Good morning. Greetings from Aotearoa. It's a pleasure to be online. It's a balmy 21 degrees here in Wellington, a little warmer than where you are. Thank you very much for the opportunity to share.
I'm not going to spend ten minutes talking to you. Having read many of the transcripts of the last few weeks on what you're working on, I think it would be much better to have a dialogue. But perhaps I could just start by being very brief in terms of the background to my office, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, the oldest office of this type in the world, which was established under the Environment Act 1986. I assume that members of the committee will have access to this and perhaps have a look at it.
I think it's also really important to understand the context in which this was born, because it was born very much pre-Brundtland. It was born as a concept in the early eighties, when there was growing concern in New Zealand about the lack of independent voice representing environmental matters—that is, independent of government. That concern came both from civil society in New Zealand and also from the first OECD environmental audit of New Zealand in 1981. So there's a fair history that went into the evolution of the office and the reforms of many aspects of our governance, which you'll all be rather familiar with, right through the 1980s.
There have been two commissioners in the role in 20 years—Helen Hughes from 1987 to the end of 1996, and me since 1997.
I think what you're really interested in is the nature of the office—its relationship, obviously, to Parliament and government. As I think you all understand, I'm an officer of Parliament. I report to the Speaker of our House of Representatives. I have exactly the same relationship as does our Auditor General and our ombudsmen.
If you look at the key in the act, which I assume you will have access to, you would look at the functions and powers in section 16 and you would look at section 17, matters to which regard be given. I can come back and talk about the details of those, but I think in terms of the functions, I will just read subparagraph 16(c)(1)(i), because it really is the heart of the way this office operates in our core function. It says that the commissioner shall be able to:
Investigate any matter in respect of which, in the Commissioner's opinion, the environment may be or has been adversely affected, whether through natural causes or as a result of the acts or omissions of any person or body, to an extent which the Commissioner considers warrants investigation;
In that, if you go on and look at matters to which I can give regard, that includes policy matters, which seem to be an area of a lot of discussion.
So how has that played out in terms of the actual way we've gone about our work, and how has that evolved over the 20 years? We've evolved a work program that really falls into five areas.
The first one and the one that I, in the last 10 years, have put over 60% of my effort into is what we call systems guardian work. In essence, it's doing quite large investigations of the way we're managing, thinking, researching, advancing whole pieces of the system of our society. We've looked at oceans, we've looked at cities, we've looked at agriculture, and we've looked at water. Those are our big systems studies.
The second role is in effect being an environmental ombudsman with a small “o”; that is, taking on board concerns from society—and we get hundreds a year. We tend to look at the systemics behind them—what is this concern telling us about wider issues?
The third area is, in fact, environmental management order, where we look at specific pieces of management. To give you a very recent example, it could in fact be by a state-owned enterprise of government. We did an environmental management systems and performance assessment of Solid Energy, our state-owned coal company, quite recently.
The fourth area is to be an adviser to parliamentary select committees such as yours. In that capacity, I want to be absolutely clear that we're acting as an adviser to Parliament. We're acting as an independent adviser to the committees when they're considering bills or other matters before them, such as petitions. We also act as an adviser when committees are charged with the task of assessing other government agencies, such as the Ministry for the Environment or the Department of Conservation. We frequently do that in close cooperation with the Audit Office.
In the fifth area, we operate as an information provider, a facilitator, a catalyst. In other words, we're out there very much advancing the concept of environmental sustainability in an education realm, in a societal realm, and in a business realm. This highlights the fact that we go to a lot of effort to actually market our reports quite widely, because we believe our findings and our assessments need to be taken to as wide an audience as possible, as often as possible.
Just to sum up, Mr. Chairman, what I'd like to leave the committee with is perhaps a starting point for some discussion. The way we work in thinking about environmental sustainability is very forward-focused. It's recognizing that we're actually trying to advance something in our societies and economies that is extraordinarily complex. It needs an enormous amount of linking between the components of governance, of law, of policy, of investment, and so on.
For twenty years now, our work has aimed to do what we say is tilling the thinking and the landscape ahead of policy formation. Policy formation is absolutely and clearly the job of elected governments, and we go to a lot of effort to make sure we don't get, as we say, sucked into the process of being a policy adviser. By golly, we are out there to shape and help and amplify the ripples of many others who are trying to do just that, but we stay very clear of that role ourselves. With the demarcations we've been making over those five functionalities, we don't believe we've ever really gotten into conflict in over twenty years.
On that, I'll close, Mr. Chairman. I think there's a pretty rich canvas on which to have a discussion about how we work. We admire the work Canada is doing, and we have learned a lot from the evolution of your office in Ontario and the one in the federal system.
Thank you.