Kuriger BarbaraBARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki - King Country): Thank you Madam Speaker and congratulations on your new role. It's a pleasure to speak in this debate today and my first opportunity of the 53rd Parliament. I'm going to today plan to go through a lot of issues from the Speech from the Throne which I have concerns about but I would like to start by—the first speaker up this afternoon the Hon Nanaia Mahuta talked about the voters choosing stability and certainty in the election. Voters would love to have stability and certainty as would many of my constituents and there's a breakdown of various areas of the economy in terms of how much stability and certainty they actually have. Now we all know what's happened with international tourism and that has been a choice that we've made as a country in terms of keeping ourselves safe around COVID19 and a very important choice that is. So it's up to us as Kiwis to then support our local tourism businesses as much as we possibly can. We've also seen essential services being able to carry on but there's been a large degree of instability and uncertainty. If we look at some of our essential services and it's been touched on in the House already today in question time in terms of shearers for the wool industry for the scanners initially which we managed to get into the country for the sheep farmers but also for our fruit pickers and the Recognised Seasonal Employer workers—the long time and the long debate that we've had to get those people into the country—there hasn't been a sense of stability and certainty for those people. I guess in my electorate if I look at some of the other areas where there's large instability and uncertainty it's around large events events like I have in our electorate like the Mystery Creek Fieldays which was the largest agricultural event in the Southern Hemisphere and will be again when people are able to travel into our wonderful country. We can make it into a fantastic domestic event but there's still some uncertainty with events like that and events like WOMAD around being able to do that and get the certainties from the Government that they need around the health issues that work around those events. It's quite restricting for people to be able to plan those events and pay the upfront costs of those events without the certainty that's brought about. I'd just like to touch on yesterday's announcement around climate change which also brings a level of uncertainty. In that climate change emergency motion it says here To avoid a more than 1.5 degree Celsius rise in global warming global emissions would need to fall around 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030 reaching net zero by around 2050."—global emissions. Now everyone on our side of the House would agree that we have to take some actions around climate change and my colleague Stuart Smith in particular who spoke on it yesterday and who I know has a speech coming up in the House soon. But what I fear from some of the actions of this Government and the scale and pace of recovery that's talked about in the Speech from the Throne—the pace of this recovery and the pace of the decisions that have been made and the talk of just transition but the lack of just transition—is going to actually shift climate change problems from our country to other parts of the world. So we actually have some of the most efficient farmers in the world and we have some of the most efficient energy industry people in the world in this country. We're in a position to help with some of our intellectual property (IP) the rest of the world—not destroying our economy and actually shifting the problems overseas. I was in the airport this morning in New Plymouth. I was speaking to someone from the energy industry who basically said that in places like Africa they're still actually in the process of using dung for energy because they're not even thinking in the realms of climate change at this point in time because they are actually still trying to get to where we are. So I think we've got to be very careful as a country. We need to do something but we need to be careful that we don't run ahead of the world to not only the detriment of our own economy but also the detriment of climate change.Forty-two billion of infrastructure investment. No action before COVID. All of a sudden at the beginning of 2020 just before COVID this Government decided it was going to be the party of infrastructure. We've yet to see it. We didn't see it before. What I would hope—our leader the Hon Judith Collins has offered on several occasions prior to being the leader and since being the leader to work with this Government on the Resource Management Act (RMA). I would urge this Government—this is our opportunity to make some real difference in this space. Infrastructure—the Hon Andrew Little over there will remember the ecstasy when we were having Mount Messenger all of a sudden in 2016; it was going to happen. Yesterday we received news that there was a development from the High Court but still a number of stages to go. Look this RMA is just tangling things up and I know that Minister your team wants this Mount Messenger reconstruction as much as we do; so I would urge this Government—if there's some sensible changes around the Resource Management Act we should work together to make sure that this long-term cost and change around RMA comes to an end.I see in the Speech from the Throne "Programmes to bolster our exports". Now I want to know: what are these programmes—what are they? Because we see programmes like Fit for a Better World which has come out for the primary industry sector. It's vague. It's got no detail in it. I wouldn't disagree with a whole lot of the high-level stuff that's in there but actually a goal without a plan is merely a dream. I think that we can do far better in terms of working out the stages about how we get to this new world. Currently I'm working through a number of things with the energy industry as the new spokesperson and I see quite a bit of alignment between the energy industry and the agricultural industry in that there are a lot of expectations coming towards us and there is a lot of ambition and will in both of those industries to bring our country and their industries into a space that we need to get into.But we keep hearing the words "just transition" and I'm not seeing just transition. I'm hearing the words. I'm hearing the promises. Then I read here "Programmes to bolster our exports". In agriculture if we go ahead with some of the constraints on water that the Government is currently pushing towards the industry we are not going to bolster our exports. The agricultural industry along with city industries is very very keen to do something about water but we've got to make sure that it's sensible and that it's transitional—along with methane. We don't currently have tools to stop the methane but what I can tell you is that we could destroy in this country our whole agricultural industry by actually pushing down far too hard on methane at this point in time and what would happen? Food production would shift to overseas. And food—Dr Duncan Webb: Do nothing.BARBARA KURIGER: I didn't say "Do nothing" to the member over there that's decided to chirp in. I've said we need tools. We have IP in this country and if that member thinks that we can sit in this country and do everything to the nth degree and the rest of the world doesn't do what we are doing and we're going to make one iota of difference to climate change then that member's got a bit of delusion going on. So we've actually got to work through these processes. I also see within our agricultural industries that technology is going to play a big part and in the last three years I haven't seen much technology being added in the form of connectivity. We had quite a good roll-out programme with broadband and connectivity when the National Government was in and we need that programme to continue desperately to get that productivity up so we can move to the new technology and we can make progress on climate change. So I would urge this Government not just to shift climate change but to actually work with the world in making a real difference not the one they're about to make. Thank you."