There is an Environmental Protection Agency which is tasked with administering the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act and the regulations under that Act. The Environmental Protection Agency is simply an aspirational title. Imagine if New Zealand truly had an environmental protection agency, then we wouldn't be having this ongoing discussion about why rivers and streams are polluted with sewage from council waste-water systems, whose contamination it is in the river, or which council or which agency is tasked to clean it up, and about how come local government gives itself 25-year consents to pollute and to discharge waste water into our urban environment, because nobody is actually protecting the environment and enforcing the existing rules we have. So an environmental protection agency currently is in name only, but they do have this important task to regulate hazardous substances and new organisms. 