Warren-Clark AngieANGIE WARREN-CLARK (Labour): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's a real pleasure to rise this afternoon to speak on this bill. It's pretty important to all of us in this country and so I am quite humbled by the opportunity.I want to acknowledge the Hon James Shaw for bringing this bill to the House and for the ongoing work that he has done in this area across all parties to try to get us to a point of agreement. I think he's done very well. I also want to acknowledge—and I have to really acknowledge—the officials in this process. We have had so many special briefings to help us understand the complexities of this work. We have been absolutely privileged by those officials helping us to understand and allowing us to ask the questions. I'd like to acknowledge I still don't quite get fungible" but that's OK. It is what it is. I'd also like to acknowledge my colleagues across the House. We sat through over 800 oral submissions and we saw more than 10000 written submissions. That was a lot of work. Because we had so much work to do we broke into subcommittees and we had an agreement that if something happened or went wrong and our numbers weren't quite right we wouldn't collapse our committees. I want to acknowledge everyone for recognising that. We met in many places and we heard lots of things. In my own community of Tauranga we sat there and it was quite fascinating—it was quite fascinating—the number of submissions that came through around climate denying in my city was absolutely surprising. Nevertheless we did listen with respect. I want to finally also acknowledge our original chairperson Dr Deborah Russell and then also Dr Duncan Webb who took over this work. It was a huge piece of work and we met many many days to do this.Finally to Todd Muller who we very much missed on the select committee: you offered and brought to the table tremendous skill and knowledge and I'd like to acknowledge that we did miss you Todd.Now that I have waxed lyrical and thanked everyone I would also like to address this bill. In its entirety it is a massive piece of work. There are a lot of very tricky parts to the legislation. One of the things that we have heard from the Opposition while they will be supporting this bill is that they have some concerns about how we got to where we got to and what the limits were. So I want to talk about a couple of things that are a little bit different about this legislation that I believe we here in this House have an obligation to discuss and that is that this is not a piece of legislation that will sit for the next three years. This is a piece of legislation that looks out beyond the horizon—beyond the horizon that we here today cannot imagine. We hope in our hearts that we are putting in place steps to turn around climate change. We hope in our hearts that what we will be doing will enable us to survive this climate crisis. What we are doing in this piece of legislation is enabling our community by putting in place a commission to be the experts to make these decisions. We're looking at not just this three years or that three years; we're looking to 2050. So we're not saying that the targets that we set today are the targets that will get us there. They may have to be higher. They may have to be lower. But they certainly enable us to sit down and think very carefully and be advised by the independent climate commission about what needs to happen.This bill gives us certainty. It gives us absolute certainty that there will be a plan and stepping stones to get there. But what it won't necessarily do is it won't say "Oh well you know we won't do this." or "We won't do that." It leaves the opportunity open. It leaves the opportunity open with the Climate Change Commission to advise.There are seven members and these are expert members. We had huge amounts of discussion from the floor from all sorts of people who wanted to have young people represented. They wanted to have business. They wanted to have farmers. They wanted to have environmentalists. What we basically came to as part of this legislation is we need to pick a set of independent and non-biased members who would sit on that commission who have a huge job—a huge job—to present for us. They absolutely have to look at all of the science. They have to predict and look at what will happen or may happen in the future and then they have to give us that advice. That advice has to come back to this House and the Minister has to respond and if the Minister doesn't respond he or she has to explain why.These are the things that we've built in—the safeguards that actually talk about this legislation not just being about a partisan situation; it's about all of us moving forward. If we cannot agree that we have to do this—and we hear this from the Opposition. They do tell us that they agree that something has to happen but they're really concerned about the economic implications. My friend and colleague Chlöe Swarbrick put it well: what's going to happen when climate change hits and we don't have any food? What's going to happen when most of our housing which is based around the coastal areas starts disappearing and our water table shifts? These are things that we need to consider and this bill does that.It is complex and there's a whole pile of fives in here. Because it's an amendment bill everything was amended with 5A B C D Z and on and on and on it went. I do wish that we didn't have to use it in that manner but it is what it is.I want to finally just talk about one thing that has been raised and that's around food production. I'd just like to read around food production and the stated claim about the Paris Agreement. The Opposition talked about how the Paris Agreement refers to the need to adapt to the effects of climate change in a manner that does not threaten food production. Following on from that it says "Increasing the ability to adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change and foster climate resilience and low greenhouse gas emissions development in a manner that does not threaten food production;". So it is a process that does not threaten food production; not about food production being more important than climate change.It is a great pleasure to stand and talk to this bill and I commend it to the House."