. There are old landfills, as there are around the country, and we know that, with climate change, we will have more storm events and we know that there will be changes to how our rivers flow, and, potentially, sea-level rise as well. This will have impacts clearly related to waste—there is the nexus that I was talking about.

Some other issues with the bill are that these criteria that I’ve been talking about in the purpose—the ones that I like that relate to that contaminated land, the emergency situations, and increased compliance monitoring and enforcement-type work—only apply, with the way that the bill is written, to the money that central government is spending. That is, half of the pot of money is central government’s, and so this expansion of criteria only applies to that Government spending. It doesn’t extend to the local government spending, and that seems inconsistent. Local governments, we know, are the entities that have the old landfills in their districts, and they’re trying to deal with that contamination and remediation or capping of it or other various solutions to a problem. So I think it’s important that we understand from the Minister why it is that that local government criteria is not expanded, and I have Amendment Papers around that.

I would go back to this point, though. The idea of the bill not doing what we would like it to do, which is to extend it to other matters which have a nexus with waste, but to go further than that and rely on this fund for propping up various different environmental programmes, is very short-sighted. The idea that we can just cut all the money in terms of the environment and cut all the money in terms of what we’re doing in conservation is going to lead to long-term costs. We heard the Minister say that there’s different issues, and I heard climate mitigation mentioned. Well, climate mitigation can be done by instruments like the Climate Emergency Response Fund, which has been taken away by this Government, and we need to reduce our emissions. Purely for economic reasons, we need to reduce our emissions. We’ve signed up to a whole lot of agreements and we will end up having to pay a lot of money if we don’t actually reduce emissions.

So that’s very short-sighted. It is totally head in the sand to not be doing work on the environment. This Budget is good for ferrets and nothing else.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Well, it looks like I am the last speaker for the night, so I thought that I could talk a little bit about circular economies, and I know that you all love to learn things. So let’s talk about some of these finite resources that we’re talking about with this extractive, exploitive system that we currently have and why we need to be serious about waste minimisation in New Zealand. We need to be serious about investing in waste minimisation because the waste problem in this country is horrific. There is a major waste problem, and we need this Government to be serious about waste minimisation.

So, like I said in my first reading, the infrastructure for waste minimisation has a deficit of $2.4 billion over the next 10 years. That is outrageous when you’re thinking of taking money from the Waste Minimisation Fund, from this waste levy, and putting it into places that you’ve decided weren’t good enough to fund. These are things like clean rivers, because we know Kiwis care about clean rivers. We want our kids to be able to swim in those rivers and learn from the river. We care about community solutions and about people who have been doing this work for generations—the people who are on the ground, who are best placed to come up with these solutions and to deliver these solutions.

A few days ago, Minister Simmonds spoke at the waste minimisation conference and repeated the words “industry-led”. Now, this is what waste levies are about. The other side of the House wants to leave it up to industry, up to the biggest polluters, to do the right thing. Well, it’s actually our job, as the Government, to make sure that our biggest polluters are actually paying the price, because otherwise the people that are going to be paying the price are our future generations. This is absolute greenwashing at its finest. You are slashing funding for clean rivers, you are slashing funding for the Community Environment Fund, you are slashing funding for environmental action and climate action, and then you’re coming over and taking money from these waste levies. These waste levies are also—can I remind the other side of the House—less than half of what they are in New South Wales and in Victoria and in the UK.

So there is a lot of things going on here. Firstly, we need to increase the waste levy more because we have got a massive waste problem in this country. We need to be moving that towards about a $20 a year increase.

Hon Penny Simmonds: Cost of living crisis.

KAHURANGI CARTER: Well, industries actually aren’t feeling that cost of living crisis. So if we actually look at industry paying that extra and leaving households who are doing what they can with what they have—and our households are doing a good job because they do care about the future generations. They do care about waste minimisation. That’s why we saw the uptake in recycling. That’s why we see people repairing things. That’s why we see people wanting to know how to repair their things so that they’re not just having to send them to landfill, which is the current system we’ve got. Do you know the amazing thing about having a waste levy that actually—actually—invests in waste solutions like the Plastics Innovation Fund? But, oh, no, that’s gone too.

When we actually invest in our communities, the ones who are doing the work on the ground—now, I know that we didn’t get a chance to talk to community, but that’s OK because I did it for you. Today, I went and spoke to Para Kore. Para Kore are the only national, Māori-led organisation who work on waste minimisation in New Zealand. They work with over 800 organisations around New Zealand at the flaxroots to implement systems to reconnect and to deepen connection with Papatūānuku and Ranginui and to ensure that our future generations can breathe fresh air from our mountains, and they can swim in the moana and not be swimming in pollution.

So, with the help of Para Kore, the school in Māhia were growing their own food, working on food sovereignty, and then using that food for the Food in Schools project, and then, at the end of that, there was zero waste going to landfill. So that is how effective Para Kore is. But, unfortunately, because of decisions from the other side of the House, you’ve decided to actually slash and burn their funding. So those 800 organisations across Aotearoa who are learning about a te ao Māori world view of waste minimisation and living in harmony with gone.

Now, we’re talking about environment centres—so Environment Hubs Aotearoa—their funding has been slashed as well; environment hubs who became these amazing resources and sanctuaries in our climate emergencies. We saw them stepping up. We saw civil defence using those hubs as distribution centres because those hubs are known to the community. But what’s happening? We’re cutting—well, not “we’re”; you’re cutting that funding, as well. So I want to see local solutions. We want to see local solutions—

Andy Foster: Point of order, Mr Speaker. The point of order is that in the last debate we were having, this side was instructed very clearly to stick exactly to the bill. We are not hearing about the bill. We’re hearing quite a wide discussion there, but it’s not about the bill itself, and we were instructed to stick specifically to the bill. I don’t think the member there is doing that.

SPEAKER: Well, it is a second reading and I’m sure there are aspects of this—in fact, I know there are aspects of this—that were covered in that first reading. I’ve watched all the proceedings for the day. The member will carry on, but keep it as tight to the bill as you possibly can in the next minute and a half.

KAHURANGI CARTER: Sure thing—thank you. So Para Kore literally translates to “para” which is “waste” and “kore” which is “nothing”—to “zero waste”. Para Kore is about solutions for zero waste, but their funding is being cut, and this comes from the waste—

Simon Court: Because it doesn’t work.

KAHURANGI CARTER: Well, the 800 organisations that they work with who are growing food in schools and feeding the tamariki and having zero waste going to landfill—it’s incredible and inspiring, and I’m sorry that the other side isn’t ambitious and that they can’t see that vision for a better future for our tamariki. But we over here can. We can see a world where we live in harmony with nature. Now, EHA is the Environment Hubs Aotearoa. Like I said, they were havens in these climate emergencies, and their funding is being slashed as well. Then what’s happening is the biggest greenwashing that there is, which is that because you’re not funding the environmental initiatives and funding environmental and climate action, what you’re doing is you are not taking waste minimisation seriously.

So let’s talk about those finite resources. Basically, pretty much everything in here comes from five main resources. Those are bauxite, which makes our aluminium; it is iron, which is making our steel; it is the silica sand, which makes our glass; and it is our oil, which is making our plastic. The fifth one is trees—now, that is the only renewable resource out of all of those that we have. I don’t think you’re quite grasping that these resources are finite. We don’t have millions of years for them to come back into being. So once we use those resources up, they are gone, and it’s going to be up to our children and the future generations to be cleaning up our mess. I want us to live by that mantra of “Waste not, want not.”, because that’s what our kids deserve.

I want to make sure that those people who are on the ground—well, this Government talks about being about localism. Well, you are slashing funding for the communities who are on the ground doing this work and taking funding away from the people who are the most well placed to actually do this mahi because they understand their communities, like that school in Māhia, and like Roma Marae in the Far North, who have a food forest that will feed generations to come. That reduces our waste, because if you understand waste, you understand that there is so much embodied energy in anything we do. So when you are—

Simon Court: Kahurangi, come back tomorrow.

KAHURANGI CARTER: Oh, we’ve got 30 seconds to go. Well, let’s talk about some things that I want for my children and for my future generations. I want my children to live in a world where we treasure the precious finite resources that have been gifted to us by nature, instead of slashing and burning—slashing and burning—them. Then they can live with a legacy of abundance that they deserve, because that is what they deserve. Kia ora.

The time has come for me to leave the Chair. The House will resume at 9 a.m.

Debate interrupted.

Sitting suspended from 12.03 a.m. to 9 a.m. (Saturday)