Parker DavidHon DAVID PARKER (Acting Minister of Climate Change): Thank you Mr Speaker. The Minister of Climate Change is in Egypt at the moment and therefore I'm giving the first contribution from the Government in this debate and I'm pleased to do so.Can I begin by thanking members of the Environment Committee from all sides for the work that they put into assessing the emission reductions plan which is a landmark document which catalogues the many things that need to be done in New Zealand to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions so that we can make a fair contribution to the world's greenhouse emission reduction efforts.I am going to come back to some particulars across the main areas of our emissions. Our emissions in New Zealand broadly split half into agricultural emissions—methane's two-thirds of that nitrous oxide is one-third. The other half splits into electricity generation process emissions industrial heat and transport. We've made most progress in electricity but those carbon dioxide emissions roughly split into one-third electricity—a bit less now—one-third process industrial emissions and industrial heat and a bit more than a third in transport.But before I go into that I do want to address the politics of climate change. I was at a meeting recently and someone asked me How do you take the politics out of climate change?" I somewhat intemperately said "Move to Russia." I sort of regretted how blunt I was in that answer. But I do get a bit sick of the question as to how we can depoliticise responses to climate change because in my experience politics is part of the answer to addressing climate change and bad politics lead to bad answers and good politics lead to good answers.I've heard from the Opposition recently that we should be putting all of the emphasis on emission reduction into the emissions trading scheme (ETS). I think we should recount the history of where we've got to in the ETS because it was a Labour Government—and I was the relevant Minister—that brought the ETS into being that was to cover every sector of the economy. When the National Party voted against it and the ACT Party voted against it they denied that outcome and when they took Government shortly thereafter they neutered the ETS in a number of ways. They narrowed it by excluding for ever the 50 percent of the emissions that come from agriculture which reduced the long-term effectiveness of the ETS by 50 percent. They then introduced a one-for-two emission obligation for emitters. So instead of having an obligation for every one tonne of emissions you halved it. So they further reduced the 50 percent reduction by another half. So they immediately neutered the ETS price signal by 75 percent. They then allowed the price of carbon which when we left office was about $20 per tonne to collapse to about $2 a tonne after the Kyoto Protocol collapsed and New Zealand became the home base for all of those Ukrainian and Russian hot air units. There were movies made about it it was so bad. So rather than the emissions pricing signal acting to reward decreases in emissions and penalise increases in emissions it didn't work as it ought to have and that was because of the National and ACT Party changes to the core economic instrument that is meant to drive reductions.In electricity the last Government set a 90 percent renewables target by 2030. We took really positive steps to achieve that. The last Labour Government introduced the 90 percent renewables target. We invested and there was contribution at the time in a grid upgrade through the Waikato. We invested in the ring around the Waikato area where the geothermal is the Wairākei ring. And we introduced a second route for power into Auckland to enable distant renewables to feed the electricity growth demand in Auckland. We replaced the Cook Strait cable. We invested in early wind through projects to reduce emissions. We priced emissions in electricity. And through those measures we turned the track around for renewable electricity which was decreasing as a percentage because we were building more and more gas. And we and the private sector together turned that around and had renewables going up. What did the new Government do under the Minister the Hon Gerry Brownlee? They said that they would abandon the 90 percent renewables target. Now fortunately Gerry got busy in Christchurch and he was replaced by the Hon Hekia Parata and she actually saved the day on that. She maintained the 90 percent renewables target and we are now at 85 percent renewables in New Zealand. Simon Court: What about the 100 percent target Minister?Hon DAVID PARKER: Well our target's still 90 percent by 2030 but when we get there we will go ever closer to 100 percent and we have the ambition to take New Zealand to 100 percent renewables. Now the next thing we did when we took Government is we banned new block offers for offshore oil exploration. What's the National Party's response to that? They say they're going to reverse it that we should be exploring for more oil and gas that we do not need and that we can use without further frying the planet. And then in respect of transport which is our biggest source of carbon dioxide emissions now for the first time we're making progress in the decarbonisation of the car fleet—the good work that Michael Wood has led. We heard that in question time today: 40 percent of the new light vehicles coming into the country in the last months were either full electric vehicles or hybrids—40 percent which is an enormous turnaround. That has been stimulated by the clean car discount. And what did the National Party say? They'll reverse that. So you can't take politics out of climate change and expect you'll reduce climate emissions in New Zealand because you let the Opposition off the hook for all of those appalling policy positions.Now where do they stand on pricing the 50 percent of our emissions that come out of agriculture? New Zealand's emissions from methane decrease by 1 percent per unit of output every year have done for about 20 years on that trend—a good trend—but all of that has been taken in volume growth. So in the last 20 years although per unit emissions by agriculture gone down by 20 percent total emissions have stayed flat and have not gone down. Now we need those emissions—Hon Member: Food—food.Hon DAVID PARKER: Oh he says "food". We still need those emissions to come down. We need to get that reduction down to about 1.5 or 2 percent per annum. It is manageable. The science is coming; we can get there. But the National Party they won't do what Dairy NZ and Beef + Lamb were up for which is He Waka Eke Noa which is a very gentle price signal to cause that emission reduction to go to the—even there on that 50 percent emission again on the other side of the House they say "Do nothing." They say do nothing. Transport electricity—it is an appalling record from the Opposition and that's why come the next election emissions and climate change should be a big issue. We do have a climate emergency. We had rivers drying up in Europe and China this year we've got wildfires around the world we've still got millions of hectares of deforestation in the Amazon and in the Congo and in Indonesia and the National Party would do nothing about it. I'm going to say one further thing. We all want a low-cost transition to decarbonise industrial heat process emissions and transport and electricity is the key. We must look at Project Onslow and I want to explain why. If we build Project Onslow which is the cost of one or two motorways we will double New Zealand's dry-year reserve but more importantly we will have a reliable hedge against intermittency for new investments in intermittent wind and solar which are our cheapest new implements to supply. We will mobilise international capital into our decarbonisation at lower cost of capital and we will guarantee a low-price path for New Zealand electricity for decades to come as we decarbonise the economy. That will reduce New Zealanders' living costs as we decarbonise the economy. That's a plan."