GM decision 'reasonable'

By ANGELA GREGORY

Environment Minister Marian Hobbs and her officials acted reasonably in allowing a national body of experts to decide on an application for the development of genetically modified cows, the High Court at Auckland heard yesterday.

Their actions have been challenged in a judicial review brought by Mothers Against Genetic Engineering (Madge), which wants to overturn a decision allowing AgResearch to grow GM cows.

The group argued that a decision in favour of the project by the Environment Risk Management Authority (Erma) was invalid because Ms Hobbs unlawfully failed to exercise her call-in powers under the Hazardous Substances and New Organism Act.

But counsel for Ms Hobbs and the Ministry for the Environment yesterday argued there were no reasons the minister should have considered doing so.

Lawyer Bronwyn Arthur said ministry officials followed the proper legal procedure, and had considered whether the application carried significant effects.

They all decided that it did not trigger any of the criteria which would require the minister to consider whether she should call in over the application.

The act provided for call-ins where any decision on an application would have significant economic, environmental, international or health effects, or any significant effects in an area in which the authority lacked sufficient knowledge or experience.

Ms Arthur said the ministry officials did not believe any of those applied in this case.

No applications had ever been called in under the act, which she said was not surprising. The act did not require any report explaining why the ministry found the effects were not considered significant.

"Just because there is no written record of the assessment, or a final report to the minister from the ministry, does not mean that an assessment was not taken."



Ms Hobbs was aware of the AgResearch application and had no concerns about it.

Ms Arthur said a Bioethics Council established in December last year was intended to take a strategic approach to ethical issues, and Erma could consider ethical dimensions case by case.

The application was for the development of new organisms, not their release, and the ethical issues were not novel, as human genes had been placed in non-human hosts before.

Ms Arthur said that if Madge succeeded, the outcome would probably remain the same after substantial time and expense.



Erma lawyers yesterday opened their case, arguing that the authority's members had weighed up all the risks and no new information had changed their minds.

Mary Scholtens, QC, said the court should not be dragged into assessing the relative merits of controversial scientific arguments, but focus on the correctness of Erma's approach to matters of law.