Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of the ACT Party in opposition to the Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading Reform) Amendment Bill. It's difficult when speaking on this bill and having had the zero carbon bill debated earlier today not to have some admiration for the bill's sponsor James Shaw and the for the way that he has come into Parliament and worked assiduously to change public policy in a way that in his view is essential to the future of New Zealand. Nevertheless when I look at this bill and the provisions within it it's not one thing or the other. The intention of it I'm sure is to introduce a truly market-based system that will allow New Zealanders and their families their businesses and exporters to find a way to meet their carbon reductions or at least their emission reduction obligations at least cost in the most efficient way and with the least political distortion of economic decisions in New Zealand. That's a noble intention—a market-based solution for people to be able to solve a problem without politics getting in the way—and it's an important way to do it because our small open economy at the bottom of the world relies on people being able to make commercial decisions and being able to invest their capital decide where to work and decide what to buy and sell without political interference. Our country has been down the other path of having a Government that attempts to control almost every aspect of the economy before and it nearly bankrupted us. Well unfortunately this bill while promising to be a market-based trading solution fails in a couple of important areas. The first is that it sets a cap on the total supply of New Zealand Units—in effect the total number of tonnes of carbon dioxide that can be emitted—and already in that is a presupposition about how much carbon-emitting activity should happen in New Zealand versus the rest of the world. Well the easy way to solve the problem is actually to allow New Zealanders to buy credible units on an open market from the rest of the world. It may be that there are things that are better off happening in New Zealand from a global perspective and that New Zealanders would like to buy units—the right to emit a tonne of carbon—from offshore. Well this bill is designed to make that if not impossible then extremely difficult. So we start off with a cap on the total number of tonnes emitted within New Zealand and that might be OK if there was a true market place with no politics inside it. The problem is that the bill gets worse. It says that there will be a cap but that the Government will regulate what the cap is. So you've already got a political decision about the total amount and then it says Actually if we think that an industry has nowhere else to go and there's no danger of leakage"—i.e. activity they do being done elsewhere—"then we'll whack them harder." Then it says "If there are industries that are going to lose out to international competitors then we'll relax things a little bit." and how are those numbers really going to be decided? Well the only way is politics and so again we go backwards 35 years to a world where if you want stuff done and if you'd like your industry to survive and prosper then one of the most important inputs you can have—being carbon credits—are going to be awarded based on whether or not the Government has regulated this five-year period that your industry should have more or less. That politicisation of the economy is not only unnecessary in order to have a truly market-based emissions trading scheme but it does enormous damage in repoliticising the New Zealand economy—something that we moved away from a long time ago. In summary this bill does things that are not necessary that introduce additional political control over the New Zealand economy and yet it doesn't achieve better environmental outcomes for doing it. That is a reason why all New Zealanders should be opposed to trying to do climate change policy this way. Thank you Mr Speaker."