Parker David: Climate Change Response (Moderated Emissions Trading) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Parker David: Climate Change Response (Moderated Emissions Trading) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 24 November 2009. Volume:659;Page:8015. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour) 
: 
 It gives me no pleasure to rise after we have just voted through those terrible amendments to the emissions trading scheme. Effectively they have rendered largely ineffective New Zealand’s main response to our growing emissions. 
Hon Steve Chadwick 
: A sad day. 
Hon DAVID PARKER 
: It is a terribly sad day. The effect of that decision on future generations is that our children and their children will have visited upon them many billions of dollars and emissions will grow more than they would otherwise have done. I think it is timely to record the fact that if a country like New Zealand with our comparative wealth—we are one of the richest countries in the world on a world scale; we are not as rich as Australia but we are still very wealthy—with our good environmental ethic which is not held by the National Party or the Maori Party but generally held by most New Zealanders who think we should do our bit for the environment; with the benefit of the rule of law; and with our wonderful scientists and our understanding of these things cannot do this right what hope is there that the world will do it right in time? What hope is there that the world will get on top of these problems in time for them not to be catastrophic? I am not a man of hyperbole—I do not use the word “catastrophic” often in this Chamber—but scientists warn us that if the world does not reduce its emissions very soon then the climate change effects will see millions of people displaced by rising sea levels changing patterns of food production caused by drought and conversely terrible storm events meaning that millions of people will not have enough food to eat and that thousands of species that currently exist on our planet will be lost. I think that is very sad. 
I will move on to why I disagree with something that the ACT Party contributed at the end of the last part of the debate on the Climate Change Response (Moderated Emissions Trading) Amendment Bill. An ACT member said that we had to protect property rights. That member was saying what Business New Zealand said in its submission to the Finance and Expenditure Committee which was that there is a property right to pollute. I might not agree with much that the Minister in the chair Dr Nick Smith has done on this amendment bill but I hope that he agrees that there is no property right to pollute. We have to stand down that notion in this country. There is no property right to pollute—whether it be the right to pollute a river; whether it be the right to pollute with ozone gases destroying the ozone layer; or whether it be the right to put lead in petrol because it was cheaper for oil companies. There was no property right to do that. There is no property right to pollute in any area. 
It is not a private property right to pollute. That is where the business lobby has made a fundamental error in its logic. I correct myself: not all of the business lobby is wrong but the Business New Zealand business lobby is fundamentally wrong. I think it is such a lazy error; it is so patently wrong. There is no property right to pollute. We did not have to compensate oil companies when we took lead out of petrol. We did not have to compensate refrigeration companies when we took out ozone-damaging substances from their refrigerants. We do not have to compensate farmers when they are told not to pollute rivers. We did not have to compensate councils when we stopped them pouring raw sewage into harbours. We did not have to compensate factories when they stopped polluting rivers with the freezing works blood and guts that they used to just dump in them. We do not have to compensate businesses to do what this country and the world needs to be done when it comes to reducing carbon emissions into the atmosphere. 
This principle needs to be reiterated. I ask the Minister in the chair to state clearly that he disagrees with Business New Zealand and that he disagrees with the ACT Party’s notion that there is a property right to pollute. That is what lies behind the right-wing agenda of those who say that we should protect property rights in this bill. That is what they mean. They say it should protect their property right to pollute. I disagree with that in principle but even if Dr Smith disagrees with it in principle he is doing it in practice with this bill. 
Some of the amendments that I have put up change the name of this bill to more properly reflect what it is. It could be the “Greenhouse Gas Emissions (Property Rights Creation) Bill”. It creates that property right. It entrenches those rights to create and persist in creating carbon pollution well past 2050. In fact the emission abatement curve is so slow that it does not abate fully for 80 years. We will all be dead and gone. Actually most of our children will be dead and gone by the time the free emissions rights completely abate under this bill. It effectively creates such a long period of tradability of that pollution right that one could not but say that in practice it creates a property right to pollute. 
In doing so we know that it increases Government debt. It increases Government debt because the free emissions rights that are given to major emitters long after they had a fair adjustment period are so enormous that Government gives away an extra $50 billion worth of emissions right. We can argue with the Minister as to whether it is proper to include the interest on that increased Government debt as Treasury did to get the figure of a $110 billion increase in Government debt but there is no doubt that it substantially increases Government debt. So an alternative name is the “Climate Change Response (Increased Government Debt) Amendment Bill”. 
At question time yesterday the Minister wriggled and wriggled and tried not to answer the question about Brian Fallow’s statement in the  
New Zealand Herald  
that the effect of this bill is to delay the date when New Zealand’s emissions peak and to have a higher peak before they go down. We now know on the record that even the Minister agrees that the effect of this bill is to increase New Zealand’s emissions. So the “Climate Change Response (Increased Emissions) Amendment Bill” might be a more proper name for it. We could give various other names to the bill. The “Permanent Pollution Payments Entrenchment Bill” would be a fair name for this bill. 
Members can choose between those names but the sad effect of this bill is to severely undermine the environmental effectiveness of the scheme. It causes irresponsible fiscal cost to be put on the taxpayer and on future generations who will have to repay that cost. It does nothing to improve New Zealand’s contribution to fixing this problem. Editorials up and down the country commentators Treasury the Ministry of Economic Development and the specialist adviser to the Finance and Expenditure Committee Dr Suzi Kerr all say the same thing. But according to the Government they are all wrong. Dr Smith is wrong. This bill is fatally flawed and it should not have the name that it masquerades under currently.