Fitzsimons Jeanette: Business of Select Committees — Appointments 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Business of Select Committees — Appointments 
[Volume:651;Page:299] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Green) 
: 
 This is a very important motion to set up a very important select committee and I think a really important select committee like this needs to have a title that is rather less boring than just the “Climate Change Committee”. I think it should be honoured with a title that indicates what it will do and just how very important it is. I have three proposals.  
We could call it the “Climate Change (Avoiding All Action) Committee” because its clear purpose is to cause delay. When we look at the terms of reference and think seriously about what it would take to deliver on these terms of reference and when we consider that a select committee normally meets for 3 hours a week my guess—and it is quite an educated estimate having sat through the last such committee—is that it will take 3 to 5 years. It will take 3 to 5 years to do justice to these terms of reference. But clearly that is not what the Government has in mind and that means the evidence that will be accepted will be highly selective because there will not be time to receive all of it and we know how the selection is likely to be made. So this committee is there primarily to waste time to delay the point at which emitters have to pay to clean up their own mess and to extend the period during which taxpayers pay for it all.  
There is another title we could give this committee. We could call it the “Stifle Innovative Investment in New Zealand Project Committee” because that is what it is already doing. We have heard from the Hon David Parker the previous Minister responsible for Climate Change Issues that some investors are turning their backs on New Zealand and going away. I happen to know about one case that I think is environmentally very serious and that was a great economic opportunity.  
A smallish firm had established some strategic partnerships to permanently reforest steep eroding land the sort of land that desperately needs reforesting. It was doing so in partnership with a honey producer which was to plant some manuka as part of the regeneration project and get high-quality manuka honey for medicinal purposes and it was to do it in partnership with landowners. The firm had an amazing project going; it had it all worked out. The firm has folded its tents and left permanently. It struggled all last year waiting to see what the final form of the law would be. It managed to keep going during that time. The firm now says that with the scheme suspended and with no guarantee that it will ever exist it cannot afford the overheads of keeping the business together so it has gone. I think that is a tragedy because there is much land in New Zealand that would benefit from that kind of reforestation to say nothing of the effect it would have on our greenhouse emissions.  
We could also call the committee the “Keep Rodney Out of My Hair Inquiry Committee” because that is clearly what it is really about. Members should make no mistake about it: these are Rodney Hide’s terms of reference. When we look at them word for word we see they are verbatim except for one small change that looks as though it might be significant until we look at what has been substituted for it and we find that it is not significant at all. John Key has allowed a party with 3.7 percent of the vote a party that could not even get 5 percent and with known extremist views to dictate the way that climate change will be considered by our Parliament. That is undemocratic and it is a travesty.  
The only change according to what the Minister of Energy and Resources has just told us is that the committee will not be re-examining the science because the Government has removed Rodney Hide’s first proposal for the terms of reference. Well I am sorry but that is not true. If we look at what has been substituted instead we see that the committee has to look at the projections that are being used to base the international agreements on—that means the projections of climate change and the rate of it—and to “consider the uncertainties and risks surrounding these projections”. That means the whole question of climate change and whether it is real is on the Table. Rodney has won every single thing he wanted in this inquiry.  
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has hundreds of climate scientists—highly prestigious highly specialised climate scientists—and thousands of other scientists and other experts in impacts responses and so forth who work every 4 years for a whole 4 years full time to peer review all the published science for that most recent period and to come to a conclusion about what it means and they publish that for everybody to see. It is a large book with many many appendices in other large books and it is published every 4 years. A select committee meeting for 3 hours a week is supposed to duplicate that work and come to the right conclusion when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change could not—I mean what kind of a mickey mouse outfit is this? Maybe we should call this committee the “Make New Zealand an International Laughing Stock Committee” because that is what we will be if we go down this route.  
I find it interesting that on the night before the terms of reference were given to Parliament the Hon Peter Dunne who is to chair this committee had not seen the terms of reference. He told me that he understood it would be a narrow review of the emissions trading scheme mechanisms which is what John Key promised before the election. Well actually an incoming Government has the right to review the policy that we use to tackle climate change. We might not agree with where the Government wants to go but if it had in fact brought to this Parliament a committee to review within a narrow framework whether the specifics of the emissions trading scheme were the best way to reduce our emissions then the Greens would have supported the setting up of that committee because we think it is the democratic right of an elected Government to do that. But that is not what the Government is doing and therefore we will be voting against it.  
The committee is expected to have a crystal ball. It is being asked to guess whether there will be a post - Kyoto Protocol agreement at all for after 2012 and it is being asked to guess what form that might take. Well we could all have fun speculating on that but what value will it be to the Government or this Parliament for a bunch of politicians to say: “Hmm I wonder whether they will or whether they will not.” when we have negotiators over there in Poznan now. Surely they are best placed to tell us where the international negotiations are heading and surely it is our role to do our utmost at those international talks to make sure that there is a post-2012 agreement that New Zealand plays a strong role in getting a post-2012 agreement and that it is the strongest agreement we can get. After all that is what the world is relying on us to do.  
The terms of reference are very biased. They direct us to look at all the negative local effects of a price on carbon—like what households will pay—but there seems to be no scope to look at the effects of allowing climate change to go unchecked and at the much larger negative effects that that will have on not just New Zealand society but the whole world. There is also no scope to look at the effects on the economy of leaving the taxpayer to pick up the entire bill for climate change. There is certainly nothing here that suggests we have any responsibility at all for what happens to the rest of the world as a result of our emissions—and our emissions if we go back to 1840 and include all the forest clearance plus all the burning of carbon fuels are not insignificant.  
We are to hear first in the terms of reference from trade experts. The issue is being treated like a trade negotiation where all countries fight from their individual corners and no one argues for the common good. This is not a trade negotiation; this is an attempt to reach a collaborative agreement about the future of the world and we need to take that seriously.  
We are to discuss whether it is better to try to limit climate change which we have been doing so far or whether we should just adapt to it. That suggests that climate change will bring about some new steady state that can be predicted and that we can adapt to. Well that is not true. If climate change continues unchecked there will be no new steady state. There will be constantly changing parameters of climate that we can never adapt to because they will happen faster than adaptation ever can. Of course we will have to do some adaptation to what will happen anyway but it is not a substitute for trying to stop climate change.  
The Greens are not apologists for the current emissions trading scheme. We are sceptical that emissions trading creates an opportunity for many people to create markets in buying and selling carbon where they do nothing except leverage the market but it is the only thing going to put a price on carbon. We need to get on and do that.