Sage Eugenie: Debate on Prime Minister’s StatementText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement[Sitting date: 16 February 2016. Volume:711;Page:8998. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green): E Te Māngai o Te Whare tēnā koe. In the Green Party we would rather the $26 million that is being spent on this flag referendum was spent on doing something about protecting our climate. I had the privilege yesterday of listening to a world leader the President of Kiribati Anote Tong talking about climate change. He called it the greatest moral challenge facing humanity. He said: “We simply want the ability to live on our island.” That is a basic human right to have a home and to be able to live in your homeland. Yet from the Prime Minister’s statement National seems totally intent on ignoring what is happening with our oceans the impacts of rising sea levels on our Pacific neighbours and the urgent need to tackle climate change. Instead it is distracted with the flag referendum as we heard from the previous speaker.Our oceans as well as producing half the oxygen we breathe and absorbing around 30 percent of the carbon dioxide we produce also absorb 93 percent of the heat we are producing from global warming. With these warming oceans we get sea level rise up to a metre or more by 2100. Warming oceans of course contribute to more intense weather events—cyclones where they did not occur previously more extensive and severe droughts—and in the Pacific we are seeing that combination of sea level rise and more extreme weather events costing those islands the ability to have a homeland.Rising sea levels will inundate some of our Pacific neighbours. Here in New Zealand we can move uphill and we can move inland. On coral atolls like Kiribati there is no uphill or inland to move to. Yet in the Prime Minister’s statement we saw a total failure to recognise that we need to reduce our emissions and that we need to adapt to the realities of an unstable climate. That was missing from the Government’s top four priorities.New Zealand cannot have the competitive and productive economy that the Prime Minister claims to want without making a shift to a low-carbon economy without shifting our policies—changing the structure of our economy to one that protects our climate. We need to make those shifts if we are going to protect the right of our Pacific neighbours to live in their homelands. What the Government is doing what the Prime Minister’s statement has set out is business as usual. It is high carbon pollution encouraging more fossil fuel extraction and more subsidies to oil drillers and miners when we know that burning even two-thirds of global fossil fuel reserves will be catastrophic for the climate.Business as usual for National means ruling out agriculture even being discussed in the current review of the emissions trading scheme. Business as usual means more handouts for irrigation and intensive agriculture despite nearly half of our emissions coming from agriculture. We heard it again today with the finance Minister’s comments. National seems to believe that there is going to be some technological silver bullet that can reduce our agricultural emissions. It is sending completely the wrong message to farmers. It is signalling that climate change does not matter by failing to set a date when agriculture will be in the emissions trading scheme.It is sending the wrong message about our economy. It means that we continue with business as usual with the old carbon-intensive economy rather than shifting investment to clean low-carbon sectors like IT like renewables. It is an utterly irresponsible choice for our Pacific neighbours and for New Zealand. It is putting the risks on to Kiwis in the future and now. It is not dealing with current challenges. The target in the Paris agreement was very ambitious: keeping global temperatures to within 1.5 degrees Celsius. Prime Minister you signed up to that target and yet this Government totally lacks the policies to deliver on that. Yesterday a leading climate scientist Tim Naish said that the window to stay within a 2-degree Celsius rise in global temperatures is the next 10 years.In the Green Party we believe that action is urgent. We want to stay within that limit. That means major structural change in the economy. It means investing in public transport not spending billions of dollars on new motorways that will make our emissions worse. Last December we had the second biennial report on our emissions. That showed that New Zealand’s emissions were set to increase by 96 percent above 1990 levels by 2030. That is this Government’s plan. It is not about being responsible. It is not about delivering a safer or a brighter future to New Zealand. It is about burdening us with catastrophic climate change.