Seymour David: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSeymour David: General Debate[Sitting date: 02 March 2016. Volume:711;Page:9311. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): I would like to compliment the previous member Mark Mitchell on his literary prowess that was on display and ask him just how on earth he has kept it so well concealed for so long.I am feeling very very good. I am feeling good for Epsom and I am feeling good for ACT. The only thing that has been making me feel bad is the Green Party because the Green Party members are not hypocrites—that would be unparliamentary. The behaviour of the Green Party is highly hypocritical. Who would have thought that the party whose members tell all of us to do as they say would be the ones who when they do are the most expensive fliers in this House? Who would have thought? Certainly not me.Their co-leader James Shaw loves to go around and around the country telling the story of how as a management consultant he once helped clients reduce the amount of time that they spent in the air. Well the Green caucus has been getting high all right—it must be his hardest client. Those members spend so much time in the air. They spend more time than any other party. When people say “Oh but that was just the last quarter.” well yes the last quarter was the highest because they spent more and more progressively every single quarter of last year under James Shaw’s leadership.And does that not tell the story about the Green Party? Some will say: “Oh but you are being churlish. It is a political party; it does not have actual constituencies like some of us who serve electorates.” But it does have constituents around the country—it does have that—and its members have to get around to see them. I could understand if the Green members sometimes needed to fly but not more than any other party. The fact is they do not care. They do not even try. The fact of the matter is that the Green Party has delayed debates in Auckland while a Wellington-based member flew in to be part of the debate when I know that a Green MP lives one bus stage away just up the road from the University of Auckland. And if you do not want to catch a bus another one lives a 40-minute ferry ride away—you know coastal shipping transport of course being very ecologically friendly—who could not make it either. The fact is the Green Party does not even try to structure its affairs to practise what it preaches for the rest of us. So much for it.The truth is if you look around the world the Green Party has been out of sync with what is really good for environmental custodianship for a very long time. If you look at the Yale Environmental Performance Index which measures the environmental performance of different countries; if you look at the Fraser Institute’s economic freedom of the world index which measures the extent to which parties practise free-market policies they are correlated. Countries that practise free markets have better environmental records than countries that do not. Those are the facts.Fletcher Tabuteau: I think China just skews the data.DAVID SEYMOUR: Counterintuitive and irritating to some members but those are the facts and there is nothing like the facts to trip up and confuse Fletcher Tabuteau. I would describe the free-market premises of environmentalism as the four Ps. Accurate pricing is important. We heard from Gareth Hughes earlier who wanted to pervert the price system in the electricity market. This would have led either to a reduction in solar panel installation by homeowners because they would have discovered that it did not pay because the price had been set too low or to a reduction in the offerings of solar buy-back services by retailers because the price had been set too high for them to buy it back. Only the Greens through their economic illiteracy and misunderstanding of the importance of the price system as a method of resource allocation could introduce a pro-solar policy that would discourage the uptake of solar. But I digress again.Property rights are important because the pollution that we see is overwhelmingly as the Greens say in the water and in the air and in the things that nobody owns where nobody is saying: “Don’t put that there.” Under the fourth Labour Government the introduction of the quota management system—that is property rights over the fisheries—was one of the largest advances in environmental custodianship that this country has ever ever made. I see David Shearer nodding there because he agrees. Prosperous countries are better at looking after their environment. The countries that encourage private initiatives are better at looking after their environment. The ecosystem does not require authoritarian measures; it requires free societies. Thank you.