O'Rourke Denis: Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
O'Rourke Denis: Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
[Sitting date: 06 November 2012. Volume:685;Page:6299. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DENIS O’ROURKE (NZ First) 
: 
 New Zealand First does not support the emissions trading scheme as it is or this Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. It is just another expensive imposition on the people of New Zealand and on the businesses of New Zealand and we think it will be an expensive failure in terms of emissions. We need to think about the whole thing again. 
The need to attack climate change and to ensure that business improves its emissions performance is not denied but doing so in this way is not the correct approach. New Zealand First understands the nature of this country’s international obligations but this emissions trading scheme will turn environmental protection into a carbon credit bank to make emissions reduction a speculative business. Issuing tradable credits means New Zealand ends up paying for the wrongs of other countries and other polluters around the world. Businesses should not be able to buy their way out of bad emissions performance. That is what this scheme will essentially do and that is the essence of our opposition. 
Continuing with this scheme will cost billions of dollars to the New Zealand economy. We simply cannot afford that especially when it will not be the emitters who pay and especially when the scheme will not be effective as a means of assisting the problems with climate change. We believe we simply cannot afford it at this stage in any case. We note that many other countries are not having a bar of it. New Zealand should rethink its position entirely. 
We believe these funds should instead be retained in New Zealand—and that is New Zealand First’s policy—in order to provide the means to tackle our own emissions and our own pollution here in this country. We should be applying environmental levies or much better-targeted carbon taxes so that New Zealand will be able to play its part. We should have the strategies the plans the legislation and the regulation to achieve the emissions performance we seek and in consultation with New Zealand business because we think that without the cooperation of New Zealand business—New Zealand business generally agriculture and the whole of New Zealand business—we will have no chance really of achieving any of these objectives. 
I might say that I think most New Zealand businesses would prefer New Zealand First’s approach over the emissions trading scheme as a whole. For example we think that transport must be a first target requiring more use of rail less polluting vehicles better public transport incentives to use non-liquid fuel vehicles and so on. We do think that agriculture needs to play its part. We think that it needs to pay much more attention to sustainable agricultural processes. We see diesel emissions as a major problem with the many old buses and trucks that are chugging along New Zealand roads. We must use emissions regulation to require better performance from them and industry as a whole. 
New Zealand First maintains that the State must strike an appropriate balance between economic progress on the one hand and appropriate emissions goals on the other. The emissions trading scheme does not in itself decrease emissions; it just facilitates the trading of credits around the world to those economies that can afford to buy them and for that reason we do not see the emissions trading scheme devised by this Government as being sustainable. We see it as nothing more than another imposition on the people and product of New Zealand without anywhere near sufficient benefit in terms of emissions or assisting the fight against climate change. 
This particular bill improves nothing whatsoever. It simply makes a bad scheme worse by so compromising it that it lacks credibility. New Zealand First opposes the bill and the scheme. We think New Zealand and the world deserve better.