Brooking RachelRACHEL BROOKING (Labour): Thank you Madam Speaker. I'm very happy to be speaking on this Land Transport (Clean Vehicles) Amendment Bill. Why am I so happy to be talking about this? I was not fortunate enough to be on the Transport and Infrastructure Committee considering this bill because I am on the mighty Environment Committee that meets at the same time. But it is because we are so concerned on this side of the House and I know many members of the other as well about climate change.This is one of the many many many things that this Government is doing to address climate change. We have this aim that was instilled in legislation in the last Government to reduce our emissions and we've got our net zero by 2050" target. All parties in the House at that time apart from the ACT Party voted for that in that commendable bipartisan initiative. And I thank everybody who was in the House in the last Government for doing that because it set in place a whole lot of work that we are now looking at in this Parliament.Now to reduce emissions really the low-hanging fruit in New Zealand is our transport emissions. Forty-seven percent of our carbon comes from transport and there was a 90 percent increase between 1990 and 2018. So in that whole time that people have been talking about climate change and saying that we need to reduce emissions we have in fact been getting in more and more cars and not making a great use of public transport and of course we've not done very well on electric vehicles (EVs). And I say this: I was very lucky—I'm embarrassed to say I can't quite remember when but some years ago maybe about five years ago—to travel to Norway where my sister-in-law was getting married and it was amazing to see all the EVs that Norway had at that time. I was very hopeful that New Zealand would soon follow suit. That has unfortunately not happened at this point because New Zealand has under 1 percent of our vehicle fleet our private vehicle fleet that are EVs. We do have this target of 30 percent of EVs by 2035 so we've got to do a lot to get to that point given a very low starting point and our late starting point. And of course we do have an abundance of renewable energy which is why the PCE the former Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Dr Jan Wright said that one of the things New Zealanders could be really doing to reduce their emissions is to invest in an EV. I live in Dunedin a beautiful place to live and many Dunedinites have taken up this challenge with a second-hand Leaf. These are imported from Japan and people have really embraced them. When I first drove one you used to wave to the other people driving them but then you know you're going to get repetitive strain injury or something because there are so many of them and well done Dunedin. But these Leafs in winter they really only drive for 100 to 200—well in winter an old one will only really go for about 100 kilometres. If you have a good summer which doesn't happen every year it'll be about 200 kilometres. Of course now there are more and more fancier EVs coming into the market and that is what this legislation will encourage. I was very pleased to see today on one of my social media feeds of a rural person actually in your electorate Madam Speaker who's about to do the Kathmandu Coast to Coast. He's driving there in a Hyundai Kona—it's a 64 kilowatt an hour—and normally it goes for about 400 kilometres he says but he's going to have two kayaks on his roof and a bike on the back. He's planning to charge at the wonderful charging infrastructure we have at Hokitika Arthur's Pass and Christchurch. That's so pleasing to see this uptake of EVs. And of course the climate commission as my colleague has mentioned before has endorsed what the parliamentary commission report said many years ago about the importance of moving as much of our fleet as we can to electric. Of course that's not going to be everyone at every time but we can do so much.We know that our public procurement of light vehicles is changing and we have the goal for central government to be carbon neutral by 2025. So obviously there'll be some uptake of EV purchases there. But that is not enough to really get the secondary market up so all the people that the Opposition have been so worried about can then afford some sort of EV as a second-hand. So we do need to incentivise these EVs coming into the country and people purchasing them first as a new vehicle and then as a second- or third-hand vehicle. This bill will create a standard the discount scheme and assist with labelling it as well. There will be many regulations from new section 167A inserted by clause 5 and if anybody is interested I would really recommend having a look at clause 5 of the bill that spells out all the criteria that the Minister must be satisfied with before making regulations that set these fees and charges. This is one of the very many measures this Government is doing to combat climate change to do our bit for the world for the Pacific and for our country so that we can export all of those rural products that we were hearing about before. So thank you Madam Speaker. I commend this bill to the House."