Graham Kennedy: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Graham Kennedy: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 12 March 2013. Volume:688;Page:8458. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Dr KENNEDY GRAHAM (Green) 
: 
 This year’s financial review I think reveals as little about the Government’s budgetary policy on the issue of climate change as they did in previous years. The stated purpose of the Appropriation (2011/12 Financial Review) Bill is “to confirm financial matters relating to the 2011/12 financial year;”. The bill retroactively confirms expenditure incurred by the Government for that year. We are about to approve expenditure already incurred in excess of the appropriation then existing or even without appropriation so it is important that such confirmation be laid before the House with accuracy and transparency. After all as the bill explains in the explanatory note “It is a basic constitutional principle that the Government can spend public money … only in accordance with [parliamentary legislation] and in an otherwise lawful manner.” Yet public funds pertaining to climate change are spread across a number of Government departments—the Ministry for Primary Industries the Ministry for the Environment the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Treasury—so transparency tends to suffer. 
The Vote Climate Change non-departmental output classes shown in the Local Government and Environment Committee report are twofold. Allocation of New Zealand Units shows net surplus of $1.2 million and issue of New Zealand assigned amount units under the Permanent Forest Sink Initiative showed net surpluses of $7.6 million. Why is this? Because the demand for New Zealand Units declined following the weakening of the emissions trading scheme by this Government in 2009. The final gutting of the emissions trading scheme was in late 2012 after the period under review but we can all see the effect on New Zealand’s climate policy from the 2009 actions. 
The fact is that New Zealand has never had a genuine climate policy. We have lurched around since the 1990s between trading and taxation. We have never developed a pathway for a quantitative cap up to 2050 or a series of 5-yearly Budgets. We gift free allocations without auctioning. We allow in cheapened international credits that force down the domestic price to absurdly low levels. We consciously witness the dysfunctional outcome of a climate policy in the name of the purity of the free market yet we drop that ideological purity when it suits us such as imposing a price cap and choosing sectors and corporations for special favourable treatment except forestry which has been left twisting in the wind. 
Meanwhile the scientific findings on climate change plus the continuing growth in global emissions make it clear that we are moving from a dangerous to a “cataclysmic” future as the World Bank puts it on current emission trends. It is not just Australia or Russia or Pakistan with their fires and their floods. It is not only the Philippines Samoa and the United States with their hurricanes. Climate Change has hit New Zealand. We have extreme drought now. The New Zealand drought like any other extreme event is part of a pattern of weather events consistent with climate change yet this Government displays an endearing political reticence over use of the term “climate change”. The Acting Prime Minister in the House this afternoon spoke airily of long-term change in weather patterns—it will not pay to frighten the voters! He speaks as if we are confronting a natural phenomenon and the change will be over a long term so New Zealanders not least the farmers will be able to adapt. This is consistent with the Government’s refusal to adjust New Zealand’s emissions trading scheme settings to the level required for behavioural change. That is why the financial review of 2011-12 reveals a drop in activity pertaining to the issuance of New Zealand Units. 
The Acting Prime Minister wittingly or otherwise conveyed a breathtaking indifference to intellectual honesty and political integrity this afternoon. He affirmed governmental support for farmers in distress from extreme weather in the short term but in the long term the farming community must adapt as it has in the past. He then lumped in households and businesses just to round the point off. In this he refuses to acknowledge that the changes in weather occurring around us are unprecedented in scale and that the occurrence of climate change is to cite the scientists incontrovertible yet Mr English wishes to assuage the voters by saying that all they have to do is adapt. 
Report noted.