Hon Margaret Wilson, MP
Speaker of the House of Representatives

Speech to open a Forum to celebrate
the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment’s first 20 years
and to reflect on New Zealand’s sustainability progress

Ilott Theatre
Wellington Convention Centre
Wakefield Street
Wellington

9.15am
Thursday 1 March 2007

It is a privilege to be asked to open this Forum, celebrating the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment’s 20_year contribution to environmental sustainability.

As Speaker, the Commissioner is one of three Parliamentary Officers who report to me - ensuring that those responsible for New Zealand’s system of environmental management and the performance of public authorities in maintaining and improving the quality of our environment are accountable to Parliament, not the Executive or the Government of the day.

It is unusual for governments to establish watchdogs with the power to criticise their policies. In fact, as Philip Woollaston said at the symposium to mark the first decade of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Labour’s 1984 election policy to establish the Commissioner, reporting directly to Parliament, could only have been written by a party in opposition.

For seven years after its establishment, the New Zealand PCE was unique – the only one in the world with the power to examine critically the policy decisions of executive government. It was then joined by Ontario, the only Canadian province with an Officer of Parliament Environment Commissioner. The provision was a response to the Clyde Dam legislation and other ‘think big’ actions during the Muldoon administration.

Twenty years later, we can be forgiven for boasting that we were well ahead of our time. February’s Herald-Digipoll, published last week, showed the environment has leapt up the ‘most important issue in New Zealand’ category to take the number four spot behind health, law and order and education - no doubt reflecting the higher priority political parties are giving to policies to address climate change.

There is no shortage of material on sustainable development and subsets such as climate change.

Britain’s Stern Review reported last year that the scientific evidence is now overwhelming that climate change presents very serious global risks and that it demands an urgent global response.

From Geneva the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that warming of the climate system is unequivocal as is now evident from observations of global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global mean sea level.

Few of us could fail to be affected by Al Gore’s ability to turn a PowerPoint presentation into a compelling movie and a book with the same name - An Inconvenient Truth.

But what has not yet been adequately addressed is our need to collectively improve our understanding of sustainability. My hope is that this Forum will make considerable progress increasing our understanding of the consequences of our dependence on natural capital.

In New Zealand, the Prime Minister signalled last month that the quest for sustainability has taken on a new urgency because of the scale of the environmental challenge the world faces.

Not only does she believe New Zealand can aim to be the first nation to be truly sustainable, but we can aspire to be carbon neutral in our economy and way of life. In a direct appeal to Kiwis’ sense of national pride, the PM went further and threw out a challenge that the pride we take in our quest for sustainability and carbon neutrality will define our nation, just as our quest for a nuclear free world has over the past 23 years.

All political parties are now engaging in the development of sustainability policies, which makes this week’s Forum well-timed and critical. It is important that it is being run by the PCE, which provides a truly independent platform. The office has a long reputation for tackling difficult and complex issues associated with sustainability.

The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment acts as ‘system guardian’, keeping under review the system of environmental management. It audits the performance of public agencies to ensure that they are meeting their environmental responsibilities and it investigates complaints about shortcomings of government and local government. It also provides information about the environment.

There have been just two Commissioners in the office’s 20 years. Both senior public servants; Dr Helen Hughes, formerly a freshwater scientist and science administrator and Dr Morgan Williams, an ecologist who spent most of his career in land management and farming matters.

Our third Commissioner, Dr Jan Wright, who takes over next week, comes to the job with a different skill set – that of an independent policy analyst and consultant with a number of non-executive public sector directorships. When coupled with her academic qualifications - Doctor of Philosophy in public policy from Harvard University, Master of Science in energy and resources from the University of California and Bachelor of Science (First Class Honours) in physics from the University of Canterbury – Jan was the standout candidate to apply intellectual rigour and effective thinking to the next stage of our environmental challenge.

Helen Hughes, our first Commissioner, started with a blank canvas and designed a model which was then adopted, in a variety of forms, by other countries – Canada, Australia’s Capital Territory and more recently in the state of Victoria are just some examples.

Helen took up the challenge at a time when there were few women in senior roles in the male-dominated public sector. She showed courage and common sense and she was not easily daunted.

This was a time of tremendous economic challenge in New Zealand. There were the state sector reforms in 1988, local government reform in 1989, the break-up of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, the introduction of the Resource Management Act in 1991, government responses to the Waitangi Tribunal recommendations, Crown asset sales, and the Rio Earth Summit in 1992.

Helen, with her catch-cry ‘non-use of land is a use’ set the tone. She believed that our reactive, short-term style of government, reinforced by a triennial electoral cycle, was almost incapable of dealing with long-term issues. New Zealand’s glaring historical failure to manage the deep water orange roughy fishery and our magnificent forests were all cases in point.

Morgan, our 2nd Commissioner, continued where Helen left off. By then times were different. New Zealand had made the move to a mixed member proportional system of voting and it was crucial that the PCE was seen as a resource for all political parties. As we learnt a greater awareness of issues, it became more important than ever that Select Committees had access to good quality sound advice as their role in policy making increased.

The Commissioner and his staff frequently advise Select Committees in their financial and inquiry work. The House or any Select Committee may ask the Commissioner to report on any petition, bill or other matter which may have a significant effect on the environment. The House may also direct the Commissioner to inquire into any matter with environmental consequences and to report on it to the House.

Within government and institutions there have been very few voices and even fewer agencies that concern themselves with sustainable development. Under Morgan’s leadership, the office consolidated its position and responded to the new demands. In recent years it has increasingly tackled the issue of sustainable development. As Morgan is fond of saying ‘Who is the keeper of the long view’.

For those of you have a copy of David Young’s excellent history of the Commission which carries the same name, the answer can be found on the last page. Dana Petersen, a Senior Researcher under Helen Hughes, sums it up:

We in New Zealand are a small and connected enough community to be leaders for incredible things, if we can find common ground and work together.

This Forum is all about finding common ground and working together. To look for an example, you need go no further than Growing for Good: intensive farming, sustainability and New Zealand’s environment, published in November 2004. It laid out the importance of New Zealand’s farming and food to our economic base and pointed out just how dependent we are on the health of our natural capital, our lands and our waters.

Growing for Good revealed the innovative thinking in our farming sector, and brought together the story of the advances in production and processing systems on and off the farm and the extraordinary opportunities for crafting more sustainable farming and food systems.

But it also released a lot of tension and conflict on the focus and direction of New Zealand’s agriculture. For example, how do we manage the expectations of customers in New Zealand and world markets alongside the expectations of urban and rural New Zealanders that the quality of our water will enable them to continue swimming in local creeks and fishing in local lakes?

New Zealand relies on the export of, among other things, food, fibre and wine. To do this we depend on our environment’s natural capital - rivers, lakes and aquifers, soils, biodiversity and atmosphere. Growing for Good investigates how we can learn to live off the income from this natural capital without exhausting the capital itself. That inevitably leads to robust debate on the issues, the causes, the ways and means of doing things more effectively, efficiently and profitably.

The other recent report to raise the level of debate about education for sustainability is See Change: Learning and education for sustainability. This think-piece aims to stimulate effective action so that we can learn to live in sustainable ways. It highlights how education, in its broadest sense, needs to bring about a transformation for the better. It comments sagely that this will require a shift in perception and understanding among many people and organisations in New Zealand today.

This brings me full circle back to the formation of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. The PCE shares its 1987 birth date with the release of Our Common Future, the celebrated Bruntland report named after chair Gro Bruntland, the then Prime Minister of Norway.

This report was a turning point for it projected the concept of sustainable development on to the world stage – and the world, with the help of the likes of Al Gore, is still debating what it means.

New Zealand has embedded sustainability into law. However, in common with other nations we have struggled to translate that into providing New Zealanders’ needs and wants in ways that do not degrade our natural capital. The 21st century needs new paradigms, new ways of thinking and new understandings.

The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment has served us well over the years and I have no doubt it will continue to do so. At a time when our health and welfare, individually and collectively, is extraordinarily dependent on our natural capital, the challenges seem to get bigger and bigger and the timeframe gets shorter and shorter.

The value of independent institutions like the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment can not be over-estimated when it comes to multi-layered issues such as sustainable development.

As Professor David Henderson, a former OECD chief economist who is one of the authors of a dual critique of the Stern Report said in Wellington last week: governments should ensure they are more accurately informed and advised.

I couldn’t agree more. Truly independent organisations such as the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment occupy a unique place in our society and they are one of the best methods I know of introducing sensible and pragmatic dialogue ahead of the policy formation process.

I wish you well for a stimulating and useful Forum.

ENDS

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