Genter Julie AnneHon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): Tēnā koe Madam Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. On behalf of the Green Party I rise to support the Appropriation (2020/21 Supplementary Estimates) Bill.I just want to start my contribution by emphasizing the importance of Government and Government spending to all of our wellbeing and our future. I believe that we are at a moment in time when it has never been more clear why we need a strong accountable democratic and transparent Government that can help ensure that all people in our country have the basics of what they need and that we're able to work together to confront the incredible challenges that we are facing—COVID was just the beginning of that. Obviously with this Supplementary Estimates bill we see a lot of initiatives to help ensure that we were able to respond effectively to COVID. I think it's worth noting that billionaires didn't save us from a pandemic. Having more billionaires doesn't help the world respond to a pandemic. Having private corporations—some of them were able to play a role and that was useful but ultimately it's Government who can coordinate and act on behalf of the people. And when Government is transparent accountable and democratic we are able to work together so that we're all better off because as individuals we could not stop a pandemic. We could not keep ourselves and our families safe from a pandemic without everyone else in the country also doing certain things to ensure that we could all be safe.So obviously you hear a lot of debate in this House sometimes quite critical of Government spending. I would like to say that in the private sector if you talk to any venture capitalist they don't expect every investment they make to be a perfect success. In fact the majority of them aren't. But it's important that they put the money in and they try. It's no different when it comes to Government. We need our Government to be doing the absolute best it can but we can't expect everything to work perfectly. The amount of criticism that comes from those people trying to pick holes in various Public Service initiatives where things haven't worked out perfectly unfortunately undermines the very concept that we need Government.But I think it was very clear that New Zealanders understood just how important it is to have a competent and caring Government. That was pretty obvious at the outcome of the last election when the Labour Party increased their vote the Greens increased their vote and we are parties that have a much more modern view of the role of Government in everyone's lives and that it can be a positive contributor. Why? Because we need a public health system. We need infrastructure. We need housing. We need affordable housing. None of that can be delivered well by an individual competitive private market. We need Government to do that. When it comes to responding to climate change it's going to be 10 times 100 times 1000 times more challenging than responding to COVID-19. And I don't know that everyone in this House really understands just how pressing and urgent it is that we respond to climate change.Now I want to acknowledge the Labour Government where they have recently made some steps in the right direction to respond to the Climate Change Commission's advice to ensure that we do have policies that are helping us as a country as a team of 5 million reduce our contribution to catastrophic global warming so that our kids and their kids have a chance at a future. We're already seeing the impacts and effects of climate change. We've had three dry years in a row. We've had some parts of the country affected by drought. That's particularly bad for a range of reasons. It's not good for our farmers. It's not good for people who live in areas where they have to have water restrictions. The drought is contributing to higher electricity prices and ironically more carbon emissions from our electricity because our lake levels are lower because there wasn't substantial investment in an alternative to coal 10 or 20 years ago when we needed those plans to be made. Of course the Government's working on it now but we are going to have to burn more coal in a dry year. Then conversely we have these periods of drought and then we get hit by epic storms and flooding which affects infrastructure in places around Canterbury and Ashburton.Now this is just the beginning because in fact other parts of the world that are closer to the Equator are already suffering worse impacts of climate change. The economic and human consequences of climate change are going to be devastating. I've just been reading a book recently and the latest reports coming out from our globally accepted institutions that have the best science are saying the window of time is running out to take action on climate change. Our kids actually—it's going to be too late for them. If we don't act right now it's too late for them. So if you care about your kids then this is something that we all have to take very seriously and work together on.I think those parties—and there will be voices of course that try to stir up fear and anger. I've seen a lot of that in the last few weeks. Voices out there—actually not just the last few weeks the last few months. Whether it's fear around recognising and finally taking action on our commitments under Te Tiriti o Waitangi whether it's fear and anger over practical policy responses in the transport sector to how we can reduce emissions I have seen members of this House and others go out there and try to stir up anger fear and hatred—things that will divide our country and make—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order! The member will come back to the bill.Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: —that will make it harder for us to respond to climate change.In this Appropriation (2020/21 Supplementary Estimates) Bill I just want to call the attention of the members to one thing: energy and resources oilfield decommissioning—an additional $200 million almost. I think this is a perfect example of where Government has to come clean up the mess of the people who have privately invested in fossil fuel extraction and profited from it but then left a mess for the public to deal with. This is another really good example of why we need Government. We need Government setting the rules and regulations monitoring ensuring that private industry is playing its role and we need Government ensuring that it's addressing inequality in our society because unless people have enough resource to have a warm dry affordable home to put food on the table they're not going to be able to care about environmental issues they're not going to be able to worry about climate change and respond to it and that's where climate change and inequality—responding to these two twin challenges together is absolutely essential.While I think the Labour Government made a good start with the Budget in 2021—the increase to benefits is long overdue and happy to see that. Of course the Green Party would like to go further and faster and some of the initiatives here in the Supplementary Estimates of course will be addressing that but again this is just the beginning. These are just baby steps. If we're truly going to meet the challenges of the next decade and the decades after that we are going to need a much more bold and transformational approach and we are going to have to work together. But we've shown that we can do it. We did it with COVID. We've had literally the best result of pretty much any country in the world in our response to COVID and that was coming from a pretty difficult situation because of course we had nine years of underfunding of our health system—total decimation of public health from the previous National Government. And the previous coalition Government was taking the steps to rebuild the Public Service after it was rendered quite impotent under the last National Government—building it up and were able to step it up in a really short period of time in 2020. And although it wasn't perfect—of course nothing's ever going to be perfect with humans—I'd say it's as good as it could have been. We need that kind of national pride and spirit and togetherness in how we approach climate change.Climate change and responding to inequality must be central to our economic strategy in the recovery and from here on out. Of course we see many other countries doing that. The United States has made responding to climate change absolutely central to their economic strategy. There's no point thinking we can get rich in the short term by continuing to do things the way we always have done when in fact it's going to cost us heaps more. Five 10 15 20 years from now our trading partners are not going to be looking at us and wanting to deal with us if we aren't pulling our weight in the global fight against climate change. And there will be severe economic consequences to those parties—God forbid they should get into power because they've made it very clear in the last few weeks they're not going to do a God damn thing to respond to climate change. They're going to complain and they're going to fight for the status quo every step of the way and they're going to try and make people very very angry but luckily New Zealanders can see beyond the fear they can see beyond the anger and I know New Zealanders are up for this fight.