Shaw JamesHon JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): Thank you Mr Speaker. In his third reading contribution just now the Hon David Seymour started by complaining or apparently complaining about the length of the debate on this bill relative to the length of the bill itself which I find ironic because the Government put this bill into urgency and then spent most of Wednesday evening filibustering it in order to make it go slower. So many of the contributions especially in the committee of the whole House stage were questions about words in the interpretation clause which are pretty easily dealt with and which in fact most of the people asking do or ought to know the answer to already. Another of the ironies of all of this is that the Hon David Seymour says that he wants to disestablish the Productivity Commission in order to be able to then use the money to establish a ministry for regulation. He's very concerned about the quality of regulation in this country and so concerned is he about the quality of regulation that this bill has had no submissions and no select committee hearing it was put through under urgency and it has no regulatory impact statement attached to it. In other words it is one of the worst examples of poor parliamentary process and governance and oversight that you can get in this Parliament where the Government is using the urgency process not because something is actually urgent but because they just don't want to take the time to have a proper regulatory oversight of the process. So that's another of the many ironies that are attached to this bill. He may complain about the length of the debate but I think he may have actually just let himself in for it given the shoddy regulatory approach to this bill itself. Part of the length of the debate of course has been extended by the fact that Mr Seymour and other members of the Government have spent much of the time talking about something that isn't in the bill and that is a proposed ministry for regulation. They've extolled the proposed virtues of this proposed ministry of regulation which doesn't exist. As far as we know it isn't on the—well it's not contained in the bill and there's no reference to it in the bill but they have spent a great deal of time talking about this thing that actually isn't in the bill. All this bill does is disestablish the Productivity Commission and so then the question becomes Is it a good idea to disestablish the Productivity Commission?" not "Is it a good idea to do something else with the money?" That is different: that is a budgetary process rather than a process of deciding whether or not to disestablish the commission. It's obviously entirely legitimate for a Government to decide that they want to stop doing something and then use the money to do something else. That's entirely fair and reasonable and Governments do that all the time—they do it every year through the Budget process. But in order to justify shutting down the Productivity Commission there have been some arguments made in an attempt to say that "Well it's a good idea to shut down the Productivity Commission." so let's examine some of the arguments that they have made to do that. The primary argument that I heard members on the other side make—because remember that they have continuously extolled the brilliant nature of the work that the Productivity Commission has done and that does not appear to be in debate at all. They've said very clearly that they think that the work that the Productivity Commission has done is good work and under normal circumstances if you didn't need the money for something else presumably that would then continue. But one of the things that they have said as a reason for shutting it down is that Governments don't listen to the advice of the commission. Well if you take that to its logical extreme you would also disestablish the Treasury and then so the bottom of The Terrace would sulk because every Government in history has continuously ignored the advice of the Treasury and yet you don't shut the Treasury down because you ignore its advice. I mean it's kind of de rigueur for Governments not to listen to advice from other parts of the Government. So that is a completely spurious argument for why you would close the commission down. Another argument that was made was that it was felt that appointments to the commission were being politicised. Now there have always been ministerial appointments to the Productivity Commission and of course people on this side of the House were concerned about some of the appointments that the Ministers on the other side of the House made when they were in Government and we felt that those were political. But that was the process; that was the system. Now they didn't feel that those appointments were political because they agreed with the opinions of the people that they were appointing and therefore it didn't look political. Then some other appointments were made by the Labour-led Government when they were in Government and the then Opposition said that they were political because they disagreed with the opinions of the people being appointed. This is a ridiculously reductive argument. It's very easy to make that problem go away: you set up an independent appointments panel. It's at arm's length from the Minister and appointments are done on the basis of merit the people who are appointed to the appointments panel are human resources experts and recruitment experts and not Ministers and so on. So it's pretty easy to solve that problem if you were interested in solving that problem. So the arguments for disestablishing the commission are weak. The arguments for retaining it are actually quite strong. As has been said the work that they have done is of very high quality. There have been cases where Governments have actually adopted the advice of the commission. There are very few other parts of the Government where this kind of independent economic policy analysis gets done outside of ministries and we kind of know what happens to ministry advice. Mr Seymour challenged this side of the House to maybe read some of the reports and to perhaps adopt some of the advice and recommendations in some of those reports as policy. Well I would like to assure him that actually not only have we read those reports we have adopted some of those policy positions and I'd like to refer to one in particular. In their very good report in 2018 which was commissioned by the Hon Steven Joyce a National Minister at the time the Productivity Commission produced the Road to Net Zero report a very substantive long piece of work. One of the many many recommendations in there was that the Government adopt a "feebate" scheme to incentivise the uptake of electric vehicles (EVs). A "feebate" scheme is where a fee is applied to the more polluting vehicles and that revenue is then recycled into subsidies for the less polluting vehicles. That was adopted by the Green Party in Government between 2017 and 2020. It was referred to as the Clean Car Discount which was implemented in the last term and it led to a more than 1200 percent increase in the uptake of electric vehicles. It did exactly what the Productivity Commission—which at the time was run by people who had been appointed by the then National Government—had said in a report that had been commissioned by the then National Government and those recommendations in an entirely non-partisan way were adopted by our Government. Interestingly enough the current Government is currently disestablishing the "feebate" scheme—which was recommended by the Productivity Commission when it was run by people who were theoretically non-political and who were appointed by the then Government—that was in a report that was commissioned by that then Government. So if Mr Seymour and the members of this Government want to make the argument that we should get rid of the Productivity Commission or that the people on this side of the House don't pay attention to the reports and don't put those things into place then they actually just need to do a little bit of reading and take a little look at history—New Zealand histories if you like—and see what actually happened. There may actually be better ideas out there by the way in terms of how you increase EV uptake but one of the primary reasons why the Government adopted that policy proposal was because it had been proposed by an independent Productivity Commission report. The assumption was therefore that it would be seen as non-partisan and political and that therefore it would endure because that was the nature of that institution. However that institution is about to be disestablished and that side of the House will continue in opposition to their own coalition agreement statements that they will be guided by facts and evidence by disestablishing one of the leading organisations in this country that provides us with facts and evidence."