Parker DavidHon DAVID PARKER (Attorney-General): Thank you Mr Speaker. Can I respond firstly to a couple of points the last speaker Chris Bishop made. He accused Labour Party politicians of not having the fortitude to go to Taranaki—Andrew Little is there tonight at a public meeting.Mr Bishop accused the Prime Minister of going on some flight of fancy into the United Kingdom and then Europe in her forthcoming trip—the focus of that trip is to try and unlock the start of trade negotiations with both the United Kingdom and the European Union. The European Union negotiation has not even started—the prior Government could not get it across the start line. The Prime Minister whilst meeting with the President of France Mr Macron and with Angela Merkel is trying to advance New Zealand's trade interests and start that process. It is not some fluffy trip for photo opportunities as the last speaker would say.The other point that the National Party members seem to forget is that their own leader says that New Zealand needs to start a transition away from burning fossil fuels and producing fossil fuels. He said it in an interview on The Nation which was his first interview post his election to the position of leader of the National Party. He said We must start a transition." And the first time he gets an opportunity to stand up as the leader of the National Party and actually implement that by starting a transition he fails—he says we ought not to start a transition. He says we ought to just put our head down and continue the way we have been going for years.This is a transition that will take many decades. As other speakers have already said there are many thousands of kilometres—indeed 100000 square kilometres—of offshore prospects already licensed for prospecting in New Zealand. None of them stops. I've heard comments to the contrary from members of the Opposition so I want to read today from one of the notifications to the New Zealand stock exchange from one of New Zealand's major oil and gas producers and explorers made since the announcement was made by the Government this morning and I quote—this is from New Zealand Oil and Gas: "The government's announcement will not have any immediate impact on the operations or financial position of the company. Potentially transformational New Zealand Oil & Gas exploration prospects in the Canterbury and Great South Basins are unaffected by today's announcement and the company is continuing to market these world-class prospects." It's hard to reconcile that with the rhetoric that we've heard from the National Party this afternoon.Time and again in my experience in this House—and I've been here for 16 years—I've heard these irreconcilable statements from the National Party about how we need to do things environmentally but we mustn't do this. I've got before me a video clip that was self-titled by the Hon Gerry Brownlee when he was the Opposition spokesperson for energy and I was the Minister of Energy. He put up this video newsletter—which to his eternal shame lasts on YouTube. You just need to google "sexy coal Brownlee" and you will find it. This is what he put up. [Holds still image from video] He put up this—this is the first part of his video blog. It says "Chapter one. Sexy Coal". That was what he labelled it.Now at that time the last Labour Government—and I was the Minister of Energy at the time—wanted to do something about cleaning up our electricity sector. Renewable electricity had dropped to 64 percent of generation and was going down and we wanted it to go up. So we had a large number of measures. We invested in the grid we priced carbon we told the State-owned enterprises to invest in renewables we eased consenting for renewables and we set New Zealand on the path for 90 percent renewables by 2025. Indeed we're actually now up at 84 percent in a recent quarter.Chris Bishop: That's right. That was us.Tim van de Molen: Great work from our last Government.Hon DAVID PARKER: Well actually that's an interesting question. So what did National say? Well they said it was impossible and they said the country would face an energy gap that they showed on that graph there. [Holds up graph] And the energy gap was going to be filled with what? Ah it was going to be according to Gerry Brownlee filled with coal. He thought we would need coal. He said the lights would go out if we didn't produce coal. He said—in fact he promised—that they would do away with the target of 90 percent renewables by 2025 and he got into power and he started to do that. Then he told New Zealanders "Oh look in order to achieve that we're going to need to mine a bit of coal in the national parks." and tens of thousands of New Zealanders marched against him in the streets. And what happened? Mr Brownlee was removed from the portfolio of energy and it was given to Hekia Parata and Hekia Parata had the good sense to keep the 90 percent target and keep the settings that the prior Labour Government had set. And now we're just about at 90 percent renewables.SPEAKER: I'm going to ask the member now to actually get back to the current decision.Hon DAVID PARKER: And now we're at 90 percent renewables without having to use thermal fuels.Now the next fuel they say that is necessary for us to meet our renewable and our energy targets is gas. They're just wrong. Yes in the next decade or two we will need some gas. Some of it will go to industrial heat. Decreasing quantities of it will go to electricity. Some of it will be used for the production of methanol. But we are in a transition away from fossil fuels to renewables.If you want to follow the rest of it there was some great pillorying of Gerry Brownlee by Lucy Lawless and others. That's the other video you'll turn up. But it shows that if you actually show some vision if you create some investment certainty for those that are investing their private capital in New Zealand they will follow the money they will follow the signal and you will get alignment of economic outcome with environmental outcome as we already have in electricity. Now the new Government is plotting the course to go from 90 percent renewable electricity to 100 percent and we don't need gas to do it. And indeed if you were using gas you wouldn't get there.The next thing I would point out is that they say Fonterra needs gas as a bridging fuel to go from coal for the milk dehydration in the South Island to renewables eventually. Well maybe they do. Maybe they'll get that out of that New Zealand Oil and Gas prospect. I suspect history will show they won't need that. I think that they will go direct from coal to renewables. In fact I've had one of the CEOs of the largest generators in New Zealand saying they think that's the way it's going to go because the cost of wind power is coming down. They don't think we'll need gas to get Fonterra off coal. They think they'll go direct to renewables. This is how a transition works.Lastly in the time I've got available I want to talk about how important it is that you invest in the right things for the future not the wrong things for the future. If you invest in the wrong things for the future you waste your capital because you create a stranded asset risk. If you over-invest in gas and oil in the next few years in New Zealand you risk wasting that money before the end of the economic life of those assets.The Japanese are down here already about to experiment on the production of hydrogen to produce hydrogen or the transportable form of hydrogen which is ammonia in order to export fuel from renewable sources. Why? Why are they coming to New Zealand? Because they think that New Zealand may be the lowest-cost source in the world of clean transportable energy sources from renewable sources. They're not coming for our gas or our coal; they're coming because they think we've got a renewables future. It is very possible that one of New Zealand's points of comparative advantage in the world in the future is to use our renewables to produce alternative fuels like hydrogen which we could export. Did you hear a word of that from the National Party? No those Luddites have got their head down the coalmine still and they think well if they pull it out of that they'll put it down a gas hole.We are in a transition to a clean future. It will be a just transaction. The lights will not go out. The last thing is that I won't be lectured by Mr Goldsmith about economic prospects. When he was in Government he dropped exports from 30 percent of the economy to 27 percent of the economy against the promise to increase them to 40 percent. That's failure. We need new points of comparative advantage in the world to grow new exports of goods and services. Statoil's pulling out of New Zealand; BP's already gone; Shell's on the way. They know that the future is not fossil fuels.The debate having concluded the motion lapsed."