Carter David: Climate Change (Emissions Trading and Renewable Preference) Bill — In Committee 
Carter David: Climate Change (Emissions Trading and Renewable Preference) Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:649;Page:18144] 
Hon DAVID CARTER (National) 
: 
 I will talk again specifically to clauses 177A onwards of “Subpart 4—Agriculture” of Part 5 inserted by clause 43 and I repeat my call to the Minister in the chair David Parker when I took an earlier contribution asking him to stand and tell this Committee how much this legislation will cost individual farmers. The Minister has taken a couple of calls so far but he has completely ignored my question probably because he simply does not know the answer. 
I refer the Minister to the  
New Zealand Farmers Weekly 
 that was published yesterday 1 September 2008. The headline for this particular article is “ETS bill 99% of farm surplus”. A Gisborne farmer by the name of Neil Henderson says he went on to the carbon calculator and put in his current inputs and it came up as saying that under this emissions trading scheme his farm surplus would be reduced by 99 percent. In other words that particular farmer would potentially be wiped out by Mr Parker’s legislation. So I ask the Minister to let us try to find out what the cost would be for that farmer. Let us assume that he is an average sheep and beef farmer for that area and that he runs 5000 stock units. On the assumption that the carbon cost is $25 a tonne the farmer has calculated that that will cost him $125000 per annum. If those are the costs I tell Mr Parker that man cannot survive. 
In an earlier contribution Mr Parker argued that farmers should not be exempted from the scheme and I accept that. He then argued that farmers should pay for their increased emissions and let us for the moment accept that. But if Neil Henderson has consistently farmed 5000 stock units for the previous 10 years and if he expects to farm 5000 stock units for the next 10 years I tell Mr Parker that he will not be increasing his emissions. Yet at $30 a tonne the Minister will be landing Neil Henderson with a bill of 150 grand so I ask Mr Parker to tell me how that man can survive. We can talk a little about fertiliser and about nitrogen fertiliser particularly but if that farmer is on the type of hill country I suspect that he is on he will not be using nitrogen fertilisers at all. So there are certainly no easy answers for him. 
What Neil Henderson is dealing with is the expectation that he will have to pay for his methane emissions so I ask Mr Parker before he presents that man with a bill of $150000 a year to tell me today what that farmer can do to mitigate his methane emissions. The answer today is that he can do nothing. If there is nothing he can do but he gets a bill of 150 grand a year he will not survive financially. So the production that that farmer used to give to the New Zealand economy—the money he used to make for New Zealand—will simply be shifted offshore. Those are the facts around this emissions trading scheme I tell the Minister and it is time that he rose and answered those questions for me. 
Mr Neil Henderson raises some real concerns towards the end of the article because he says he has read that by 2020 the cost of carbon will not be $25 a tonne and it will not be $30 a tonne; he has read that the cost of carbon in 2020 will be $200 a tonne. On that basis he will not have to pay a hundred grand a year; Mr Parker will be asking him to pay $1 million a year. 
So I tell the Minister that it is time he got out of his seat and answered some simple questions for those of us on this side of the Chamber. If he proposes to bring agriculture into the scheme as he has so dictated in this legislation he or any other member who supports this bill should rise in Parliament today and simply tell us what the annual financial cost will be to Mr Neil Henderson who farms in Gisborne.