Parker David: Annual Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeParker David: Annual Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 13 April 2016. Volume:713;Page:10520. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour): I want to talk in the time that I have if I can about water climate change renewable energy and the Resource Management Act. I love that quote from Herman Daly a World Bank economist who said that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment and I think that is true over the longer term. If we think about what the major parts of the environmental challenges that we have in New Zealandare as the last speaker Catherine Delahunty said you really cannot go past water and I would add climate change.Let us think about what has happened with water. There is a very sad history of the decline in water quality in New Zealand. It goes back to the Resource Management Act being passed. There was full delegated authority to regional councils to control the degradation of our rivers; they did not. They failed in their duty in part because I think they were surprised by the speed of the transition to more intensive farming practices which were caused by the increase in dairy prices following the Doha round of the GATT actually.In response to that the last Labour Government started to do something about it and then the whole thing got sideswiped by the foreshore and seabed controversy. The Labour Government made mistakes. Some mistakes were made by the National Party rarking things up and by Hone Harawira rarking things up on the other side. Anyway the terrible confrontation that we had over the foreshore and seabed left Māori feeling very suspicious that everything that we did in respect of fresh water was somehow going to try to usurp their claimed interests in fresh water. It took some 2 years for the Government to separate water allocation from water quality and by the time we did it we put the national policy statement into a process under the Resource Management Act. It did not pop out until just after the 2008 election.The effect of that national policy statement which was drafted by former Principal Planning Judge of New Zealand Judge Sheppard was to say that clean rivers ought not to get dirty dirty rivers ought to be cleaned up over a generation and in order to stop clean rivers from getting dirty we actually needed to stop and control intensification of land use. It is no longer the councils and the factories that are causing most of the pollution of our rivers; it is actually non-point source discharge which is the diffuse pollution caused by increasing numbers of cows mainly but also sheep and deer on our farms.What did National do? It spiked it. It put in place an inferior instrument that to this day does not control the increasing intensification of land use in New Zealand which is why in places like South Canterbury we have a continuing decline in the quality of our rivers not just in the lowland—it was worst there first in the lowland rivers—but also in the mid-country. Until we go back to that form of national policy statement—the Judge Sheppard form—we will not get our river quality under control.I believe that most New Zealanders want their rivers to be clean enough to swim in. I believe that most New Zealanders think that the most important river to them is the one that is local to them which they want to swim in. They are the two messages that I parley around this country and the people respond and say that they agree with the Labour Party that the standard should be swimmability and it should be for their local rivers. The simple proposition is that if their local river is clean and my local river is clean then all of our local rivers will be clean. We can do that over a generation but today we could stop our clean rivers from getting dirtier if we had the form of national policy statement that was promoted by Judge Sheppard.The National Government under Nick Smith says that you cannot do that—you cannot have a swimmability standard because when rivers are in flood you cannot swim in them. What nonsense—no one is suggesting that the standard is for rivers in flood. He says that some rivers occasionally have seagulls defecating in them—or in their nests on the banks of the Ashburton River which is another example I have heard used. Well again we are not trying to stop natural challenges to water quality; we are actually saying that it is the human-induced ones that we need to control.I want to turn to climate change because the performance of this Government on climate change shows a similar weakness to what it has done in respect of fresh water. Before doing so I will just say that I am a bit tired of Nick Smith standing up and claiming credit for the Taupō and Rotorua restorations which were approved by the last Labour Government and funded by us in our Budgets. I have to say that I opposed both of those initiatives in Cabinet because I did not think that we should have to pay farmers to stop polluting but anyway I lost. I think my colleagues including Ruth Dyson were right because it was actually a bit of money from central government that actually facilitated the processes that have led to improvements in Taupō and Rotorua.Climate change—well who is the Government preferring the interests of in climate change? Again it is farmers. It has an economically irrational emissions trading scheme. The Government has allowed the price of really its only instrument to control the growth of emissions to collapse to close to zero after the second Kyoto Protocol period did not happen and the price of carbon dropped to zero. It did not do anything to stop units coming in. Even worse than that the Government excluded agriculture which is where 50 percent of our emissions come from.What is the effect of that? Increases in agricultural emissions become a burden on the rest of the economy and a burden on the environment and you get the land use signal wrong between increasingly intensive farming practices which produce emissions and forestry which reduces emissions. It is economically unsound what the Government has done in respect of the emissions trading scheme.The Labour Party says that we should have different targets for carbon dioxide emissions than the target for reduction of methane and nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture which make up 50 percent of our emissions but are harder to reduce to zero. We say that you should have a 40 percent reduction target below 1990 levels in respect of the carbon dioxide emissions from transport and power energy production and factory emissions and the like by 2030 and a different target in respect of methane and nitrous oxide because you cannot reduce them to zero in the same way but you certainly should not be increasing them. You certainly should not be keeping them outside the emissions trading scheme. Sure the agricultural sector needs high levels of free emissions rights but you must preserve the marginal price signal that penalises that industry for increases in emissions and rewards them for decreases. That is how an emissions trading scheme works.In respect of renewable energy this is an illustration of how national policy statements work. The last Labour Government promoted a national policy statement on renewable energy. Since then our proportion of renewable electricity has gone up from 57 percent to 80 percent. That was through a combination of things—including the national policy statement and including the price of carbon and various things to improve the grid investments that the Labour Government recognised were necessary to get distant renewables to market and therefore to give the generators the confidence to invest in new renewables—and it has worked. Gerry Brownlee tried to abolish the target of 90 percent renewables by 2025 but luckily the Prime Minister saw fit to throw him out of that role and put Hekia Parata in that role instead and Hekia Parata had the good sense to keep the target that the last Labour Government established.The Resource Management Act—after all these years we still have National blaming the Resource Management Act for New Zealand underperforming economically. We have per capita growth rates of close to zero after 8 years of the National Government. After a couple of attempts to amend the Resource Management Act it still blames that as the cause of the economic underperformance of this Government. Luckily because the Māori Party Peter Dunne the Greens New Zealand First and Labour combined to vote 61 votes against changing Part 2 of the Resource Management Act—32 of those 61 votes coming from the powerful Labour Party I note—the Government did not get to ruin Part 2 of the Act.There are some other changes that we are working through under the capable chairmanship of Scott Simpson on the Local Government and Environment Committee. I am enjoying that process. We have got to fix things. I am suspicious of some of the collaborative processes—some of the stripping out of appeal rights for people whose interests are adversely affected—but there are also some good things like templates so long as they go to form not content.Overall I think the National Government has to be judged harshly for a decline in water quality and increasing agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. It has done all right in continuing what we started with renewable energy and in its Resource Management Act reforms this time round—I think we can probably make a decent job of them at the select committee. I hope if we have cooperation from members we can get to a decent outcome there.My final point—estuaries. Our wetlands in our highlands and in our lowlands—our estuaries—are our rarest landscapes. So many of them have been converted to agriculture or polluted. They are the filters through which we trap silts and things and stop them going out to sea. At the moment—