Smith StuartSTUART SMITH (National—Kaikōura): I'd like to thank Minister Robertson for his response just before and he made a very strong point about the Parliament not deciding the order in which audits should be done and that we should trust the Auditor-General to make those judgments. So the Minister in short is asking us to trust the Auditor-General to make a decision about which entities should have priority for an audit. This is the same Auditor-General that has got us in a position where a bill has to come to Parliament for us to get him out of the trouble he got himself into. He hasn't either but perhaps it's because the Minister—perhaps not the Minister in the chair but the one who's responsible for that Government department hasn't adequately provided the funding for the Auditor-General to remunerate the staff sufficiently to keep them.But that isn't our problem today our problem is trying to clean up the mess that we have. So we're being asked to trust a person to make the right decision about what entities should be audited when they have got us in this position where we are tonight: in urgency trying to clean up the mess. I think that that's a very big stretch for us. I'd like to while I'm on my feet speak to a tabled amendment in my name around the Climate Change Commission. I think the Climate Change Commission has to be exempted from this perverse piece of legislation being rushed through the House under urgency. The simple reason is the Climate Change Commission the decisions that they have made the report—albeit that it is going to be before the court for a judicial review which we could debate tonight if we wanted to—that entity any decision that they make is going to impact everybody's lives in New Zealand. And yet that entity won't be at the top of the list. I think they have to be at the top of the list. I'll give you a good reason: one of the commissioners is a research fellow of a company called Motu. Motu is one of the biggest contractors to the Climate Change Commission and I think that in itself may not be sinister and there might be nothing wrong with it but how can we have confidence in an entity that is giving advice to the Government that will have an impact on every New Zealander's life?If the numbers that were released earlier in the week are anywhere near correct we could be talking about not $50 a tonne as they said to get to net zero but over $1100 a tonne. That will impact on every household in New Zealand. We need to have confidence that the advice that has gone into that report and gone to the Government is actually something that we can all have confidence in. If there's anything in New Zealand that we should have confidence in it is the Climate Change Commission. And it's not just Trust us we know what we're doing." Actually we need to check. That's what the Auditor-General is supposed to do. That's what the Audit Office is meant to do. And actually what they should have probably been checking is did they have enough staff to do the job. But they clearly didn't do that early enough. If they had we wouldn't be here tonight.I think that a fundamental of confidence is actually being confident in yourself as an entity to be audited have everything thrown open show that there's nothing to hide. That flows through to every household in New Zealand having confidence that that entity is actually a robust entity with no conflicts. And what conflicts they do have if there are any are not conflicts that would impact in any way on the advice that they gave because it impacts on us all.As I'm sure you will be aware Madam Chair that the advice is far reaching it is absolutely far reaching. They've gone further in fact in the agriculture space than was required under the Act. So there has to be good reasons behind that. What happens if the person who's the commissioner has perversely moved that advice in a direction that they have some sort of conflict with which we don't know about? And so it's right and proper that this entity is at the top of the list to have their entity audited."