Fitzsimons Jeanette: Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading Forestry Sector) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading Forestry Sector) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:655;Page:4730] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Green) 
: 
 By tonight the Government will be in breach of the law and so will some foresters unless we pass the Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading Forestry Sector) Amendment Bill. As I indicated in my first reading speech the Greens will help get the Government off the hook here. We will support this bill. That was conditional initially on the Government agreeing to put firm dates for the obligations in the bill rather than open-ended opportunities to pass dates by Order in Council. The select committee has done that and the Minister responsible for Climate Change Issues has agreed so we are supporting this bill and we are also offering our support to the process of giving leave for the bill to go through all stages today. 
We had an interesting debate at the select committee about the “no later than 1 July” clause. Some of us wanted to know why we did not just set a firm date of 1 July and reduce uncertainty even further. It was pointed out to us that if in fact that date can be moved forward then the allocation plans can get under way earlier as well and that is entirely a good thing. We are comfortable with the degree of flexibility that “up to 1 July 2010” gives us. 
However the forestry industry is still not very impressed with what is happening under the emissions trading scheme. Foresters have no one to sell their credits to and many of them are not convinced that they ever will have. Charles Chauvel and Craig Foss have expressed the hope that deforestation has now ended but I do not think we can guarantee that. Those who own forests but are interested only in dairying are pushing extremely hard for rules that make it as easy as possible to deforest and convert their land to dairying. They are expecting to get the ability to offset on to different land from this Government even if it is not accepted under Kyoto. Many people hope that the whole thing will just fall over and go away because it is not clear how the Government will proceed in terms of getting a majority in the House for whatever it wants to do. 
In Opposition National attacked Labour—justly in my view—for taking 9 long years to get any economic instrument in place. Now the National Government itself has delayed and created new uncertainty for 7 months and counting and we may be counting for a while yet. As the previous speaker said this has been going on since the mid-1990s when the Cabinet of the day first tried to get an in principle decision about an emissions trading scheme or a carbon charge and for God’s sake either would have been better than neither by a very long way. But the fact is that nothing happened for a very long time. If this Government goes to Copenhagen at the end of the year with no clear plan or agreed majority of the House for a way forward New Zealand will be a laughing stock. It would be extremely bad for our trade and our international relationships. 
These last 7 months when officials should have been able to get busy writing the rules and the allocation plans for the emissions trading scheme they have instead been spending countless hours servicing a select committee going over old ground and writing yet another summary of the science for the disbelievers showing that yes climate change is real yes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has done its job properly and yes climate change is a real and present danger. I think that is a huge waste of the valuable time of our skilled officials and of many of us on the committee as well. 
Meanwhile just today my colleague Metiria Turei tabled in the House the summary report that will be used by many countries as the latest authoritative statement on the science even if it is not an official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change document during the Copenhagen conference showing that on many measures we are already above the worst scenario ever put forward by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It put forward a range of scenarios showing that it could be this bad or this much worse or even if things are really bad this much worse and we are already worse than that particularly on predictions of sea level rise and predictions of the rate at which Arctic sea ice is melting. 
There is no sign so far that the Government actually intends to reduce New Zealand’s emissions by very much and I find that a tragedy for us and for our descendants. First of all the Government would like to align with Australia. Of course it makes some sense if we could have similar rules with the country with which we trade so much across the Tasman Sea but the Australians have just failed to get a majority in their Senate for a scheme that was so weak it was worse than useless. The Australian proposal was worse than useless and that is why the Green members of the Senate did not support it; not because they are against emissions trading but because they are against a scheme that gave billions of dollars to the worst polluters and was going to have very little effect on emissions. There may never be anything to align with in Australia so we need to develop our own scheme. 
We know that the Government is looking seriously at softer rules than the existing emissions trading scheme which was only just strong enough for the Greens to agree to its support last year. We know that the Minister said this afternoon that we do not really need complementary measures like standards because we will have a pricing signal instead. We know that transport behaviour is extremely sticky when it comes to following pricing signals because it takes an awfully big increase in the price to induce a little bit of change in transport behaviour. By far the most cost-effective measure for the whole economy for transport is to set some standards as other countries have done. 
Although fuel efficiency standards for the average of the vehicles coming into the country from now on is part of the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Strategy I cannot see any sign that the Government intends to proceed with it. I hope the Government will think again about that because our vehicles use on average about twice as much fuel to go 100 kilometres as the European fleet will use when it moves to the new standard already announced. US cars will not meet the fuel economy standards in China because China has set its horizons higher than what the US is doing. We are left taking what every other country wants to dump because they no longer meet their standards and it is not the old vehicles that are the problem; it is the new ones because they are bigger thirstier and release more carbon than the old ones. There are many areas where a price on carbon will not be enough to solve the problem. It is an important first step and it is a vital first step but we have to have complementary measures as well. 
Returning to this bill it deals with the timing of coming into force of various parts of the emissions trading scheme but it deals only with forestry. A number of people are now pointing as I did myself in the first reading debate to the fact that the coming into effect of the rules for the energy sector on 1 January poses some difficulties because there are no allocation plans and there will not be by 1 January. The sector is just automatically assuming that the Government will legislate a big delay in that and I am concerned that Labour appears very willing to help it do that. That is not the only way of doing it and I urge people to think about the fact that companies should have been preparing for the 1 January date for a long time and that there is no reason why the scheme cannot still come into force on 1 January provided that by that time the Government is in a position to announce its intentions in terms of allocation plans and the companies do not become liable to pay for those units until well into the following year. So it would be possible to start without an allocation plan provided the Government can make its intentions clear by 1 January and those companies can still comply with the law when the time comes. Let us not fall over backwards to delay even longer doing something about climate change.