Abel SteveSTEVE ABEL (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker.Andy Foster: Here we go!STEVE ABEL: Here we go—you are right about that. There is no away place Andy Foster. There is no away place. Waste needs somewhere to go—waste needs somewhere to go—and if you don't put it in the right place it causes a legacy of toxic mess for generations to come. And right now all across this country the public is having to pay for cleaning up a bad history of waste management. There are dozens of sites across every district in this country—in fact up to hundreds of sites—that need to be managed and we are still creating the problem. We are still landfilling millions of tonnes of waste that should not be going to landfill. The reason that we the Green Party under Nándor Tánczos put up the Waste Minimisation Act was to address that and it was supported and taken on board by the Labour Party. And they will also at some point support our very wise proposition for increasing the actual volume of the levy because we like to bring the Parliament with us on what needs to be done to address this very important issue of waste.There is no away place and when the levee breaks we have no place to stay. What do I mean by that? I mean that the levy as rightly articulated by my colleagues David Parker and Rachel Brooking is a very important thing that we all agree on. We agree on the levy and we agree it should be increased but if you start frittering it away on the wrong things you are squandering that vital—DEPUTY SPEAKER: Please don't use the word you". Thank you.STEVE ABEL: Pardon me. Madam Speaker I'm really sorry. I am genuinely trying to work on that thing.DEPUTY SPEAKER: You are not alone Mr Abel.STEVE ABEL: I appreciate that it's against the rules and I apologise.Hon Dr Duncan Webb: You'll never walk alone!STEVE ABEL: Thank you—over the hills and far away. If we waste the levy—waste the levy—on things it is not designed for we fail to actually mitigate the waste problem; we fail to actually accumulate the money that we need to build the infrastructure to actually deal with the waste problem. And that is a crime. That is a terrible thing to pass down to future generations.What's more this amendment to the Act actually means that you can use this waste levy for cleaning up things that were produced by other industries such as acid mine drainage from the coal industry—acid mine drainage from the coal industry—such as tailings failure. Tailings dams if you don't know about them are a consequence of the mining industry. There's a massive one outside Waihī full of cyanide. They commonly fail around the world and they commonly kill people when they fail and they cost a lot of money to clean up. Why is there not a levy on the mining industry to address the legacy of that industry's cost? Why is the levy being put instead on municipal waste to cover the cost of the effects of contaminated sites from the mining industry?That is an absolute failure and this Government here this "coal-ition" Government want to do even more of that mining. They want to do even more of that mining and create even more of those acid mine drainage sites and those toxic tailings dam levees that in extreme weather events—which we're seeing more and more of because of climate change which is caused by coal burning coincidentally in case no one knew. Because climate change is going to cause more extreme weather events it is in those circumstances of huge rainfall that you get more tailings dam failures. So we are facing that risk as a consequence of climate change. Why is there not a levy put on the oil gas and coal industry the "drill baby drill" industry that this "coal-ition" Government want to have more of? Why is there not a levy put on them to clean up the mess that they are going to create?That is where the levy for those toxic site contamination cleanups should be coming from not from municipal waste not from construction waste not from the things that this waste levy was designed to do. That is why we will be voting against this bill—that is why we will be voting against this bill—and when the Government is ready to have a conversation about how we do a waste levy well we'll be there for it Scott Simpson. We'll be there for it."