Kuriger BarbaraBARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki - King Country): Thank you Madam Speaker. I'm wondering now that we've got to this point in the debate when we are going to get a rural MP with some sense of reality around utes actually standing up and making a speech. I could see the senior whip over there for the Labour Party who had one such vehicle until recently until unfortunately his Prime Minister put him in a space where it was very difficult to retain his ute for ute purposes after he'd given her a ride in it. It just showed me that as Greg O'Connor said before Farmers adapt." Well we've actually seen Kieran McAnulty adapt and farmers will adapt. But you can't adapt to something that doesn't exist and that is the message that this side of the House is trying to get through.The National Party do want the climate change goals to succeed but to get the right goals to succeed you have to have the right settings. And right now—I was at Fieldays as well and I can tell you that I'm not sure if Mr O'Connor over there actually told us all that the farmers said to him because a lot of farmers were actually telling us a lot of stuff at Fieldays about what a stupid policy this was because you tax something for which you have no replacement for and all you are doing is taking money out of the pockets of the people who actually want to make a difference to climate change. So that doesn't work. It's a tax it's a wealth transfer and it's got nothing to do with climate change.The Prime Minister said way back at the beginning a few years ago that this could be her generation's nuclear-free moment. Well unfortunately we've heard too much of that and we've heard today that the renewable energy is going backwards in this country. So when you claim that something's going to be a nuclear-free moment you might want to be very careful what you wish for because we all know that our renewable energy is going backwards. So therefore even if Minister Wood's grand plan about us all driving around in electric cars actually worked at some level and we could all find a suitable vehicle for our requirements for which many people can't right now i.e. farmers and tradies then we wouldn't have enough renewable electricity to run such vehicles. We all know that there's quite a lot of Indonesian coal going into our renewable energy system and taking it backwards.Farmers do adapt. I think this Government actually needs to adapt some of their policies to understand how things actually work in the real world. When the technology is available people will change to it. This is just mucking around with market forces. This is just putting taxes in place that are going to make no difference and one day the Minister is going to eat his words and everything he's said around this piece of legislation.We did hear today about the excitement about this discount—for our families that can't afford to buy cars. There's a lot of families that won't be able to afford to buy these cars even with the discount. These cars are expensive. These cars because we don't have enough of them yet haven't actually come down to an affordable price. And when they do then we should start thinking about encouraging some of our families to be able to afford these electric cars. The market forces will take care of these things when they're available.Angela Roberts is over there and she must understand the dynamics of a rural electorate because she's actually covering quite a big rural electorate in her role at the moment. But I had quite a level of—well I don't know if it was comedy or discomfort or quite what it was the other night when Michael Wood stood up and talked about how he'd had a wonderful holiday in the summer with his family and he actually had driven through my electorate made a point of saying that he'd been there. He'd been on State Highway 3 in Ōtorohanga and Te Kūiti and he had his electric car and he'd managed to charge it and that was all wonderful. So rural was taken care of. We all know that Minister Wood in his discussion document actually said he was going to put a lot of cycle ways in rural so that farmers and tourists could go about their business and I wondered if he'd ever been there until that moment.So yes we do have electric vehicle chargers in Ōtorohanga and Te Kūiti but that is not rural New Zealand at the most remote points of it. I made a point to Minister Wood the other night that if he had been in Marokopa last weekend he probably wouldn't have got to work this week because he would have been stuck in his electric car. I asked him when he opened the road at Awakino whether he'd actually seen the hills surrounding northern Taranaki and the King Country because people need utes to be able to run the businesses; the sheep and beef farmers in particular that operate on that hill country. Mr McAnulty knows this well and Angela Roberts must see it as she goes around in her travels as well.Now when Canterbury flooded the Prime Minister was down there. How did she get to go and meet with those Canterbury farmers? In a ute. Nicola Grigg will tell us that. She went in a ute. Greg O'Connor I remember back when you were a new MP you telling us stories about how you'd been to the West Coast.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order! The member won't bring the Speaker into the debate.BARBARA KURIGER: Thank you Madam Speaker. I remember Greg O'Connor telling us his memories about working on his uncle's farm on the West Coast of the South Island—and I know that his cousin's farm is pretty severely flooded at the moment and there's a lot of mud in the West Coast of the South Island. Unfortunately for those people down there three sessions of weather within about eight months. It's been very wet it's been very muddy and the only access that some of those people have to be able to get in and out are four-wheel-drive ute vehicles. It is a big slap in the face for those people who want to continue to drive those vehicles to have to turn round and pay a tax on top of the cost of a vehicle that they have no replacement for.So I just want to reiterate to the Government—I mean we know the voting dynamics in this House. They're going to change very soon: 2023 is coming up and the game is on. But I just want to give some reality to those people on the other side of the House that actually if you put a tax on something for which you do not have an alternative all you are doing is taking money off people. The Government is not going to make any difference to climate change with this policy. It's just a dynamic that's working against market forces. It's a dynamic that's putting vehicles into the system for which we have no renewable electricity for. I look forward to the day when we can point out to the Government that this policy has not worked and we can get back into Government and we can reverse the ute tax and we can put some sensible climate change policies on the agenda. Thank you Madam Speaker."