Cullen Michael: General Debates 
Cullen Michael: General Debates 
[Volume:619;Page:14809] 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN (Acting Prime Minister) 
: 
 I move  
That the House take note of miscellaneous business 
. On Monday we saw the second National Party reshuffle in a year—the second episode of  
The Young and the Restless  
or at least “The Young and the Restless Plus Dr Brash”. Of course in one sense Dr Brash has become the perfect National Party leader—an absentee landlord. He turns up on occasions to collect the rent. 
Hon Member 
: What about the Prime Minister? 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN 
: She is doing Government business in the Tokelaus and Samoa not just poncing around somewhere never seen by anybody. Unlike the leader of the National Party she is shown on the front page of the  
Dominion-Post 
 doing her job. It is a good job that Don Brash is not on his beloved performance pay; he would be below the poverty line if he were. 
But the most extraordinary thing is what has happened to Simon Power—the man who would be king but could not even make it to being prince in the first place; the man who found out that indolence a good jaw and a taste for conservative suits is not enough in the 21st century to be leader of the National Party; a man who failed but gets rewarded with a pay rise. That is the National Party’s approach to rewarding merit. He is now a senior whip and is ranked seven places above the finance spokesperson. 
This is the whole new approach to Government that we are seeing from the National Party. It shows how it has abandoned the core issues. Look at National’s spokespersons. The spokespersons on finance health agriculture and foreign affairs all sit in the second row. This is the party of farmers the party of cosying up to the United States the party that taxes on health the party of finance—all those spokespersons are in sitting in the second row. National’s spokesperson on conservation its associate spokesperson for this and its associate spokesperson that are all sitting in the front row at the present time. Simon Power sits on the front bench and his colleague on the back bench—the whips cannot even talk to each other in the National Party these days. But what can one expect from a leader with 2 years’ parliamentary experience and a total of 20 hours actually sitting in the House throughout those 2 years? That is what we have got. 
Look at the rest of them. Ms Rich wanders around looking like a pre-Raphaelite painting trying to find a frame. She had a big row with Dr Brash a couple of weeks back. He wants time-limited benefits and she does not and she is right so in the future she had better stick up for herself against him. 
And now Mr Key. Mr Key has been promoted a short distance. But note his comments: “I came into Parliament with the real aim of being Minister of Finance.” That is what one could call a modest person for a first-term MP. But the funny thing is that that is exactly what Don Brash said when he came into Parliament—“I went into politics with the intention of becoming the next Minister of Finance.” Imagine if one is Dr Brash and Mr Key has just said exactly what Dr Brash said! “I’m just happy to be the spokesperson on finance.” says Mr Key. No wonder he is being kept back in the second row at present a long dagger’s throw from the front bench. And of course what about differences on policy? Mr Key thinks the superannuation policy is quite a good idea. Mr Brash thinks it is some great big kind of con job. Who will win that great policy debate? Who will win the policy debate on State assets? Dr Brash wants to flog them off. Mr Key came from what he calls a sort of State house. I am not sure what a “sort of State house” is but that is what he actually said on radio. He said he wants to keep those State assets because he knows how important State assets can be to future successful international bankers in terms of their careers. 
Let us next look at what has happened to the rest of them. All the grumpy old men are sitting in the second and third rows. David Carter spent a couple of months on the front bench—the peak of his career. Lockwood Smith can go home and look at the photos on the wall again and dream of what might have been. Mr Richard Worth has proclaimed his ambition any number of times in the  
National Business Review 
 to be deputy leader but nobody except the  
National Business Review  
takes any notice of those particular claims. Georgina te Heuheu has been relegated to the unranked and poor old Wayne Mapp again a relic from the front bench is there at the back. But welcome back Mr Ryall to put a firm hand on the front bench of the National Party! 
The final clue to the internal dynamics of the National Party is that the caucus secretary is also the spokesperson on food safety and she is dispensable because she is retiring. She takes the notes and tastes the food at the same time. 
MIKE WARD (Green) 
: 
 Yesterday the Minister for the Environment signed the Packaging Accord. We have some difficulty with the fact that the accord is voluntary. We believe that the targets need to be a tad more demanding than the 65 percent recovery rate for aluminium when we are already saving 70 percent. We think the 23 percent recovery rate is likely to be met by the recycling operations of local bodies. Although we may be pessimistic about the effectiveness of the accord we are committed to reducing the amount of packages pottles plastic and polystyrene that go into the nation’s shopping baskets wheelie bins rubbish skips and landfills. 
Yesterday the Minister drew attention to the success of some recovery operations. It is essential that we recover the resources from products we discard and we applaud the activities of successful waste initiatives. However I was more encouraged by her references to design efforts to reduce the amount of packaging because it is the sheer volume of the stuff that we use and discard and the unrecoverable energy used in the manufacture packaging and transport of that stuff that contribute to the catastrophic climate change and sea-level rises confronting our children and our grandchildren. The packaging accord needs to be seen not just as a mechanism to reduce the amount of stuff we generate but as an essential component in reducing our energy and resource consumption and the ecological footprint of our all-too-often hugely profligate lives. 
Climate change is no longer a vague scientific hypothesis somewhere in the distant future; it is already happening. It is happening here and it is happening now. And for those who doubt climate change or that we are responsible for it I refer them to a recent article by National Party candidate and long-time environmentalist Guy Salmon who wrote in the winter of this year  
Is climate change scientifically unproven 
? 
The Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change the “IPCC” was set up to advise Governments on the complex scientific issues involved in climate change. It strives to obtain a broad consensus of thousands of experts on all aspects of the topic. Thanks to the culture of integrity in the global scientific community and the cautious thoroughness of the panel’s processes the 20-year debate over whether greenhouse gas emissions are affecting the global climate has now largely fizzled out. Significant uncertainty still surrounds the rate of change and the likely global and regional effects and these provide scope for argument. But the case for actively managing humankind’s emissions into the atmosphere has been convincingly made. 
Packaging waste is a significant component in those emissions. It would be churlish of us not to commend the Minister for drawing attention to the waste issue for this is what the accord does; but the absence of encouragement for producers who use refillable containers who use recycled materials in their packaging or who do away with the packaging altogether are serious omissions. 
I want to speak briefly about one of the more successful initiatives. Carter Holt Harvey’s Full Circle paper and card recovery operations are an example of what can happen when there is a market for recycled materials. Full Circle works with waste operators from one end of the country to the other and paper has become a key component in waste-recovery operations. However it is of little comfort to the people whose lives have been devastated by the mudslips resulting from illegal logging done to produce pulp for the paper that is being recycled particularly if that paper is never read is printed only on one side and is used for documents that are not needed in hard copy. So full marks to Full Circle but let us remember that recycling is what one does with stuff that was made to throw away and the first priority in the waste reduction hierarchy is reuse. 
Taking a pile of sand on the other side of the world pouring in a heap of energy and turning it into a bottle shipping the bottle around the world filling it once emptying it and smashing it even when it is turned into another bottle is wasteful. It is inexcusably wasteful. Taking another shopping bag every time we make a purchase is wasteful inexcusably wasteful. Using polypropylene and cling film around fresh fruit and vegetables is just plain silly. 
We do not question the sincerity of the Government’s intentions; it is the lack of urgency that concerns us. And we are running out of time.