Hughes Gareth: Civil Aviation (Cape Town Convention and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hughes Gareth: Civil Aviation (Cape Town Convention and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 22 June 2010. Volume:664;Page:12014. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
GARETH HUGHES (Green) 
: 
 Kia ora Mr Assistant Speaker. Nga mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. It is a great honour to be here today to talk about the Civil Aviation (Cape Town Convention and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. We could hear the passion in the Minister’s voice when he was talking before. As I have been tweeting over the last couple of days about the House being in urgency I have been asked by lots of people in tweets blogs and Facebook messages why the House is in urgency. They are asking about the most important thing that we will be debating and which regional council we are sacking this time. I have been telling them what I will be debating which is the Civil Aviation (Cape Town Convention and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. This is an important bill. The Green Party will be supporting it given that we have 4431 aircraft including microlights and balloons in New Zealand and they flew 214 million kilometres in the last year. It is an important bill and the Green Party will be supporting it. But I want to outline a few parts of the bill and a few of our concerns as we go into this debate. 
The bill the convention and the protocol are private legal agreements that will significantly improve the financial security for investors in cross-border trades of things like aircraft railway rolling stock and other large and expensive equipment. The convention enables creditors to access a registry. I wonder whether the status quo actually works all right. We have a register in New Zealand for our aircraft companies. It will be considerably more expensive to register through the new Irish registry under this bill. But I guess the airline companies and other parties who will be using the provisions of this legislation will point to the fact that it will help them with finance when they are purchasing new heavy equipment such as aircraft and that some of the financial benefits could be in the order of $18 million to $325 million. 
We have to question whether we even need this treaty. It is interesting that the House is in urgency to look at this bill. Perhaps we needed urgency to get this done when we consider that the treaty was signed in Cape Town in 2001 and came into force in 2006 that the Ministry of Transport began looking at it in 2004 and that the previous Government agreed in principle to support it in 2005. We are 9 years on from the signing of the treaty so I guess we needed urgency in order to give it a push along. 
My final point and something that I look forward to picking up in my second reading speech is that on the one hand this bill is not controversial. It is logical to establish an international rule-based framework to look at the issue of default. We support having greater international cooperation and reducing the risks for Kiwi and foreign corporates. But on the other hand do we actually want to see a growth in airline emissions? In my second reading speech I will look at some of the environmental and climatic impacts of the worldwide aviation industry and I think an important question is whether we in New Zealand want to support and subsidise the pollution from our aircraft industry when we know that the world is burning and we do not have a “Planet B”. I look forward to addressing that issue in my second reading speech but I say the Green Party will be supporting this bill.