Jones Dail: Urgent Debates — Greenhouse Gas Emissions—Release of Report 
Jones Dail: Urgent Debates — Greenhouse Gas Emissions—Release of Report 
[Volume:627;Page:21764] 
DAIL JONES (NZ First) 
: 
 I stand to speak on behalf of New Zealand First. I should make it clear that I do not have a PhD. We seem to have enough PhDs in this House to go around. It is a degree that one acquires to learn more and more about less and less and as I hear the speeches made by the various PhDs around this House I come to that conclusion. They do know more and more about less and less and they express it every time they speak. 
I am just a simple lawyer who has had a bit of practice here and there and who tries to get the facts together and reach a conclusion as a result. I look at why we are involved in this thing called the Kyoto Protocol from New Zealand’s perspective. Someone mentioned the name Simon Upton to me and almost straight away things seemed to fall into place. We remember Mr Upton. I knew Mr Upton when I was in the National Party caucus with him— 
Hon Ken Shirley 
: You even look like him. 
DAIL JONES 
: Oh no. I might have looked like him; I have not seen him for a while. 
He also introduced us to the Resource Management Act as we know it now today following on from Dr Palmer who is also a PhD. So one immediately gets suspicious. From the Resource Management Act Mr Upton moved on to the Kyoto Protocol and having brought all that to our attention he then got a very nice job at some conservation agency in Europe. 
Hon Ken Shirley 
: OECD. 
DAIL JONES 
: The OECD. He moved up; I think on the reputation of the Resource Management Act and the Kyoto Protocol. It shows how these things gather their own momentum and how if someone has a good reputation for being good in the environment and having led one’s country down the garden path that person can still be promoted into some agency that will lead a whole lot of countries down the garden path. 
Well where is New Zealand? We are here in the South Pacific. How many countries south of the Equator have ratified this protocol? 
Hon Ken Shirley 
: Only one. 
DAIL JONES 
: Only us; only one. No one else has thought about it. I think Dr Cullen said something about “no other countries in the Southern Hemisphere exist”. Well of course we have South American countries—lots of them. [ 
Interruption 
] They are developing a lot of emissions even more so than that honourable member on the other side of the Chamber. That is what this is all about—greenhouse emissions. They develop plenty of emissions. South Africa is developing plenty of emissions and a lot of those South American countries south of the Equator are developing emissions. None of them are linked to the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. 
So I ask myself how many countries in Asia have ratified it. There is only one: Japan. That is all. Nobody else in Asia has. China and India have 1200 million or 1500 million cattle—heaps and heaps of cattle—all belching out emissions yet they are not involved in this. Who in Africa is bound to this protocol? Nobody. None at all north or south. In the Americas as a whole only the one country Canada is involved. 
Who then is part of this? Europe is. That is what it boils down to. Europe is making all the mess. It is belching out all the greenhouse emissions and it wants the rest of the world to carry the can for the mess that Europe is making out of it. That is how I look at this from a very simple viewpoint. Europe is making the mess and Europe should pay for it. Why should the New Zealand taxpayer have to carry the can? Why should the New Zealand taxpayer have to pay a $4 carbon tax because European countries are making a helluva mess of the atmosphere? 
Hon Ken Shirley 
: We are making a mess of the atmosphere. 
DAIL JONES 
: The member says that we are making a mess of the atmosphere. Purely on the Kyoto figures alone we make up 0.2 percent of the emissions. 
Hon Ken Shirley 
: 0.04 percent. 
DAIL JONES 
: It is 0.2 percent I think with respect. We are No. 100 on the list and we make up 0.2 percent. 
We get lost in the roundings of other countries. We are so negligible that we get lost in the roundings. For example we are at the same level as Latvia and we are just fractionally above Luxembourg in the amount of our emissions. Of course as an environmentalist I am concerned that if I want to remedy something I want to know what the problem is and I want to make sure it is remedied. 
What is the problem in New Zealand in so far as our emissions are concerned? It is cattle and sheep belching and farting. That is where the majority of our emissions come from. What are we doing in New Zealand to prevent all those emissions from getting up into the atmosphere and drowning us in a few years’ time? Dr Cullen would have us believe that if New Zealand does not do something we will be underwater before we know it. Are we going to put bags on the front of cows? Are we going to put filters on them so that they breathe through a filter and all their ghastly emissions do not go up into the atmosphere? Will we perhaps put an even bigger filter at the other end as well just to make sure? I am sure there are some—[ 
Interruption 
] In the main cattle and sheep making emissions is our problem. If we are going to remedy the situation for New Zealand we should be looking at solving it. But of course we have absolutely no intention of doing that at all. 
How did this problem come about and should the Government have known about it? The answer is yes. Clearly the Government thought it was on a winner. It was going to make some money and confiscate the rights of tree owners in the way of carbon tax credits and pocket them. It did not matter who they were. The Government was going to pocket the profits from every New Zealander Maori or non-Maori who planted trees and add those profits to its Budget surplus—and away it went. 
Government members got a terrible shock today. But should they have been more careful? I asked Trevor Mallard the Acting Convenor Ministerial Group on Climate Change today in question time whether he knew that forests must be planted on grassland to meet Kyoto definitions and whether he should have known that 16 percent of New Zealand forests are planted on scrub so cannot be counted as forests for Kyoto Protocol definition purposes. He was filling in for the Convenor Pete Hodgson and did not really know. But I am informed by a colleague that that issue was discussed at the select committee when this bill was being considered. The Government ought to have known that some of the bases on which it came to its conclusions were false—which in fact the officials knew and the Government knew. The Government was being totally reckless in the way in which it was trying to work out its profits for itself. 
It is well known already that forests must be planted on grassland to meet Kyoto definitions. They cannot be planted on scrub. Yet the Government blindly went ahead despite the fact that 16 percent of New Zealand’s forests are planted on scrub and cannot be counted as forests for Kyoto Protocol purposes. The Government went ahead and said it was going to make a lot of money out of this and tried to bluff the New Zealand public into thinking how clever it was. 
I was reading an article from the  
Independent 
 from before this report came out. It made the point that the projections that were being put forward are wildly optimistic and fail to factor in the downside risk that New Zealand will lose some of its forest. Rising land prices and falling log prices will likely ensure increasing deforestation. The Government’s projections also appear to be in a state of flux. The article goes on to discuss how the Government’s surplus forestry credits have declined from 56 million tonnes to 33 million tonnes primarily as a result of predicted growth in agricultural emissions and deforestation. 
This situation has been known. The debate we are having today should not have come as a surprise to the Government. It should have fronted up and said that all the promises it was making about how much money New Zealand would get as a result of this were totally wrong. Of course New Zealand taxpayers the ordinary men and women who are struggling to make a living and to pay higher interest rates under the new mortgage rate revisions and who are trying to send their children to school and paying these extra fees for primary schools and secondary schools—$400 to $700 a year for their children in the Auckland area—are going to be banged with another tax thanks to this Labour Party. 
The question the Government should have answered in the speech we heard from Dr Cullen is how this mistake could have been made. What is being done to ensure that serious errors are not made again? Are the officials and all Ministers responsible for such an enormous error being held accountable and how? I asked that question today: will the Minister take responsibility? Of course he was not here. He is away on business. It is quite fortuitous that Mr Hodgson should be away on other business today when this enormous issue has come to everyone’s attention. 
Now that we know that the Kyoto Protocol is going to be a net cost to the economy is the Government prepared to consult afresh with business and other interested parties with a view to considering the possibility of withdrawing from the protocol in 2008 as we are entitled to do in accordance with article 27? New Zealand First will only proceed with the implementation of policies for the Kyoto Protocol to ensure they are in harmony with those of our major trading partners and only once a coherent plan has been formulated to allow the appropriate targets to be reached. Our major trading partners such as Australia and the United States are not party to it. Of course China an up-and-coming major trading partner is not involved either. It looks very very unlikely that New Zealand First could possibly be part of this because there is clearly no coherent plan.