Ward Mike: General Debate 
Ward Mike: General Debate 
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MIKE WARD (Green) 
: 
 This morning I had the joy of cycling from Wainuiomata a lovely little town just outside of Wellington with three parliamentary colleagues. It was a delightful thing to do a most appropriate thing to do because it is Bike Wise week. Bike Wise week is a week devoted to encouraging people to get off their backsides to use their own means of getting around on a bicycle. One might say that it is a sort of frivolous thing to do but unless we encourage our younger people to adopt different lifestyles the reality is that a lot of people will get sicker as a consequence of having too little exercise in their lives. Type 2 diabetes is the most striking manifestation of this probably at $200 million a year annual cost to our health budget. It is something that is likely to blow out sometime in the next 20 years to over $1 billion—$1 billion that we could quite easily avoid from an input of relatively modest sums of money to encourage lifestyle changes at this stage. 
Is biking difficult? Is getting out and getting exercise difficult? Well it is in a society that has been designed around the motorcar. If people want to ride a bike they take their life in their own hands to do so. For the uncertain it can be a scary prospect. In fact this city has made some attempt to make it slightly easier. It has taken some of the grit and the gravel off the cycleway but none the less it is not the kind of thing that most people would do willingly. 
For the rest of the country—well could I say that the land transport roading programme last year devoted something like $100000 to each community for cycling initiatives. Most local authorities have not actually budgeted to spend that money. They have nothing in their particular roading programmes or in their regional land transport strategies to spend that money on. None the less the money is there to do it. It is a move by the Government in the right direction. What we have to do now is make sure that those local authorities take it seriously. 
The other reason Bike Wise is important this week is that it is an important part of changing the culture of high energy demands that our lifestyles require. Climbing into motorcars to travel to places that we should have been much closer to in the first place is not only extraordinarily expensive it is extraordinarily risky. Some time in this century the carbon dioxide levels are likely to double. They have increased by only 90 parts per million in the last 240-odd years. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that in fact they are likely to increase this century by 550 parts per million from 370-odd parts per million. In fact since it made that prediction there have been announcements of 3 and 4 parts per million increase in carbon dioxide per year which gives a doubling to something like 775 parts per million. 
Now a 90 parts per million increase in carbon dioxide levels over the space of a mere 240 years gives rise to 1 degree of warming—large parts of northern China and large parts of Inner Mongolia turning to desert and extreme weather events. What can we look forward to if in fact carbon dioxide levels double this century? It is not the kind of thing about which we can simply say: “Well it may not happen the technicians will come up with a fix.” It is something that all of us have to take seriously and nothing less than a substantial culture change will do it. The reality is that the Kyoto Protocol is a requirement of all of us. This country has given an example accepted the responsibility and it now has to measure up to it. 
As I said nothing less than a substantial culture shift will meet that responsibility. So what is this culture shift? Well it is sourcing our needs closer to home. It is choosing to live closer to the places we need to be so we do not spend half our lives getting there and the other half of our lives earning the money to pay for it. It is actually supporting Buy Local. It is actually going into our supermarkets and looking around for the products that are made here and that do not have an ecological footprint of thousands of miles. 
I find it absurd in a food-producing nation that something over 60 percent of the product on the shelves in this country are imported. In a food-producing nation that is absurd. It is also something we can no longer afford to continue; carbon dioxide and sanity decide otherwise. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Clem Simich) 
: I call—[ 
Interruption 
] Does Jill Pettis wish to take the call? 
Jill Pettis 
: No not us.