Fitzsimons Jeanette: Address in ReplyText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeFitzsimons Jeanette: Address in Reply[Sitting date: 09 December 2008. Volume:651;Page:43. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green): Mr Speaker I offer my congratulations on your election. The Green Party will support you in your efforts to raise the standard of debate and behaviour in the House. It is time.On behalf of the Greens I extend a welcome to new MPs. I hope they succeed in making the difference that they came here to make. I offer our congratulations to all returning MPs on their re-election.The Greens are proud to be the third-largest party in the House and to welcome three new members—a 50 percent increase in our numbers. We look forward to serving on more select committees asking more questions and covering more issues. So I am happy today to introduce to the House Kevin Hague Catherine Delahunty—who yesterday became a grandmother—and Kennedy Graham. We have no backbenchers in the Greens. They all received a raft of portfolios on the day they arrived and we know that all of them will make a big contribution to Parliament.As the third voice in Parliament the Greens are neither in Government nor Opposition; we are an independent voice for those who have no other voice here—for the natural environment for sustainability for children born and for children to be born in the future for those who suffer discrimination poverty and violence and for all the creatures that we share this beautiful planet with. We are not part of any voting bloc. We have no agreement or defined relationship with the Government but we do not see ourselves as a professional Opposition whose job is just to oppose. We will vote for good legislation. We will seek to amend bad legislation and we will vote against it if we cannot amend it sufficiently. We are not opposed to any people or any parties but we are opposed to poor policies wherever they come from and to bad legislation.We made it clear before the election that we would not give our confidence and supply votes to National as its stated policies and programmes are just too different from ours. But we said that if it became the Government we would seek to work with it wherever we had common ground. Where that common ground might be is still to be established but we will be talking before Christmas.I offer my congratulations again to John Key on becoming Prime Minister. It is a time of huge challenge and he must be feeling the burden of that. I also acknowledgeHelen Clark who has made a big contribution to the history of this country. I say to Helen that her Government made a difference to many families who were struggling. She kept us out of an illegal war in Iraq. She embraced sustainability too late in her 9 years to deliver on it but she may have eased that path for the future. We hope she finds another role in which to further the causes she believes in.It is commonplace now to say that this is the worst crash of the financial markets since the Great Depression. Last year’s panic over inflation and an unsustainable bubble in the housing market has given way to a different panic with nearly a year of economic contraction lower commodity prices people losing their savings with the collapses in the financial sector people losing their jobs and people losing their homes through mortgagee sales. The path out of this scary situation will not be quick or easy.We are in this mess because of greed because of speculation and because of individuals corporates and nations living beyond their means. Compulsive consumerism combined with a lack of regulation and safeguards around financial markets have been an explosive mixture. It is unrealistic to expect that the same behaviour will get us out of that mess. The invisible hand of the free market has shown what it can do and it is not pretty. The freedom to sell what one does not own and to lend what one does not have results in the freedom for others to lose their homes their jobs and their families’ security. What will get us out of the mess is a return to the values of cooperation sharing and sustainability.The financial markets create no real wealth; they just move around the wealth created by others. They trade in what they call products which are really just shadows of the real economy—they have no intrinsic value. It is a zero-sum game: no one can make money in the financial markets without someone else losing it. That is not a recipe for social progress. But we are in a bind: if there is no credit the modern economy cannot function yet the more we bail out those who are failing the more we use the savings of the prudent to reward the reckless.Of course it is mainly not those who caused the mess who are suffering from it—it never is. Even the high-flyers who go bankrupt have very comfortable lives stashed away in trusts. The chief executive officers of companies announcing mass lay-offs still arrive for talks in their individual jets. Those with money do very well out of snapping up forced sales of companies shares and houses. So for every action we try to take to deal with the mess we must ask who is paying for this who will benefit from this and what kind of behaviour this is encouraging for the future.We now have as Prime Minister a man who has come out of those same financial markets that have overreached themselves and crashed. I say to John that I guess we are all hoping that after spending all that time among them he has some insights about how the international community could control them and ensure that this never happens again. Most of all we are hoping that he will not allow this financial mess to disguise the much more fundamental mess that underlies it. Professor Peter Barrett one of our most distinguished scientists put it very clearly in theDominion Poston Friday: “Markets recover in a few years—climate takes millennia.”Our society is now so divorced from its relationship with the natural world that many people cannot see that our economy and our markets are totally reliant on the environment which provides resources and absorbs wastes. We cannot balance environmental responsibilities and economic opportunities as the Speech from the Throne suggests. The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment. If the parent company collapses so does the subsidiary.We note with disappointment that the only mention of the environment even obliquely in the speech was as an obstacle to development requiring the weakening of the Resource Management Act. We hope this will not become known as the generationthat saved the banks but let the biosphere collapse. It is not just climate. Demand for oil gas fresh water food and some minerals is outstripping supply thus causing price rises that have contributed to financial collapses at least for homeowners who could no longer afford to pay their mortgage as well as fill their tank and their pantry.The world economy has grown so fast that environmental processes are breaking down. That tells us that unless we make radical changes in the way we do business and live more growth will mean more pollution more resource shortages and rising prices more inflation and eventually more ecological collapse.There is a very direct relationship between oil prices and the recession. Oil prices of over US$150 a barrel have stretched household budgets and pushed people further into debt. World recession has seen oil drop to a 4-year low because demand can now be met from the old onshore fields where it costs US$5 to US$10 a barrel to extract and process it. Growing demand requires tapping the new fields in deep water or in the Arctic where it costs US$70 to US$90 a barrel to extract and process. The surest sign that the recession is not yet easing is that fuel prices are still so low. If demand starts growing again they will be back up to US$150 but a lack of refining capacity will mean scarcity and price rises. This will show up in food prices and in the inability of our markets to afford our exports.Nations are right now in the middle of a life or death negotiation in Poland on whether to act collectively to preserve a liveable climate for all of the world or to hold out for our individual short-term interests—and so all go down together because we are all on the same ship. It is sad and embarrassing that New Zealand is not on the side of those arguing for clear binding targets for all OECD countries and financial instruments to enable developing countries to cut their emissions too. Instead we are arguing for taking food production out of the Kyoto Protocol. We are seeking an exemption for 50 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions before we even start trying to reduce them at all. The climate will respond to what we put into the atmosphere. The climate does not care whether we are food producers. After all the world needs more cars but Japan is not arguing for steel and coal in vehicle production to be outside the climate change agreement. We have to be realistic here: all emissions change the climate and all emissions must come into the agreement.It is significant that New Zealand has sent its Minister of Trade to the talks to fight our corner. Trade negotiations are never about the collective good; they are always about individual country interests. They stall for years over trivia. They demand special exemptions for demanding political constituencies. We cannot afford to let Kyoto become another Doha.A few months ago we passed legislation—many years too late—that put a price on carbon emissions. It was a weak economic signal to clean up but at least it was a signal. Part-way through the Government got cold feet and delayed the entry of transport for another 2 years. I ask Labour members when they look at fuel prices now whether they wish they had held their nerve on transport. Next January would have been the perfect time to bring transport in while fuel prices were so low—as originally planned—to keep up the momentum towards lower fuel consumption.The emissions trading scheme has many loopholes exemptions and delays but it was a start. Now no one can figure out what is happening and that is a recipe for a loss of business confidence and a loss of investment—and it is already happening. The Prime Minister tells us that he will put the emissions trading scheme on hold. I ask him how. Energy transport and agriculture have had no obligations for ages anyway. But foresters who planted over the winter of 2008 are legally entitled to credits in January 2009. Is this Government of property rights and business telling them that there will not be any credits in January 2009? Is a bill coming before the House during this urgencysession to wipe out forestry credits and obligations? We hope not because that would usher in a new season of clear-felling forests and converting to dairying with no penalty. I would have to drag out Nick Smith’s old speeches that went on for months and months blaming the Government week after week for creating just that situation in 2007. That would also see an enraged Roger Dickie climbing the steps of Parliament and I would be supporting him.Perhaps putting the legislation on hold is just a figure of speech and nothing will actually happen. But business does not know and business is worried. We already have a number of investors having second thoughts about investing in New Zealand. Now we have ACT—the party that believes that climate science is wrong and that human-induced climate change is a myth—trying to delay and confuse for another year by demanding a carbon tax. That is one more year of business offloading the costs of its emissions on to the taxpayer. The select committee will be instructed to consider that and even to consider the bizarre suggestion that politicians should review whether the international science community has it wrong. That is still in the terms of reference in code. I say to John that he cannot afford to waste public funds educating Rodney on 20-year-old science and he cannot afford to let Rodney pull the National-led Government into fantasy land. It is time to take serious action to reduce our emissions and to join the global effort to reach an effective agreement.The Government is proposing an infrastructure investment package to stimulate the economy. The Greens proposed such a package early in the election campaign before other parties did. However the packages are not the same. It is vital that the infrastructure we build prepares us for the very different world of oil depletion climate change and resource scarcity. We need more and better public transport and a rebuilt rail system not new motorways. We need more affordable housing built to high standards of energy efficiency and close to public transport and workplaces. We need the Greens’ billion-dollar home insulation programme that this Government is going to axe. The programme would be the fastest source of new jobs in a recession and would reduce people’s power bills and keep people with asthma out of hospital. If John wants value for health dollars then he should insulate cold damp houses. The Greens would be happy to work with him on that and the money for it is already there in the dividends the energy companies will pay under the emissions trading scheme.I now hand over to my co-leader Dr Norman for the rest of our time.