Shaw JamesGENERAL DEBATEHon JAMES SHAW (Minister of Climate Change): I move That the House take note of miscellaneous business. And not only do I move the debate I demand the debate! Ms Collins has said that National can easily win the next election but only if the National Party focuses on the things that matter to New Zealanders to those Kiwis who deserve more. The National Leader has called on her caucus apparently to stay focused and to not get distracted by the bait that is laid their way by the Government. So she is going to stay focused on the issues that matter to New Zealanders to those Kiwis who deserve more apparently such as the location of a portrait rather than some of the other things that might matter to New Zealanders such as whether we can speak in two languages or not about our country. I am astonished I have to say at how long she was actually able to maintain her focus between Friday afternoon and today's portrait-gate". Meanwhile I actually do want to debate something that I think matters to New Zealanders a great deal more than the location of a painting—and that is climate change something that I think is going to affect people a lot more than the location of a parliamentary painting. That is a debate that I am interested in having. Because on Monday this last week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released their latest scientific assessment about the state of things in relation to our atmosphere and our climate. It is of critical importance that this House pays attention to contents of that scientific assessment. What it essentially says is that the modelling that people were arguing about 20 and 30 years ago has actually turned out to be completely accurate that global temperature increases are roughly in line with what the modelling predicted. The big variation however is that the effects of climate change—the droughts the floods the fires the storms—are happening sooner they're happening more frequently and the effects are more severe than the modelling predicted. In other words for most of the history of climate change policy in Aotearoa and around the world we have thought about climate change as something that is happening in the future somewhere else to someone else—to polar bears in the Arctic in the future maybe. But what this report shows is that the floods in Germany the fires in Greece and in Turkey the fires in the Port Hills and Nelson the floods in Westport and North Canterbury the catastrophic droughts that we've seen in Australia in the Midwest of the United States the Californian wildfires the Australian wildfires—all of those disasters can show a direct line back to human-caused climate change.Now we have always had floods and fires and droughts and storms but as the modelling was saying for years and years and years and years climate change acts to exacerbate those to increase their frequency to increase their severity to change the actual nature of the event itself. When we had those horrendous rainfalls in the top of the South around the Tasman and Nelson region a year or two ago one of the things that came out of that was that the nature of the rainfall had changed from previous similar events. So we were getting these kind of rain funnels enormous amounts of water coming into the hillsides at once rather than a more even spread that you might expect from a regular rain pattern. What our scientists here in Aotearoa were telling us about that is that that change in the nature of that rainfall is part of the effects caused by climate change. These are the kinds of events that the IPCC report on Monday pointed to. This is the kind of thing that we are seeing more frequently here in Aotearoa not just around the world but here at home. I think we have been complacent in our response as a country in part because we feel that we've been insulated from the effects or we don't have a lived experience of the overall event. That is why this House must pay attention to that report. Thank you Mr Speaker."