Court SimonSIMON COURT (ACT): It gives me great pleasure tonight on behalf of the ACT Party to confirm we will support this bill. Now I did have significant reservations at first reading which I set out quite clearly. Unfortunately due to the very short time available the committee was not able to attract any significant submissions. And knowing how difficult it is for organisations and individuals particularly smallholders particularly small farm foresters the type of people and businesses that this bill—people carrying out forestry activities with low volumes people in those situations often find it very difficult firstly to know when Parliament or select committees are calling for submissions they often need to get advice they need to talk to memberships or co-ops about what's our position going to be how should we respond what are the various concerns. And so it's not surprising that we didn't get any submissions that could help the committee potentially deliver a better bill back to the House. But let's just look back at what this problem is. Essentially the current legislation imposes an extraordinarily extreme penalty to farm foresters to organisations individuals who remove trees from their land and don't replant. They might do that for a variety of reasons. They might decide to do something remarkable like change their land use from forestry to productive farming to beef and lamb even dairy. They might decide that actually they're going to remove the trees the pine trees if they are for example—and they're not going to replant anything they're just going to let the bush come back by itself because maybe those paddocks are just too steep maybe it's too difficult to get equipment in there. Maybe during the cost of living crisis they can't afford to pay for the equipment to get in there. And maybe with the immigration settings still pretty much turned down to zero under this Government they can't get the labour they need to go and replant what are often quite remote and challenging bits of terrain in the back country of New Zealand because those are the kind of people who—after 1996 and particularly when the Kyoto Protocol was signed by New Zealand—realised there might actually be some benefits to continuing to allow forests to grow on their land and not cut it down for a reasonable time and to participate in schemes that allow them to claim carbon credits.But of course the problem is that when this legislation was passed the climate change response—well essentially the zero carbon Act back in 2020—the penalty that would have applied to farm foresters and smallholders to remove trees from their land and didn't replant or who had removed them since 1990 would have been in the order of $20 a tonne times three. A three times multiplier a penalty of about $60 a tonne for every tonne of carbon they were assessed as being obligated to compensate the Government for in order for the Government to meet carbon targets that they had announced. So crikey I mean if I was a small holder or farm forester and I knew that I had a liability to either replant the land I'd cut trees from or pay you know $20 a tonne if I didn't pay it crikey if it was going to be $60 a tonne I could be assessed on—so it's kind of like an IRD of emissions trading penalties—then I might choose to do something. But of course what's happened is a lot of these farm foresters and smallholders really had no idea what their liabilities what their exposure was.So this bill this extension of time for the Government to work out what's a fair regime recognises actually the penalties and the regime that were going to be imposed on small holders—on farm foresters for example—was completely out of proportion to the risk that they didn't replant their land with pine trees or some other vegetation; the risk that they didn't fulfil their obligations under the emissions trading scheme or under the Climate Change Response Act to pay off their carbon debt. That risk is actually tiny; it's infinitesimal. When you think about the scale of global emissions the fact that New Zealand emits over 80 million tonnes a year of carbon dioxide from manufacturing from transport from energy production and consumption from making things—DEPUTY SPEAKER: Sorry could the members on the left please just keep it down; they're affecting the concentration of the speaker. So could you just move closer if you want to have a conversation rather than across the House? Mr Brown you might just leave something. Just behave. SIMON COURT: Mr Speaker—DEPUTY SPEAKER: Carry on my apology. In fact I'll ensure you get an extra minute.SIMON COURT: Thank you. And look ACT Party MPs enjoy the support and the occasional encouragement from members from the National Party here to my right. And so I just assume faithfully that it was just the usual encouragement and Just give them hell" that we expect from my National colleagues. But thank you Mr Speaker for offering to run defence to protect me from people like Simeon Brown and his sharp tongue his great wit; and of course Nicola Grigg who is—like me—a regular attendee at agricultural shows A&P shows like the Christchurch show New Zealand Agfest last week. Of course that's the kind of places that New Zealand farm foresters that small holders the kind of people who grow a batch of pine trees on the back of their property potentially as an investment something that mum and dad thought about years ago: "We'll get into one of these pine-growing schemes and will get these pines and in 20 or 30 years from now someone will come and cut them down and that'll form part of our retirement investment our savings for the future." And of course it's people like that—it's people who never expected to have to face these incredible penalties under the emissions trading scheme and under this piece of legislation who we are trying to give a break to at this time.Because the penalty regime was never really intended to punish such a group of people who have such a small stake in our overall emissions or emissions reduction—emissions mitigation—as this group. But of course what's happened since the legislation was passed the carbon price is not $20 or $25 a tonne; it's about $85 a tonne. So a three times penalty is going to be somewhere in the region of $240 to $260 a tonne for the obligation that these people are under who might have cut down some old growth forest pre-1990. They are required if they haven't replanted it and it was there on their land before 1990 to fulfil their obligations under the emissions trading scheme to pay a penalty or to basically buy carbon credits and hand them back to the Government at $85 a tonne. That makes no sense. Because if you've got some forest that your mum or dad or grandparents planted or let regenerate on your family farm say up the back of the King Country where I visited a farming family in January at Aria and who showed me a bush block that their father and grandfather had allowed to regenerate and they said "Well look we don't get any carbon credits for it because it's pre-1990 but if we were to cut it down we could pay that bill and we could replant it with pines and we could earn around $85 a tonne for the carbon sequestration." None of this makes any sense because the way this Government's meddled with the emissions trading scheme introduced a zero carbon Act—in the words of the Hon James Shaw and Dr Rod Carr the Climate Change Commissioner what they say is they want to pull all the levers on every aspect of the economy to reduce climate change. None of that makes any sense.The emissions trading scheme if it was allowed to function as a market-based scheme—and I know that the Minister Megan Woods this afternoon asserted that you know in order to reduce emissions from the transport sector for example the cost of a unit of carbon in the emissions trading scheme would have to be over $500 a tonne. Now again none of this stuff makes any sense because when you look at the way the Labour Government back engineers its terrible social engineering policies to get us out of cars and comes up with prices that are completely unrealistic—like $500 a tonne of carbon to incentivise a change of direction—this back engineering stuff is one of the ways that they justify some of their terrible policies when really if you just let the emissions trading scheme do its work with one change only and that would be—I mean it's important that we give an extension of time to these people while the Government works out how not to ruin a whole bunch of smallholders and mums and dads and older people at retirement age who have saved for their retirement by putting some pines on the land and cutting them down. While it works out how not to ruin them there's one more thing they could do. What they could do is adopt my member's bill which is the Climate Change Response (Offshore Mitigation) Amendment Bill. What that would allow New Zealand businesses to do and thank you Mr Uffindell for paying attention it's very very important. The National Party needs to have a close look at this policy; we expect you to support it as well. What my bill would allow is for New Zealand businesses to mitigate their emissions offshore. Currently that's not allowed. This Government imagines that New Zealand's climate is a little bubble. It's like the town of Springfield in The Simpsons; it's got a glass bubble over it right? And under that glass bubble is all of our emissions that we're supposed to emit and then mitigate right? Now in fact if we were allowed to mitigate our emissions offshore we could do it at a much lower cost; we could engage in proper climate diplomacy where we're helping developing countries replant forests that they've lost to unsustainable land-use practices. Places like Fiji where they cleared mangroves to get tourist boats in we can help them regenerate their environment reduce carbon or suck it up in all of the regenerating bush and actually allow threatened species like orangutan and eels and other things to have homes and places that currently they don't.So look ACT will support this bill the Climate Change Response (Extension of Penalty Transition for Forestry Activities with Low Volume Emissions Liabilities) Amendment Bill but we think there's a couple of important things that we could do under the emissions trading scheme. Mr Speaker thank you very much for your concern running defence. Thank you very much Mr Speaker."