English Bill: Climate Change Response Amendment Bill — In Committee 
English Bill: Climate Change Response Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:635;Page:6219] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 The National Party in the context of the Climate Change Response Amendment Bill has every right to question the sincerity of the Government’s statements about New Zealand becoming a carbon neutral country. Helen Clark made some grand statements in a speech to the Labour Party conference and we have put the motivation behind and the sincerity of those remarks to the test. Here are a few simple facts. 
Despite the fact that the Labour Government made a substantial show of signing the Kyoto Protocol New Zealand has had the biggest increase in carbon dioxide emissions in the OECD—not the second-biggest increase nor a bit bigger increase than that of Australia or the UK; in fact the rate of our increase in carbon dioxide emissions is three times that of Australia and twice that of the US. That is why we are questioning Helen Clark’s motivation in suddenly signing up to an unachievable emissions target—New Zealand has the biggest single increase in emissions of carbon dioxide in the OECD. 
Helen Clark has also overseen the biggest fall in energy from renewable sources in the OECD in the last 7 years. It now appears that if Labour has a policy to achieve something the opposite of that happens. Labour had a policy to reduce carbon dioxide emissions or to hold them to their 1990 levels yet those emissions went up faster than the rate of increase in any other country. It had an energy policy aimed at focusing on renewable energy and it got exactly the opposite result of that. It is not that Labour had no chance to make decisions that would have made a difference. The Labour Government turned down the Dobson dam proposal which would have been a source of significant renewable energy. Instead it built an oil-fired power station funded by the Government and decided on by the Government at Whirinaki. Those were exactly the wrong decisions to make. 
 I know that the Greens are sitting here asking themselves the same questions that National is asking because Labour has now tried to shackle the Greens to Labour’s greenhouse emissions policies and Jeanette Fitzsimons must know that the chances of that approach coming to anything meaningful are zero. When we look at the track record of this Government we see that if it has an environmental policy to do with climate change the opposite happens of what it sets out to achieve. 
National is supporting this bill because it is one of the very few initiatives that make some sense but it has come as too little too late. It is a very very small measure—too little too late—and has come after Helen Clark has managed to achieve something that no other New Zealand Government has managed to achieve in my lifetime which is that more trees have been chopped down than were planted. No one else has achieved that. But the forestry industry has been telling this Government for the last 7 years that its policies would have that effect. So that is another one. The Labour Party set out with a policy to encourage carbon sinks and ended up with less afforestation than any other country in the OECD. The problem with these shortcomings in the policy is that they are such major shortcomings that people do not believe they are shortcomings. People cannot believe that a Government that professes to have any kind of environmental target could have made such a bad job of achieving it. But that is exactly what the Labour Party has achieved. 
I tell the member for Otaki that the document that National has put out on environmental policy is attracting the attention of every single opinion leader and activist on the environment in New Zealand. People are showing up on wet cold Tuesday nights in empty church halls to talk about it because they have had enough of going along to Labour Government - funded talkfests where Labour members go on and go with the latest fashionable words from the Ministry for the Environment yet nothing happens. That is why they are going along to Nick Smith’s public meetings all over the country in their hundreds. They know that National’s environmental policy is a sincere and practical policy.