Smith StuartSTUART SMITH (National—Kaikōura): Thank you Madam Speaker. It is a pleasure to speak on the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill. The National Party will not be supporting this bill. This is quite pernicious actually I will go into that shortly but I note that the Minister who's just taken her seat Carmel Sepuloni spent most of the time talking about legislation that's already been passed rather than what this bill is about.You would think if you were the Minister of Energy and Resources that you would have gone down a mine. Actually I asked the Minister that very question and in fact while she has visited a mine she's never been down one. Never got inside a mine to actually see how it works and what it's doing and the good stuff that it's bringing out. I think we're seeing that lack of interest in the sector coming through in this bill.To remove the word promote" from the Act sounds quite innocuous—and to have more neutral language as the Minister mentioned before. It actually has quite a chilling effect on the confidence to invest in the industry in New Zealand. It's a very strange thing. I'm looking over the other side now and most of the members are on their phones. Now if they really want to follow through with this Crown Minerals Amendment Bill throw your phones away—throw your phones away—because you don't need them. You don't want them. I've got this very helpful book here which gives out a list of all of the minerals that are in everyday objects and a number of them we can mine in New Zealand. At the moment we mine a significant number of minerals in New Zealand but we could do a lot more. We currently mine gold; silver; sand and aggregate of course—and actually that's getting hard to do even though we've got rivers choked with gravel; iron sands; pounamu; halite; limestone; and of course coal.I visited a mine on the West Coast just recently Westland Mineral Sands which are mining among other things garnet and rare earth minerals as well. Garnet for those that don't know is used if you've got sandpaper when you're doing your woodwork the sand on that is actually garnet. Really small garnet is used in those liquid cutting tools to cut steel; a very fine garnet cuts the steel with precision cutting. But we could also mine lithium here we have supplies of lithium particularly that's associated with volcanic activity; rare earth elements which at that Westland Mineral Sands mine they will be able to get out—and I'll come back to what the uses for those elements are later—vanadium; nickel; cobalt; and of course tungsten. Tungsten has a lot of uses particularly in manufacturing. So we could be doing all of those things.But to go back to the mobile phones that they're all using over there—the electronics in a mobile phone the elements that are in them are: gold copper silver tantalum and tungsten. So there is tungsten—we can mine that here. Gold and silver—we also mine here. But I won't talk about the batteries in them because I've got another example further in. The good old electric vehicle (EV) the EV has lithium cobalt nickel and carbon. So the lithium and cobalt we can mine here—most of the cobalt in EV batteries now is mined by child labour from the Congo. And carbon—does anyone know where carbon comes from?Andrew Bayly: No.STUART SMITH: Coal. And so it's quite interesting isn't it? Coal is thought of—and West Coast coal in particular is metallurgical coal and it's used for all these sorts of things. And actually the Spring Creek mine applied for a permit to mine for another useful element used in these things: solar panels.Now the Greens and Labour love solar panels. I love them we've got them on my house. But a major part of that is silicon—polysilicon in particular. It requires an extremely high temperature to make polysilicon to get it to the purity needed for solar panels and that comes from coal. That's what the Spring Creek mine wanted to mine for; it's quite high in silicon. But not only that the high temperatures needed to make it it's coal that is used to make the polysilicon for solar panels. And also polysilicon is used for computer chips which your phones and computers all run on. All modern electronics do.Just to give one more example the windmills that we are now getting to generate our electricity well the blades are made of carbon and carbon fibre and that as I said comes from coal. The resins that are in that come from methane—methanol at least. Now methanol comes from natural gas which Methanex makes here in New Zealand. All of those things we do here in New Zealand. And yet the Government wants to make it more difficult than it needs to be. This is a silly silly bill.I think we have to judge this Government by their results. They talk a huge game on climate change but since 2017 emissions have gone up in New Zealand—up under the big talking climate change Government. And actually our coal imports have tripled. So we are burning more coal. Everyone else in the world they're lowering their emissions. Do you know how they're lowering their emissions Mr Bayly? Andrew Bayly: How?STUART SMITH: They are swapping coal for gas. What are we doing in New Zealand? We're doing the opposite—we're swapping gas for coal. How does that work? It comes about because of not taking a problem definition in the first place to work their way through these policies. And of course they don't. It is these platitudes that come from the other side—an expert in this area has said that in the game between platitudes and physics physics remains undefeated. And unfortunately that's what we're seeing over there.However I'm going to end with some good news Mr Speaker because I know you need this on a Friday morning: they just finished "COP Flop" the COP-27. Madam Speaker this relates to this climate change issue that's driving this bill. Actually what we found out—we were expecting a business-as-usual case for temperatures to rise between 4 and 5 degrees centigrade by 2100. However the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has backed right away from that; they are now saying business-as-usual is expected to be a 2.5 degree increase in temperature by 2100. So we're all in a very good space actually. So we need to actually acknowledge that. And that's not been acknowledged because that is a really important piece of good news for New Zealand.But this is a terrible bill. The permits that are—this will do nothing to speed up permits being processed. It's way too long. It's making it very difficult for the industry an industry that we need to meet our climate goals an industry that we need to electrify. All of the elements could be here and for strategic reasons we should be doing it here rather than importing them. Rare earth elements most of them are coming from China and if they don't have them they control them in Africa. We can produce them here and we should be doing that but we need a permissive but of course environmentally protected system to be able to get those permits up and running. And this will do nothing to help that. I condemn it to the House."