Stanford Erica; Rurawhe AdrianERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. There are so many issues with this bill: the massive decrease in investment in the Taranaki region which has started already; the loss of skilled people and the loss potentially of thousands of jobs; the cost of billions of dollars of revenue—$9 billion at a mid-point; evidence from the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment—the fact that this bill does nothing to deal with the issues of demand and an inevitable switch to the importing of more oil and gas and an uptick of oil tankers coming into Marsden Point; and the major issue of carbon leakage which means that global emissions will likely rise rather than decline. But in the short time that I've got available I would like to focus on process and I do so because it was a theme that ran very strongly through the submissions that we heard and that we read. This is a bill that has been dogged by a poor process right from the beginning. We know that this decision was made on the fly in front of an audience of university students in Wellington. We know there was no prior consultation with affected parties such as the oil and gas industry or the communities of Taranaki. We know there was no Cabinet decision prior to that decision. We know there was no advice or any attempt to analyse whether the policy would actually achieve the intended outcomes or any cost-benefit analysis. We know that the regulatory impact statement and the Cabinet paper were prepared after the announcement was made. We know the Government used urgency to table the bill. The feelings of betrayal from the submitters came through very strongly. The Taranaki Chamber of Commerce stated In March at the petroleum conference Megan Woods said that this was something that they were only considering." and furthermore "She categorically stated that the Government would follow a robust consultation process. In fact she used the word 'extensive' when it came to consultation before a decision was made." The Petroleum Exploration and Production Association of New Zealand felt that they were misled by the Minister around consultation. They said in their submission "At the Petroleum Conference on 27 March … the Minister of Energy and Resources [said] 'We are a Government that listens then acts. That consults widely thinks through issues deeply and seeks to forge consensus on how we can take New Zealand forward together.' " Powerco stated in their submission "The Government did not consult with stakeholders prior to making its announcement on 12 April … Nor has it consulted on the development of the Bill. The Bill [was] placed into urgency which means this Select Committee [process] has also not allowed for meaningful consultation [which] affected [the] industry [and] the public." The extremely truncated and rushed nature of the select committee process was a continuation of this poor process. For such a massive decision that has huge ramifications for the region of Taranaki our economy and in fact global emissions with no consultation taking place prior to the select committee process this was our chance to have consultation—good consultation—and what did we get? A refusal of the Government members of the committee to allow us to travel to Taranaki to hear submissions. Submitters were given just two weeks to digest the bill and then submit to the committee: four days of submissions and 10 days for us to deliberate and report back. Just compare this to our indigenous freshwater fish bill that we've also got before our committee: six months we've got for that bill and fewer submissions and I anticipate that the Environment Committee will likely be far more generous to those submitters in terms of travelling to Taranaki and the West Coast to hear from them in person. Great if you're a freshwater fish; not so great if you live in Taranaki or rely on our economy for a good health system or a good education system or drugs or all the other things that we get from the benefits of oil and gas.We know that there were a number of substantial submitters who felt there wasn't enough time for people to take into consideration what the bill was proposing. We know that submitters felt that they weren't given enough time to have their say in their five minutes or 15 minutes if they were an organisation and they were cut off to the second—embarrassingly so I felt—by our chair. We know that there were many potential submitters who didn't get to have their say because of this truncated process. And why the rush? Why is it that we had to do this? Jacinda Ardern's reasoning was so that the 2018 block offer could go ahead and this was something that she wanted to happen in this calendar year to give certainty to the industry. Firstly the block offer isn't happening in 2018—it's not happening until 2019—and even if it was happening this year the petroleum production industry of New Zealand said that the industry was happy to forgo this year's block offer to allow them more time for a better consultation process. Let's face it this was a political decision. It was made without proper advice or proper consultation and when the Government did get advice it actually undermined the justification for imposing the ban. Ministers predictably attacked the credibility of the advice in very dismissive terms. Then it rushed public consultation and refused to go to Taranaki—a shameful and undemocratic process from whoa to go and we oppose this bill. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): This is a split call—five minutes."