The death notice for the ministry was read out in Parliament on Wednesday, when the government passed a Bill which dis-established it after 40 years of service to New Zealand.
Except, not really. While the ministry itself is as bereft of life as Monty Python’s dead parrot, its staff and functions are set to continue their work as part of the soon to be created Ministry for Cities, Environment, Regions and Transport (MCERT).
An environment ministry was the creation of the Fourth Labour Government, created as part of a suite of planning law changes which included the Resource Management Act. Its demise comes as part of the present government’s work to revamp planing laws.
Its website, which endures despite the effects of recent legislation, contains more than 2000 reports on everything from inventories of dioxin emissions and mercury-releasing minerals in New Zealand, to a multitude of assessments of national environmental standards.
No-one, and certainly not the likely final Minister for the Environment, Nicola Grigg, downplays the work and the worth of the ministry. She told Parliament this week that it had been instrumental to the lives of New Zealanders and the wellbeing of our environment and it had left a legacy that we can all be proud of.
However, as Ms Grigg noted, scrapping it signalled ‘‘a new chapter for environmental management in New Zealand’’ and with that comes great uncertainty.
The ministry was established for a reason. Growing awareness of the impact of narrow fields of human activity on the wider world around us brought with it a need to consider whether the environment could cope with what was happening within it.
It was to consider long-term pain and weigh it against short-term gain.
Its demise comes at a time when the government is revamping environmental regulations under the slogan of removing green and red tape, insisting that a need exists to build more things, and build them faster.
Combining those factors has given opposition parties a platform from which to complain that the government had a deplorable track record on the environment and was deleting its needs from consideration — as Dunedin Labour MP Rachel Brooking did during the third reading debate.
The credibility of that claim, and the government’s denial of it, will be fully tested in the next few months as MCERT begins its work.
With its abolition, the Ministry for the Environment's statutory functions under the Environment Act transfer to the Secretary for the Environment — who will also be MCERT’s chief executive.
It is intended that environmental functions remain central to the work of the new department.
During the Act’s committee stages an amendment was added to heighten that, requiring the Secretary for the Environment to report annually on its performance in that area.
Reporting is all very well, performing is quite another.
In a brave new world where the MCERT is expected to ‘‘support more practical and joined-up decision-making that both protects the environment and supports economic growth’’ — to quote Ms Grigg — that kind of language has many nervous that the former will be subordinate to the latter.
The government has been emphatic throughout this process that each will have equal weight. That is now to be tested.
To gain the confidence of the sceptical, MCERT will need to be transparent in how it functions, and be able to clearly show that environmental concerns have been appropriately considered as it carries out its work.
An annual report is all very well, but sceptics will need more than that to be convinced that MCERT is truly diligently protecting air, land and water quality.
Risks will need to be properly identified, and any trade offs which fall on the development side of the ledger rather than the environmental side will need to be fully justifiable.
MCERT may well be change to planning laws which works and keeps pristine parts of the New Zealand environment in that state — but it will need to demonstrate that that it is indeed doing just that.
