Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Well thank you Madam Deputy Speaker. I want to talk about a New Zealand where this Parliament does things right where it makes laws that will stand the test of being measured not by their intentions which always sound good from this Government but by their outcomes. I'd like to spell out in the faint hope that the Government will get it what is wrong with this bill and the policy announcement from back in April behind it—not based on its intentions but its outcomes.We've heard what the intentions are—that New Zealand will be seen as a leader in the world that New Zealand will be seen as a country that is prepared to take bold action to solve global problems and that our esteem as a nation will increase whilst at the same time we introduce legislation in this House and policy from this Government that will take us into the future to a more technologically sophisticated future with lower emissions. Those are the intentions: a leader on the world stage with better environmental outcomes. Sadly the outcome in reality is that we look like fools on the world stage we are viewed as a place that is dangerous to do business and we find ourselves if anything ending up with higher environmental impacts from the same activities that we would have had otherwise.Let me just explain how this works. You see only a Government like this would ban looking for more oil and gas resources about seven or eight years before the biggest field we have runs out. It's been said by the great economist Thomas Sowell that a lot of policy making is simply being prepared to relentlessly ask the question what happens next? So what happens next when the known reserves run out? Well the Government says that there will be new renewable energy sources. Well I happen to be the only trained electrical engineer in this House and I can tell you that there is nothing on the horizon that is going to replace the need for peak load generation from gas.The facts are that having not let anybody look for oil and gas reserves in New Zealand for the past decade or two we will one day find ourselves in a position where our alternatives are switch out the lights—you just have to ask Australian Prime Ministers what the political implications of that are—or the implications might be to dig up something else that is readily available that we have lots of but is not so good for the climate and it's called coal. Or another alternative as we've just heard from Erica Stanford might be to import oil and gas resources at great expense from foreign countries where they do not have the same environmental protections that we do.If you doubt that you only need to consult the regulatory impact statement. I'm proud to say as a former parliamentary under-secretary for regulatory reform I helped design those templates which have shown up quite how bad this Government is on this particular policy. They will tell you—and Treasury and the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment—that actually there won't be environmental impacts in a positive sense from this policy. So let's just get this straight. The intention is we lead the world in environmental policy. The outcome is the world thinks we're foolish idiots in a kind of banana republic that can't make laws in a predictable principled or stable way and at best a whole lot of new technology will come along and make this legislation redundant because no one will want to dig up anything they find anyway. At worst we end up either burning coal or importing dirty oil and gas from foreign jurisdictions.I mean it's actually difficult to get through to this Government quite how stupid this bill is. What a shame. Thank you.