Jones Shane: Climate Change Response (Moderated Emissions Trading) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Jones Shane: Climate Change Response (Moderated Emissions Trading) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:657;Page:6874] 
Hon SHANE JONES (Labour) 
: 
 Tena tatou katoa. I begin by broadcasting to every taxpayer that the Climate Change Response (Moderated Emissions Trading) Amendment Bill puts in place a scheme that they will go on paying for whilst at the same time the architects of the bill—the Government—give them daily weekly and monthly lectures that there is not enough money to go around. There is enough taxpayer largesse for the Government to reward the vested interests and the corporate forces that actually sustain its support base. This is a shocking and utter ravaging of our tax base.  
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: It’s not true. Treasury says it’s not true. 
Hon SHANE JONES 
: There was a point when the Minister for Climate Change Issues was a credible voice for environmentalism in his own party. He was a strong speaker but now he is a weak man. His sardonic tone throughout this entire debate has soured what could have been a very strong win-win situation.  
I turn to what an earlier speaker David Parker said about the Treaty settlement process. Our country has international obligations which the Kyoto Protocol represents. Climate change obligations affect all New Zealanders; I say to National that despite its desire to partition Maori and Pakeha there are no differences Hone Harawira notwithstanding between a Maori emission and a Pakeha emission. This notion that the Government can cut a side deal for the Ngai Tahu tribe brings into incredible disrepute the whole Treaty settlement process. During the time Labour was in Government we had a very senior lawyer a QC who was—if memory serves me correctly—agreeable to the Ngai Tahu advisers as well. That QC went acre rood and perch through the entirety of their settlement and did not find a basis for reopening that settlement and giving them an opportunity for further lucre. At the same time people who have similar classes of assets will not get that privileged treatment. This is from the person and the party who railed about “iwi” and “Kiwi”—they are giving a sweetheart deal to one community in Maoridom— 
Hon Member 
: Only one. 
Hon SHANE JONES 
: One. They are foisting it on the rest of us and they will not release the advice or the papers as to why that tiny segment of Maoridom ought to get this privileged status. There is no reason whatsoever why they should shirk their international obligations and not stand side by side with the rest of us. An industry or a sector has to go through a transitional stage; our colleagues have already addressed that fact. Of course there was always going to be a transition. Of course there will always have to be offsetting features. But that is different from choosing one privileged group on the basis of its tribal claims process. The question is why the Maori Party continued to oppose the introduction of an emissions trading scheme that was intensity based but after a small degree of lobbying in the South Island it rolled over.  
It has yet to explain that this is a massive shift of burden and financial liability from corporate interests on to taxpayers. That is the sort of thing that happened in the 1960s and the 1970s and it was actually our party that reversed that very bad trend. Today despite all the camouflage and the rhetoric around climate change the Government is effecting the transfer of that burden. It has been aided and abetted by the Maori Party a group that stands up every week and reminds New Zealanders that Maori are hard-done-by. So what will that party do? It will cuddle up to the international investors who continue to threaten swagger and say that they will take their toys elsewhere if they do not get what they want. Who did those investors pick off? They picked off the Maori Party whose very members have made a reputation and have created their own status through exaggerating the Maori level of woe and economic plight. But perversely enough they have bought into a scheme that actually worsens the taxpayer’s ability to address the very things that they believe lie at the core of their identity: equity fairness justice special pleading secret deals and sell-outs. They will not be able to get away with it.  
At this stage naturally we look forward to the fact that the Maori Party members may change their minds at the Finance and Expenditure Committee because they have said that perhaps they will address those issues at the committee. We will campaign incessantly so that every single member knows that the Maori Party is the party that writes in the minority report that it opposes the bill because of its inequalities including the subsidisation of the nation’s largest polluters at the cost of households and small and medium sized businesses then turns round and shafts those very households. Members of the Maori Party may think that the people who read papers listen to the news and watch television do not understand. It is bad enough that those members do not understand it but the rest of them when we have finished our campaign spreading the facts—the gospel of truth—will know. They will know up and down the country.  
Throughout the entirety of this process we have had to put up with the Minister’s choleric disposition. He sells the notion that a market-based approach will effect a change in investment behaviour. He sells the notion that we can use an emissions trading scheme model whereby investment decisions will be given the signal that if people continue to invest in a particular way then the Government will impose further levies on them because it is not right that the entirety of the nation should bear the burden for the privileged status of a narrow range of shareholders. That is what the Minister started off by saying. But in actual fact one cannot have a market-based solution if one does not have a cap. Otherwise it is akin to changing the fisheries quota system and saying people can catch their quota but we will stop sustainability measures and remove the cap so that they can catch as much as they like and if they catch the last fish in the sea we will get the taxpayer to meet the cost of it. That is not only absurd it is actually very sad because it is an accurate reflection of one of the key principles underlying this Minister’s approach originally which was to go for a market system and not a tax. The Minister says he wants to be a party of light regulation yet he sets up a system that can do nothing other than impose the financial medium to long term costs on taxpayers thereby worsening their financial status over the medium to long term and doing absolutely nothing to move New Zealand investors towards a position where they represent less of a liability in terms of our international obligations. 
The final point I will focus on is accountability. Dr Nick Smith has come to this House and circuitously imposed an indefinable liability on the balance sheet. He has introduced an enormously gruesome possibly unaffordable liability and he is not prepared to observe accountability provide the information and the papers or have a debate as to why this balance sheet should be so burdened with this new policy. I hope during the course of the select committee we get ample opportunity not so much to pin him personally—because he has now destroyed his own personal credibility as a blue-green member—but to hold the Government accountable so that it does not use climate change as a way of further adding weight to an already straining balance sheet. This is not climate change - friendly; this is a jack-up and a corporate takeover. Kia ora tatou katoa.