Woods MeganDr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): It is a pleasure to take a call on the External Sector which does cover a large number of agencies as we have heard: the Customs Service the Defence Force the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Official Development Assistance. I am largely going to cover in my speech the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade vote and what was covered at the Estimates hearing and I will touch on some of the other votes. It was a very interesting Estimates hearing and I think that is covered off in the report that has been returned to this Committee about that hearing. What we had was a Minister of Foreign Affairs who came before the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee who had a number of questions to answer in terms of foreign affairs. There was the $12 million that had been wasted on the demonstration farm all supposedly to stop a legal threat that appears to have been non-existent and this was something that the committee certainly looked at. Despite this that Minister said himself in Cabinet papers that the Government needed to enter into the multimillion-dollar deal to avoid the legal threat. It really does open up questions about this most important of portfolios because the Minister does need to front up and provide evidence that he did not mislead Cabinet or otherwise there are some very serious questions that need to be asked. Another issue that was of concern to the committee and was certainly at the fore of the hearings when the Minister appeared was the recent report that we have had from the Ombudsman on the inquiry into the diplomats Derek Leask and Nigel Fyfe and whether or not those two men are now owed an apology. This was something that was traversed in some depth at the hearing. Although it was suggested by Opposition members of the committee that this was certainly something that these two men are owed the Minister simply replied that he did not want to open up old wounds. One of the other key areas of course that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade is responsible for and has a great deal of responsibility for is climate change. Although some of the climate change portfolio falls under the environment portfolio which was talked about in the last theme that we were discussing some of the issues around the ratification of the Paris treaty fall squarely within the purview of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and certainly so do the issues around overseas aid in terms of climate finance and what goes to our Pacific nations in that respect particularly. So there are questions that have been asked. We have a new Minister who is trying to bring a new energy to the climate change portfolio and do more than her predecessor but we do have the very real question that the previous Minister for Climate Change Issues said: that whether or not the Paris Agreement would be ratified in New Zealand was highly conditional on a set of international obligations being met. There are still some questions around what happens in terms of the conditionality of the target that New Zealand put on the table in Paris in terms of that ratification process of those international obligations particularly around the international trading markets put in place. The other issue that was discussed more fully with the Minister at the Estimates hearing was the issue of climate finance because of course within that financial year the Prime Minister had come to the Paris conference and talked about an additional $200 million of climate aid to be put through the overseas development aid budget and some of that of course is apportioned into this year's Budget and appropriation. The Prime Minister came to Paris and talked about that funding but it was good to have a chance to have a discussion with the Minister and to learn that a lot of this was actually just recycled aid money. This was not new aid money that was coming in; it was money that was going through the overseas development fund anyway. It is not that I have any problem with us delivering a big portion of our climate change finance through bilateral rather than multilateral means. I actually think it makes a great deal of sense. But one of the things that we did ask about at that Estimates hearing was what checks and balances were going to be put in place to check that the money that is spent in this financial year as climate aid is in fact around mitigation and adaptation in terms of the Pacific: where that money is going whether it is really genuinely climate finance or whether it is overseas development aid that is just wearing a different cloak.