Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of the ACT Party to stand again alone in opposition to this bill in its second reading. I carry on a kind of serialised commentary from the first reading about why this bill is such a bad idea if you are concerned about climate change or if you're not. I said in the first reading speech that there's a fundamental problem: that if the bill is ambitious in its targets in a country with 0.2 percent of the world's emissions carbon leakage will make it counter-productive. You can see the evidence for that because the country that's been most aggressive—in fact the country that we model this legislation off—has for 20 years had no better performance on tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted per unit of GDP. Of course that's the UK. They overtook us in about 1997 and they've tracked our progress at reducing emissions ever since despite having had legislation just like this for the last decade. So fundamentally it doesn't work but it's worse than that.You go to new section 5W inserted by clause 8—one of the clauses in this bill—and it says (1) Emissions budgets must be met as far as possible through domestic emissions reductions and domestic removals." Well what does that mean in practice? That means that when other countries can access cheaper carbon credits when they have projects to sequester and store carbon that are more cost-effective than those available in New Zealand can New Zealand families New Zealand businesses and New Zealand exporters purchase those cheaper more efficient credits? No. New Zealanders are put at a disadvantage by this completely pointless clause. That means New Zealanders can end up paying more than the rest of the world to achieve the same environmental goal.If you're concerned about mitigating climate change then having a law that says it's more expensive for New Zealanders to do it than anyone else has got to be one of the stupidest policies imaginable. People will say "Ah but that's in order to ensure the emission credits or the units purchased by New Zealanders when they emit are higher quality because there's some junk from overseas." Well the interesting thing is that this bill doesn't actually have any effective controls on the quality of credits produced in New Zealand. So it's nothing to do with the quality of credits; it's all about controlling the New Zealand economy.That's what takes us to new sections 5ZD and 5ZF and this is where the bill in my view becomes not just ineffective but actually pernicious because you've got a plan made by a Minister that must include—if you go to 5ZD(3)(a)—a sector-specific policy to reduce emissions and increase removals. The powers that are put in the hands of Cabinet and of a Minister under this bill take us back to a place that New Zealand has not been for 35 years and that is when we were under the Economic Stabilisation Act where a Minister or Cabinet could actually make economic decisions about not just what the general rules of the game are but how much and at what price people could trade in different sectors. What does that mean in practice? It means a Minister can decide whether a sector or an industry—particularly perhaps a steel mill or who knows at the current time an aluminium plant—lives or dies. Where does that get you? To an enormous amount of the kind of lobbying that I thought the Green Party was against.So in summary the ACT Party opposes this bill because not only will it be ineffective in achieving the goal of mitigating emissions it will also be inefficient because of its requirement for New Zealanders to use New Zealand credits at almost all times and therefore inefficient and more expensive and also pernicious because it introduces a level of central control over economic decision-making that this country has not seen since 1984. Those are reasons why all New Zealanders and especially my erstwhile colleagues in the National Party should be opposing this bill."