O'Connor DamienHon DAMIEN O'CONNOR (Labour): Look it's a pleasure to stand up and speak on this stupid piece of legislation. I say that because as in so many things this Government is just too late to the party. What we did was—and you've heard from my colleague the Hon Dr Megan Woods who had a big part to play in bringing in what was termed the ute tax—this unfair incentive to get more electric cars on the road to impose a greater cost on the high-emitting vehicles and then to incentivise the low-emitting ones. And do you know what? It worked. It worked to the point where the uptake of that was so great that it was starting to cost us but it had within that legislation the ability to fully cost-recover.So in its typically ideological way the coalition Government has come in and said Oh we're going to get rid of that. That's just stupid." at a time when we were reducing our emissions across transport which all the farmers over there should acknowledge and applaud you know because that's one area where there is technology and in fact we can make some progress. What was said at the time particularly from the farmers—and a couple of members over there would be championing it—was "Oh this is ridiculous. There's no options for people in the rural sector."Grant McCallum: They're right—correct.Hon DAMIEN O'CONNOR: Oh really? Well maybe if you'd got out of your little head and got online and started to look at "What are the options in electric utes?"—well let's go through the list. Let's go through: LDV a T60; Volkswagen have an Amarok; Ford have a hybrid and an electric vehicle (EV); JAC are running electric trucks; Rivian in the US; Hilux are running a hybrid—up at the Fieldays actually. The Ford Ranger will have a plug-in hybrid in two years. They will also have—Grant McCallum: Oh not yet—not yet? Hon DAMIEN O'CONNOR: Well just listen. The Ford Ranger will also have an H2X a hydrogen vehicle. The Australians have got an ACE EV Ford Hummer Tesla RAM Rivian—they're all in what has been deemed the manufacturers' race for the EV market.You know what? We could have been as we have been in the past a very good test bed for that market and in fact all of those or most of those manufacturers would have probably put their vehicles down here to see how they'd perform in the market. I have to acknowledge that the conditions here in New Zealand are not quite as rugged as in Australia but probably the utes in this market here are used to their full capacity and beyond and that's what manufacturers are looking for. That's why we would have seen more of those utes in our market more quickly because we had an incentive in place. The previous Government had the vision to get out there and talk to the manufacturers and say that there is an incentive for people to buy those low-emitting vehicles and it's paid for by the people with the higher-emitting vehicles. That is smart economic evolution and smart development of our economy because if we don't meet our targets each and every New Zealander will be writing out cheques.If we go way back to ask how did all this happen well Simon Upton as a National Government Minister signed up to our international obligation—and it included agriculture may I remind the Government—in 1997. It was reinforced through the Paris Agreement—reinforced by the National Government and by the Labour Government—but of course we were struggling to work out how to implement it. We took a bold step in the area of transport and provided a cost-neutral incentivisation scheme that would have seen more of these electric vehicles alone.Look this piece of legislation we're talking about here provides the ability to remove the targets in the Act—which is just crazy; that protects each and every politician—in order to enable targets to be set by regulations which is a very risky process. This is a dumb piece of legislation. It's too late just at the time that the world is moving on and we could have been at the leading edge of that transition."