Chauvel Charles: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Chauvel Charles: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 18 November 2009. Volume:659;Page:7780. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CHARLES CHAUVEL (Labour) 
: 
 That was a very very interesting contribution from the member for Napier Chris Tremain. He was crowing about the National Government’s record in office after 1 year. He should be ashamed of himself. Hawke’s Bay has the highest regional unemployment of any region in the country at the moment. What is that member doing apart from “helping around the margins” with the rest of his colleagues to make a difference to those unemployed people in Hawke’s Bay? What about the fact that over 60000 young people are on the dole queues at the moment? About 25 percent of the unemployed are young people. 
Dr Cam Calder 
: We are working on addressing that! 
CHARLES CHAUVEL 
: That is a terrible record. Dr Calder should not make light of that. The really terrible thing is that we have the highest level of youth unemployment in this country since the 1990s. That is not something that anyone wants to hear members opposite crowing about when they talk about the record of the last year. 
Today I want to repeat some of what we have heard already about the shambolic handling of the emissions trading scheme by Nick Smith who is the Minister responsible for it. Members might want to recall what the Prime Minister said at the allocation of portfolios late last year. Mr Key said on that occasion that Nick Smith had “a brain the size of the South Island”. Well his management of the emissions trading scheme has gone from bad to worse and it has culminated in this $110 billion blunder that we found out about last week. Ministers were told about this on Tuesday and made no public comment about it. It fell to the Labour minority members on the Emissions Trading Scheme Review Committee to reveal the blunder to the public a week after Ministers themselves learnt about it. 
What is good about that record in terms of economic management? We are now told that the cost of Nick Smith’s changes to the emissions trading scheme in 2050 could be up to 16 percent of GDP on to the national debt—16 percent of GDP. That is a $92000 burden on hard-working Kiwi families every year. That is $44 extra a week that they will end up having to pay because Nick Smith and Treasury could not get the numbers right and not only could they not get the numbers right but they would not own up to it. They left it to the select committee to carry the can and make the announcement telling the public that the figures were wrong. 
What was the Prime Minister’s defence of his embattled Minister when we found out about this? It was to attack Treasury and to say “Never mind about Treasury’s numbers. Treasury can’t even work out what the deficit will be next year so we don’t have to worry about their long-term projections.” Well I ask members opposite who if we cannot believe Treasury modelling are we supposed to believe? Nick Smith’s dismissal of those Treasury figures as speculative because they look beyond the next 10 years should be a real worry for all New Zealanders. Responsible Governments like the Labour Government that was in office over the past 9 years plan ahead as far as they can. They do so for those big-ticket multi-generational programmes like superannuation like accident compensation and like health; they have to. 
Why is the Government ignoring Treasury advice on the cost of the emissions trading scheme? The reality is that the Government is simply running a diversion to cover for the fact that its emissions trading scheme changes will cost billions and billions of dollars in the years going forward. What do we get for this in terms of environmental outcomes? The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment an independent expert of this House was very clear. She told us in her evidence to the select committee that under the changes Nick Smith wants to this emissions trading scheme emissions from greenhouse gases will rise; they will not come down. We will pay billions and billions of dollars in order to see our greenhouse gas emissions as a country rise. What sort of a scheme is this Minster being allowed to foist on this country? The reality is that under National’s scheme taxpayers will be writing huge cheques to subsidise big polluters for years to come at the expense of education health and growing the economy. 
This is not the first time that Nick Smith has fumbled the numbers on climate change. He likes to pick and choose prices of carbon to suit his needs. When the Sign On campaign was in full swing he was using a carbon price of $200 a tonne because it suited him then. But when he was outlining the costs of the Government’s emissions trading scheme he used a carbon price of $100. In his Cabinet paper he was using $25 only to be caught out trying to hide a $110 billion subsidy.