Stanford EricaERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): Thank you Madam Speaker. Well different year same old Government. So much for New year new you" because here we are back again doing the same old things that we did all of last year: a bill raced through under urgency completely unnecessarily because we find ourselves in quite a curious spot. Thanks to the super-sleuth work of Mr Scott Simpson we have been able to uncover that this is not just a simple case of "Oh dear! Oopsie we made a mistake and we've got to fix it up very quickly because we've got an auction coming up." This is an issue that the Government and the Minister knew about a year ago—in March last year—and despite what Minister Wood said last night about it being some kind of conspiracy theory which is what we all know is the word du jour to bat away uncomfortable truths the fact of the matter is it's in black and white. There was a Cabinet paper taken to committee which outlined the need for a mechanism—a secret mechanism—that was worked out secretly to set a secret reserve price so that the secondary market wouldn't be compromised and that's perfectly fine. But the point is that the Minister knew about it at this point but he refused to take the advice or he refused to acknowledge that advice that actually—and a Cabinet paper says that he recommended proposing regulations be set without providing a technical price at this time. So that was a year ago. Now I went back over his speech last night and had a good look to see exactly what Minister James Shaw said and whether or not he acknowledged that this is the kind of thing that's been kicked around for some time and thought about but nowhere does he say that at all. In fact the only thing he says is that "Following the passage of the subsequent reform bill there was agreement … that a confidential reserve price was necessary". Well even if that is the case that was in September last year. Here we are in February racing something through urgency giving ourselves only three weeks to have a look at this very complicated piece of legislation and we all know how mind-numbingly—Simon Court: Boring.ERICA STANFORD: It's a really tough piece of legislation. It melts your brain—it really does—and this is an issue that we need to kick around in select committee properly and properly consider.The National Party are all obviously in favour of the emissions trading scheme (ETS). After 25 years of debate it was the National Party who introduced the emissions trading scheme in 2010. We are in favour of that and to be fair to the Minister we're also in favour of any technical fix-ups that need to happen along the way and we're open to that—as we are today—and we will vote this bill through to select committee. But the point is that we shouldn't be doing this now. We could have been doing this in March last year if the Minister had actually understood the scale of the problem properly or even in September last year when he realised that actually this needed to happen.We have left this till the very last minute to tackle what is as I said a brain-melting bill. I sat on the select committee last year and I feel for new members of that committee this year who have to grapple with the technicalities of this because it is really difficult to comprehend and there are some questions that we want to be able to ask and have time to properly digest. Some of those questions are around: is the Minister the correct person to come up with this mechanism—this secret mechanism—which effectively sets the price. Is he the right person to do that? Is this even the right mechanism to fix the problem? Maybe there are other things that we could be looking at. But what it looks like is that the Minister has decided that this is what he wants to do and we're going to be rubber-stamping it through the select committee.But there are questions like I say that need to be asked because effectively the Minister is setting a price that will then flow through into our gas prices. Is he the right person to be doing that? I don't know the answer to that question right now; I'm just posing it. It's one of the things that we should be looking at in a proper select committee process and if we'd had the time we could be doing that and indeed we had the time. We had the time all of last year to be doing this in a proper manner giving us a proper six-month select committee. Even if we did it in September last year we could have had a number of weeks last year and into this you could properly have kicked this around. It is a difficult bill to get your head around. There are lots of complications. It needs to be looked at properly. While we support this bill and we support the ETS this has been a horrible process and the Minister really should have owned up to that when he got up to speak last night. Thank you Madam Speaker."