Mackey Moana: Cheque Duty Repeal Bill Climate Change Response (Unit Restriction) Amendment Bill Dumping and Countervailing Duties Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third ReadingsText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMackey Moana: Cheque Duty Repeal Bill Climate Change Response (Unit Restriction) Amendment Bill Dumping and Countervailing Duties Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third Readings[Sitting date: 15 May 2014. Volume:698;Page:18063. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MOANA MACKEY (Labour): It is a bit rich for Paul Goldsmith to talk about business confidence after he has just completely pulled the carpet out from under the post-1989 forestry sector. I am guessing that it is not feeling particularly confident right now Mr Goldsmith and it has every reason to be absolutely irate with this Government for the nasty surprise it has dropped on the industry in this urgency motion. As my colleague Grant Robertson said it is astounding that this legislation has been done under urgency. If you look at the 35c saving that families are going to make from the abolition of the fees on cheques as seen in the Cheque Duty Repeal Bill that is kind of up there with the tax on paper boys that the Government brought in in a previous Budget. This is just pathetic it really is and it does not need to be progressed under urgency. Although I am sure that every little bit helps I do not think getting that 35c a year to families is going to be what makes or breaks the Budget.The second bill the Climate Change Response (Unit Restriction) Amendment Bill which amends the Climate Change Response Act definitely should not be in an urgency motion because of the wide-ranging implications it has for the post-1989 forestry sector. This is a sector that was not consulted on about these changes. This is a sector that did not have the ability to come to a select committee to ask the National Government why it hates the forestry sector so much. The Minister responsible for forestry the Associate Minister for Primary Industries is in the House. Go and talk to some of the sector Minister Goodhew. You have? Yes it loves you. Here we go: someone is actually responding. Why was it not consulted?Hon Jo Goodhew: Actually if you understood—MOANA MACKEY: Oh! Actually if I understood—right OK I do understand. I understand that you are not applying this to your corporate mates in the heavy-emitting industries. They still get to engage in arbitrage between New Zealand Units and Kyoto units. The Cabinet club still gets access to these cheap units so why are we not limiting access to those cheap units for the Cabinet club heavy-polluting industries and instead applying that only to forestry? The Minister responsible for forestry is now ignoring me just as the Minister in the chair did during the Committee stage of this legislation because there is no good reason why you would not apply this across the board. The great irony of course is that iwi are also going to be disproportionately impacted by this and I am very disappointed that the Māori Party voted for Part 2 of the Budget Measures (Miscellaneous Fiscal Matters) Bill and voted down my and Kennedy Graham’s amendments given that iwi are going to be disproportionately affected by this. I am very very disappointed.Ironically iwi and the post-1989 forestry sector have been calling for a restriction on these units for years and that has fallen on deaf ears. The sector has called for a restriction on these units across the board in a more equitable way that applies to everyone fairly not with one rule for it and another rule for National’s mates who are heavy polluters who got a free allocation of New Zealand Units but are perfectly entitled—according to the National Government—to go out and engage in arbitrage and speculate on those units playing off the differential price between the New Zealand Units and the Kyoto units. But now we are saying that the forestry sector the one sector actually doing anything to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions is not allowed to do it. We did not tell the sector about it. We did not consult with it. We did not check what the impact would be. We are not allowing any kind of—Iain Lees-Galloway: The Government didn’t.MOANA MACKEY: —the Government did not sorry. There is no transition period and no select committee process. This is an absolute outrage and the Minister responsible for forestry should absolutely hang her head in shame.There are going to be a lot of people out there—and a lot of these are mum and dad foresters—who have bought emission reduction units these cheap Kyoto units and they know that they are going to deregister or harvest and that they need to meet that obligation and they now cannot do anything with those emission reduction units. Those units are worthless and those people have paid good money for them. They have made investment decisions based on having those units and being able to surrender them to meet any deregistration obligations. How is it fair to completely remove retrospectively the value of those units? And then they are going to have to go out and buy New Zealand Units to replace them. We could have simply said that from today no more emission reduction units can land in the register for post-1989 forestry and that would have taken away the completely unfair retrospective element of this bill.What we should have done is what the forestry sector and iwi for years have been calling for which is to apply this provision across the board to everyone. I look forward to the next National speaker explaining how they can justify allowing these cheap units to be accessed by their mates in the Cabinet club—the heavy emitters—whilst they are removing access to the one sector that got them out of a hole when it came to the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol. We would have ended up with a financial liability at the end of the first commitment period at Kyoto had it not been for forestry offsetting our ever-increasing gross greenhouse gas emissions. Emissions kept going up and we were just lucky that there was enough forestry to mitigate it.So how does a National Government say thank you? By yet another attack on the forestry sector. It is absolutely outrageous. This is not about fiscal risk because the fiscal risk to the Government of foresters sitting on New Zealand Units is estimated to be between $11 million to $66 million. The fiscal risk to the Government of all the other New Zealand Units that are being sat on by the other sectors is $107 million. So why are we attacking the $11 million fiscal risk and leaving the $107 million fiscal risk? The answer is that the Government hates forestry and it likes heavy-emitting industries. That is the simple answer.The Minister referred to this as an unintended consequence. I want to point out that this is absolutely not unintended; it is absolutely deliberate. For years we have been putting up Supplementary Order Papers in the House bills in the ballot and calling on the Government to restrict these cheap international units across the board and those amendments have been voted down. The calls from the forestry sector and from iwi have been ignored. The Government has allowed the carbon price to collapse. It has allowed a differential in price to open up between the New Zealand Units and the Kyoto units and so it is about $3.20 for a New Zealand unit at the moment and about 35c for a Kyoto unit. That is the problem. That is what we should have a bill fixing. There should be a bill to fix the carbon price and to reduce the differential between the international units and the New Zealand Units and this will all go away. We will not end up hurting the one industry that we are hugely reliant on in terms of our climate change response.This bill is not about reregistration at all as the Government has claimed. This is not about the fact that foresters can go in and register and deregister and then reregister again and get more New Zealand Units and continue to speculate on the differential in that price. We could have fixed that by simply saying that in any 5-year reporting period you can register only once. That would have fixed it without all the down sides of this piece of legislation. That was one of the options that officials actually put up to the Government in the regulatory impact statement. That option was simply saying that you get to register only once in a reporting period and the problem would have gone away.Instead the Government went with the most brutal over the top unfair retrospective option. So for the Government members to sit there and talk about business and being friendly in terms of business investment—give me a break. Give me a break.Tell that to the foresters out there who have suddenly had the carpet whipped out from underneath them with absolutely no warning and absolutely no ability to submit on that piece of legislation to let us know how damaging it would be. They found out about it only when we sent an email to a few of them saying: “Have you seen this? Have you been consulted?”. Suddenly it went around the industry and the reaction has been incredible. They have every right to be furious because this is an absolute betrayal of good faith. Minister Goodhew the forestry Minister thinks it is funny. Well we will be taking that out on the road Minister Goodhew because whatever the forestry industry thought of you before I have to say that this is an absolute indictment on your Government. As forestry Minister you should be ashamed of yourself—absolutely ashamed of yourself—because this bill is yet another attack on forestry by an anti-forestry anti-environment Government.That is why we need a change of Government on 20 September—so we can have a Government that takes climate change seriously that takes the environment seriously that supports regional development in sectors like manufacturing and forestry and that does not continue to whip the carpet out from underneath them so that it can snuggle up to its cronies its Cabinet club mates giving them favours protecting them and shielding them whilst all the time hurting one of the most important industries in this country the forestry sector.