Important note: The HSNO Amendment Bill and ACVM Amendment Bill submission deadlines are midnight 15 June 2026, five weeks from introduction.
Centralisation of powers and no voice from human and environmental health behind current law changes.
There is a troubling pattern across New Zealand’s current hazardous substances and new organisms (i.e. genetically modified organisms) shake-up – it’s not only being reformed, it’s being captured.
The sequence seems to be: A regulatory review identifies that the models are broken, get industry actors to consult, model fix contracted to firm with agrochemical industry clients, fix not yet delivered, consult again with the industry actors to support the creation of a new Bill, design new pathways relying on broken models, rush the Bill through before the new CEO arrives, only give the public five weeks to respond to a 145-page Bill, and if the public discuss issues that are not discussed in the Bill, rule their concerns as out of scope of the current consultation.
The Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (HSNO) Amendment Bill (304-1) has nothing to do with improving risk assessment and making hazardous chemical use safer for people that handle hazardous substances, including cereal croppers, vegetable growers and horticulturalists.
Did you know that the Ministry for the Environment no longer exists?
Keep in mind as you read this, that the Ministry for the Environment stewards the HSNO Act, but mysteriously the Primary Production Committee are doing the decision-making. Why? You may not yet have twigged that the Ministry for the Environment has been disestablished, even though only one of the 585 submissions clearly supported the Bill that disestablished it. Ministry for Cities, Environment, Regions and Transport (MCERT) will have minister for the environment, but the real power will be held by the ‘Secretary’:
‘The Bill formally transfers the Ministry for the Environment’s statutory functions under the Environment Act to the Secretary for the Environment. The new Ministry will continue to administer the Environment Act, with MCERT’s chief executive carrying out the responsibilities of the Secretary for the Environment.’
Who formally announced this shift?: Chris Bishop, Judith Collins, Simon Watts & Penny Simmonds. As Minister for the Public Service from only 24 January 2025 to 2 April 2026, Collins held responsibility for the machinery of government during the period in which MCERT was being designed, the Public Service Order establishing the Ministry for Regulation was in operation, and the HSNO Amendment Bill was progressing. From April 2026, Chris Bishop is simultaneously Attorney-General, the minister driving RMA reform, the minister responsible for housing and infrastructure, and the accountable minister for MCERT, the institution that has just absorbed the Ministry for the Environment.
Nothing like the centralisation of power to get the job done.
The title ‘Secretary for the Environment’ has been recycled from a role whose sole institutional loyalty was environmental protection into a statutory fiction carried by a chief executive whose primary mandate will be housing, transport, and economic growth. The Minister for the environment will hold subordinate or nominal power.
We presume that the administrative powers for the HSNO Act 1996 will shift to MCERT.
Ministry for Regulations set the priorities for current HSNO Amendment Bill
Although the now defunct Ministry for the Environment was the agency responsible for the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Amendment Bill (304-1), the focus and scope was effectively established by the Ministry for Regulation.
The Agricultural and Horticultural Products Regulatory Review (Ministry for Regulation, February 2025), was, as the Regulatory Impact Statement (May 2025), page 7 stated
‘was prompted by significant concerns from the industry association representing chemical companies.
That association is identifiable as the Animal and Plant Health Association of New Zealand (APHANZ) who topped the list of contributors to both the MfR’s sector reference group (page 5) and the Ministry for the Environments (MfE) ‘targeted stakeholder engagement’ (page 9) the small coterie of organisations that were permitted to provide early feedback to the MfE’s underlying policy.
Agrichemical lobbyist the (APHANZ), formerly known as AGCARM, has a membership that includes Syngenta Crop Protection, Bayer CropScience, BASF New Zealand, and Corteva Agriscience, among other major global agrochemical companies. The association represents ‘90% of New Zealand’s animal health and crop protection manufacturers.’
These are the very companies whose products include the herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides that carry the toxicological and environmental fate risks that the HSNO Act is designed to manage.
The PCE’s Submission to the Regulatory Review observed that ‘The Terms of Reference overplays industry as a stakeholder and underplays stakeholders with other concerns such as public health and the environment’. I had also previously discussed, the September 2024 regulatory review contained narrow terms of reference, involved (again) a hurried timeline for submissions and, as I noted downplayed more ‘complex considerations relating to risk and benefit, trust and safety for our growers, farmers, veterinarians and the New Zealand public’.
The MfR Review determined that:
‘efficiency of the approval path must be improved to enable more timely access to agricultural and horticultural products (and uses of products) while still maintaining effective management of products risks’,
The Review made 16 recommendations. The recommendations address process velocity, regulatory coordination, and stakeholder access; not one requires independent toxicological or public health scrutiny of the substances being approved.
The deferred Māori engagement explicitly recommended in the review report ‘it is best that the required engagement and consultation with iwi/Māori take place when agencies develop final proposals’ (page 11) – ultimately resolved into a two-week consultation with a single entity.
Remember, the Ministry for Regulation was enacted under secondary legislation, its functions and principles have nothing to do with the protection of human and environmental health.
Predetermined? The HSNO Amendment Bill
The scope of Bill 304-1 was essentially predetermined before any meaningful analysis was conducted. The Regulatory Impact Statement: Omnibus Changes to the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act 1996 (May 2025) and Cabinet documents confirm that by February 19 2025, the Cabinet Economic Policy Committee had agreed to progress all 16 recommendations, which included both operational and legislative changes, and the New Zealand Environmental Protection Authority (NZEPA) had been working to develop legislative amendments to the HSNO Act.
The result is a chain of predetermined outputs: an industry-triggered review with an industry-dominated reference group, producing recommendations a government had agreed before MfE conducted its fourteen-day targeted stakeholder engagement, generating a Bill whose conclusion, as the RIS acknowledges, was settled before the options analysis was written.
Regulatory Impact Statements summarise the problem, the reaction and the solutions that underpin proposed changes to legislation. The background and problem in the Regulatory Impact Statement (May 2025) for Bill 304-1, focuses on sector concerns about limited access, lengthy and uncertainty approval pathways and regulatory complexity. The May 2025 RIS stated that
‘the core policy issue is to improve the regulatory approval path for agricultural and horticultural products in New Zealand, while maintaining effective risk management.’
The RIS acknowledges the predetermined approach directly: the scope of feasible options was
‘limited by several factors, including the commissioning and scope of the MfR review recommendations, and the agreement to introduce a Bill with these changes’.
The conclusion preceded the options analysis.
Remember, the Regulatory Impact Statement (RIS) released May 2025, states that the Regulatory Review ‘was prompted by significant concerns from the industry association representing chemical companies’ (paragraph 2).
The policy problem presented, is a need to make the approval path more efficient, timely transparent and certain – and the policy objectives is a system that balances fostering innovation, productivity and competitiveness with effective risk management.
This position may have been assisted by the March 2025 ‘targeted stakeholder engagement’ with 11 organisations, many of whom had ‘previously been engaged during the MfR review’ (page 9, RIS).
Well, that’s efficient.
The Sector Reference Group which were incremental to arriving at the MfR Review, ‘who were used to ‘to confirm and verify issues and underlying causes of the issues raised about the approval path as well as understand potential impacts of various options’ made 16 recommendations, (that then became the underlying policy for the Bill) included representatives from
‘Animal and Plant Health New Zealand, Dairy Companies Association New Zealand, Federated Farmers of New Zealand, Foundation for Arable Research, Horticulture New Zealand, Veterinary Council of New Zealand, and New Zealand Wine Growers’ (page 5)
The pre-Bill consultation was not a test of the policy but a ‘targeted engagement’ (RIS, pages 2–3): between 11-24 March 2025, eleven organisations were consulted, the majority being industry bodies and CRIs.
No public health organisations, no independent toxicologists, no environmental advocates, no consumer groups, no organic sector representatives, no communities exposed to agrichemicals, no freshwater or ecological scientists outside the Crown Research network, and no Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, who had specifically flagged the overseas regulator quality problem in submissions on the predecessor 2021 Bill, were included.
Neither were epidemiologists or doctors who recognise patterns of occupational illness in sprayers, orchardists, cereal croppers and vegetable growers. Central nervous system disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and depression, or specific cancers that are known to be common occupational ‘hazards’ such as prostate, multiple myeloma and colon cancers among pesticide applicators.
Perhaps ACC would provide insight into the patterns observed in New Zealand workers, perhaps Centre for Public Health Research epidemiologists who have researched occupational disease and pesticide risk, including for the development of motor neuron disease.
But no, as we see above, the ‘targeted engagement’ was limited to the corporations that you see above in Table 1 (RIS page 3). This table shows the list of companies that were consulted to provide input to the RIS development concerning new organisms, or genetically modified organisms, including gene edited organisms and gene editing technologies.
The participating organisations were AgResearch, Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research, Plant and Food Research, Scion, New Zealand Plant Producers Incorporated, AgriZeroNZ, and Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu HSNO Komiti.
Four of the seven have merged into an institute dedicated to advancing biotechnologies. AgResearch, Plant and Food Research, Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research and Scion are Crown Research Institutes. These organisations merged into the New Zealand Institute for Bioeconomy Science (July 2025), whose prime focus concerns accelerating bioeconomy-related science and advanced biotechnologies.
Collins announced the Crown Research Institute restructuring into this institute on 23 January 2025, the day before she handed the science portfolio to Shane Reti, describing it as ‘the largest reset of New Zealand’s science system in more than 30 years’. It seems that she designed it, announced it, and then stepped away, leaving Reti to implement a blueprint she had authored.
Collins, who wore more hats in her tenure than any prior government minister, was previously the responsible Minister behind the Gene Technology Bill. Collins was dedicated to deregulating gene technology since the publication of National’s Harnessing Biotech manifesto, and PSGR had identified systemic problems associated her work in biotechnology and science system reform.
HSNO Bill does not address underlying risk assessment problem
The Ministry for the Environment has launched into legislative drafting without a comprehensive assessment of the problems with the risk assessment process. There is nothing in Bill 304-1 concerned with improving New Zealand risk assessment – nor ensuring that when NZEPA officials do look to decisions made by foreign regulators, that they exercise discernment in the public interest.
The MfR Regulatory Review found that the NZEPA’s risk assessment models are ‘outdated and no longer fit for purpose’ – the models of concern are contained in a 2022 Risk Assessment Methodology. This document not only contains outdated models; it defers to the agrichemical industry applicant; fails to provide a pathway to ensure the independent literature is reviewed so as not to depend on the agrichemical company science; does not provide instructions for how the precautionary approach might be used during uncertainty of decision-making; nor support decision-making to navigate low-dose endocrine-system relevant effects.
But now, without any evaluation of the risk assessment models, the government are launching into another Bill. A consultation to redraft the risk assessment methodology back in 2020 was narrow – just like the current consultation for this Bill.
The NZEPA’s risk assessment process is dilapidated. The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment has done this – stating clearly that we do not appropriately manage the environmental risks of substances equally, that New Zealand lacks a cohesive framework to understand and prioritise chemicals’ risk; that many chemicals in use have not been properly assessed, and that – damningly – we do not have the information to appropriately manage the risks of chemicals used in our environment.
In 2022 the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (PCE) found that New Zealand operated a:
‘disjointed and patchy system for asking, and answering, questions about the environmental fate and impact of chemicals’.
The NZEPA doesn’t look at bioaccumulation, persistence and toxicity in the New Zealand environment, and it has largely stepped away from formal risk assessment, to reassessments where the data is predominantly supplied by industry.
The NZEPA does not refer to NZ modelling to reflect sub-regional conditions which impact the fate of pesticides, nor does it require studies of persistence of pesticides in soil, sediment and water, to understand the toxicological profiles in New Zealand regions. The 2022 Methodology acknowledges it is out of date, stating plainly that the groundwater model, Sci-Grow, ‘has been replaced by the US EPA’s Pesticide in Water Calculator and is currently only available on an archive page of the US EPA website’. It states that spray drift curves ‘APVMA are in the process of updating’. It describes aquatic screening via GENEEC2, a model from 2001 calibrated to a hypothetical American farm pond, as a tool it plans to review ‘in due course’.
The MfR Regulatory Review (where the agrichemical lobby group topped the ‘sector reference group’ list) made 16 recommendations – a major one, number 10, was to Update the NZEPA’s outdated risk assessment models and considering how to keep them up to date for the future.
The NZEPA then contracted an expensive UK management consultancy to do this work. The NZ EPA’s Hazardous Substances Models Modernisation project, the exercise that will rebuild the risk assessment framework underpinning all HSNO approvals was contracted, via Government Electronic Tender Service RFP 2992 (awarded 30 January 2026), to ERM (Environmental Resources Management), a London-headquartered global consultancy, at a cost of NZ$3,160,000.
ERM’s own published case studies confirm Syngenta, one of the dominant multinational agrochemical companies whose products flow through the HSNO approval pathway, as a client. ERM’s product stewardship practice is explicitly oriented toward helping clients ‘bring products to market’ and ‘maximize efficiency’ in navigating regulatory systems.
The appointment of a firm with commercial relationships to the regulated industry to redesign the models that will be used to assess that industry’s products is a structural conflict of interest of the kind that independent regulatory science frameworks are specifically designed to prevent.
ERM is majority-owned by KKR, one of the world’s largest private equity firms. ERM’s own published case studies confirm a named, multi-year client relationship with Syngenta, one of the world’s largest agrochemical companies, whose pesticides are approved for use in New Zealand. ERM actively recruits ecotoxicologists to help agrochemical and biocide sector clients prepare risk assessment dossiers and navigate regulatory approval processes. ERM lists the chemical industry as a primary client sector. No conflict-of-interest framework for the NZEPA contract has been made public. No outputs from the ERM contract have been published. The models remain unfit for purpose.
However, you might think that we don’t really need a Methodology document, because the legislation permits the NZEPA officials to look to foreign jurisdictions, and piggy back off their decisions.
International regulator decisions: No provision for discernment
The legislation that grants the powers to defer to an international regulator contains no minimum benchmarks for quality. There is no published methodology for how the NZEPA weighs, say, the US EPA’s regime against the EU’s REACH system against Australia’s NICNAS/AICIS regime.
Section 76E(3) of the HSNO Act asks only whether an overseas body’s system is broadly comparable to the EPA’s, it does not ask the EPA to evaluate the quality of any individual decision made by that body. Once a body is recognised, every decision it makes carries equal weight under ss 28A and 63D.
It currently treats process-level recognition of an overseas body as sufficient justification for outcome-level reliance on any individual decision that body has made, without any mechanism to assess whether that decision reflects current science; whether the applicant’s data package was independently verified; whether commercial interests shaped the assessment and whether the originating jurisdiction has since revisited or restricted the substance. There are no mechanisms in the legislation to ensure that the quality of decision-making, and whether decisions made on risk assessment involved risk assessment last year or a decade ago.
These deficits matter acutely in the context of international regulator recognition: if “comparable manner of operation” under s 76E(3) is measured against a flawed domestic baseline, New Zealand risks locking in, rather than correcting, that baseline by treating overseas decisions made under similarly industry-proximate processes as sufficient justification for approval.
For example, the Joint FAO/WHO Meeting on Pesticide Residues operates as an expert scientific panel convened by two UN bodies, it has no domestic constituency, no public submissions process in any meaningful sense, and no obligation to resolve scientific controversy in public. Its outputs are heavily used by national regulators precisely because they are efficient. But that efficiency is achieved partly by limiting the scope of review and by relying substantially on registrant-submitted data packages.
When Australia’s APVMA or the US EPA adopts a JMPR conclusion, which both do routinely for MRL-setting and registration purposes, they may add a thin layer of domestic process, but the epistemic foundation remains the JMPR assessment. If the NZ EPA then counts both the APVMA decision and the US EPA decision as two independent international regulatory authorisations for the purposes of the new temporary approval pathway (Bill, new s 29A), it has in substance accepted one assessment twice. The requirement for ‘at least 2 international regulators’ in the Bill does not guard against this at all, because it counts jurisdictions, not independent evidentiary bases.
The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), by contrast, conducts its own peer review, publishes its uncertainty analyses, maintains a public register of comments, and has repeatedly diverged from JMPR conclusions, on glyphosate, chlorpyrifos, and several neonicotinoids, among others. Treating an EFSA authorisation and an APVMA authorisation as equivalent inputs is not defensible in public law – if the public interest is to be preserved.
The Bill’s amendments to s 76E add nothing to the qualitative assessment of individual decisions. Clause 123 simply extends the scope of s 76E(1) to cover the new temporary approval pathway. There is no requirement to require the EPA to ask: on what evidentiary basis did this particular decision rest, how old is it, and was the science independently reviewed?
Incoming NZEPA CEO – Designated Bystander Status?
The Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Amendment Bill (304-1) and its companion measure, the Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines (ACVM) Amendment Bill (305-1), were introduced to Parliament on 11 May 2026. Together, they represent the most significant restructuring of chemical regulation in New Zealand since the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act 1996 (HSNO Act) itself came into force thirty years ago.
The submission deadline is 15 June 2026 – five weeks from introduction.
The incoming NZEPA Chief Executive, Lian Butcher, takes office shortly after that window closes. Butcher brings genuine environmental credentials: a background in marine biology, two tenures at Greater Wellington Regional Council most recently as Group Manager of the Environment Group, and a role as Deputy Director-General, Partnerships and Engagement, at the Department of Conservation. These are real qualifications for managing an environmental agency. But there is no public record of Butcher having worked across the chemicals regulatory space, a complex, highly technical domain in which the Bill’s most consequential changes will be made.
The short submission deadline of 15 June 2026 means that the Primary Production Committee will receive and begin processing submissions before the incoming CEO has started. If the Committee reports back within standard timeframes and the Bill proceeds to second reading in late 2026, the new CEO will have had no opportunity to appear before the Committee, contribute technical EPA expertise to the select committee process, commission internal advice on the Bill’s implications, or exercise their statutory responsibility for EPA stewardship in any meaningful way before the legislative train has left the station.
We presume that Butcher was invited into a briefing meeting to advise her of this process.
A new CEO navigating an unfamiliar technical field, inheriting a Bill already through select committee, with secondary legislation powers already delegated and a methodology requirement already removed, is precisely the situation in which institutional capture becomes most likely and independent regulatory judgment most difficult to exercise.
A recent quote from current NZEPA Board Chair, Barry O’Neill in Rural News suggests that the current EPA Board Chair is less focussed on risk assessment and human and environmental health, and focussed on stakeholder engagement:
‘We are focused on innovation and strengthening our engagement with stakeholders. Lian is well placed, given her experience and leadership approach, to lead the organisation through this next phase.’
This, unfortunately not surprising. In a previous Daily Telegraph article, I discussed the backgrounds of the new EPA board, and the risks that their priorities might lean closer to industry stakeholder interests than human and environmental health perspectives.
The truncated submission window for the HSNO Amendment Bill was not designed to help Lian Butcher succeed. It appears alarmingly like it was explicitly designed to ensure the architecture was fixed before she arrived. This sequencing reeks of the old guard, dressed in the language of efficiency, whose legacy includes precisely the degraded regulatory standards the Bill now proposes to entrench.
However, we might also suspect that the temporal alignment is designed to foreclose the possibility that Butcher, with fresh mandate, independent perspective, and legal authority over the EPA, might pause, interrogate, or publicly oppose a package of reforms that systematically weakens the agency they are about to lead.
A new chief executive, appointed to run an independent regulatory agency, has both the authority and the responsibility to assess legislative proposals affecting that agency’s core functions. The NZEPA’s independence from ministerial direction on individual decisions is a constitutional feature of the Crown entity model, not an administrative courtesy.
A CEO who believed that the Bill would harm the NZEPA’s ability to fulfil its statutory purpose, protecting human health and the environment from hazardous substances, would be acting entirely within their mandate to say so publicly, to advise the board accordingly, and to recommend to Ministers that the Bill be reconsidered.
BIN THE BILL
If the government’s genuine concern is efficiency, reducing the backlog of applications, cutting unnecessary duplication with overseas assessment, modernising timeframes, there are ways to achieve that without dismantling protective infrastructure, removing the public notification, establishing a temporary approval pathway that evades assessment, placing decision-making power with a CEO that lacks a background in regulatory risk assessment.
The HSNO Amendment Bill formally retains the existing protective framework for new organisms, but introduces a series of interlocking mechanisms that together materially weaken it.
Most significantly, a new Part 5A allows the NZEPA to declare an organism ‘not a new organism’ by notice, removing it entirely from the approval regime, and delegating that power to the chief executive or a sub-committee (inverts precisely the constitutional logic that the New Zealand High Court confirmed in the Sustainability Council of New Zealand Trust v Environmental Protection Authority [2014] NZHC 1067).
The Bill also allows the NZEPA to reclassify organisms taxonomically via website publication rather than Gazette notice, creates a ‘vagrant’ pathway for GMOs that go wild (also known as outcrossed, ‘volunteer’, and feral) permitting the development of previously prohibited Schedule 2 organisms including unauthorised GMOs where the NZEPA judges them to have arrived unintentionally, and extends conditional release approvals for up to fifteen years, potentially deferring full unrestricted release assessment indefinitely.
The standard for removing controls on a conditionally released GMO can itself be set and changed by EPA notice, without a parliamentary vote.
Compounding these substantive changes is a systematic narrowing of public participation. The existing right to public notification of new organism release applications is replaced by a discretionary test, notification occurs only where the NZEPA considers there to be “significant public interest,” a threshold the NZEPA sets for itself.
Applications that fall below it are decided by targeted consultation with affected persons, or by the chief executive or a delegate rather than a broader review. In the context of new organism releases, where affected communities may have no way of knowing to seek participation and where the consequences of release are irreversible, this shift from a default of public participation to a default of administrative determination represents the most structurally significant democratic regression in the Bill.
The Incoming CEO’s Obligation
The reforms New Zealand actually needs – updated risk assessment models, independent science, genuine public participation, and meaningful scrutiny of overseas regulatory decisions – are absent from this Bill. What is present is a framework designed to move faster, consult less, and decide more quietly. New Zealanders deserve better than a system retreating from its own acknowledged inadequacies.
The Ministry for the Environment is gone. The incoming NZEPA chief executive will likely inherit a Bill already through select committee, secondary legislation powers already delegated, and a methodology requirement already stripped out.
The Bill’s timeline was constructed to ensure that no independent regulatory or human and environmental health voice could interrogate it before the architecture was fixed.
Lian Butcher has both the authority and the obligation to ensure that voice is heard anyway. Bin the Bill. Reappraise the system. Do it properly.
This argument is based on analysis of the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Amendment Bill (304-1), the NZ EPA Risk Assessment Methodology for Hazardous Substances (December 2022, Version 1.1), and the Regulatory Impact Statement: Omnibus Changes to the HSNO Act (Ministry for the Environment, 23 May 2025).
The HSNO Amendment Bill and ACVM Amendment Bill submission deadlines are midnight 15 June 2026, five weeks from introduction.
- Full report
- Summary report
- Summary of engagement
- Sense Partners economic scenario analysis
- Cabinet paper (ECO-25-SUB-0006) — Progressing Recommendations
- MfR review landing page (lists all documents and context)
- And for completeness, the RIS for the HSNO Amendment Bill itself
