Parker DavidHon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): Thank you Mr Chairman. Responding to the last speaker Sarah Dowie and the record of the last Government on conservation I'm always a bit leery about these loaded terms like predator-free by 2050" "war on weeds" and "battle of the birds". It sounds to me a bit like Operation Enduring Freedom and the coalition of the willing. The problem with these high-sounding words when they're not matched with a budget for the Department of Conservation is that they don't meet the rhetoric. "The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment"—a World Bank economist used that phrase. I like to quote it because it's true and it's especially true of New Zealand's economy which is so dependent upon natural capital: a benign climate and adequate supplies of water. If you don't get the environment right the economy suffers. In the time that I've got available I'm going to cover briefly climate change water some Resource Management Act (RMA) issues and the Environmental Protection Authority if I have time. There is a very large programme across the environment by the incoming Government. Climate change as another speaker before me—the Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern—has said is the nuclear-free moment of our generation. What are we doing? A net zero carbon target by 2050 is going to be legislated. A climate commission will be put in place to assist us to depoliticise the path to achieving that outcome. We're going to go past the 90 percent renewables by 2025 target set by the last Government and which we're getting close to now as a country. We're replacing it with 100 percent renewables. On water—terrible. Seventy percent of monitored swimming sites have got increasing nitrate levels. I believe that the most important river to most people is the one they live closest to and use and that it should be clean enough for them to pop down swim in in summer and put their head under without the risk of getting crook. That should also be alongside sustainability of the natural environment—that is sustained by clean waterways—and we're going to do a lot better in respect of that. We're going to update the national policy statement and take many other measures to improve our water quality so that we stop it getting worse because it is still getting worse in some areas and within five years you will see material improvements. Once you see that in rural areas rural people can be assured that they will have their social licence restored and that they'll be given time to clean up to the levels we want to get to everywhere. In urban areas it's great to see Auckland bringing forward more than $800 million of expenditure to separate sewerage from stormwater and that's going to reduce the sewage overflow on to beaches by between 80 and 90 percent in the next 10 years. That's great that they're doing that and important that it be done. On the RMA and urban planning we've got some real problems in New Zealand with urban planning as evidenced by the housing crisis that we've got in Auckland. We've got a substantial work programme bringing forward improvements in urban planning. On the back of that at the end of that we're going to be bringing forward RMA reforms so that we've got more effective plan-making processes without ditching the environmental baselines that are so important or excluding public participation or the role of the Environment Court—the Environment Court sidelined by the last Government. In respect of solid waste I'll leave that for Minister Sage to speak to but in respect of some of the other environmental initiatives obviously we need to get our carbon emissions under control. Now the last Government reduced the effectiveness of emissions pricing by 75 percent. They excluded the 50 percent of emissions that came from agriculture and then they had a one-for-two deal—that you had to remit one emissions right for every two units of emissions. Those two steps alone decreased the effectiveness of the emissions trading scheme by 75 percent in terms of the marginal price signal it sent. We're going to fix that. The last Government made it worse because they allowed unlimited quantities of Ukrainian and Russian hot air to flood the New Zealand system after Kyoto II disappeared and those Russian and Ukrainian hot air units had nowhere else to go but into the New Zealand system. The last Government let the price collapse to about a dollar which was of no effect whatsoever on short-term decisions and it led to deforestation on the volcanic plateau that also added to sediment and nutrient losses to the Waikato catchment. There's lots that this Government's going to do. We're going to leave this country with a stronger economy and a cleaner environment. You do not have to choose between one or the other. You can do both with good policy and that's what this Government's going to do."