Coffey TāmatiTĀMATI COFFEY (Labour): Thank you Madam Speaker. I'm proud on behalf of the Government members of the Environment Committee to be standing and taking a call on this. Can I just first of all start my contribution by noting some of the debate that's gone on in this House. I've got to say I'm feeling a little bit despondent—despondent because actually to be able to tackle the ravages of climate change what New Zealanders want us to do as a House is to actually work together on this. And it was something that we did work together on. When we put the zero carbon Act through this House we said that we'd work together on it. And the second that it comes to actually implementing one of the first stages of that which is this emissions reduction plan and the associated budget that goes with it we all seem to be reverting to tribalism politics—the tribalism politics that has the Opposition opposing for opposition's sake and the Opposition criticising everything that the Government's doing because that's their job as the Opposition. It makes me despondent. It makes me a little bit disappointed because there are people around this country—our future generation of New Zealanders—that expect more from us in this House. They expect that we're going to be able to work together to be able to solve—as our chair of the Environment Committee said earlier—one of the biggest challenges that we'll ever face in our time. But it's not us—the ones that are sitting in this House—that will actually be responsible for it; it'll actually be the future generations. It's our children. It's our children's children. Back home we've got a saying that with everything that we do in our iwi we should make more mokopuna decisions decisions on behalf of our grandchildren not just for us—that's not the long-term approach that we should be taking. We should be making more mokopuna decisions and it's disappointing to hear that in the House we've reverted back to political tribalism.That said I want to talk to the submitters that came to our committee and submitted—especially to our Māori submitters because there weren't actually that many and there's something to be said in that too. There's something to be said in the fact that maybe there's a big part of the Māori community out there that feels as though the problem's too big. They feel as though climate change is way too big for our small little hapū and marae communities to be able to deal with. So I want to take the time to acknowledge the Māori submitters—the land trusts the incorporations and the whānau trust—that came forward and submitted into this bill. And I want to note that in chapter 2 of the emissions reduction plan there's a real focus on empowering Māori to be able to cope with and respond to the effects of climate change because it's our Māori communities that really feel it.Back home in Rotorua we've got a Te Arawa climate change action group. It's a bunch of people that are really passionate about making sure that we have Māori responses to this as well and that it's not just the big corporations and Government actions that sit up the top but actually small Māori communities that are impacted by climate change. If you drive around the lakes between Rotoiti and Whakatāne you'll see that it's a very thin piece of road and there's road slips all the time. With the increase in rainfall that we're having—that we're seeing—what they're noticing is that they're becoming more and more disconnected from their communities and they understand inherently that it's an environmental problem and it's climate change. So they're calling for more transparency on what the Māori climate platform looks like. I want to thank the Minister for Climate Change for setting up the ministerial advisory committee with Māori members so that we can really amplify the voices of our Māori communities around the country. I want to congratulate from Te Arawa Lani Kereopa who's been put on to that committee to be able to help solve some of these problems. We need a Māori climate change platform to be able to hear those voices to be able to get Te Tiriti o Waitangi principles embedded into this as we step forward. We need to be able to make sure that Te Ao Māori is represented in the emissions reduction plans and the budgets and that actually we do take a step back from the tribal politics here by listening to the voices of those communities by funding by Māori for Māori solutions as well. We know that some of our land trusts and incorporations are big on sheep and beef farming. That has an effect too. So I look forward to hearing those voices continually not just through this plan and this report that we've gone and published but ongoing. We need to keep hearing those voices. Otherwise we may just be listening to the tribally political voices that dominate in this House. And I think that we owe it more to our grandchildren to not do that.