Fitzsimons Jeanette: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:645;Page:14097] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 Madam Speaker I am sure you have taken to heart all this advice about how you should be voting in the election later this year with the speeches in the House being addressed to you. The oldest trick in the book in politics is to spend election year appealing to greed and fear. That is how the year has started with greed for tax cuts and fear of violent youth and of course immigrants. It is an old recipe. 
A few weeks ago I challenged our leaders to campaign on something more substantial. I challenged the media to frame their coverage around the substance of policy and the ways that it affects ordinary New Zealanders not simply around the weekly ups and downs of the political game. Today I challenge the voters to see through this tired old game to look for the vision and the action to bring us together as a nation and to make us what we could be—vibrant prosperous compassionate and sustainable. Instead we have been presented with a vision of New Zealand as a society cowering before the tiny minority of its violent youth while waiting on a tax handout. There is no plan for how our families our workplaces and our country will cope with the looming realities of peak oil and climate change and with the income gap between rich and poor. In particular neither major party has offered New Zealand a vision that sees the best in our young people and one that helps them to flourish. 
To bring out the best in our young people we need to build stable home environments for those most at risk and to do that we need to tackle the lack of affordable housing in the communities in which they live. It is the unaffordability of rents that leads families to move from flat to flat every few weeks or months. This takes the kids from school to school in a cycle that fatally disrupts not just their education but their lives and it leads them to see gangs as the only stable social unit in their lives. 
The Prime Minister’s lack of targets in her speech to address the crisis in affordable housing was disappointing. Although we welcome the fact that the Government is now prepared to do something it is a bit late in the day to be starting a stocktake of affordable public land holdings and reducing the compliance costs for building consents then painting this as a way of getting ordinary New Zealanders on to the homeownership ladder. By now the Government should be announcing concrete plans to accelerate the building of the State homes it has pledged to build each year and saying clearly whether it favours medium-density housing close to public transport routes or whether like the National Party it favours freeing up land on the periphery of towns with all the roading energy and infrastructure costs that such ribbon developments always bring in their wake. 
The lack of affordable housing is one key factor driving the youth crimes statistics but a related issue is that of the low wages that force both mothers and fathers to take up two or more jobs to make ends meet and that limit the time available for quality parenting. As Campbell Roberts says in the report released today Working for Families has allowed more two-parent families the luxury of one parent focusing more on childcare but it has pushed even more single parents into the workforce in many cases increasing stresses on those children. 
Ever since the early 1990s New Zealand has pursued a business model based on cutting labour costs and driving down wages in marked contrast to Australia which took a far more sensible constructive and much less ideological approach to centralised wage bargaining. Simultaneously in New Zealand business has avoided making the investments in technology that are essential for real productivity gains. If John Key and Helen Clark truly wish to tackle the problem of youth crime they should be willing to renounce the low-wage economic model that both major parties have maintained for the past 20 years. 
We have heard a lot in the last year and today about the Government’s new vision of sustainability and carbon neutrality. It is great that Labour is finally tackling climate change after presiding for 8 years over the fastest increase in greenhouse gases in the Western World. The emissions trading scheme will put a price on carbon and will create some incentive to reduce emissions in some sectors of the economy. But direct actions like codes and standards research and development better information and interventions to support new technology and penalise waste will actually do more to meet our Kyoto target than trading—which is mainly a new market for speculators and that is why businesses love it so much. 
While Government members are fixing their eyes on the far shore of long-term sustainability goals their own actions as a Government are paddling steadily backwards and already mired in the mudflats. Last year the Greens asked repeatedly how we could be the first sustainable nation while the Government’s own companies were ripping out forests to establish dairy farming with massive effects on greenhouse emissions and water quality and ramping up coalmining to sell to China and India while at the same time berating those countries for their increase in emissions. Then of course there are the embarrassing BMWs which will not even meet the efficiency standards that the Government has set for everybody else. 
Now let us look at what is planned for this year. New Zealand’s largest and most expensive transport project ever is to be a new motorway tunnel in Auckland—costing more than $2 billion—so that all the people who were starting to think about using public transport now that it is gradually improving are sent back to their cars. Let us just think what that money could do to improve public transport services in Auckland—a rail tunnel to link the western and southern lines; a link to the airport so that we would start to see a real electric rail network; safe cycle routes with intersection priority; or a new busway like the northern one to the south-east. That is what Auckland will need to reduce carbon emissions and cope with rising oil prices. But no the contradiction of this Government is a vision of a world first in carbon neutrality and a reality of more coal more dairy and more motorways. 
This is the year in which the Government hopes to sign a free-trade agreement with China. A little incident the other day shows just what that will mean. When driving through Moerewa on the way back from Waitangi I stopped for a drink. I chose a little can labelled “mango juice”. Puzzled that it cost only $1 I looked at the fine print. I could just make out at the bottom of the label “fruit juice drink”—suspicious. On the back in very fine print were the ingredients of water sugar various additives and somewhere down the list mango juice. There were no percentages but it was at least labelled with its country of origin—Guangzhou province. I swapped it for a real juice. 
As I drove on I reflected on just what it is that we are trading here. Fruit drink may have as little as 5 percent actual juice in it in which case we are importing water and sugar from China in an aluminium can. We know that China is short of water; we know that its water is often very polluted and very much less desirable than the water that comes out of our own taps. The aluminium can would have been made with coal-fired electricity. The bottling plant probably also ran on coal-fired power and marine diesel brought it here. 
Mothers in Moerewa buy that drink thinking they are giving their children healthy juice because it is so misleadingly labelled when they are actually giving them sugar water. And what are we exchanging for this? We are exchanging dairy products that consume massive amounts of our fresh water. We are currently using two to three times more water per person than most other OECD countries. For every litre of milk produced 1000 litres of water are consumed in the process in Canterbury. Every extra cow increases nutrient and bacterial pollution in our waterways many of which are already not safe to swim in. Every extra cow increases our methane emissions—a potent greenhouse gas. What benefit do we get from these dairy exports? We get cans of water and sugar. We pollute and over-allocate our high-quality water here in order to pay for importing doubtful-quality water from China. 
Does this make sense? Well one may say that it must be profitable or it would not happen. So it is time we looked at why it is profitable. Dairying is hugely profitable at present partly because it is heavily subsidised. Farming is subsidised by taxpayers to the tune of a million dollars per working day which is the cost of the greenhouse gas emissions from farming that will be picked up by taxpayers who at the same time are paying for their own emissions. It is subsidised by our environment particularly our rivers which are fouled by the runoff and reduced to a trickle by the irrigation. 
On the other side of the equation how can a can of even water and sugar imported from so far away cost only $1 retail? The only explanation is that as in so many other industries China is employing the equivalent of slave labour in prison camps or special economic zones where people are paid as much in a day as we pay for that one can of drink and often they are not free to withdraw their labour. So to sum up free trade with China means swapping our good-quality water and the health of our children and our rivers for its poor-quality water using lots of fossil fuel to arrange the swap and denying the human rights of its workers. This is what the Government wants us to do more of under a free-trade agreement. This is part of its vision of sustainability. 
The Government is also very keen for a free-trade agreement with the United States. There have been letters in the papers recently asking what the US would want in return for opening its markets to our dairy products. We do not need to speculate because a few years ago the then Secretary of Trade Robert Zoellick told us. The US wants freedom for its citizens to buy our land; it wants access for its GE foods without labelling; it wants no obstacles to importing its GE seeds for growing here; and it wants access to our market for pig meat and poultry that do not meet our disease control requirements. Great! Surely that trade agreement is a great prize to be sought! 
The fact is that sustainability is rather a facade for this Government. The overarching goal is economic growth and if the economy can be grown bigger by being dirtier less fair and less sustainable that is what the Government will back. The game is to push the brand of the clean green image in order to sell more goods to expand the economy but if actually becoming clean and green gets in the way of expanding GDP that can get lost. 
There is a lot of work left to do. This Parliament still has a third of its term left to go. It is too soon to stop the real work and roll out the electioneering slogans. Today I want to echo a call from journalist Colin James and ask the Prime Minister to give us a firm election date so that we can all stop playing cat and mouse put the campaigning on hold and get back to work. The Greens would like to see a binding referendum to be held with this year’s election on having fixed election dates in the future. However fixed election date or not each of the Green Party MPs is committed to using this year to make as much progress as we can towards our shared goals. 
As Government spokesperson on energy efficiency I am committed to making sure that the new initiatives in the National Energy Efficiency and Conservation Strategy actually happen—the bigger programme of home insulation the bold target for more energy from waste wood the 25 percent improvement in fuel efficiency of cars coming into the country a more cost-effective solar water heating industry regional goals for public transport and all the rest. Sue Bradford is looking forward to a 2008 where more people become aware of the economic and environmental benefits of buying New Zealand - made products—quality products that create more jobs for Kiwis. 
A number of Green Party bills are set to pass this year. Nandor’s Waste Minimisation (Solids) Bill will be a significant step towards reducing the legacy of waste that our current rates of consumption and patterns of packaging will leave to our children. We also applaud the Prime Minister’s signalled intention to take seriously the findings of the Greens-initiated Justice and Electoral Committee Inquiry into victims’ rights which has resulted in a promise to implement a charter of victims’ rights and progress towards a victims’ compensation scheme. 
My Climate Change (Transport Funding) Bill would alter funding priorities so that we see more public transport rail and cycle facilities and less funding wasted on building new motorways. Sue Bradford’s Corrections (Mothers with Babies) Amendment Bill will provide some of our most vulnerable babies with a safe and stable environment within the prison system and reduce offending rates among mothers who are able to bond with their babies. 
The Greens will be pushing hard to see the remaining initiatives within our cooperation agreement with the Government fulfilled. We are yet to see progress on our agreement to ensure that growers of GE-free crops will be able to continue to meet the requirements of their markets if approval is ever given to grow GE crops here—which we hope it will not be. 
For too long student debt has been crippling the options of our young people. When we talk about losing graduates to Australia we hear about tax cuts but we fail to acknowledge that many young people are so hobbled with debt that their choices are constrained. They will go wherever they need to go to pay it off and much of that debt is a result of Government policy that for many years has forced students to borrow just to pay the rent. New research from the New Zealand University Students Association reveals that there has been a significant reduction in university enrolments from students from poorer backgrounds—down from 15 percent in 2004 to 6 percent in 2007. How can we be a nation of equal opportunity when the cost of education is prohibitive for those less well-off? The Greens are committed to providing every student with a livable allowance and although this Government’s commitment falls short of that we were able to negotiate in our agreement a move in the right direction with an increase in the number of students eligible for student allowances. 
Sue Kedgley will continue her struggle to allow consumers the information they need to make informed choices about the food they buy. The Government seems so transfixed by its desire to secure a free-trade deal with China that it will not see reason on this issue but the Greens will be holding the Government’s feet to the fire on country-of-origin food labelling. 
Last year Green MP Keith Locke’s long and patient campaign for justice for the Algerian refugee Ahmed Zaoui finally ended in success but the Government appears to have learnt nothing from the experience. Widespread use of classified information and the extension of detention powers in the Immigration Bill fall far short of achieving an acceptable balance between individual liberties and national security. The Green Party will be opposing the widened use of classified information; the denial of the basic right of people to know and answer all the evidence against them; and the scrapping of tribunals with proven independence and expertise. 
The public expect the Greens to be the environmental conscience of Parliament. Just about every environmental advance and many of the advances in social policy over the last 8 years have been the result of prodding and goading by the Greens. Just in the last week we have seen what an important role that is. Whoever it was who sent us in plain wrapper the censored chapter 13 of the new 
 State of the Environment 
 report knew we would not sit on it but would hold the Government to account. The main report shows that in the 10 years after the first report the crisis in our biodiversity is not overall improved though there are some local success stories. In addition we now face major problems of environmental degradation caused by land-use intensification and increased road transport which in turn are leading to more water quality problems and greenhouse emissions. 
The originally unpublished 13th chapter identifies the causes or the drivers of the environmental decline. It fingers increased land intensification with more fertiliser and more stock per hectare; greatly increased use of motor vehicles; and increased consumption. It explicitly acknowledges the conundrum of trying to grow our economy while reducing our environmental footprint. Economic growth is placing increased pressure on the environment yet the economy is dependent on the environment. Our tourism industry is built on “100% Pure New Zealand” branding and our dairy industry sells itself overseas as clean and green. 
The report dares to speak of environmental limits and it points out that some of those limits have been reached—for example freshwater in parts of the country. It calls for regulation on a national level and for the polluter-pays principle to be adhered to as the Greens have been saying for years. The men and women who wrote this chapter were good public servants. Sadly someone did not want us to hear their advice but that attempt failed. We have the chapter; we can choose to listen. I ask both National and Labour whether they have the courage to act on it.