Seymour David: Climate Change (Divestment from Fossil Fuels) Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSeymour David: Climate Change (Divestment from Fossil Fuels) Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 11 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:7931. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): I rise on behalf of the ACT Party in opposition to the Climate Change (Divestment from Fossil Fuels) Bill.Stuart Nash: Do you want an economically illiterate speech?DAVID SEYMOUR: I am sure Mr Nash will get up at some point speak in favour of it and reflect on that as he flies home for the weekend. I want to thank James Shaw for bringing a substantial bill with noble intentions to the House but I have to say that I think it fails on a couple of measures. One is that he claims one of the advantages is that it is fiscally prudent for New Zealand investors not to invest in certain areas because they may end up with stranded assets. Now if it is true that James Shaw and the Green Party have that sort of foresight in respect of the financial markets I have got a simple solution for them: start shorting those assets. The Green Party could fund its entire campaign—it would not have to go and ask people for donations; it would not have to do fund-raising drives; it would not have to sell sausage sizzles or anything else; it could make all of its money just by shorting assets with the foresight that it used to design this bill. But of course we all know that that is hogwash. It has no such foresight as it has demonstrated with peak oil over the last decade.Secondly let us imagine for a moment that we are not going to delude ourselves that this is somehow fiscally prudent but rather we believe that this is a very important issue to address and ethically we—the nebulous “we” that the previous member Megan Woods kept talking about—must stop supplying capital or at least raise the cost of capital to these industries that we see as being a threat. The problem with that is that you have created a conflicting objective for those who manage the fund. On the one hand they have to maximise return to taxpayers for the purposes that taxpayers have and on the other hand they have to pursue this secondary ethical objective. It is never a good idea in politics in business and in life to have one organisation with two diametrically opposed objectives which is what they would have. It is far better to tax or disincentivise the consumption of carbon-heavy materials services or goods at the point of consumption.But of course the real difficulty is that all the 40000 people flying off in jet planes to Paris to talk about this next month will not be able to solve the fundamental coordination problem in that they cannot get every Government in the world to agree on a price level for carbon. Until you solve that problem nothing in this bill is going to help the security of New Zealand’s investments or have any significant or measurable impact on global carbon emissions. So with those few comments and caveats I again commend the member for bringing the bill but I cannot agree with its intentions or what its results will be and so I have to oppose this bill. Thank you.