Shaw JamesHon JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): Thank you Mr Speaker. Well that was a vibrant speech from the previous MP who's clearly had quite a lot of coffee today given the subject material and the passion with which that that was delivered. I wanted to—with this being a debate—take the opportunity to respond to a few of the points that the Hon Matt Doocey made in his contribution just now. There was a lot of slogans there and a lot of kind of retreading the election campaign from last year—and that's fine. That's kind of to be expected it's the theatre of the House and so on. But I do think it is kind of dangerous for the country when we govern by slogans and we don't look at the facts and the data that sits behind some of those stories.The Hon Matt Doocey has paid a lot of attention in his parliamentary career to the health system and in particular the mental health system and I commend him for that work. One of the things that he referenced in his speech was around the previous Government's moves in relation to essentially creating a New Zealand health service out of the DHB system rather than to go with Heather Simpson's recommendations of reducing it to a smaller number of kind of regional health authorities. Now the Government did not make that choice to go further than the Simpson report because of some kind of socialist centralising instinct; the Government went further than the Simpson report because the experience of trying to get information and to coordinate a pandemic response through the DHBs proved to be so hard so challenging and so nigh-on impossible it became clear that we were only going to get a nationwide response with a nationwide health service. That is why that decision was taken.So I just want to encourage Mr Doocey to take a bit of time and maybe go back through some of the Cabinet papers that were around at the time the next time he's got the temptation to stand up and expound in the House about the evils of socialism because actually if you just spend all of your Government's time checking out what the previous Government did because that sounds like a good slogan then you're not going to leave the country in a better place. That is one of the things that worries me: at the moment as far as I can tell the new Government's agenda is basically a Government of revenge to get rid of everything that the previous Government did. Sure you can argue the toss on some of the initiatives of the previous Government—fine. But surely having a long-term stable policy environment and having arguments on the detail around the edges is way better than every three or six or nine years completely throwing out all of the work that the previous Government has done because do you know what's going to happen next time? Next time these guys get on to that side of the House they're just going to do exactly the same thing in response and all of those grand plans that you've got that you're going to spend the next three or six or nine years developing they're just going to get in and reverse them in the first three months because that's apparently what new Governments do because that's the standard that's been set by this Government. I want to in particular draw attention to another thing that the Hon Matt Doocey said which was around three waters. That frankly is an area where the National Party repeatedly got up and said that New Zealanders were concerned. New Zealanders were concerned because the National Party ran a campaign against it. National and the ACT Party campaigned against it and fine you can do that—you know everybody does that in this House. But let's not pretend that a political campaign by a political party is the same thing and I've yet to discern a clear plan from this Government for what the replacement for three waters is for the more than $100 billion worth of asset replacement that has to happen in this country when it comes to the three waters infrastructure. Let's not forget that the reason why that programme was such a high priority for the previous Government was that people died in Havelock North as a result of poor water infrastructure. People actually died as a result of that—that's why it was a priority—and the two key principles that drove that programme were one of balance sheet separation and amalgamation to the point that it would be able to attract the level of investment required in order to be able to deal with those massive challenges. If the first thing that you do is take six years' worth of work—all of that work by public servants all of the work that was done by professionals to get that system up and running—and you throw it out and you seem as yet to have no plan to replace that programme with anything else other than to say Well we're just going to return it to communities but also we're not going to provide any additional funding to it because this Government's not about providing additional funding."—OK; again you can argue the toss on that—how on earth do you square the circle of saying that you're going to fix the problem but not by using balance sheet separation and not by using any kind of amalgamation to get scale for outside investment? You're not going to do that right? So it's absolutely incoherent. Like I said it's Government by slogan and it deeply worries me.I also want to draw attention to a discrepancy that I perceive between what the Government campaigned on—or what the National Party at least campaigned on—prior to taking office and what it is saying now that it is in Government. I remember the slogan—again Government by slogan—being deployed over and over and over again during the course of the election campaign that theirs would be a Government that was relentlessly focused on the cost of living to New Zealanders. Relentlessly focused—so relentlessly focused on the cost of living that I have yet to hear a cost of living initiative from this Government.In fact the one thing that I think we can discern from the media since the Government got elected is that the highest priority of this Government is revisiting the Treaty of Waitangi. That is the one thing that this Government is currently known for—right?—and that is a long way away from a cost of living measure. Whatever your point and whatever your arguments are about that the idea that you want to rewrite the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi—frankly that is not going to do anything for people who are struggling to make ends meet put a roof over their head keep the power on and put food on the table.Hon Member: The Government's cutting the waste.Hon JAMES SHAW: Now one thing that I would like to—I love this kind of intervention: "The Government is cutting the waste." Really? Cutting the waste? Can you tell me what is more wasteful than supporting a Government bill to select committee getting the Parliamentary Counsel Office to draft it getting advice from officials—which so far appears to be pretty negative about it—taking it through Cabinet spending the Minister's time on it pouring thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of Government time and resource into developing a bill and then killing it the moment it makes it out of select committee? What is more wasteful than that? How does that reduce the cost of living to New Zealanders—I ask that. Be very careful about your interventions. Maybe rely less on the kind of slogans that you campaigned on in the election campaign and try and turn yourself to the facts and the data that your own coalition agreements say that you will use as the basis of your Government. But facts and data have so far been absolutely absent in any decision that I have seen coming out of this Government. Now because this is the debating chamber and because it's politics I'm now going to reverse myself to acknowledge that there's one area—and I do want to acknowledge the Government on this because I believe in being constructive and giving credit where it's due. Whilst the Government has essentially poured all of its efforts in the first four months or so of its tenure into getting rid of everything that the previous Government did there is one area where I do want to acknowledge that this Government—and the National Party in particular—have held the line and that is around the zero-carbon framework for this country. I want to draw attention to this in particular because the acid test for that piece of legislation—and I want to acknowledge the efforts of the former National Party leader and climate change spokesperson at the time Todd Muller who worked on this with me whilst we were in Government. The acid test for that particular piece of legislation was that it had to endure changes of Government over multiple decades and that is why a number of compromises were made in that piece of legislation including things I frankly was not happy with and don't support. But ultimately they were necessary in order to ensure that it could endure. I think that is critically important in terms of our overall climate change response and I thank all parties who were in the House who supported it on third reading which was everyone in the House at the time. But I do want to suggest that actually there are other areas of governance where we should try and find common ground and try and work together so that we can create some enduring solutions because the kind of activity that we've seen from this Government over the course of the first four months is going in the opposite direction."