Roy Eric: General Debate 
Roy Eric: General Debate 
[Volume:636;Page:6938] 
ERIC ROY (National—Invercargill) 
: 
 For those people who are listening on the radio out there this is the general debate—a debate that takes place each Wednesday afternoon with 12 members from around the House participating. I am amazed that we have in this debate the opportunity to sell policy and express a way forward yet week after week members of the Labour Government have done nothing but look over their shoulders and criticise a fast-finishing National Party. They seek only to try to discredit members on this side of the House. This debate is the opportunity they have to sell their policy but clearly there is no policy— 
Jill Pettis 
: Didn’t you listen to Gerry Brownlee? 
ERIC ROY 
: The member on the other side said there is policy. Now there is a point because at the Labour Party conference the Prime Minister said: “We will be carbon neutral.” Well that is a policy and I am happy to debate it today. If that is the policy the Labour Party is promoting then I think it needs a great deal of scrutiny. We have a Labour Government that signed us up to the Kyoto Protocol. And yes I am a believer—I believe we must respond to climate change and I have made that comment before in the House. So I am not coming from the point of view of a Luddite who does not believe that there should be a response. But being a signatory to Kyoto will not solve the problem. 
Let us look at the Government’s record on this matter. There is an intention to get the levels of greenhouse gases back to 10 percent less than 1990 levels. That is the objective of signing the first section of the Kyoto agreement. Then the Government blaming agriculture announced a “fart tax”. It said that 49 percent of our greenhouse gases come from agriculture. I have asked again and again in this House for it to give us the science to support that. But then the Government said that it would not go into that debate and backed away from the “fart tax”. Then it said that we needed to have a carbon tax. It announced it then abandoned that idea. Then it calculated what the sale of our carbon credits would be—and that was a billion dollars out. The Government stopped the tendering of renewable energy projects. It negotiated greenhouse gas agreements that a whole lot of businesses in New Zealand spent a lot of money on getting involved in and now that has been abandoned. 
So we have never been given any vision or any ability to connect back to the commitment made when Kyoto was signed and we said that we would hit those 1990 levels. It is absolutely factual that we have no hope of doing that. At the climate change guidelines conference in Nairobi New Zealand was perhaps the worst performer certainly out of countries of the First World that were attending that conference. So we do not have a hope of hitting those 1990 levels and the Government comes out and says we are to become carbon neutral. Well goodness me we cannot see any possibility of our first commitment to Kyoto happening yet the Government says that no we are going to do better: we are going to be carbon neutral. That is an impossibility. 
For a start we need to know what that means. Does that mean—and I ask the next Government speaker to explain—that we will offset in some form every tonne of fossil fuel consumed in New Zealand? That is what I take it to mean. If I have it wrong I ask the Government to please explain. And how does the Government say it will do that? It says it will do it by planting trees. Under this Government forestry is declining. Does it mean that the Government will sequester carbon in some form in the ground? Will it do it by having scrubbers in chimneys or by doing something that is not yet in operation anywhere in the country? Will it buy carbon credits somewhere around the world in order to be carbon neutral? Because under this Labour Government we have slipped back and we are nowhere near having carbon credits that we can use in our own right. Not only that the industries that might produce them are moving away from it. 
The Government has the fine ideal of New Zealand being carbon neutral but it has not explained what it means how it will get there or what the cost will be. We need leadership on this situation not platitudes and rhetoric. It is absolutely critical that New Zealand pulls its weight in the international forums around the world and we need to have a credible plan. If we do not do that that is when the consumers will start to boycott our goods. We have heard the comments made about food miles. We need to act credibly in order to come up with an acceptable plan that will work.