Roy Eric: Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading) Amendment Bill Electricity (Renewable Preference) Amendment Bill — Third Readings 
Roy Eric: Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading) Amendment Bill Electricity (Renewable Preference) Amendment Bill — Third Readings 
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ERIC ROY (National—Invercargill) 
: 
 Firstly I acknowledge my parliamentary colleague Hone Harawira who has deferred his speech to allow me the opportunity to speak. 
I listened to a very confused contribution from Mr Brown of New Zealand First. He said that New Zealand First is supporting the legislation but he is not sure why and that it will need to be modified. 
Peter Brown 
: I didn’t say that. The member will need to listen from time to time. 
ERIC ROY 
: I listened carefully and the member said that it will need to be modified. 
I want to state something again. Out there if one dares to criticise anything to do with climate change one is termed a naysayer—that is the call. I have said it before in this House and I will say it again: I am not a naysayer; I certainly believe that the climate is changing. I believe that there is a natural cycle and I believe that human activity is chasing it along making it go faster than would occur naturally. I am concerned about that and I have made several speeches on it. I do not want to be accused of being a naysayer. In that respect I should say that I think this legislation has one thing right: there needs to be a market for carbon driven by market forces and that is essentially what this legislation does. But there is a list of things about it that give me some angst and some concern and that is why National is not supporting the legislation. 
The first concern is the process. Yes a very committed group of officials worked for a considerable time to work up a bill to come before the House. We were presented with a tome of I do not know how many pages—several hundred. It is one of the bigger bills to go through Parliament but there is nothing wrong with that; it just shows that this matter is complex. It requires proper scrutiny and proper assessment and we need to make every endeavour to get it right. Well how can National members sign off legislation on something as important as this when in the Committee stage 780-odd amendments were dumped on us before we even had a chance to read them? So my first concern is the process of this legislation which will imprint itself on the business culture of New Zealand and on the quality of the impression that we give internationally. We are a world leader on many aspects of this legislation but National members are not able to sign it off. 
That is the first point. It raises three other questions. Will it work? Is it practical? What is the cost implication? Those are the issues I want to address to some degree in the third readings of this legislation. 
I have said that it is important we have a market price and I come to the reason why we need to have it. I have mentioned that I believe that human activity is increasing the rate of climate change. But whether or not one is a naysayer if New Zealand as an exporter of products to the highest-priced markets in the world does nothing we will be caught by consumer resistance to buying products from countries that do not conform. Right at this time all three main food retailers in the UK are embracing a greenhouse-gas branding process for their food products. Tesco is reputed to be spending between £400 million and £500 million on branding 110000 different food items. Is it doing that because it wants to save the planet? I would suggest that it is not. Tesco is doing that because it wants to earn another pound. That tells me we have no alternative but to respond. 
We come to the question of whether the legislation will work. We could introduce something that is a placebo and to a degree this legislation is a placebo because we have not given it enough scrutiny to be sure it will work. We have an emissions trading scheme and it is in legislation so we can hold up our hand and say that yes we are responding. But there is a little issue that concerns me and in the Committee stage I raised quite a bit of detail about it. You see the measurement is not of where we sit in the world; the measurement is being done on the basis of per head of population—not on the basis of world’s best-practice. If we have a higher agricultural profile per head of population than other countries then we show up as in our case 50 percent. If we have one aluminium smelter per 4 million people then our aluminium profile is higher. China has 23 aluminium smelters but its profile for that stuff will be much lower. And China is a category 3 country so it will not count for a long long time. 
The issue is that if this legislation does not embrace world’s best-practice it will drive industry it will drive agriculture and it will drive dirty industry in particular to countries where the system of estimation of their carbon imprint is lower. The higher the population of a country the more dirty stuff can be crowded into it. Well this problem is a global problem and quite simply that approach is nonsense and to a large extent it is one of the dangers of this legislation. Let me give an illustration. Rio Tinto has very very carefully considered its responsibilities in this matter. Initially we were called to get back to 1990 emission levels and I think—and someone can correct me—Rio Tinto is the only significant energy emitter in this country that has got itself back to 1990 levels. [ 
Interruption 
] There is another one; I thank the member for that. 
Hon Member 
: They’re actually below 1990 levels. 
ERIC ROY 
: I think the aluminium smelter is too; I think Rio Tinto is as well. We hold up our hands in horror because when we measure the smelter’s emissions against our population it looks bad and because for every tonne of aluminium produced the smelter releases 2 tonnes of greenhouse gases. We can get carried away about that but if the plant at Tiwai was to close down Rio Tinto would most probably move its production to a country such as China which to my understanding now has 23 aluminium smelters. The average greenhouse gas emission of those 23 smelters is I am told 7.9 tonnes for every tonne of aluminium produced. So how clever is it to introduce a system that has the tendency and the propensity to drive those sorts of industries from New Zealand where they use world’s best-practice to a place where environmental consideration is not worth the paper it is written on? 
Hon David Parker 
: But it won’t. 
ERIC ROY 
: I am pleased the Minister is seriously confident about that because I am not. 
Let me raise another matter that this legislation does not address. Various colleagues have made this point. We have heard about the chainsaw massacre of trees. Sequestration is important. By any measurement we have gone seriously backwards because of the way in which we have embraced our response to the Kyoto Protocol and this legislation largely does not correct that. It does not allow tradability of forestry within New Zealand in order to have the best use made of land. Significant catchment areas in the North Island are crying out for forestation yet we cannot transfer that land to what would be best-practice or even go for two-for-one use of it. I am sure we could wear that—putting 2 hectares of eroding land back into trees. 
Then there is the cost factor and I want to make this point. When we impose a cost it is always the producer who picks it up. It cannot go anywhere else. Everybody else is cost-plus all the way through—in the servicing of it and in the transport of it—so the cost comes back to the producer. This House might not have noticed but large sectors of the agricultural industry are not in a position to absorb any more costs into their production systems—none whatsoever. There is a paucity of information on how the producers can mitigate those costs. I would say that even putting a date on this system embracing agriculture is something National members were seriously concerned about. 
We need to have all those answers before we are prepared to support this legislation.