Twyford Phil: Climate Change Response (Moderated Emissions Trading) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Twyford Phil: Climate Change Response (Moderated Emissions Trading) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 24 November 2009. Volume:659;Page:7973. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
PHIL TWYFORD (Labour) 
: 
 I am speaking against the Climate Change Response (Moderated Emissions Trading) Amendment Bill this morning and I will follow on from comments made earlier by my colleague Grant Robertson. He referred to the interjection made by a National member last night a member who told Jacinda Ardern that she had no right to talk about or reference the rights of future generations given that she had no children. Well I have a son and my son will be 60 years old at a time when he will be paying half the costs of the subsidies for high-intensity industry emitters. When my son is 60 he will be paying half the costs of the subsidies for high-intensity industry emitters. Something is seriously wrong with that; there is a very disturbing pattern with this Government to push off the costs of today’s decisions on to future generations. 
I will make some comments about process because there is a direct relationship between the quality of process and the sausage that comes out the other end. The process of this bill has been shambolic shoddy and shonky. The result is a piece of legislation that I think quite frankly should not be before this House. If this Government had a shred of self-respect it would take this bill back to the drawing board. I have been in this House only a year but I have learned one or two things about parliamentary process. I have watched the progress of two of the Auckland super-city bills as they went through the House and I thought that they were bad! 
There is a strange Alice-in-Wonderland principle at work with this Government. The more important an issue is to the country’s future the less scrutiny and the less attention is paid to it and the more rushed its process is. I do not know why that is. Could it be the perpetually relaxed Prime Minister grinning aimlessly while his coalition partners in major legislation spin off into the ether? Could it be the genial incompetence of Gerry Brownlee and his House management or has Nick Smith finally blown a gasket and what we are seeing with this emissions trading scheme process is a result of that? At least Rodney Hide has an excuse for his shambolic handling of the Auckland super-city reforms. He was off around the world going to Universal Studios and attending weddings in London. What is this Minister’s excuse for this shambolic process? 
Let us talk about some of the similarities between the Auckland governance process and this emissions trading scheme process. Some things that I think have a very strong parallel between the two processes include the misuse of urgency which has been another hallmark of this Government’s record over the last 12 months; a rushed and inadequate process; inadequate select committee scrutiny; important decisions made behind the scenes while the committee was actually receiving submissions from the public—and we have seen the sweetheart deal that the Government made with certain iwi in order to get Maori Party support—and shambolic last-minute changes. In the case of the Auckland super-city it was the panicked last-minute decision to bring the Rodney district into the super-city; in the case of the emissions trading scheme we have seen very similar things. 
Let us continue with this issue of process. We have seen the chair of the select committee try to limit oral submissions to 30 and the hearings to a single day. I ask members how bizarre that is. In the end submitters were given only a few hours’ notice to appear before the committee—far too short a time to actually speak prepare and communicate on issues of this complexity. The Government withheld key documents including the Treasury analysis of long-term fiscal costs and the details of an agreement with the Maori Party. Treasury officials looked at each other in confusion and had to ask for a break so they could go out and discuss what the real estimates of the long-term fiscal consequences were. It was utterly bizarre and both Treasury and the Parliamentary Counsel Office said to the committee that they simply did not have the time to do their work properly in order to provide advice to the committee. The process was a shambles and Government members should be ashamed. To rescue this bill at the last minute we have seen a cobbled-together deal.