Willis NicolaNICOLA WILLIS (National): I rise to speak on the Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading Reform) Amendment Bill. I think it is worthwhile remembering a little bit of the background of how this bill came to be introduced into the House because of course the ETS—the emissions trading scheme—is a piece of legislation that has actually endured through Labour- and National-led Governments. It's a piece of legislation that yes National's made reforms to through the years but there has been agreement that an emissions trading scheme is a useful way of encouraging the reduction of emissions across the economy. The way it's been seen is that it creates financial incentives and it ensures the efficient reduction of emissions because it encourages the least cost mode of reducing emissions to be used. So in that regard it has been a useful mechanism.Now of course National kicked off a review of the emissions trading scheme in 2015. That has gone on. There was public consultation in 2018 and some of the goals of that are really laudable: providing certainty to business improving the administration of the thing making the scheme more accessible strengthening the compliance regime—and we can see some of that coming through in the 200 pages of this bill. These are complex technical matters. These are things around the accounting treatment of forestry technical improvements around the cost—SPEAKER: Order! I apologise for interrupting the member but it is kai time. The House will be resumed at 7.30 p.m.Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.NICOLA WILLIS: When we took off I was going through in some detail some of the technical aspects of this amendment bill which are many and varied but the aspect I hadn't yet dwelt on was its way of dealing with agriculture. Of course previous speakers have talked about the fact that the Minister for Climate Change and the Minister of Agriculture have agreed that agriculture wouldn't enter the ETS until 2025. At face value National thinks that that's a good thing because actually we don't think that farmers should be facing a tax for something that they can't actually mitigate on-farm because there isn't yet the technology to do so. We would go back to the Paris Agreement which was very clear on the need for the world not only to work together to reduce emissions but also to do so in such a way that it didn't threaten global food production. We on this side of the House think it is not productive in any way to ask farmers to reduce their own production by culling herds or making other changes of that sort simply to meet an ETS target while others are farming in less sustainable ways in other parts of the world.But I want to draw the House's attention to some technical aspects of this bill which I think are going to require a lot of further examination during the select committee process because even though there are 200 pages there's quite a lot of detail that's yet to be worked through and which the select committee will need to investigate thoroughly. What the bill currently says is that it requires the Minister for Climate Change and the Minister of Agriculture to report back on the development of an alternative farm-level pricing mechanism in 2022 which is quite different from 2025—it's not too far away—and in the meantime it uses the New Zealand ETS as a fall-back option for emissions pricing. Essentially what that sets out is that if an alternative farm-level price mechanism isn't found then the ETS will kick in. So we on this side of the House are very interested in how that will be worked through.We're also interested in this question that's posed where it says that Some of the more detailed provisions to support decisions during the interim period to 2025 have not been included in the Bill on introduction. [They] among other policy decisions … will be incorporated into the Bill through draft text provided to the select committee or via a Supplementary Order Paper." I was in the House earlier when the Minister for Climate Change acknowledged the question from the Hon Nathan Guy who said "Well this is going to be pretty important to the way this ETS operates and the way that this functions." Will the select committee have the opportunity to examine that Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) because unfortunately as members will be aware there have been previous occurrences where the Government has introduced SOPs late and has not taken the opportunity to avail itself of the advice of the select committee nor to hear submissions from the public.So it was very pleasing to see the Hon James Shaw nod his head in agreement that yes that SOP would be presented to the select committee because what is very important here I think is that the decisions that are made on the ETS are done so with good evidence and they are done so with full awareness of the impact on these economic actors downstream because in the end what we are talking about here is communities livelihoods and how much money people can take home and how much money they can spend in our local towns. That stuff's really important and it's important that the Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading Reform) Amendment Bill gets adequate attention from the select committee. Thank you very much."