Mackey Moana: Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Mackey Moana: Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 23 August 2012. Volume:683;Page:4724. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
MOANA MACKEY (Labour) 
: 
 I think the Minister has forgotten why we are doing all this. He has talked a lot about carbon costs and the cost to business and a lot about the cost to industry. He has not talked at all about the cost to the environment and the cost to our planet of doing nothing. I think that the Government has completely forgotten why we have an emissions trading scheme in the first place. 
Frankly if this is the kind of legislation that we are going to be passing in this House we might as well get rid of it—because we do not have an emissions trading scheme. The emissions trading scheme we have in place is “all sectors all gases”. That is how it was designed. It does not work if all sectors and all gases are not in the scheme and when 50 percent of this country’s emissions which come from the agricultural sector are excluded from the scheme it simply does not work. We are seeing the impact in the forestry sector at the moment. We have a lot of carbon foresters who would like to be able to sell the units they get from growing their forests to someone but half of the country’s emitters are not in the scheme. So the market for their credits is not there. 
We are going to be facing massive liabilities in the future when I believe there will be a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol. When that will be I do not know and I know that the Minister is part of those negotiations and has a decision to make very shortly as to whether we enter into the European second commitment period or whether we enter into a voluntary period with non-binding targets. That is a decision the Government has to make and we await that decision with bated breath. But the fact is that if we are not going to do this properly then why are we putting everyone through the pain of doing it at all? This further undermines the scheme that Labour put in place when we were in Government. It further undermines any efforts— 
Jacqui Dean 
: Yeah. 
MOANA MACKEY 
: Jacqui Dean is really pleased that we are not doing anything about climate change. She is really pleased that we are not taking our climate change commitments seriously. Does Jacqui Dean realise how much exporters in her electorate rely on our “clean green” branding? Does she realise the value of that branding to this country? If she does then she should be very concerned about legislation like this added on top of a pile of policies that are consistently undermining the very branding that we rely on to remain internationally competitive as the Minister said in the first place. 
 That is one of my biggest concerns about this Government and about this piece of legislation. It is the “say one thing do another” approach of the National Government. Government members go out there and they tout our “clean green” and “100% Pure New Zealand” credentials. John Key when he went on  
HARDtalk 
 on the BBC when he was in the UK got absolutely done over when some actual hard investigative journalistic questions were put to him about just how clean and green New Zealand really is—about just how clean and green New Zealand really is—and he could not answer the questions. 
Labour members say we should actually start walking the talk and living that brand rather than just paying lip-service to it which is what the National Government is doing—which is what the National Government is doing. It has relied on an economic downturn to provide a reduction in the growth in emissions but our emissions have continued to grow. When Minister Groser was asked at the Local Government and Environment Committee when New Zealand’s gross greenhouse gas emissions were projected to peak he did not know. He had to come back to us and the answer was never—the answer was never. 
So instead of actually having a scheme in place that starts to reduce our gross greenhouse gas emissions we do not. We have one that is going to allow them to continue to grow and is not putting any carbon price at all on the very people we want to drive that behaviour change—the very people we want to drive the behaviour change that we need if we are going to one actually take our commitments seriously internationally in terms of global climate change and two protect the very brand that has been built up over decades. I will tell you what: reputations are hard-earned but they are very very quickly lost. This National Government with its single-minded focus on oil and gas exploration whilst putting in no support for low-carbon or renewable technologies now with pieces of legislation like this is doing a very good job of undermining our brand which is so important to our economy. 
I want to give an example of the kind of “do as I say not as I do” contradictory statements that we are getting out of the National Government. Minister Groser is very very keen on promoting his involvement in the scheme of a group called the Friends of Fossil Fuel Subsidy Reform. This is a group that has very very laudable objectives which are to go around this country and to talk to countries that have subsidies in place for high-carbon industries and for fossil fuels about the benefits of getting rid of those subsidies which are often costly to the Governments that provide them and also very very costly to the environment. 
If you go to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade website there is a whole page on this particular scheme. It is all very grandiose it has got quotes in big fonts and it is on a very appropriately environmentally friendly green background. The quote from Minister Groser is this: “It is completely incoherent for the world to be tentatively coordinating actions to put a price on carbon while simultaneously massively subsidising consumption of carbon”. Agreed. It is a very good quote. So why then Minister are you introducing a piece of legislation into the House that entrenches for perpetuity for ever subsidies that come from emitters of carbon? We have this one-for-two surrender obligation which the Government put in place after the last election where basically for every 2 tonnes that are emitted the emitters have to surrender only one unit instead of two—so that has halved their costs. 
 The review panel which the Minister referred to said that that should be phased out and gotten rid of because it is expensive. Instead of doing that the Minister who goes around the world telling other countries that we should not have these subsidies has just entrenched them in legislation for ever—for ever. It says “maintain the 1-for-2 surrender obligation after 2012 without specifying an end date in legislation:”. Not only that but also the Government subsidises and has tax credits for oil and gas exploration for people who want to engage in that activity. As I said there is nothing for those who work in the renewables area in terms of that kind of assistance. Again how can the Minister hold his head up high and go preaching to other countries that they should get rid of subsidies for fossil fuel extraction and for fossil fuel subsidisation when we are doing exactly the same thing in New Zealand? It is this kind of activity it this kind of contradictory behaviour that does New Zealand no favours on the international stage. 
I have talked to a number of people recently who have said that New Zealand’s standing internationally has declined dramatically since this Government took over and that is something we should be concerned about. National used to accuse us when we were in Government of being world leaders in climate change. We thought yes we were trying to take a stand and that we were trying to be principled on this. John Key when he was elected said: “We are not going to be world leaders but let us be fast followers.” He said we will be fast followers instead. Well what we have actually become is apathetic spectators—that is what we are. We are standing on the sideline waiting for Australia to do something so then we might or might not decide what to do. And it has been noticed that for New Zealand the clean green country at the bottom of the world which people respect and look up to internationally our reputation is in sharp sharp decline. Members of this House should not be in any doubt about how dangerous that is to our economy. 
I want to come back to the issue of agriculture. The Minister could have done something very simple. If the issue with agriculture is price the cost to farmers and not the principle of bringing agriculture into the scheme which is what we are always told then he should bring them in but not put any price obligation on them. Bring them into the scheme so that they are in the scheme and they know that in the future they will face a price cost. Why can they not come in? The Government can subsidise them 100 percent if that is what it decides. We would not agree with that but that is what it could do. I remember that back in 2009 John Key was telling the agricultural sector that it had to come into the scheme or risk the loss of export markets. He was quite adamant. He said that the cost to agriculture would be about $300000 a year and that was when the carbon price was much higher. It is very low now. The cost would actually be minimal to bring some of these people in. You could argue that this is a good time to bring people in if they are worried about the cost. 
I want to raise one very important point which is that I do not think you will find a single farmer who will say that getting rid of the subsidies in the 1980s was a bad idea. They hated it at the time. They absolutely hated it but they had to then become innovative and responsive. They had to respond to market signals. They had to respond to consumer demands. They had to be aware internationally of what was going on. That is what has made our farmers the best in the world. That is what has made them the most innovative. They have not been shielded from these kinds of market signals. So I am stunned as to why the agricultural sector and the National Government would now argue that we should bring back subsidies that we should now blunt those market signals and that we should now shield the agricultural sector from the very signals that in the past it has responded to phenomenally which has made it the greatest farming industry in the world. I would like an answer to that question from the next National speaker. Thank you.