Court Simon; Salesa JennySIMON COURT (ACT): Thank you so much Madam Speaker for your patience tonight. ACT opposes this bill but unlike my colleagues here we are not pleased to be here debating this arcane and complex piece of legislation under urgency no less. ACT opposes this bill for the same reason we opposed the 2020 regulations: because it prohibits purchasing credits on an open market which is how markets in the real world actually work and it's a needless complication to an already complicated system devised by the climate Minister and the Government. We heard how complicated it was. It sounded pretty complicated.That Minister's explanation confused most market analysts and maybe that is what is intended but it won't help New Zealand reach a target of net zero emissions by 2050 either which is what New Zealand signed up to in Paris. It will create uncertainty and discourage New Zealand businesses to innovate. That's the fastest way to solve the problem about how to mitigate our emissions. ACT's position is this: New Zealand business should have the ability to purchase high-quality credits from any willing seller and New Zealand business should not be subject to the invisible hand of a Government Minister who will have the power to set a confidential reserve price at an auction especially from a Government led by a Prime Minister who once declared that she would lead the most open and transparent Government ever.This bill entrenches a damaging culture a culture that pervades this Government's lawmaking—this culture of urgency and once-over-lightly and She'll be right". Well it's not right. This bill continues to politicise the New Zealand business environment at a time when business needs certainty and a steady environment from which to grow out of COVID and all of the economic and social issues that that has caused. Now the Minister already controls the supply of carbon credits to this closed market that the Government created and therefore has the power to influence emissions up or down. So why doesn't the Minister simply reduce the supply of credits rather than hiding behind the veil of a rigged market? Well that's because this Government has shown a willingness to race far ahead of our trading partners by setting unrealistic time frames for New Zealand to reduce its absolute emissions.The Minister even said recently that those unrealistic targets set at Paris are not enough to satisfy the Government's agenda and that New Zealand businesses should expect their assets to be stranded—I repeat "their assets to be stranded"—and jobs to be lost in order to meet the Minister's targets. You can imagine what those targets will do to communities up and down New Zealand—like South Auckland and the thousands of workers at the Glenbrook steel mill and all of those supporting industries and the communities that they live in.In the central North Island in the Bay of Plenty where pulp and paper are made and from there exported to the world those communities where those high-paying jobs are essential for the health and wellbeing of the people who live there. In Northland cement manufacturing at Golden Bay will be put at risk and in Taranaki already suffering from this Government's flawed policy agenda where fertiliser and other raw materials are made—that's where we will see the impact of this kind of flawed policy rushed through under urgency. Now all of these materials can be imported from countries which have no intention of matching New Zealand's unrealistic time frames and based on this Government's trajectory it looks like the loss of those industries will come sooner rather than later. So the Minister must believe that the market system won't be enough and that's why we need these extra controls allowed for in the bill—this rigged market proposed by the Minister. Now we've seen other examples about how markets work all the time. We've seen the housing market. There's an awful lack of land supply; therefore the price of land has gone up far beyond what we could imagine. So we know a market price encourages changes in behaviour. We've seen those changes in behaviour. We've seen intensity; we've seen high-rises going up; we've seen new dwellings being built which don't even have car parks. They don't need car parks because we know that—David Seymour: The beauty of the market.SIMON COURT: Oh! There's behaviour changes coming from price signals from the market. So we understand that the Government's climate change interventions are designed to change behaviours. Now ACT's opposition to the original bill and to this amendment were well founded. These regulations that the bill seeks to amend were flawed in the first place and this amendment only complicates things. ACT opposed Government's meddling in markets and creating more uncertainty for business at this time when business needs certainty more than ever as we slowly recover from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on our economy and society. We support an ETS an emissions trading scheme which gives New Zealand business options—options to mitigate the effects of carbon dioxide emissions on the climate at the lowest possible cost to their businesses and to society as a whole. This regulation does not do that. ACT supports an ETS which allows for trade-offs between businesses which emit carbon dioxide as part of their process like a steel mill or a power station and a willing seller those which take up carbon dioxide as part of their business activity like growing trees or some other capture and storage technology because ACT trusts New Zealand scientists and engineers to work out how to mitigate carbon dioxide. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): This debate is interrupted. The Government has indicated to me that it does not wish to continue in urgency."