Rushed minerals changes ‘bad lawmaking and they know it’

Tight deadlines and an onslaught of policy overhauls have put pressure on environmental NGOs, making for conditions some long-standing representatives say are the worst they’ve ever seen.
The four-day window for public submissions on the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill was so short that the Environmental Defence Society opted not to submit at all. They saw their resources as better spent preparing for future legislative challenges; not here, where “no-one will be listening.”
Independent legal experts, policy groups and the Attorney-General have castigated a pattern of excess urgency employed by the current coalition Government as they hasten to rewrite some of New Zealand’s most fundamental environmental laws. 
Public submissions on the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill opened September 26 and closed last night, October 1, at midnight. Discounting the school holiday weekend, this left four working days for the public to provide feedback. Select committee oral hearings are to be heard on Friday and the following Monday, with no further dates scheduled. 
Victoria University of Wellington law professor Dean Knight said the minute timeframe for public submission was “a meaningless opportunity that doesn’t do justice to the importance of the policy and legislation.” He said the entire process was “bad lawmaking and they know it”. 
Knight called out politicians of all stripes for becoming “addicted” to expediting laws through Parliament. “It has got to stop. Our laws and democracy suffer when the Parliamentary process is rushed.”
Richard Capie, the acting chief executive of Forest & Bird, said his team just managed to scrape together a “very fast submission”. They asked to join the oral submissions later this week. “It is hard to consider a consultation process, that is so short, as anything other than lip service.”
Capie was so frustrated by the timeline that he plans to write to Attorney-General Judith Collins QC with his concerns about due process.
Collins fired a warning shot across her own Cabinet’s bow on March 25 when she wrote a letter warning of the dangers associated with rushed lawmaking, an overuse of urgency and constrained select committee timeframes.
Capie hoped to see her back those words with some sort of action in this case.
The bill in question was not “some minor technical amendment”, said Capie. It would reopen New Zealand to oil and gas exploration and replace the word “manage” in the purpose statement with “promote”. The current purpose reads: ​​“to promote prospecting for, exploration for, and mining of Crown owned minerals for the benefit of New Zealand.”
Capie said Government knew these changes were significant and contentious, and did not believe they were backed by good reasoning. He asked why Government would choose to so strictly condense the public’s participation in the bill and said the only reason he could think of was “they don’t value input from people on this. They don’t care.”
His concerns echo criticisms voiced in 2018, when Labour enacted the ban on exploration that’s now being repealed by this bill.
The Petroleum Exploration and Production Association chief executive of the day, Cameron Madgwick, said “given the strong public interest and enormous ramifications of this decision, it’s crucial this process isn’t rushed.” 
He bemoaned Labour’s public consultation process as “deeply unfair” after it was “slashed to just four weeks”. This week’s consultation process, on the very same piece of legislation, lasted only four days.
Environmental Defence Society chief executive Gary Taylor said the pace of work since December had been unlike anything in his 50-year career, culminating in a first for the organisation: the decision not to provide a public submission on the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill.
The Government “knows it won’t stand up to scrutiny”, said Taylor.
The premise of the bill – in part, to import gas to cover what’s exported – “makes no sense,” he said. “It’s hard to see any international investor being bone-headed enough to risk millions in exploration at a time when the world is transitioning to renewables, and oil and gas should be left in the ground.” 
Taylor said his team had looked forward over the next two years at the coming wave of environmental policy work, including the reform of the entire Resource Management Act – 14 national policy statements as well as seven new national instruments – all to be reviewed.
“We’re having to marshal our forces a little bit and not engage in pro forma submission writing when we know nobody will be listening,” said Taylor.
Taylor said the pace and quantity of legislation pushed by Government was overwhelming the big four environmental NGOs – the other three being Greenpeace Aotearoa, the Worldwide Wildlife Fund and Forest & Bird. 
Even when these groups were able to draft a submission to proposed legislation, Taylor said their advice often seemed to fall on deaf ears.
The wider picture was “an executive that is bullishly dominating Parliament and its select committees, attempting to bully the courts into quiescence and civil society that is stretched to engage… I don’t think our democracy is in a healthy state at the moment.”