Fitzsimons Jeanette: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:637;Page:7254] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 The Prime Minister has announced a call to action on sustainability. She has called it the compelling issue of our time. She has said that it should define our national identity. And after 30 years of advocating for sustainability and warning of climate change and oil depletion and after 10 years of pressing for those issues in this House and seeing those issues first ignored and then ridiculed and marginalised—as they have been by some members today—obviously the Greens welcome such a statement from the Prime Minister. 
At this point I was going to say something about National’s call for action on climate change and sustainability which I thought might be forthcoming but I could not actually find anything to comment on so I will carry on without it. 
What we are looking for now from the Government is the action to back up the words and in the Prime Minister’s own words we are looking for the substance not just the slogans. So the Government can expect the Greens and I believe the public—and I hope the media—to measure its actions regularly against its goals. 
The Prime Minister’s speech has taken some first steps which I want to acknowledge. I have been saying for many years that the Government cannot expect anyone else to embrace sustainability if the Government does not do it in its own departments and today’s announcements of actions made by Government departments to walk the talk are welcome. Last year I raised in the House the appalling performance of the ministerial car fleet which is among the worst gas guzzlers in the country. So I welcome the news that when those cars are replaced it will be with much more efficient cars—we wait to see how much more efficient. 
I am glad to hear that six Government departments are to be carbon neutral. It is true as John Key says that they are mainly pen-pushing departments and I look forward very much to the news that they will be joined for example by Landcorp which has some appalling carbon behaviour. 
I welcome the Government’s support for the Greens’ Waste Minimisation (Solids) Bill and for adding some mandatory measures to the voluntary approach in the New Zealand waste strategy which has not been particularly successful. 
But this was a speech in two parts. The first part had—I am told by staff who have counted—something like 30 references to sustainability. Well that is a first. Then the Prime Minister turned to the economy and we were back to business as usual; sustainability was absent and there were no further references. 
The Prime Minister says that business needs to be sustainable and I want to talk particularly today about sustainable business because if business is not sustainable our economy cannot be sustainable our way of life cannot be sustainable and our nation cannot be sustainable. That is a given. But business is responsible to its shareholders and it cannot survive if it is not profitable. That is a given too. Business will and must respond to the rules the price signals and the opportunities in the wider economic environment and a Government’s role is to ensure that those signals encourage the behaviour it wants from business. It is Government’s role to ensure that business can profit from being sustainable—and it is not doing that. 
We can look at the business tax review. It is billed as designed to transform the economy—but to what? Sustainability is never mentioned in any of the objectives of the business tax review. The aims are to increase productivity competitiveness with Australia exporting and staff training. All of them are good objectives in themselves but they are seriously inadequate for a Government that wants to blaze a trail to sustainability and carbon neutrality. 
The trouble is that there is no joined-up thinking. The Government thinks in silos that are patterned on the departmental silos that make policy. Climate change and sustainability policy is made by the Ministry for the Environment and it rarely connects with what Treasury the Inland Revenue Department or the Ministry of Economic Development do. That has to change. 
The tax review proposes tax cuts whether as accelerated depreciation or write-downs for businesses that invest in productivity gains and export development. A sustainability policy would give tax incentives to businesses that invested in plant or processes that reduce energy use that reduce pollution that reduce the use of toxic materials and that reduce waste. The taxpayer can afford to do that because it reduces what we have to pay in 2012 for greenhouse gas emissions over and above our 1990 levels. 
Tax concessions are also proposed for research and development. What sort of research and development? We want to see incentives to do research and development on less carbon-intensive production methods less carbon-intensive food miles alternatives to toxic materials and ways of using less water. “Tax incentives for staff training”—in what? “Increased productivity”—fine but what about training in cleaner production techniques minimising spills of hazardous materials and better plant maintenance to reduce energy waste? We used to train engineers in this country in advanced energy auditing. There are no such courses now that I can find. We simply do not have the people who can walk into a business and show it how to cut its energy use by 30 percent which is usually possible if one knows how. 
There is a proposal to reduce compliance costs for small-scale payers of fringe benefit tax which is good but again it is what is taxed that is ignored. What about removing fringe benefit tax for employers that give their employees public transport passes and cycle facilities rather than cars or car parks? The tax review is a huge missed opportunity to put some meat on the bones of the Prime Minister’s goal by making it profitable for businesses to be sustainable. 
Probably the most unsustainable thing about our current way of life is the way we use motorcars. Transport emissions which are mainly from motorcars are 43 percent of our carbon dioxide emissions and they are growing fast. Last year the rise in oil prices that took petrol to $1.70 a litre prompted people to look for alternatives. For the first time in years traffic volumes on the inner Auckland motorways decreased and public transport trains and buses in Auckland and Wellington were full at rush hour. This is a golden opportunity for Government to build on that new awareness and to put substantial money into new infrastructure for rail freight and passengers and into facilities for public transport generally. 
What did Michael Cullen do? He gave money for more roads. The Prime Minister says that New Zealand needs to go the extra mile to lower greenhouse gas emissions. I want to suggest that not going the extra mile might be a smarter way of reaching the goal of sustainable transport. We already have an annual roading budget of $1.63 billion—it has virtually doubled over 5 years—but just before the last election our Minister of Finance “found” a spare half a billion dollars and threw it all into roads. Then in the 2006 Budget he “found” another billion and a half and threw that into roads too. Now he has just announced that he intends to borrow money from our children to fund the largest roading programme New Zealand has ever seen. Well it is well recognised in all the overseas literature that building new roads encourages people to drive more and further. This extra traffic soon fills up the road so it does not even reduce congestion for very long. And then more roads have to be built so new roads mean more carbon emissions. 
Our rail system is in a dire state and now that we own it again are we seeing money found suddenly to fix it up? Unfortunately not. Many large towns have no public transport at all and some cities have only a skeleton service. The Prime Minister says that we have increased our spend on public transport by seven and a half times what it was in 2000. That is good but seven times almost nothing is still very little I tell the Prime Minister. 
The Government in its roading addiction has reached the stage of the alcoholic who having spent what was in the bank on booze and then robbed the grocery money is now borrowing from the kids’ piggy banks to fund the increasing addiction. Both the repayments of the infrastructure bonds the Government is issuing and the interest on that debt will be paid by our children at the same time as they try to cope with the effects of increasing climate change the cost of an increasing price on carbon and oil prices that will go through the roof. We have inherited a fully-paid-for system of roads from our ancestors and we are charging our children for what we want to build. To change the words of an old Values Party song from many years ago we did inherit the world from our fathers; now we are borrowing it from our children and we are charging them the interest. 
It is good to see the increased target for the sales obligation for biofuels. If that is to work we will need to regulate vehicles coming into the country from now on in order to make sure they are capable of accepting at least 10 percent of biofuels in the mix and preferably more. Otherwise they will hold us back as we try to raise the level further. 
I believe we should also have a statement of origin regarding any fuel that is imported. There is no certification system yet but there is a real problem in that the worldwide rush to biofuels will lead to the extinction of the world’s remaining old forests and all the wildlife that lives in them—as is happening in Sarawak where rainforests are being cut down for palm-oil plantations for bio-diesel—and there is also a worry that land will be taken from feeding the hungry into feeding the cars of those who have them. So a statement of origin is necessary to ensure the sustainability of biofuels. 
I welcome the statement that we need to change our farming practices and I hope that the Government will start with Landcorp which is not exactly a model of sustainability in terms of its nitrogen use riparian plantings stocking rates and methane and climate-change emissions. It is certainly not a model of sustainability policy in the way it is converting huge areas of land from forest to dairy farms with the loss of carbon storage and the emission of large quantities of methane from animals. 
We have to make sustainability part of our trade. The problem with free-trade deals like the one being negotiated with China is that giving preference to environmentally friendly or local production is seen as an impediment to trade and destroying more of our manufacturing industry by opening it up to full competition with China does not enhance the sustainability of the New Zealand economy. 
We need environmental education. The UK Government has just announced that education about climate change energy and the impact of people’s decisions as consumers will be part of the compulsory core curriculum for 11 to 14-year-olds. It announced that in the last couple of weeks. But despite the Minister responsible for Climate Change issues and the Minister for the Environment both strongly supporting environmental education despite the Green Party’s successful initiative in the last Budget for $13 million for that education and despite the growing recognition by teachers and schools of its importance for our future sustainability the Ministry of Education’s deputy secretary Anne Jackson has confirmed that it will not be part of the new curriculum and that schools could if they wish incorporate it into various learning areas. There is and will be no compulsory environmental education at all in New Zealand. It is entirely up to schools whether they teach anything at all to prepare future citizens for the rigours of an environmentally damaged world. 
The Prime Minister has devoted three whole lines of her speech to the relationship between the Crown and Maori. It is a relationship that has recently been returned to the darker days of New Zealand’s paternalistic attitudes. The refusal to support the Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the imposition of a settlement deadline for Maori and not for the Crown in just the last few months displays an amazing arrogance. It is no surprise then that the draft education curriculum has omitted to prioritise the education of our children in the history of the Treaty. It is an absence that will continue to breed ignorance and that will entrench racism. 
The Prime Minister has talked a lot about national identity and it is extremely important for a small nation in a large world to know what it is that makes us New Zealanders and to know that it is something that unites us and that we can be proud of. I strongly agree that sustainability as a goal should be part of our national identity. We already refer to ourselves as Kiwi; that is part of our unique biodiversity. Our biodiversity is under threat—more perhaps than that of any other nation because of the introduced pests and predators that are making extinctions occur very rapidly here. There is no reference in the Prime Minister’s speech to our unique biodiversity and the extent to which that can be part of our national identity and part of our sustainability. 
The Greens have been working with Government to foster our national identity with the Buy Kiwi Made programme where I believe we can show a lot more pride in our manufacturers the products they make and the people who work in those businesses. We intend to continue to promote that cause. 
The Prime Minister congratulates us on our nuclear-free status being part of our national identity and I believe strongly that it is. That is all the more reason then to look at why it is that the rules for the Government’s New Zealand Superannuation Fund allow the guardians of that fund to invest our savings in the manufacture of nuclear weapons. Either the guardians did not respect the criteria they were supposed to operate under or—much more likely—those criteria allow investment in the manufacture of nuclear weapons. 
Michael Cullen remarked to the media that the guidelines for the guardians were consulted on with the Greens; that is true. They came to see us. They said: “What do you think?”. We gave them quite a lot of information but none of it ever made it into the instructions that were given to the guardians. I think it is time they were rewritten. The Prime Minister is uncomfortable about our savings going into tobacco. I believe she should also be uncomfortable about our savings going into any other form of unsustainability including Exxon Mobil Corporation which funds most of the climate-change deniers in the world and including anything related to nuclear weapons. So we look forward to working with the Government to progress legislation that will make sure that like Norway’s superannuation funds which have achieved a very good financial return for their future pensioners ours are also invested in the things that we want to promote rather than in the things that we shun.