Shaw JamesGENERAL DEBATEHon JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): I move That the House take note of miscellaneous business. Earlier at question time the Prime Minister called this House's attention to the Stats New Zealand report yesterday that the last quarter's emissions for this country are the lowest in eight years. It is all too easy I think to despair at the climate emergency or to think that it's all too late but it is not. The release two weeks ago of the latest scientific evidence from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the climate crisis is certainly very sobering reading. Essentially what the IPCC report said is that we have to globally halve emissions in the remaining years of this decade and then eliminate the rest of it by the year 2050 at the absolute latest if we're to have any hope at all of keeping global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius. But amidst the increasingly dire warnings in that report and all of the ones before that I think that there was an optimistic note which is that it is not too late to make a difference. Ever since climate change was first discussed in the mainstream a little more than 35 years ago our collective understanding of what the climate crisis is and what we can do about it and the kind of world that we are creating for ourselves has changed dramatically. Over the course of those 3½ decades it's also true that half as much climate pollution has been emitted since the beginning of the industrial period. So since we started saying that we needed to reduce pollution globally we've actually emitted as much as we did in the industrial revolution up to that point. So you cannot say as a planet that we have done a terribly good job of doing what we said that we would need to do. Politicians around the world have known over the course of time what was unfolding. Hundreds of politicians thousands of politicians had a chance to stop it but they did not and so in that final IPCC report a couple of weeks ago it did say to us essentially this is our last chance. This is it—the time is now. If we do not act comprehensively now then we will absolutely miss that 1.5-degrees Celsius temperature threshold. It is time to accelerate our efforts. It is time to meet the scale of the crisis with the urgency and the scale which it demands and we are making progress. As the Prime Minister said our last quarter's emissions were the lowest that they have been in eight years. That is a good sign. Now it is only one quarter. It comes after a number of other quarters where emissions were up but the fact that we had one quarter in which the emissions were the lowest in eight years is itself remarkable. We are going to have to wait for our next inventory report to see what changes in terms of our future projections but we are starting to get an inkling that the policies that this Government has put into play over the course of the last six years are starting to make a difference. It is starting to deliver results and the pace of action is—yes it is still too slow and I do not want another generation to have to inherit the burden of slow progress. We must push harder. We must do more than we have to date. I have always rejected the idea that politics is a matter of absolutes and that if we can't win everything then we lose everything. It often requires an ability to see past our differences and to find common ground and over the last 5½ years there is no one who has done more to show us what that means than the Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern. I am one of the fortunate few who has had the opportunity to work with her during the course of this Government. We did not always agree and sometimes we vehemently disagreed but there is no doubt that she is one of the most dedicated authentic values-driven people that I have ever had the pleasure of knowing or the privilege of working with. Now when people ask me if we can do enough quickly enough to meet our emissions reductions targets I have to remember that before she started as Prime Minister even the idea of legislated targets seemed completely out of reach. She has changed politics and once the politics changes the possible outcomes also change. It is in no small part due to her leadership her clarity and her direction that we are where we are. Thank you Mr Speaker.