Graham KennedyDr KENNEDY GRAHAM (Green): In opening this debate the Prime Minister offered four goals for the 2017 election: opportunity for people to get ahead; new jobs and businesses; assistance in raising families; and support for those in need. That was a fairly standard set of political goals—motherhood more or less. Anyone can sign on to them at least if times were normal but times are not normal.People will not get ahead if the global climate is out of control. There will be no real jobs and business creation if countries are ravaged by extreme weather not least in Australia and New Zealand. People will not successfully raise their families if their children's lives are blighted by the planetary stress that extreme climate change is causing. The Government will struggle to support those in need if its capacity to do so is dwarfed by global pressures as the world transitions to a low-carbon economy faster than we do. We are in fact all in this together and so the Green Party seeks to work with the Government—support it when justified cajole it when desirable condemn it when necessary—in developing a national climate policy that is worthy of the name of New Zealand.One year after the Paris Agreement and 2 months after the last climate policy conference the Government is assuring us that it is taking a new approach to climate policy. I believe this to be true. I want to acknowledge the positive approach that the Minister the Hon Paula Bennett is bringing to bear on the subject. We welcome this. Our cross-party group GLOBE-NZ is working together on a British consultancy project and we are making good progress. It does not follow that the Green Party agrees that the policies her Government has developed to date are sufficient in light of the urgency and magnitude of the global ecological crisis we face. She assured us in question time that more is to come. We shall see. We shall judge and so will the people of this country—they who wish to get ahead create new jobs and businesses raise their families and flourish and prosper.The Prime Minister devoted a fleeting mention to the Government's climate policy in the course of his speech. It will progress initiatives he said to meet the Government's Paris Agreement target of 30 percent of 2005 emissions levels by 2030. That means of course 11 percent of 1990 levels. This will be done he said through a review of the emissions trading scheme and a strengthening of the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority and that is all he said.Setting aside the palpable inadequacy of these two extreme measures to reach even the Government's 11 percent target the main weakness of the Prime Minister's statement is the inadequacy of the target itself. It may be lost on him but it was 10 years ago that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recommended that developed countries needed to reduce emissions by no less than 25 percent by 2020. That would mean about 30 to 40 percent by 2030 not 11 percent. It may be lost on him but the Paris Agreement calls for an effective and progressive response to the urgent threat of climate change. Developed countries he said should continue to take the lead. It may be lost on him but in adopting the Paris Agreement the parties noted that much greater emissions reduction efforts will be required to stay under 2 degrees. It may be lost on him but the Paris Agreement said that a party may at any time adjust its target with a view to enhancing its level of ambition. Yet there was nothing of that in the Prime Minister's speech and nothing in the Minister's answers in the House.In 2015 the Green Party adopted a policy of a 40 percent target by 2030 and all of this through domestic reductions not reliance on international offsets and we advanced policies and measures to get there. That would be on track to carbon neutrality by 2050 just as Norway and Sweden have done. New Zealand can do this. New Zealand must do this. With the Greens in Government after September New Zealand will do this.