Mapp Wayne: Climate Change (Emissions Trading and Renewable Preference) Bill — In Committee 
Mapp Wayne: Climate Change (Emissions Trading and Renewable Preference) Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:649;Page:18162] 
Dr WAYNE MAPP (National—North Shore) 
: 
 As the previous speaker Jeanette Fitzsimons said we are now 10 weeks from an election. I guess she has had a discussion with the Prime Minister on that date so we assume the election will be on 15 November. 
The concern I want to raise—and many people have raised it—is that passing the emissions trading scheme at this point is purely politics. It suits the Government the Green Party and New Zealand First to divide New Zealand on this issue; that is what they want. They have done that on this very day by putting in hundreds of amendments that no one could possibly have had an opportunity to analyse and consider. There has never been any serious consideration of referring this bill back to the select committee even when hundreds of amendments were put to the select committee yet we are now faced with hundreds more amendments. 
What has been the strategy? The strategy has been to ignore business and to ignore all the parties affected by this legislation. That is why Mr O’Reilly of Business New Zealand can quite realistically issue a press release with the headline: “Cynical politics around emissions trading scheme”. That is exactly what we are faced with—cynical politics intended to divide New Zealand on this issue. 
I can tell the Minister that I have had numerous phone calls over the last few weeks from people who would like to know what an emissions trading scheme actually means. One of the reasons those people are making those phone calls is that the Government and indeed Mr Parker has chosen to make this a partisan political issue. In that environment one simply cannot properly explain the situation. 
There was another approach. Dr Nick Smith wrote to the Government back in 2005 to ask for a more considered way of doing this. It would have meant dialogue and it inevitably would have meant compromise—by both sides; the Government and the Opposition would have had to compromise as would the sector groups as well. That is what would have been required. 
In that situation there might have been the possibility of having a proper sustainable emissions trading scheme with public consent because as Mr Groser said this is a bill for not just 1 year or 2 years. Realistically I guess it is expected to at least last until 2020—12 years. That is four elections away. No one could possibly imagine that one Government would last four elections from here until then. The truth is that Governments change so this bill has to embrace the broad views across this Parliament which is a multiparty Parliament. A consensus approach as has been practised in other countries would have been able to forge a decent approach in this country. 
Let us look at just one issue: the pre-1990 forests. The Government says—I think quite naively—that it is locked into a commitment that does not enable the owners of pre-1990 forests to plant on equivalent land. That is not the same land that they harvest from but equivalent land. The Government says that the protocol simply does not allow that; therefore the legislation bans it. 
I would say to the Government that surely if New Zealand is leading in developing an emissions trading scheme—and I recognise that we are—then we could have told our Kyoto Protocol partners that we would make that change in the interests of implementing this particular legislation in our circumstances. I would be prepared to say that there would have been no protest from our Kyoto Protocol partners. They would have looked at the bigger issue which is how important it is to get the process of emissions trading schemes implemented not just in New Zealand but also in Australia Canada Europe and the United States. 
Inevitably there is a certain level of adjustment. Everyone knows that an agreement made at the international level back nearly a decade ago could not possibly take into account every detailed circumstance. In truth in international relations a certain amount of flexibility is given on that. This Government has ignored that opportunity.