Kedgley Sue: Budget Debate 
Kedgley Sue: Budget Debate 
[Volume:631;Page:3244] 
SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 What a strange fixation the National Party members seem to have with Australia. They are like younger envious children who constantly compare themselves with their older sister. It is like the classic inferiority complex or cringe that I thought we had left behind over a decade ago. Dr Cullen’s speech was littered with compelling catch phrases about economic transformation and national identity. Sadly despite that it was a business-as-usual Budget. It was a Budget firmly based on a business-as-usual model that is rapidly becoming obsolescent and indeed redundant in a world of rocketing oil prices and accelerating climate change. 
There were some positive initiatives in this Budget—a Budget that Ron Mark has described as an MMP Budget. Some of those initiatives came from the Green Party and we applaud those on obesity health promotion and telecommunications deregulation. But sadly for the most part it was a Budget based on short-term thinking and a Budget carefully crafted to win votes at the next election rather than to equip New Zealand to withstand the looming threats that confront us—particularly the facts that in a few years’ time we may very well face the prospect of world oil prices permanently trading at US$100 a barrel and face climate change accelerated to the point where a major effort will have to be made to take carbon out of our economy. This is a Budget that Marshall McLuhan would have said is one that looks to the future through a rear-vision mirror. 
The Budget puts off the hard questions such as what we will do to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and how we will secure our energy supplies into the future so that we are independent of volatile and rapidly rising oil prices. Where is the plan in this Budget to reduce our dependence on oil? Other countries such as Japan and France have had such a plan since the 1970s. Why in 2006 do we still not have a plan but just Treasury officials running around with wildly unrealistic and out-of-date predictions about the price of oil? 
And where is our plan to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions? We signed up to the Kyoto Protocol. We promised that we would return our greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2008 and of course if we do not we will be penalised by having to buy emissions credits. Instead of providing measures to return us to the 1990 levels this Budget invests in a roading binge the like of which we have not seen in recent decades. Inevitably that will increase our emissions which will mean that in a couple of years’ time we will have to spend a billion dollars on buying emissions credits from countries such as Russia which have reduced their emissions. It is simple common sense that we should spend a billion dollars now on future-proofing our economy and reducing our greenhouse emissions rather than pay a billion dollars in a few years’ time to Russia much as Russia may need the money. But now that the Government has abandoned the carbon tax there is no policy to address the issue of reducing our greenhouse emissions. 
Where is the plan to increase the proportion of our energy that comes from renewable resources which has been steadily declining? Where is the plan to shift our tax base to encourage the things we want such as productive work and to discourage the things we do not want such as pollution and waste? Having abandoned the carbon tax there is really no incentive whatsoever on industries or agriculture to reduce their waste and pollution. There is no system of “polluter pays” so the price we pay for most of our goods does not even begin to reflect the true cost—environmental health and otherwise—of producing those products. 
If we take food for example we find that effectively we pay twice for our cheap food at the supermarket: once at the checkout counter and a second time in the taxes we pay for the environmental costs of producing that food and of course for the escalating health costs of coping with nutrition-related illnesses such as type 2 diabetes heart disease and so forth. The Ministry of Health says that every year 9000 New Zealanders die prematurely from nutrition-related diseases. That is way more people than die from alcohol violence cigarette smoking and road deaths combined. About 30 lives a day—210 every week—are lost as a result of poor nutrition. So we are delighted that after years of campaigning about that serious public health crisis the Government is beginning to grapple with it and is investing $76 million in a campaign to fight the obesity epidemic. We congratulate Pete Hodgson on recognising that the obesity epidemic not waiting lists is the real health crisis that confronts New Zealand. We have been working with the Government on initiatives in that area and we look forward to further initiatives such as a nutrition fund to encourage healthy eating. 
We are delighted too that the Government has finally begun to take the organics sector seriously. It has agreed to a Green Party Budget bid to invest $2.2 million over the next 3 years in establishing an organics advisory service to help farmers to convert to organic and more sustainable forms of agriculture. It is frankly astonishing that a country that markets itself as being at the leading edge of innovative agriculture has been so slow to embrace organics—a farming method that sustains rather than destroys our environment. Only 0.24 percent of our land is in organic production. It is astonishing too that the National Party which claims to be the farmers’ party is so reluctant to embrace organics. 
One of the problems is that there is really no incentive to switch to organics because producers and growers do not have to pick up the environmental costs of conventional agriculture such as polluted waterways eroding soil and contaminated sites. The taxpayer and society pick up those costs. For example the Government is spending $1 million a year just on picking up old pesticides from farms—things like DDT. I applaud that initiative but we have to ask why the producers of the pesticides are not spending the $1 million on picking up the old pesticides like DDT that are lying around on New Zealand farms. Why does the taxpayer have to pay for that? Why is it not the responsibility of the pesticide companies? Creating a policy environment that is much more favourable to organic and sustainable agriculture and that helps farmers to convert to organics makes simple economic and environmental sense. By switching to organics we will solve most of the problems we have created with conventional food production. We can protect our wildlife reduce pollution and treat animals with respect. Why would we not support incentives to create all of those environmental and other savings? 
Those are very positive Budget initiatives but one initiative we are horrified about is the binge spending on roading. Smart Governments around the world like the Swedish Government are investing heavily in public transport. In fact Sweden is investing twice as much in rail as it is in roading in order to reduce its dependence on oil and because public transport is about five times more energy efficient than cars. But we are doing the opposite of Sweden. We are investing billions of dollars in new motorways at a time when I do not believe one MP in this House fails to believe that fuel prices will continue to rise. We should be investing in public transport which is collapsing. The public transport infrastructure is collapsing around us. We have clapped out 50-year-old train carriages and 23-year-old trolley buses. We have decades of deferred investment in our public transport infrastructure. Commuters are switching en masse to public transport because of the rising price of oil and we cannot even get on the buses if it is raining. I cannot get on a bus in my area if it is raining; the bus just whizzes straight past me because it is full. 
In New Zealand and in cities like Wellington in particular we are completely out of step with other places in our transport priorities. The rest of the world is looking at environmentally friendly public transport but Wellington is looking at ditching our environmentally friendly trolley bus network. Land Transport New Zealand which was set up to promote sustainable transport is bickering about the subsidy it pays for trolley buses and that is putting the entire network at risk. This Government may be putting the entire trolley bus network of Wellington at risk under its watch. That is a tragedy. That is where the $1 billion should have been spent not on more roads.